Rev Left Radio - Nonviolence is Violence, Too: Somebody's Gotta Die

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

In this episode, we're joined by author and poet Too Black to unpack his essay "Nonviolence is violence, too: Somebody's gotta die," and to challenge the comforting myths that often surround "nonviolent" struggle. We dig into what he means by the claim that nonviolence is never actually bloodless, why he prefers the term "sacrificial violence," and how nonviolent movements frequently gain leverage precisely because an opponent supplies the repression that shocks the public, shifts legitimacy, and forces concessions. Along the way, we talk through the research Too Black draws on including Erica Chenoweth's work on lethal repression, and we explore his core metaphors and case examples, from confronting power like "poking a bear over honey" to the method-independent brutality of settler colonialism in Palestine. At the heart of our conversation is a deep dialectic between Martin Luther King Jr. and Frantz Fanon, and how both frameworks, in different ways, move through violence as an unavoidable terrain of liberation. For King, suffering becomes the redemptive path, a willingness to absorb brutality to expose evil and transform the political and spiritual situation. For Fanon, revolutionary violence itself is the redemptive force, the route through which the colonized reclaim dignity, agency, and self-respect. We close by asking what this reframing means for organizers today: if rights require enforcement and "dramatizing evil" often demands real sacrifice, how should movements talk about nonviolence honestly and strategically in the world as it actually is? Subscribe to Black Myths Podcast ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/ Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show, one of my favorite guests, recurring guests on Rev Left. Two Black, who is a poet, an organizer, an intellectual, writes essays, is on the Black Myths podcast, and recently wrote an essay that is on grassrootsthinking.com, and I'm sure some other places as well, entitled Nonviolence is Violence, Two, Somebody's Got to Die. It's, I think, a really historically dialectical, materialist analysis of the seeming binary between violence and nonviolence. The way that we talk about violence and nonviolence and think about those two things are often as two separate spheres, as two wholly opposite things that we either pick one or the other to the exclusion of the one that we didn't pick.

And I think two black complicates that in a really generative and analytical way. using a sort of dialectical materialist approach to the seeming binary. And I think the discussion we have about this is, you know, genuinely deep. I think the stuff that you're going to hear in the next hour or two of this conversation takes a topic that many of you have probably thought about, probably talked about, and deepens it and complicates it and adds nuance to it in a way that I think is rare and genuinely unique. So I think this brings a certain depth and clarity to a well-treaded conversation that is incredibly worth it, especially at this moment of extreme violence in our society. I talk about this a little bit up front from the releasing of the Epstein files and the violence of the U.S. and Israeli ruling classes, the genocide in Gaza, the seeming imminent possible attack on Iran, the violence and murder of ICE in the streets of Minneapolis and across the country, the violence of the detention centers, etc.

We're living in an incredibly violent fucking system that every single day, in order for it to continue on, it costs human life. It's like human life is what we pump into the engine of this system. And the daily grinding violence that is necessitated by its very existence and continuation needs to be seen and looked at very clearly. And only then can we begin to actually talk about the possibilities of revolutionary violence or nonviolent strategies against the system. So whatever you think on that topic, this conversation will add new wrinkles to it. that almost certainly you haven't considered in the same way that I hadn't considered a lot of the stuff that we do get into. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Too Black on his latest essay, nonviolence is violence too. Somebody's got to die.

Yeah, I'm Two Black, poet, author, organizer, host of the Black Miss podcast. Just recently wrote essay, this is part one of two parts. It's actually on the essay being called nonviolence is violence to somebody's got to die. Yeah, it's a really interesting essay. I think it grapples with not only a question of violence and nonviolence and the sort of the dialectic between them, but a lot of the major figures that those of us on, you know, the Marxist left in particular, we'll be familiar with and the different sort of strategies employed by them in the face of the overwhelming violence of the capitalist imperialist state. This is also, I think, an interesting moment to have a discussion like this for so many reasons.

We've seen the ICE protests and the resistance to it. We've seen the state murder people in the streets and have no accountability. We see what they're doing in West Asia, funding and arming the genocide in Gaza, making moves now on Iran. Just an incredibly violent system. And we're speaking about two days out from the most recent release of tranche of Epstein files. showing that the entire or at least large, large factions of the ruling class in this country in the economic and political spheres have engaged or have been adjacent to the engagement of human sex trafficking, pedophilia, and just acts of unspeakable violence against the most powerless people on the planet. So, you know, it's sort of a macabre but important moment, I think, to discuss this issue in particular. The essay itself, of course, is titled, as you said.

Nonviolence is violence too. Somebody's got to die. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So I guess to start off, obviously a lot of people won't have read the essay before listening to this podcast, although I'll link to it in the show notes. People should read it and grapple with it in detail. But can you introduce us to this essay, some of the historical figures that you are wrestling with, and what you mean by the claim that nonviolence is violence.

too. Yeah. The interesting brought those events up because this was actually conceived of months ago. I just knew it was going to take some time to write it. The goal was actually have it out by MLK Day, but there was still some edits that needed to be done. So it ends up dropping the same day that the last, that the name is slipping me, the nurse who was killed in Minneapolis. It ends up dropping the same day that that occurred. And I, It was no intent to time that obviously no one knew exactly when that was coming, even though, as we'll get to, the violence is inevitable in these kind of situations. So the time it was kind of eerie because, you know, I'm not one of those people that likes to write stuff to exploit tragedies.

Like, some scholars do. Like, that's not really my, that's never been my thing. So it was kind of, it kind of took me back for it. Like, an honest thing when I actually hit me, like, that it dropped the same day. but at the same time, taking myself out of it, I think it was relevant to, to kind of grapple with what occurred. In terms of what I mean by nonviolence and violence, too,

I mean, there's a lot of different ways we can go here. Some of this, some of what I'll say is in the essay, some of it's not, but I guess for me, particularly since I'm on this podcast, it comes down to this question of idealism versus materialism per usual. So this is a materialist analysis of so-called non-violence. And I feel like when you look at it materially, it doesn't really hold up that there's somehow nonviolence involved because it requires violence to be successful. From the idealist perspective, if you are simply thinking about the intention of someone who goes into a protest and decides not to carry a gun or not to shoot a gun or not to not to cause any physical harm to their opponent, then from that perspective, I guess you could say,

It's nonviolent, but as we'll get to later in the discussion, often what requires violence to or the nonviolence to work is the opponent has to be violent. Non-violence that is best is about confronting power. And in this case, we're talking about capitalism, right? So capitalism is inherently violent. Imperialism is inherently violent. And when you confront these things about, when you confront them about their violence, they will react violently. and that is often what brings people to your side, right? That is often what galvanizes more people.

