Prior to this administration, we regularly celebrated peacemakers like MLK and Ghandi, advocates of non-violent resistance. This was our primary goal post WW2, the achievement of great progress without another Great War. We wanted stability, we wanted compromise, and we wanted equality under the law.
But that didn’t come about without violence, no matter how much we tried to ignore it. Names like Malcolm X and John Brown may be well known, but less known are Bhagat Singh or Subhas Chandra Bose. All four believed in building a better world, but they all acknowledged that to do so required making room for it. And that explicitly involved violence against those who would seek to perpetuate evil.
And they all benefitted the non-violence movements by making the hard choices and forcing people to the table. They were never going to be the people who made a treaty or designed legislation. They never set out to be those people. Their mission was to protect their people and vision and bring to justice those who harmed innocents and perpetuated unfair systems.
So that begs the question: when do we advocate for violence against a tyrant and his masked thugs maiming and murdering Americans without restraint or accountability?
We’ve been taught so long that we should only protest non-violently, but that is now leading to the unaccountable murders of people who believed in that. At what point do we have to acknowledge that in order to create a better world, some things need to be left behind at the least and forcibly removed at worst?
It’s not an idea that I find particularly fine to think about, but it is one that I think we need to be able to talk about. Where is the line? When do we defend ourselves and others? What do we do?
I am not advocating violence. But I’m not sure I would reject it if it were to come to pass. And that thought alone tells me the seriousness of the situation today, and that it is becoming harder and harder to see any other way out of this nightmare of ghoulish cultists cheering on masked rapists and pedophiles murdering innocent Americans on the orders of a psychopath.
So… thoughts? Outrages? Poorly disguised projections? Go ahead, the forum, for now, is open.