Tag Archives: Nonviolence

Trump’s Takeover of DC is a Blinking Red Light

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Bad omens and scary portents abound

President Trump has taken over Washington, D.C. What’s next for the rest of the United States? Will the seizure of the capital district be temporary, a test run for declaring martial law and suspending our Constitution? As an American, I can say my nation-state is not yet in a complete fascist dictatorship under the Trump-Vance regime. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation of sorts. Yet we are perilously close, oh perilously close, and getting closer. Let’s call what we live within what it is, a creeping dictatorship. The yellow warning lights are now blinking bright, bloody red.  Continue reading →

The Verdict: Justice Achieved

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George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, and the United States of America

Encounter with Cops and Protesters in a strange demonstration

To many a surprise and with great relief, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a White man, was found guilty on all three counts in the murder of George Floyd, a Black man from Texas, originally North Carolina, who had recently moved to Minnesota. There was not any hung jury nor partial rendering of justice. The jury, itself composed of people from different ethnic groups including Blacks and Whites, deliberated quickly and returned their verdict to the court. The verdict took mere minutes to read out loud, and the world changed. Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, guilty of murder in the third degree, and second-degree manslaughter. Sentencing is set for two weeks, why so damn far out I don’t know, but the killer will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. Although Minnesota abolished the death penalty back in 1911, the murderer of George Floyd is more likely to be killed in prison by fellow convicts than to die of old age.

Faithlyn, my fiancé, first notified me by text while I happened to be on a break at work. We are both hard of hearing so we text to stay connected. She’s excited, riveted, and texted me “…The verdict is about to be read!” Moments later, she wrote one text: “Guilty.” Then, “On ALL counts.” Later on, she texted me it felt “so surreal.” Sent me an image of her avatar crying, “TEARS of JOY.” Full disclosure here: my Beloved is Black, Deaf, and an Immigrant naturalized as a US citizen while I am White, Hard of Hearing, and a native-born US citizen. Aye, tears of joy! Continue reading →

Violence and Nonviolence are Tools

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Is Nonviolence a Tactic, Policy, or Principle?

Is Violence Pragmatic and Necessary?

Both can be ineffective. Both can be effective.

It’s not Violence vs. Nonviolence.

It’s Violence and Nonviolence, and

how they’re leveraged for success.

Violence, nonviolence, and civil disobedience are tools in the great struggle against tyranny and oppression. They have been used in the great class war against the Global Financial and Political Elites. They still are. These tools are strategies and tactics based upon values and principles. Violence and nonviolence are no more anything else than the term Global War on Terrorism is rife with misnomers. Terror is a feeling. It’s an immediate physiological response to a reactive emotion. Flight or fight or freeze and still piss your pants. Terrorism is a tactic in crime and war. It’s been pointed out repeatedly one cannot wage a military campaign against tactics. Instead, one does so with strategies and tactics against enemies using terror as a tactic.

Many of us confuse nonviolence with being a rigid “thing.” Growing numbers of people continue to feel inspired by the fierce stands Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., took for nonviolence. Ironically, both were murdered almost 20 years apart during periods of violent civil strife. Their deaths sparked even greater outbreaks of violence.

Even so, many people view nonviolence as an inviolate colonnade of pillars holding up temples of peace as if such abstractions of mind existed out in the physical world. Nonviolence, a tool, has come to be regarded as religious doctrine by many people. Instead of a tactic, however, it’s another invisible but real, to them, flying buttress supporting the invisible architecture of an abstract cathedral. By doing so, these believers in the holiness of this abstract tool risk bringing everything they stand for collapsing down upon them in bloody ruin.

The proponents of nonviolence, upholding Gandhi and King and even Buddha and Jesus, often dismiss or suppress any challenge to nonviolence. Who would dare question nonviolence? I imagine the Global Elites and the security and intelligence apparatus under their control appreciate being the only ones to dispense violence while not receiving any in turn. Nonviolence helps keeps them in power.

Don’t make any abstraction of mind so rigid an ideology it cripples effective action. It doesn’t matter if it’s politics, religion, economics, or tradition. Those nouns, those words stand for concepts with definitions held within the abstract mind. Which means we make it all up in our heads and call it “real.” If enough people agree yes, it’s real indeed, and then we label it “consensual reality.” And so we go, as brilliantly collapsed as ever. All abstractions are tools.

The most effective toolboxes have a modest variety of choices. It is the same during resistance against oppression and struggles for justice, equality, and liberty. We struggle against the class war of the financial elites, against institutionalized racism, corporatism, sexism, corruption, and fascism. We struggle for social, environmental, and economic justice. We struggle for power. Aye, we struggle for the power to determine our own lives together.

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