So you mentioned Minneapolis, unfortunately, the murder of two people within what a week and a half or two weeks. There was others murdered as well, but the high profile murders of particularly two white folks brought more attention to what's happening in Minneapolis and has brought more people into the streets. And now there are real considerations for general strikes and more people are getting involved and organizing and even and even the Trump administration for a moment there had to retreat a bit in their strategy in Minneapolis. They had to fire one of the people who was over it at the time and

bring in a new guy and say they're going to do targeted operations. Most of this is PR. It's not that they're really retreated materially, but they have to put, they have to push out the idea that, you know, we kind of messed up here because they said that this man was wielding a weapon and he came to kill officers and all of us watched the video. We can see that's not happen. So non-violence as people think of it has this effect of bringing all more people, but it requires someone to, as I say, in the essay, die or to be harmed or to be hurt. And if ICE was peaceful from a, again, this, we're talking about how this looks, not more so how it actually functions, but if ICE was not putting on, you know, these grand stages of raiding

Home Depot's and was just doing what they did under Biden and Obama, there wouldn't be anybody in the streets. So this creates a bit of a contradiction that if it's not violence, why does it seem that violence is the thing that brings more people to the cause? And if that's the case, then materially, for me, I don't think that could be not violence. So when I'm talking about the, you know, idealism versus materialism, it's like, you know, I think Engels is there something to the effect of people

take the concept somehow starts to paint the object instead of the object painting the concept. I'm paraphrasing. So nonviolence becomes a thing where

the idea of it that someone is behaving peacefully and someone is not hurting somebody. The idea of that, I think, moves people that you are somehow standing above the gunk as I get into a bit in my second essay. But when we actually

look at what occurs, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's not just the individual's intentions. It's the fact that you have to provoke the worst of your enemy to bring about, um, you know, the most, the most change usually. And, and the less you're able to do that, the less people are really interested in getting involved because they don't really deem it necessary, particularly in the United States where people have been so desensitized to violence. Um, you have to really ratchet it up for people to be involved. We've been hearing the word fascism for years, and you know, I've debated whether I think that's the way people frame it at least has always been, has always been helpful. But nonetheless, like, words have been thrown around for years and people didn't really take it seriously. But then when something like this happens in the streets, then all of a sudden, you know, even the Atlantic is like, well, actually, this might be fascism now, right? Like this is, but now, again, there's a lot of contradictions even in that because we could talk about, you know, Maduro being kidnapped. We could talk about what's happening, like you said, and is

real. We can talk about all those different things and how that violence does. It somehow seem to shock people in the same way sometimes. Nonetheless, what it shows in this case is that nonviolence is it requires, as I was, we can get into more details later, but it requires some kind of violent reaction to really be, particularly to be successful, particularly nonviolent action, particularly like civil disobedience. Now, if we're talking about a visual or just writing a letter or putting out a statement or some of those things that Gene Sharp talks about in his books. I think he has like 178 different types of nonviolence. Like individual forms of it may not always lead to that. But anything that is actually confronting power and forcing power to

have to make a move, you almost need power to react in its worst forms to demonstrate why other people need to be involved and why it needs to be defeated. Yeah. And we're going to get into more of the details. I think what comes out already, and if you read the essay, it comes out even more, is like, and you've kind of made this explicit, that there is this dialectical materialist analysis of violence and nonviolence that is much deeper and more analytical than the conversations and discourse that usually surrounds the topic, which, as you say, are often idealist, right? Like two totally separate categories of behavior, juxtapose to one another as always in opposition to one another and you get a pick which one you do or don't agree with.

And that's the sort of childish way, I think, of looking at the topic and you, and you complicate it in all the right ways. Before we get into this, go ahead. I was going to say it was quickly, yeah, and it's like, that was part of the argument is I think we need to move on from that binary of nonviolence versus violence, because I don't, as I said, the essay, I think it's actually immaterial. You are in a violent situation, nonetheless. And the only question is really, how do you choose to confront?

it, right? But you are in that situation nonetheless. If I go up to a cop, you know, and stand in front of a cop and don't put any hands on the cop, the cop is still standing there with a gun. Even if the cop doesn't pull the gun, it's still standing there with a gun. I'm in a violent situation. I'm not, I've not avoided that at any point. Now, maybe I don't, you know, respond in the same exact way, and that's an individual choice, but the actual material interaction is still violence. And it can get very violent even if I don't pull any kind of like deadly weapon, right? And it's somehow like you said, we, the idealist part of it doesn't deal with the actual circumstance as a whole. It reduces it to the individual and their ability

to make a choice how they want to move. And it's not to take away from people's personal like morals or their autonomy. I think that's important. But I just don't think that the whole situation can he understood as nonviolent. I just don't think that actually, that actually explains anything. Yeah, absolutely. Before we get into this next question about sacrificial violence, which I think is an interesting concept and core to the argument, I'm just kind of curious, like, outside the outline itself, like what, was there anything in particular that prompted you to think and write on this topic, or was it something that's just been simmering in your mind for, for years, or what prompted you to write about this? Yeah, I was, you know, I do work with

political prisoners and I was talking to one of my comrades who, um, who works on the campaign for the Pendleton two, which I've talked about on this podcast. It's two political prisoners, I'm here in Indiana where I'm from, uh, Nying Trotter and, um, and John Cole, John Ballagoon Cole, who, um, received over 200 plus years combined for intervening to save a prisoner, a fellow prisoner in 1985 at Pendleton Prison, um, who was being beaten by guards. We later find out or in the clan. They actually did not, they didn't kill anyone in that situation. They simply intervened just to defend him. Nonetheless, that turned into them getting 200 plus years. So I've been involved in that campaign for a while. I was talking to somebody, you know,

involved in that campaign. And we were actually talking about Palestine, but we were just talking about this, this kind of like missing point that we see. And when people want to talk about like innocence or things of that nature in relation to Palestine and how with the, you know, people want to condemn Hamas so they want to condemn resistance and then they'll say, but the genocide must stop. And even without getting into the condemn Hamas conversation so much, it's just, I think if you zoom out a little bit, what people are saying is almost as if there is not some kind of force that needs to be applied very material. Like it's almost as if that doesn't happen.

It's just like we all get to just say this is bad, but we don't have to really acknowledge what it will take to end it. Like that part never really gets addressed. So everybody gets to be on the right moral side, but we don't have to acknowledge that there is a force that needs to take place. So we were talking about that. And then it just led to, I think I had said in the conversation, and he had said it as well.

Like even when you look at, you know, nonviolent, so-called nonviolent movement, they have to confront these things, and usually it still requires a form of violence to get to move things along or to at least bring attention to the situation, even if they're not fully successful with ending whatever they're fighting against. So we were saying, like in any case, there has to be a confrontation with violence, but it's also the fact that there has to be some kind of force involved, even for the people who like to claim the peaceful side or something of that nature, right? It requires it nonetheless.

So it made me think about just from there I just wanted to write something on it. Because I've noticed it for years, it's always kind of struck me as odd that when I look at the history books, whether it's in the civil rights movement, whether it's in India of this essay, particularly the second one is going to deal a bit with Ghana and positive action. There's, it's never this cling. Everybody just walks to the streets. It is nice. And then they got what they wanted. Like people had to die. People had to be slaughtered.

