Without the Awful Roar of Its Many Waters

or: False Nonviolence Won't Save You

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

—Frederick Douglass

Maybe you’ve seen the flyers, read the statements. Maybe you’ve found yourself parroting them yourself. “We’re nonviolent,” the flyers say. “No one will be permitted to bring weapons to these protests,” the flyers say. “We respect law enforcement,” the flyers say.

Never mind the fact that the overwhelming majority of weapons brought to protests are brought by the police. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of violence that happens at protests is enacted by the police.

I don’t have a problem with nonviolence, not inherently. For some, nonviolence is a tactical choice. For others, it’s a moral imperative. The thing is though, the lackluster “nonviolence” promoted by some protesters is at best simply a lack of courage and a refusal to look earnestly at the stakes, while at worst it is essentially collusion with a fascist state.

A fascist state. We’ve reached a sort of rough consensus about this, by this point. All across the not-right-wing-end of the political spectrum, academics and historians and antifascists and anarchists and liberals and democrats and progressives are all willing to accept the fact that the US state apparatus has been captured by fascism. We’ve tasted the word on our tongues. For some of us, it’s got a strange taste, an unfamiliar taste; we’re not used to calling things “fascist” and meaning it literally. For others, we’ve used it all too freely for years to describe anything we dislike.

The US is a fascist state, and a lot of us live here, and a lot of us don’t want it to be a fascist state, so we’re looking for ways to resist that fascism. We’re looking for ways to be antifascist.

For lack of a better set of terms, I want to distinguish between “false nonviolence” and “actual nonviolence.” Actual nonviolence is a set of organizing principles and tactics that have been used to great effect from time to time across the world. It involves putting your body on the line and requires great courage. Actual nonviolence involves people—often thousands of people—risking their lives and their freedom to interfere with the machinery of oppression. Actual nonviolence also only works when its practitioners make it clear that nonviolence is a choice they are making. Martin Luther King Jr carried a gun, and behind every nonviolent resister in the South during the civil rights era there was an armed Black farmer watching over them as they slept. (Read This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed by Charles E. Cobb Jr for more about that history, or you can listen to part one and part two of my podcast about the armed civil rights movement). Nonviolence works when it says to those in power “look we can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way.”

Or to quote Frederick Douglass, from 1857, “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” If you are attempting to challenge unjust systems, you must bring power to bear. Nonviolence, actual nonviolence, is one method among many for doing that (and is certainly not the method that ended chattel slavery in the US or the fascist armies of World War II).

False nonviolence is far and away the predominant type of nonviolence in the US (and I suspect “the West” more broadly). False nonviolence does not challenge the status quo, but instead bolsters it.

Where actual nonviolence says “violence would be justifiable in this situation, but here we are practicing nonviolence in order to highlight the cruelty of our enemies and challenge them on a moral level,” false nonviolence says “the violence of the status quo is more justified than the violence of those who fight it.”

Perhaps the easiest way to distinguish actual nonviolence from its toothless lookalike is that actual nonviolence is usually illegal while false nonviolence brags about its law-abiding nature.

Actual nonviolence is not the only way to resist, of course, and I don’t believe that it is a moral or strategic necessity. One of the great lies of our times is that only nonviolent resistance to oppression is justified. It’s fascinating that we fall for this lie, considering what a militaristic culture we live in, and considering the incredible efforts so many people in so many of our families put into stopping fascism the last time around.

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In 1936, when Franco tried to stage a fascist coup in Spain, he failed—a ragtag assortment of republicans, anarchists, and Marxists stopped him in his tracks. The Spanish Civil War broke out as a result, with fascism on one side and the Republic (and anarchist communism) on the other. The Western ostensible democracies, like France, the UK, and the US, sat the conflict out, and Spain fell to fascism. 35,000 internationalists joined the fight, though, trying to stop fascism. 2500 of them were Americans. When those Americans later tried to enlist in the US military to continue fighting fascism in World War II, many of them were refused, or were kept from gaining rank. The official term for them was “premature antifascist.” They fought fascism before the US government wanted them to.

The thing is, you don’t need an official seal of approval from this or that government to feel legitimate fighting fascism.

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When faceless organizing bodies put out statements demanding nonviolence, claiming to speak for the whole of “the movement” against the Trump regime, they’re doing the state’s work for them. They’re creating obvious fault lines for the state to exploit. When they say “only nonviolent protesters are legitimate,” they’re laying the groundwork for the de-legitimization of violent (and even criminally nonviolent) protesters and are asking the state to divide and conquer us. False nonviolenceists are implying that they respect the violent agents of the fascist state (such as the police) more than they respect those who use violence to resist that fascist state.

