Non-violence as Privilege
There is a pattern to the historical manipulation and whitewashing evident in every single victory claimed by nonviolent activists. The pacifist position requires that success must be attributable to pacifist tactics and pacifist tactics alone, whereas the rest of us believe that change comes from the whole spectrum of tactics present in any revolutionary situation, provided they are deployed effectively. Because no major social conflict exhibits a uniformity of tactics and ideologies, which is to say that all such conflicts exhibit pacifist tactics and decidedly non-pacifist tactics, pacifists have to erase the history that disagrees with them or, alternately, blame their failures on the contemporary presence of violent struggle.”-How Nonviolence Protects the State (Peter Genderloos 2007)
Love doesn’t stop bullets
Love won’t stop a car
Love won’t change mandatory minimums
Love won’t stop asset forfeiture
Love won’t bulldoze prisons
Love doesn’t stop gentrification
Love won’t put women on the bench
Love won’t pay your ER bills
Love don’t pay the rent
Love won’t stop fists
Love won’t defeat COVID or make your MawMaw wear her mask.
Love doesn’t prevent sexual violence
Love won’t impeach an illegitimate president (and when he was, it didn’t mean anything).
Love won’t make a fascist concede, it won’t stop a coup.
And when love does do these things, it is because that love is founded on righteous indignation backed by fury and fueled by resistance.
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.”
Assata Shakur taught us we should love and support each other, but the love she spoke of was prefaced by the admonition that we have a bound responsibility to fight and fight to win.
There’s no fence sitting in this struggle, My Loves. You need to stop trying to compromise on the humanity of your siblings.
The center will not save you.