People had to be harmed and hurts. And that part is always just seeing as this kind of utility to to uplift nonviolence. But I'm like if there was bloodshed, then again, it just seemed like if there's a contradiction here, they were not really addressing. And for folks who were new to it, it's almost like we're not being honest with them and really telling them what they're getting involved with. And you go a little bit like the Civil Rights Movement, but they were very clear on what they were entering into. like there was anybody that you know these are people who were trained if they were going to do a bus a bus boycott if they were going to go to a segregated lunch counter if they were going to ride on do a freedom ride like these are people who were trained and prepared for the violence of the south for the violence of the clan like they knew what was coming and in freedom rise people even had to write wheels um james bell will have people write wheels before they got on the bus that he had to turn into their family if something happened because he said i'm not going to going to let you get on the bus if I can't explain to your people why you died. You had to have a good reason. So they were very clear on this, but I think nonviolence somehow hides that part of it.

It's as if you get to stand above the violence. And it's like, no, you're actually entering into it. You're not standing above it. You're here with it like everyone else, no matter how they choose to confront it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that leads in and you've already kind of started addressing this idea. but you propose explicitly in the essay a renaming nonviolence as sacrificial violence. And again, you just kind of touched on that. But what exactly qualifies a tactic or a campaign as sacrificial violence? And what does that term let us see that, as you say, nonviolence,

the term nonviolence obscures? We can walk it back a little bit. In the essay, we talk about philosophy, or nonviolence as a philosophy versus nonviolence as a tactic. This is something that has been, I think, used, somehow sometimes explain the differences of how people approach it. So nonviolence as a philosophy, you know, comes out of the more like Gandhi and tradition or,

and then Dr. King and Lawson and many others, whether it's the rights movement, I pick that up. And, you know, that is more so the idea that living one's life nonviolently overall, there's a certain philosophy that and how you approach that You try to avoid violence in all in all manners, at least ideally. And it's also that you can suffer and show your opponent that their ways are wrong. So if someone was to hit you, you can somehow demonstrate to them. By not responding, you can actually show them that they're wrong and that they can change their ways.

It's a form of redemption, right? That's the philosophy. So you believe overall that people can be changed by your non-response to violence or by you being even kind in response to you, you know, you loving your enemy and turning the other cheek. That's the philosophical concept of it. Technically, it's different. You are not necessarily, you may not necessarily believe that people's hearts can be changed more broadly. but you understand, like, as we've already been talking about, that by, like, one, you don't have a, you may not have a military, right? You may not have the arms or ability to fight on that front anyway. It's kind of a form of guerrilla warfare, honestly, but like you, so you say, okay, we can't fight in that way, but what we can do is not following any of these walls. We can simply not go to work or we can simply not buy any of these things or we can simply not a, any of these, any of these things that may belong to the enemy.

And then when the enemy hits us, we can decide not to hit back because, again, we know that that will bring attention and that will heighten the contradiction of what we're up against that can hopefully bring more people to our side. You're not necessarily interested really in changing the heart of the enemy as much as you are trying to change the heart of others watching your enemy and see if you can get them involved. And that's, you know, that's something that different. nonviolent movements have applied. So those are the differences. And then Kwame Torei also

formerly known as Stokely Carl, Michael, the late Kwame Tarray, talked about, you know, it's probably probably people have seen this quote going around on the internet that, in order for nonviolence to work, your, your opponent must have a conscience. But if you go back and watch the full, I've never made people actually find the full speech, but the full clip of that speech. He talks about Dr. King more so applying it philosophically and feeling like you can suffer and you can take pain and harm and your opponent will be changed by witnessing what they're doing to you. Like they will stop and see the wrong of their ways. And then he says, you know, he only made one fallacious assumption is that, you know, in order for that to

work your opponent must have a heart in the United States or have a conscience in the United States has none, which I don't disagree with that. But what I was trying to advance in the essay, not necessarily disagreeing with him is that, again, if you break it down between philosophy and tactic, the opponent doesn't necessarily need to have a heart if, you know, you and I are involved in a struggle and we're trying to get other people involved to fight the opponent. We don't care if the opponent has a heart. We actually prefer, to my point earlier about the mean violent. We prefer they don't have a heart because the less of a heart they have, the more likely we might be to even move people to our side. But what? What?

what unites both the philosophy and the tactic is the opponent must be violent, right? That's what unites them at the end of the day is that even whether it's a philosophy or tactic to really change the opponent or to even change the circumstance, even if the goal is not change the opponent, the opponent has to be violent for any kind of transformation to occur, which again demonstrates that violence is part of it. The opponent has to overreact or do something that, um, force, that heightens a contradiction. And, you know, that's normally not going to be them being nice back to you, right? That's just not the way it works. So, you know, Dr. King and others, Gandhi, if you read

some of their statements, they're very open about this being a kind of a sacrificial thing. Like Gandhi said, we are entering upon a life and death struggle, a holy war. We are performing and all-embracing sacrifice in which we wish to offer ourselves as ovulation. Dr. King said the way of non-violence means a willingness to suffer and sacrifice. And he talks about offering them. These are different quotes and different moments offering the body as a weapon. And, you know, James Lawson said something to the effect that, you know, we wanted to end the cycle of violence. So we say we will take violence upon ourselves to end it.

So for all of them, Jay Vossin, for those who don't know, was also a Ghanaian student. He was studied in India and he eventually leads. He trains what was called the Nashville's student movement where all the sit-ins against lunch counters and stuff happened. And he was the one who trained a lot of the folks that were involved in that. It was also just broadly involved in the movement. So these are the practitioners of nonviolence and they all speak to this kind of sacrifice and seem to have a certain clarity about violence that today we don't really get when people talk about not violence. So for me, it was like, well, looking at it materially,

you're actually sacrificing your body and sacrificing yourself knowing that there will be a reaction, sacrificing yourself to bring about that violence to achieve some set of specific goals. So, and the piece has said, we can understand sacrificial violence is an act where one fomence the violence of their opponent and then willfully consumes it as a sacrifice for a specific set of objectives. So you are consuming this violence, knowing that it's coming, knowing that this is going to happen. So for me, that's more sacrificial. And that was really me trying to, I don't think it's the perfect term. I don't particularly care if people take it up or not. It's more so trying to respect what I read nonviolence to be at its best.

Like this is not a piece to bash it or to say just run out with guns. It's not what I was going for here. So I didn't want to call like suicidal violence or recklessness or because I don't think that's what it is. It is saying, you know, it's kind of trying to combine the idealist with the materialist. It is saying I'm willing to sacrifice myself for a greater cause, but I do need violence to do it. even if that's not how they fully explicitly said it. That's really what happens. So it's like it's a sacrificial form of violence because I'm taking the violence on myself and then you're hoping that the violence that occurs upon me can bring more people in and can hopefully end the injustice

that I'm fighting. That's that's more how I understand as opposed to nonviolence because again, that that doesn't actually seem what's really happening here. So I hope that gives some clarity. Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to reiterate that point you made at the end. This is like this is not like some sort of intellectualized screed against nonviolence. You're taking the arguments incredibly seriously. You're seeing the strategic sort of approach and orientation of it. You're giving like full credence to the advocates of such a strategy, especially in the case of the civil rights movement, that they knew exactly what they were doing. And this is not something that they're naively going into like wide eyed and bushy-tailed.