Fundamentally, if I see someone resisting fascism in a way that I don’t consider strategic (maybe it seems naive, maybe it seems reformist, maybe it seems extreme), what I remind myself is that I have more respect for the person resisting fascism than I do for the fascism they’re resisting. (Ironically, this includes the very people I’m critiquing in this essay. They are not my enemy; fascism is.)

When you’re committed to a moral position (like antifascism), it’s easy and dangerous to believe that you and your friends hold the one true position. That you know the single best strategy, the most true ideology. But we’re all in this fight for different reasons. We all use different tactics. We all use different labels. We’re all fighting for different worlds.

The Zapatistas though, they remind us that we’re fighting for a world in which many worlds are possible. We are fighting fascism because it’s fascism. There is not a single right way to do that. Both morally and strategically, we need to accept that other people will have different tactical ideas. The strategies we pursue need to be strategies that recognize that diversity is our strength, not a weakness. Diversity of religion, ethnicity, opinion, culture, ideology, tactics.

When we make ourselves rigid, we do not make ourselves strong. Instead, we make ourselves brittle. The brittle sword has no use in battle.

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When the Nazis came to power, they were dead set on consolidating power and destroying democracy. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened at a rapid pace. Famously, along the way, the parliament building was attacked, in what history calls the Reichstag fire. Most versions you’ll hear about this event is that the Nazis burned the place and blamed it on the Left, using the fire to consolidate power and destroy democracy. The lesson you’re supposed to take from this event is, paradoxically, that it would have been wrong to set fire to the Reichstag—yet within a few years, the US, UK, and USSR would be bombing the place themselves and millions of people were going to die trying to stop the Nazi government.

The Reichstag fire wasn’t set by a Nazi agent. It was set by a committed antifascist, a Dutch council communist (think like, a communist who doesn’t like the USSR and believes in the working class ruling itself through democratic bodies instead of top-down hierarchies). His name was Marinus van der Lubbe. He grew up poor and rough, and he once threw a cop through a window, and he’s been done dirtier by history than just about anyone I can think of.

Marinus set fire to the Reichstag because he was tired of the Left not doing anything about the Nazis who’d just seized power, and because he hoped his arson would spark a workers’ rebellion against fascism. Instead, it was the pretext the fascists used to seize even more power. Strategically, the fire didn’t work out. Morally? I simply can’t be mad. His actions could have sparked a rebellion. They didn’t. If they had, it coulda saved the whole world an awful lot of trouble. (You can hear me discuss his story in part one and part two of my podcast.)

No one seriously believes that without Marinus’s fire, the Nazis wouldn’t have done, you know, the whole Nazi thing. No part of me believes that Marinus significantly changed the course of history. Under some pretext or another, or without one at all, the fascists would have taken power. Blaming all their evil deeds on a working class antifascist Dutch kid is one of the most lasting lies of the era. Why do we even entertain the thought?

Why are we priming our movement to fall for the same thing again, 92 years later?

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For what it’s worth, my understanding of history leads me to believe that the most effective action, most of the time, is neither strictly “violent” nor “nonviolent,” at least when you’re talking about the people of a country resisting their own oppression. While there are examples of regimes being brought down by essentially military action and examples of regimes being brought down by principled campaigns of nonviolence, it’s more common to see regimes brought down by what you might call “spicy action.” (Or maybe you won’t want to call it that, but that’s what I call it.)

General strikes and popular revolt are generally more effective strategies in most (but not all) situations. When people get into the streets and stay in the streets, they stop the functioning of the oppressive state and challenge the state’s legitimacy. These sorts of actions are generally neither military in nature nor strictly nonviolent. Some people bring signs, other people bring signs stapled to baseball bats. Barricades and bricks and spraypaint and unarmed masses have brought down regimes before and they’ll do it again, particularly when the mass of nonviolent protesters offer their support and solidarity to the spicier ones who storm prisons and burn the occasional building.

The core lie of false nonviolence is “the state wants us to be violent so that it has an excuse to enact martial law.” If you never do anything that makes it worth it for the state to enact martial law, it won’t bother. But it will destroy nonviolent protest and political opposition regardless of the tactics that opposition uses. What the state wants is for us to preemptively build consensus that it would be wrong to use force to resist it. When you say “the state wants us to be violent,” you are doing the fascist state’s work for it.

There are no “good protesters” and “bad protesters,” and the fascist state is certainly not going to bother sorting us out into those categories before trying to deport us to prison camps abroad. This is not hypothetical: people are already being deported for writing op-eds and for participating in actual nonviolence.

We have no reason to believe that being law-abiding will save us.

We have every reason to believe that building antifascist solidarity across ideological and tactical lines might.