Tuesday, December 20, 2011

"Occupy" and nonviolence



















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There may be a time in future when violence will be necessary to combat the state power of capital in the usa, but without meaning sarcasm there may also be a time when foreign intervention is necessary to liberate America from that power...all things are possible but neither is likely, and the first is even less likely than the second...

 the world has changed and is changing more rapidly than any of us can keep up with, and those changes not only involve the power of the state to kill more people but also the power of the people to democratically take control of the state...that situation has never before existed and it offers far more hope than trying to organize an army to fight the state, when it is more likely and hopeful that we can disarm that state with democratic power...

I’m not advocating that we should all join hands and sing in the face of an attacking army, but if we have not organized an army in our defense we might as well sing as we die since physical resistance under such circumstances would be meaningless...an organized military force will slaughter us unless we can counter it with our own organized military force...this is not to imply support for a non violent philosophy according to the old reality but to suggest that philosophy makes far more sense and offers far more possibility of success in the newly emerging world…

past non violence that never fought back physically but accepted vicious attacks with passive resistance swayed many of those watching on film or TV but guaranteed those taking the abuse certain physical pain and possible death...it may seem romantic but thus far it has not worked… despite myths and legends about Gandhi and Martin Luther King,  India still suffers appalling poverty and black men are crowding America’s prisons in greater numbers than ever before...and militantly violent opposition brought about by the failure of passive resistance has also failed, leading many to die or waste away in prison at trying to confront massive military force with relatively egotistical, if sincere tactics of killing some policemen and soldiers, taking some temporary territory that the state doesn’t want or need for the moment, or robbing banks… and let’s not forget that both heroic passive figures, Gandhi and MLK, were violently murdered...however, this is a different time and place and it should be remembered and meditated on, if necessary, that the entire world is seeing uprisings of a kind never before imagined, with democratic power possibilities and communications across borders and barriers that can no longer  permit the state power to separate , isolate, divide and conquer peoples with the ease in which it could in the past...

while our anger may provoke us to wish to strike back at an ugly force of armed representatives of the antidemocratic state, we had better be prepared to counter such force with equal force of our own or forget about it...and organizing an armed, revolutionary uprising in the USA at this time seems as likely as hoping for a messiah to return or show up for the first time…the desperation among the people necessary for such to happen would mean a chaotic situation of near total social breakdown had taken over, and given the tremendous task of trying to create democracy now, that task would seem a more positive endeavor to work on than trying to counter , say, nuclear arms with more nuclear arms, rather than gaining control of nuclear stockpiles and destroying them…the first is hopeless but the second is possible…

much better to follow the lead of places like Venezuela and Bolivia, where previous attempts at military coupes , armed uprisings and over throwing governments failed but democratic efforts are showing signs of turning  entire nations and areas of the globe around via organized political and economic and not necessarily military power...that kind of force exercised by the people of the west, whose nations have plundered and savaged for generations and continue to do so under control of tiny anti-democratic minorities, would not only ease burdens in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, but create a balanced movement in the west operating in the same democratic, non-violent fashion and offering hope for the global community itself, and not just one or another nation …and doing so with an army of humanity militantly demanding and exercising its rights as a majority against which no minority would have a chance….


1 comment:

Bob Yancey said...

Although I agree about the futility of armed resistance in this country at present, I believe that at a certain point in the future, conditions will deteriorate to such a level, that armed guerrilla units will spring up much as they did in Nazi occupied territories in Europe during WWII. As history has shown, this has a way of breeding its own monsters.