They knew what it entailed. And so I really respect that part of the analysis as well. And I just kind of want to make explicit really quick before we move on the causal chain of sacrificial violence, more or less as you lay out in the text. So I'll just read it so that the listener kind of understands what's going on. And you can correct me if I get anything wrong here. But step one in this causal chain is the confrontation, right? We'll talk about this in a second. But the movement in one way or another pokes the bear.

it sort of threatens power in some way. The second step is provocation that the opponent reacts with lethal repression, which we'll talk about more here in a second. The third step is sacrifice. The practitioner consumes the violence, as you said, without retaliating violently. Four, amplification. The dramatization of evil goes viral. And we'll talk about an example of that later in this conversation.

And then ideally, number five would be the concession that the state public is forced to act out of necessity, not out of conscience, right? Never in American history, for example, or we could extrapolate this to other contexts, is that when the state is acting, it's not out of like some come-to-Jesus moment where the light dawns on them and the power of the moral argument convinces them. It is always necessity. I even talk about like the New Deal, right? It was not some, like, FDR didn't come to power with all these wonderful ideas about helping the regular person, that was a concession made by the U.S. state in a specific context where not only did you have an external alternative like the Soviet Union in play, but also within the U.S. itself,

you had a robust and increasingly militant communist movement that, you know, arising and flourishing in the context and wake of the Great Depression, that was a real threat to power. And so the concessions of the New Deal was the system itself kind of being backed into corner, having an external alternative on display for the whole world to see, and an internal mass movement gaining lots of credence and power and mass support. And so the new deal was not FDR coming to some sort of moral realization. It was the system as a whole reacting out of necessity precisely to save the system. And I think, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but FDR said, I've heard this said,

you know, you can look this up. Again, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but that his greatest achievement was, was saving capitalism, that the New Deal was meant to save capitalism in the face of a genuine communist challenge. And so, is that causal chain correct? And do you more or less agree with how I laid it out? Yeah, I actually appreciate that. Because I didn't, I never thought about it, honestly, in a sense of, since I was writing about it more philosophically, I guess I didn't think about in a sense of steps. So if you got that, send that to me after the interview. Yeah, for sure, for sure. You wrote that down. But yeah, but yeah, I think that that is,

a good characterization of it in terms of there is a when it's we think about how it plays out yeah that's how it has to go in some way shape or form and obviously it varies depending on the the literal circumstance that one thing happens versus another but yeah you you have to like said there's a causal chain you have to create a reaction there's a cause and effect that's happening here and if there's if that doesn't occur you know these things are often stifled or they're not really able to grow because you're trying to, you know, you can't, you cannot force that concession because power feels as if it doesn't really, there's no real threat here, right? So you have to create some kind of crises, some kind of

threat for, for it to occur. I think some of the downsides of that is you go through all it is and at best you might get a concession, you know, at best, you might. you might, you may, and the concession may not always be strong enough. Or as we know, with like the New Deal, or as I talked about with, even with laundering, there's a, there's a way that as history moves on, we almost forget that that's, like, the way you laid out the New Deal, we forget that that's what occurred. And we do think that FDR came in with great ideas and that's what happened. We do think that the New Deal is the best thing ever, you know, as opposed to, like you said, it's just a concession.

Because the downside here is your nonviolence often is not, it has some troubles when it's time to actually take power. It's good at heightening contradictions. It's not necessarily always the best at governing once those contradictions are heightened. You know, like that's some of the problems it runs into. And even once it does govern, as well, maybe we get to more a bit later, it's not going to be able to govern in the same way that it rose to power. So it's not going to be able to govern in this kind of so-called nonviolent way anyway.

Because that's not how you defend your revolution, right? Or that's not how you defend your movement. But yeah, I definitely think that that's a good characterization. So I don't even really feel like I need to add much more. Yeah, and quickly, you know, once the internal threat sort of subsided, had been co-opted, the concession had been made, the fire was tamped down a little bit internally. We got what we now refer to retroactively as the rise of neoliberalism, but in so many ways it was a conscious dismantling of the new deal by the

ruling class. So the moment they could, they took all that shit back, proving that it was always just a concession and that they were forced into it. And then the moment they weren't forced into it anymore or didn't have to maintain it, they dismantled it. So, yeah, that's the challenge. Right. How do you, how do you help people remember? Because I'm even seeing that even now with like looking back at 2020 as I've talked about on here when I was on here last time we talked about the EI and how

now people are defending things that were actually met to pacify them because those things are being taken away so it's also another causal chain you know to think about in terms of you do all this they send you something to pacify you and then

and then you somehow forget and now you're defending the thing, now you're defending the pacification, right? Like that's, that's an odd circumstance that you find, particularly in America happens pretty often. I think as I described in the last essay, it was bullleg rehab, right? It was a drug dealer who starts a rehab center,

and then another drug dealer comes in to take the rehab center and you start organizing to keep the rehab center that's funded by a drug dealer, right? It doesn't actually make any sense. But that's often what we get into. And I think, you know, coming back even to the beginning, I think some of that is the idealism of the United States in terms of it's the way we remember history. We don't remember it materially.

We remember it as heroes and villains and, you know, comic book story kind of things. Right. So we don't remember the actual evits that got us to something. we just kind of maybe remember the end result of it or we don't even know in some cases. It's not even though it was about remembering. We don't know the events they got us or something. So that's my worry in this moment in terms of Minneapolis and elsewhere, honestly, is people forget 2020 already and we're just six years, not even really six years removed

from George Floyd. And people forget that. And now because ICE is so bad, people are love the cops again because they're local. You know, it's like, and I think it's very strange that that's happening in the city with that almost abolish police, right? So there is this tendency. I think nonviolence, unfortunately, does contribute to that because it doesn't, because it's always dealing with, it's trying to get you to look at higher or higher ideals and higher like forms of morality, which are important.

But because it tries to stand above, I think, too much in its rhetoric, not in so much in his actions, but in this rhetoric, it tries to stand above. the freight and it and sometimes I think that gets people to the point where they don't actually look at what's materially occurring they think about all these ideals that they could just impose on the world and and we don't learn anything with that yeah absolutely and just on on a zoomed out level like liberalism is idealist and if liberalism is the dominant ideological hegemon the narratives that that will be produced by liberalism will be idealist and that's true in the civil wars true in the revolutionary world

war, it's true about the New Deal, et cetera. And that is also why materialism is a threat to liberalism and the liberal ideological hegemony is precisely because it digs deeper and reveals what liberalism obscures. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But let's move forward. And I'll ask a two-part question here so you can take it any direction you want. I'm interested to hear about, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing this correctly, Chenoweth's findings that regimes responded with lethal repress.

and 88% of nonviolent revolutions from 1900 to 2019. So I'm wondering if you could talk about that statistic. And then I would like for you to kind of flesh out the honey and the bear sort of metaphor that you use that I think, you know, is powerful as well. Yeah. So I don't know if I say her name correctly either. I'm bad with names. But, yeah, Chinaweth, I believe is how you said. But the statistic comes out of the book Civil Resistance.

And, wait, that's the chapter name. Hold on. Yeah, Civil Resistance, what everyone needs to know. Yeah, that's the name of the book, Civil Resistance, what everyone needs to know, what came out in 2021. They actually have some pretty interesting research. If you just want to look at the research itself, and they look at Violet and Nonviolent Revoluted Revolutions from 1900 to 2019.

I think originally they had one, I think it started, and maybe they had one that went up to 2006. And then since then, they've just continued to grow the information. I don't have all the metrics down on the top of my head in terms of how they measured that. But I know in that specific instance, you know, she was able to track these different movements and show that even when they were nonviolent, there was some kind of violent response. Now, to be fair, she does demonstrate that, you know, movements that are,

are explicitly like violent arms struggle tend to have more casualties than movements that are nonviolent. But so, but that's still not a case for nonviolence. It just means that maybe more escalated for violence will bring about more repression, right? But for me, that statistics stood out because it shows, as I opened a piece with, that, you know, that history teaches us that violence is an inevitable consequence of nonviolent action. So if 88% of the time in so-called non-violent revolutions, some kind of repression occurred, then violence is almost always a response to it.

So it's just something you should be expecting at this point. She even says, I think, later in that piece or later in that book, that nonviolent movements have experienced, I think 23% of the time have experienced mass killings, which is 1,000 deaths or more. So not just a few protesters here and there, but you're talking about like over a thousand people aboard that are, that have killed. That was between 1995 and 2013, nearly one and four nonviolent revolutions and over-turning regime and during mass killings at some point. That's a direct quote from the book. So about so nearly nearly 25%, 23%. So this was something that for me, I was just trying to look for something that.

could verify the observation that I was making maybe more anecdotally. And I didn't want, and I was saying, okay, is there anything that can verify this beyond just a few case studies? And I felt like that statistic verified that it is an inevitable consequence and often even welcomed. Like Gandhi, for instance, during the assault march, the salt march was, there was various campaigns that happened on the Indian independence movement, which is also as a lot of contradictions in terms of so-called violence and non-violence, but during the salt march where, you know, they were, it was the whole thing about British sought and not buying it because they was imposed on the Indians. So there was a big march against that and trying to get people in mass to oppose it and to really oppose all

British customs. But it was a 24-day march. But during that march, he literally told his protesters or his marches to not even block themselves when they were beaten. by the British. So, you know, at least in Civil Rights moment, they were taught to, like, cover their heads. He was like, don't even do that. So that's why anybody actually welcomed in some cases, because you're trying to, you're trying to really exaggerate the point, right? So for me, I just seem to be a statistic that without, since I was writing an essay and out a book, I don't have time to go through every revolution or every movement. So that's a statistic for me, I think just summarized the point that the cause and effect, the causal chain

that we've been talking about here. Yeah, I have a thought as you were speaking and you were talking about those statistics. You know, you made it clear that in nonviolent movements, there's an overall, you know, there is an objectively lower body count, right? Even when the nonviolence is met with violence, the overall amount of casualties is significantly lower than when violence is met with violence, which we would expect. But I have an interesting thought here, which is that if you're doing a non-violence, violent movement and you're met with violence.

There's less overall casualties. But I would argue that it makes logical sense that maybe 90 to 100% of those casualties are taken and absorbed by the nonviolent movement. So there's lower amount of harm overall, but almost all the harm is on the side of the nonviolent movement. Now, if you meet violence with violence, there's a higher number of casualties, an increase in overall harm, but perhaps, and I think this makes logical sense, the casualties are on both sides, right? When you think about John, you know, this is just one example. We'll talk about Palestine in a second, which I think is another example, horrifyingly so.

But in John Brown's movement, right, if John Brown and his comrades were doing nonviolent methods against a rabid slave state and all the fascist and slavers that supported it, it like bleeding Kansas, like if John Brown's side of that was nonviolent, there might have been less casualties overall, but it would have been on the side of John Brown and his comrades who would have taken the brunt of that violence. John Brown and his comrades went out, killed people. Overall, the body count goes out, goes way up. And ultimately, of course, John Brown himself is hung and many of his comrades killed. But they took out several, I mean, you know, a lot of slavers and what we would call fascists today, defenders of slavery and those that were attempting to flood into Kansas to make it a slave state. So that's just a calculus

that seems objectively true. And what you think about that, you know, you can make up your own mind as to what you think is more worthwhile. But there is something to be said. Meeting violence with violence means that their side suffers too, right? Yeah, I don't, I don't take that statistic as an endorsement really of one side or the other, more so just, like to your point, it's just thinking about how the puzzle pieces might fit together differently, right? Like, but the, that's why I ground the piece and this is ultimately a matter of confrontation. That's why if we're talking, like, that's why I don't think the, the, um, the debate of violence and non-violence is that deep or really even useful because ultimately it comes down to, you're going to have to confront this and

we'll get to that the next question, but you're going to have to confront this thing, right? So on a nonviolent point, if you are, or as I call a sacrificial by the point, you can weigh the, you know, do we want to take the cost of losing that many people? And do we want, if you're thinking about it philosophically or spiritually, do we want to bear the brunt of taking that many lives? Like these are questions that you can genuinely wrestle with. If you are not of that persuasion and you're like, this is what we got to do. we got to pick up arms. You still wrestle with those same questions. Like,

that's another thing that annoys me about nonviolence sometimes is they act like they're the only ones that care about life or something. Like, I don't, I mean, again, I've tried to be respectful and not take shots at it. But when we read some of the literature,

that was one of the things that stood out was this sense that people that pick up arms don't consider the toll of their fight, right? Like, they're just willing to just go in bloodshed and, and because we're, not willing to shoot or punch anybody, we don't, we don't take on the weight of, or we, we care about the weight of other lives being passed. And it's like, that's not, anyone that's approached

this from any sense of actually caring about the people they're fighting for, always take on that cost. They're always considering it, right? Like, that's not something that's lost on them. But there's a way that the violence is made to be bloodthirsty and almost mindless, um, and nonviolence is made to be this caring thing. And I think that's, that just, Just like the people who are proponents of nonviolence don't like to be called weak or soft or, you know, or immature or whatever, all the different, all the different ways that they're casted, you know, in negatively. I don't, they don't, you know, they don't like those terms. Well, I don't think violence should be casted in that way necessarily either. Like people who are more, I should just say explicitly violent. I don't think should be casted that way. Anyone who's fighting a power. and trying to overcome that, that takes that seriously and is not just looking to duplicate the thing they're fighting. Anyone that does that is always considering the amount of lives that have to be shed

or something, but they're making a calculation. Just like nonviolent folks make a calculation that's worth getting beat up to achieve their goal. They're making a calculation that it's worth losing certain lives to achieve that goal, right? Like these are questions that everyone wrestles with. Neither side has some kind of moral high ground over the other. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so, you know, we can touch on this question as well, because early on you say that confrontation with power makes bloodshed imminent and you raise up this metaphor of poking a bear over honey. Can you talk about that metaphor and what makes violence so structurally likely in your view through that metaphor? Yeah, the quote was, if one confronts a bear over who controls the honey, the bear will kill to control it. The raging bear does not care of the struggle is armed or nonviolent. It's a simple equation. Once the bear is poked, bloodshed is imminent, in the end somebody's got to die for the honey. So it's just to say that if I want to rob your home

and for whatever reason I decided to come in there without any weapons, I thought I could just do it while you're asleep or something, you will still shoot me if you have a gun if I'm in your home because you try to protect your family. If I go into your home and I show up with a gun, you will still try to protect yourself because I'm in your home, right? Like, you're not going to let me take anything, you know, like you're going to try to protect yourself, especially if you have some kind of weapon on you.

So we're talking about a bear, not just a regular person, like a bear who can, who has a lot of power physically. If you try to mess with a bear's honey, they're not going to just, you know, it doesn't matter how you try to steal their honey. They're going to respond, you know, violently. So these debates that we have about armed or non-armed struggle or whatever are not relevant to the bear. It's just a question of how to get there, how they maintain their honey. So we're talking about capital.

And you ultimately want to challenge anything related to capital. They're, you know, they'll deal with you differently only as much as it advances their goals. But they're not really, they don't really care that much if at the end of the day you're trying to take something that is important to. their entire world and that's capital, right? That's, that's, that's control over the means of production. That's all those things. So if you want to confront that in any form, even if you're doing it to just say, we want equal rights in the South, well, we know that wasn't just about hate and, you know, a bunch of rednecks. There was, there was real money invested in that. There was a certain social order that was being disrupted. People are not going to respond nicely to that.

You know, when Dr. King takes it a step further and doesn't just confront the South, but confronts the U.S. Empire, he's dead within a year of the speech against Vietnam. Like, that's how they're going to respond. This is just, again, this is proven out by the statistic that we just talked about, you know, a bear wants to protect this honey. The honey is, is whatever is important to your enemy. The honey is whatever is the red line for your enemy for your opponent. And then again, in the world of capitalism and imperialism, you know, it's pretty clear what the red line is for them. And when that line is crossed, they're going to respond in whatever they have to do to defend it and to maintain that. And they're going to put whoever down that they need to do that they need to put

down to do it. Sometimes they'll buy people off. Yes, sometimes it's not always explicit violence. But even when they're buying somebody off, somebody's usually dying alongside that. That's how they juxtapulsed. Right. So that's what that's just the ultimate reality of what we're dealing with. And I think to cast it any differently is not being honest with people about what they're walking into when they go to the streets to protest or anything of that nature. Now, if you go to protest something that isn't very important to the capital, then you might get a concession that doesn't really require a lot of violence or any at all. You know, hence why we can get certain forms of representation or we can get acknowledgement statements. These things don't cost people anything. But, you know, but if it's something that really cost them, they're going to respond hostile,

right? They're going to respond in a hostile way and that's something that people need to be prepared for and they don't discriminate against how you confront them. If you confront them, that's all they're really working. about. How you confronted them is secondary to the fact that you're that you are willing to confront them. Absolutely. Yeah. And two quick points on that. Well, one quick point is that, you know, I think this applies directly to anybody that is a democratic socialist or anything like that, which, you know, I'm not hating or anything. I'm just presenting you with the contradiction, which is

that there's an implicit belief on many, on behalf of many Democratic socialists, and, you know, they're rising in the institutions, you know, people that are self-proclaimed democratic socialist rising within the political system, which is that if we do it the right way, if we do it democratically, we follow law, we win elections, we rally the people that will eventually be able to do something that threatens the bear's honey without provoking the bear because, hey, we did it all the right way. You can't, you can't, we didn't do it violently. We didn't steal it from you. We did it through the democratic mechanisms and the legal order that you yourself laid out and said is legitimate. But the truth is, and we've seen this

time, we saw it in Chile, for example, which is the moment you get close to the honey, no matter if, as you said, you do it peacefully, democratically and legally, or you do it any other way, if you actually threaten that honey, you will be met with overwhelming violence. And so there's a certain sort of delusion on behalf of people who think they can do it peacefully that they won't be met with violence and therefore they're not prepared for it. And my only thing to, to, to, to, you know, people like that is just to be like you have to be prepared for it in the same way that a that a you know salvador yende did everything right did it the right way um even even stepped back from the precipice of arming the workers and making this more explicitly violent and you know he was still killed for

it um and and his entire political project was was drowned in blood regardless because he got too close to the honey and it doesn't matter how you do it and the second point that i think is really good about this metaphor, the bear is representative of a system, meaning the bear is an animal in this metaphor. It has no individual conscience or personal moral deliberation that an individual might have. It is a perfect representation of the instincts of a system because the system operates at a higher level than any individual within it. And so, you know, the bear is a sort of animal driven by instinct to protect its honey in the same exact way that the capitalist imperialist system is not an individual morally deliberating but is as instinctual in some ways as an animal itself.

And so there is no reasoning with a system in the same way that there's a way that you can reason with an individual and there's no reasoning with a bear like you can reason with the person, right? Right, yeah. You said a lot of things that dope I want to touch on like it speaks to kind of When we're talking about the strategy and tactic or the philosophy and tactic, like you were talking, you were using DSA as an example, but that's kind of a scaled up version of what that is, right? Like, so there's the going into the streets and, you know, trying to confront the South or trying to confront the racist police or something. But like you said, on a scaled up version is it is an entire political party that, again, this is not to disparage it or whatever. It's just dealing with the reality, like I said, materially, that, you. you are, if you do things through the correct mechanisms, that you just have a great strategy

and you just, you know, show that you're willing to play, that you're willing to play ball, but you're also going to do it with, you know, I don't know, ethics or something, right? And you just try to work a little bit for the people that that will inherently somehow, like, you know, prove that this is the way, right? And that's, that's very idealist. it's been tested many times and doesn't seem to work. But in doing that, you also will see how people lose the plot of it. So originally you might have entered into as a tactic.

Like we're going to run under the Democratic Party because that's the easiest way to get on the ballot. And yes, we know the Democratic Party sucks or something we're going to run on the ballot so we can get our name out there. And then either we're going to take over the party or maybe we even break from the party. Like, this is the kind of stuff you'll hear. But then you get in the party and now, you know, like we saw under Biden, now because Biden elected some of your people to certain cabinet seats, you're not as critical of him. The progressors is the last people actually to come out against, like to say Biden needed to step down when he was clearly over, you know, his age had, you know, decline. Um, because they had really invested a lot in there. So now this has become

a philosophy. Now this is a way of life that we have to capitulate. Because we can get these things that we need done, so to speak. So there's a way that your tactic, and this is true with a lot of things, could become a full out philosophy if you're not careful. And now you are totally under that system. You're totally, you are, now you're accountable to the bear. You're not even confronting it anymore. You're simply just trying to, trying to say, hey, we need to share some of your honey.

Right. And the bear, if the bear is fat and happy, the bear, the bear, bear will share some of his honey for a moment to capitulate to whatever. And then eventually the bear is like, I ain't got to share nothing. And that's Trump. Like, I ain't sharing nothing. I'm saying that's what he represents. Not him as an individual.

But like, I don't have to share anything. I'm not sharing shit. So now you're, you're in a position where you have no power like you fully, because you work for the bear now, you know, you don't have a base. You don't, you, because you've denounced all the things that are needed to confront the bear in real life because those things are too far. those things are too extreme. Those things come with too much human cost, whatever.

You fully fall, found yourself totally under, you know, like sleeping with the bear basically, right? Because you have, you've capitulated so much in trying to get this and trying to redistribute the honey

without ever taking it, you know? Yeah. Because you don't want to, like the reality of that is something that you're not willing to deal with. And if people are just honest, like, it's scary to mess with a bear, like, quite literally, if we're talking about a bear,

like, you don't want to, you know, confronting a bear is not a fun project. I get it. Absolutely. So it's okay to be human and acknowledge that. Like, we're not sitting here standing above that either, but that's, but if we're being honest about how you ultimately share the honey, quote, unquote, you know, if that's resources, if that's wealth, whatever, then you're going to, the bear can't be the one over the honey

anymore. And you might have to confront the bear in ways that, you know, you don't necessarily want to do it. So that's, that speaks to the limitations of it because again, like, you know, people don't, it's like there's a way that particularly in the United States, I'll say, I don't think this is as true elsewhere. Where elsewhere, I think they're able to hold on to the tactic. Like, even when you're talking about Chile, that was probably more just tactical errors in it was a kind of fantastical belief in something. Yeah. You know, and that was also 19, what, 1973. So we should have learned a lot, but I think, but, but, but I'm saying, you know, here there's just this way that people start to tell themselves that things aren't really as bad as they

once said they were. You know, there's this, there's this kind of slippage that occurs intellectually or, you know, mentally where people just don't really, because, and I think some of that's because the violence is often displaced into dark corners. It's not so much confronting the everyday, you know, middle class white person or just middle class person in general. It's not necessarily confronting them. So there's this way that you can kind of disassociate and it's definitely confronting people across the world in a different way than it does here. So there's a way you can just distance yourself from it and be like, well, it's not really that bad and I'm good if they throw me a small little, you know, prickling of honey. That's good enough,

you know. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And I would just say, you know, summed up in one sentence. It's like, the closer you get to the honey, the more you must be prepared for violence. And I think that that kind of sums up what we're getting at. And again, no shade to the DSA. I think it's a formation that has to exist. I think it's good that there are candidates out there for all my critiques of them and as far to the left of them as I am, that they are in the electoral arena on that terrain, getting people to think in different ways. And I think it makes people more susceptible to moving for their left. There have been many people that have been brought in to left-wing politics through a figure like Bernie Sanders, who over the course of a few short years have themselves moved far to the left of Bernie

Sanders and now critique him from the Marxist left. So I think there's absolutely a role to play. And I also want to say that there are plenty of caucuses and comrades within the DSA who nod in agreement at every single syllable that you and I said and see it very clearly. So I'm not trying to, you know, the DSA itself is a sort of ecosystem of different caucuses and thoughts and lines. And, and so I don't want to like pretend it's a monolith either. No, I agree. And again, it's more so just speaking to the strategies as a whole, right, and how they sometimes do fall victim. to the pitfalls that stand in front of them. And I think it also goes to,

this is maybe a little more abstract point, but something I had talked with sometimes, even when I'm talking to black folks, there's a, but it's not limited to us by any means. But just this tendency that want to call out hypocrisy in it of itself and thinking that that will have some inevitable great ending to it. So what I mean by that is if you,

people sometimes are very much bothered by the fact that certain individuals in society can get away with things that others can't. And that's from racial, class lines, gender lines, etc. People can be very annoyed at that and will spend a lot of time on social media or something expounding on how terrible it is that a group of people can get away with something that you can't get away with or a group of people can do something that you're not allowed to do or they can engage in a behavior that someone else is punished for. And I think it's important to note those, those that kind of hypocrisy. That is a form of heightened contradictions. But there becomes a thing sometimes I think where that becomes a point in of itself to just name that,

to just name how bad something is, just name that this is a hypocrisy or that this is unfair, that the ruling class could do this and we can or white people can do this and we can't. And it's important to like start there. But if you get stuck there, like, you're just kind of in a circular motion at that point. You just name a hypocrisy. And because the system is what it is, you're going to always have new hypocrisies to name. And at what point do you figure out how to confront it, right? Like, so there's a way that, you know, because there's so much commentary nowadays that people are just naming hypocrisy. I was joking with somebody the other day, caught it in this kind of hot potato radicalism where you, you name something and hope someone else picks up the gun that

you won't pick up, right? You point out a flaw and hope someone else does. does something about it. And we just bounced around hoping somebody else acts on it. Because the best we can do is just name something. And sometimes it's true that that's all you genuinely have the power to do. So I'm not talking about those people, but I'm talking about the habit of just naming hypocrisy for the sake of it and how that just becomes a kind of dead end after a certain point.

And I just think that that's part of the problem when confrontation is not really the main thing on the table. Yeah, and like, you know, in the MAGA movement in particular, they don't give a fuck. Like, they don't believe in anything. Like, they spent years talking about stop the groomers, save the children, Pizza Gate, Podestine Clinton are eating children in the bottom of a whatever. Alex Jones spent decades talking about a globalist pedophile cabal. And then the real thing is actually here. And they all just shrug their shoulders and say, I'm sick of hearing about it. You know, it's just like they don't give a fuck.

Like pointing out, hypocrisy is just telling other lefties, I see it too. but the right will just be like, I don't know if it's cognitive dissidents, or it's just the raw pursuit of power and domination. They don't fucking care. No, it has no impact. We've seen all of those things go away. It was just propaganda. It was just straight up propaganda.

Free speech was propaganda. Constitution is propaganda. Yeah. Bashing identity politics, why that's literally what y'all are engaged in. You know, like all of those things were, you know, propaganda, anti-Semitism, whatever, right? Like, all of that propaganda, that's not, you know, and, and again, propaganda has its, as its utility, clearly, because a lot of folks were swept up in it and they thought that, you know, Trump was going to drain the swamp this time or whatever. You know, like this, it's laughable, you know, to those of us who know better, but, you know, liberals do the same thing, hold their feet to the fire, hold them accountable, push them to the left.

Like, this stuff's honestly not much better. But, you know, so it's just, it's just, again, I don't want to be cruel. I think people really be desperate, man. So they claim or whatever you throw at them sometimes because they just be desperate. And capitalism does that. It makes people desperate. But nonetheless, these things are not, these things are not helping move the needle, honestly, at this point. They're just not.

Absolutely. So getting back to Palestine, you compare that the great march of return. and Al-Axa flood to argue the oppressor's aim can be method-dependent. Can you kind of walk us through that and what exactly you mean and what that reveals about the nature of colonial power strategy, the bear more broadly? Yeah, let me look at the piece real quick. I forgot to pull that quote. This extends beyond a just metaphor.

For example, in Palestine, land is the honey. So Zionists kill Palestinians for it. They killed them when they peacefully confront them on their feet. That would be the great march to return. And even more when they forcefully confront them with arms, the Alasker flood. Neither a knife nor a hug makes a difference they want the land. Right.

So it's just really following that metaphor with the bear, but saying that it's beyond a just metaphor. That was a play on words, like a just instead of saying a just-a-metaphor. But this isn't just like a great idea. Like, no, this is how it works. Like if, you know, the Great March of return, you know, there had been a blockade on Gaza up to that point. I think that was, what, 2018-ish, don't quote me on that.

But up to that point, it was like 11 or 12-year blockade on Gaza since people were who, you know, rightfully lived there were trying to return. And just in one day, you know, Israel shot 59 people dead, right? And these are people who by and large were returning without any guns. This definitely was not an October 7th situation or anything. people were just hands up peacefully all the words we hear were returning and they were shot down and goals just kind of show the limitations of again the sacrificial violence that that you know certain people particularly Palestinians um and and mohammed el kurd talks about this in in his latest book but that you know they people just see them and they're almost like characters to us that are

supposed to die. Like, that's how we treat Palestinians. So their death actually has no effect, unfortunately, on, on most of the world beyond just virtue signaling. It's, because it's almost like baked into how the regular thing is supposed to go, you know. So it, that's why it took so, it's taken, it took so many and it's continued to take so many of them to die for folks to find a conscious. Now, we know that people who've had a conscience the whole time about this, but for a while, you know, you have all these articles that came out the last year about how I'm now against this, you know, after two years of slaughter, like, oh, I'm now against genocide. Like, okay. So there's a certain way that, you know, that doesn't have an effect. But to your

question, I could go off on that all day. But to your question, Israel is a illegal, you know, occupation, a project, that's what it is. It's stolen land. That's what the entire project is, not just the parts that Palestine is live on now, the whole thing. And, you know, they don't, they don't care again how you confront them because they're not giving up the land. If anything, they just want to keep expanding it. That's the greater Israel or whatever project or whatever, right? Like, they think they're the whole Middle East, if you let them tell it. So they're not, sharing the land and there's no appeal to them. I don't think Palestinians were trying to appeal to Israel at all. I'm sure they're way past that point, but they were at least trying to appeal maybe

to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world, as usual, was not, was unable to come through. But the enemy does not care in this case, particularly Israel, whether you march and return or whether you, you know, Ios will flood. The only difference that they make is they just, see one is a reason to kill more people than the other because they're like, oh, now that they actually like rolls up with arms, not just rocks or stones or like straight up arms like, oh, now we really can go with him and just wipe them out. Like it just gives them more justification. So again, we talked about the body count earlier in the sense that you are, you are maybe

facing more, but that's the only difference. Basically, oh, this is just a reason to go even further. This is just a reason to intensify what we're already doing. But like I said, neither a knife nor a hug makes a difference. They want the lamp. They don't, they're not, they just don't make the distinction. So like you said, it's method independent because we have to be clear thinking about what does the enemy actually want.

What is the thing that they want and how are we threatening that? If we're talking about this from an organizing perspective, how are we threatening that and how are they going to be willing to respond to our us threatening that? That's it. If you're threatening it, you're threatening it. How you threaten it is just a simple question of what is better to get you, get your objectives met. So maybe, maybe walking, maybe a march to return is a better way to get your objectives

met than Alaska flood. Maybe, you know, I'm talking about metaphorically speaking. Maybe, maybe not. But those are the only questions I think we need to be asking ourselves. Even we're talking about DSA, maybe even if we understand the limitations of this space, Maybe the electoral space is one of the better ways of struggle compared to something else because we don't have the kind of forces elsewhere. Those are arguments I think people should continue to have. It's not that they're not already having them.

Those are real arguments that have. Because it's just a question of what is going to advance our goals, not the morality of it so much. The morality is the fact that we're trying to get free. We already have the moral high ground. We don't need to argue anything else. You know, like we already got that because we're oppressed. We don't need anything else to really make the case. So whatever gets you there is really for me the question, you know.

And if people can make a case that just the nonviolent or as I'm calling sacrificial violent methods are the ways to get you there, then, you know, I'm not, obviously I'm not out here just shooting everybody up. So obviously I'm open to that perspective, you know. But I'm just saying at the end of the day, we do have to think about it in that sense. what gets us there and stay focused on that and not do like what I said earlier where you get lost in the soup of it and now you're all of sudden like cozying up with the bear when you originally were just trying to figure out tactically how to defeat the bear now you're like on this bear's side and now you're still lying to yourself telling yourself that well if you work with the bear you can like secretly get them to do what you want like that's not how this works that they the bear never really

loses focus you know that's us that do that so Like they know what they want. They're pretty clear on that, you know. Yeah. And, you know, I think that's so important. And exactly to your point, I think, to build off of that, the issue with settler colonialism, as you made clear, is that the land is the honey.

And so even when we're talking about nonviolent versus violent approaches to trying to, you know, self-determine in that context from a national liberation perspective, it's not even deeper than that. It's your very existence on the land. So even if you decided, I'm not going to protest at all. I'm not even going to do the nonviolent or violent. I'm just going to keep my head down and try to get by.

The Palestinians are still being killed. They're still being slaughtered. Same as that concept with the U.S. settler colonialism. It didn't matter how the indigenous people of North America resisted, whether they resisted violently, nonviolently, or just tried to live their own life in their own territory. They were still slaughtered because the land is the honey. And insofar as you're on it, your existence is a threat to the bear because the honey is underneath your feet. And so settler colonialism in particular is so nefarious because no matter what you do, even if you do nothing, you will still be killed.

Yeah. It's funny something, this isn't, this doesn't align perfectly what you say. I think land is important here, but it's funny. I was really into some Dr. King's stuff and he was talking about, he was talking about, he finds it interesting that people when they would. would say they couldn't come out to a protest or something. He's talking particularly about men who said they can't come out to a protest because they're going to get shot or not get shot, but they don't want to get spit on or they can't let somebody hit them.

Like they'll have to respond. Like, they're not going to take it. And he was like, well, you get spit on every day and y'all don't do anything. So it's like, I'm paraphrasing it. But he basically said this. Like, you get spit on every day all the time. He was like, you know, all the nonsense that happens to us. all the time you you don't really do much.

So coming out to a rally or something can't be much different than your day-to-day life. Like basically like at least if you're doing it here, you're doing it to try to win something, right? So it's to say like to your point, this violence happens even if you take out the confrontation and you just are living, this is going to happen to you. Particularly in the case of Palestinians because they're on land. that someone wants, that someone is not willing to concede under any circumstances unless they're met with the same force, right? So you're, you, you are forced into a situation where you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't quite, you know, quite literally.

So you have to think about it in that sense. So if you're willing to, if you want to just put your head down and go to work and all of that, you know, that's, we, no one's going to judge you or I'm not going to judge you for that. But it doesn't mean you can necessarily avoid what is an inevitable thing, even when we get outside of the conversation or confrontation, because especially when it's someone like an Israel, it's all encompassing. It kills people who have nothing to do with it as we as we see. It as people who are not, who's never kidnapped anyone, who's never shot anybody who's never even thrown the stone. It will just, you can just get shot in the West Bank just being in the

vicinity of of some IDF soldier who was mad at a kid one day and just randomly goes off or some settler that goes off and kills someone like this can just happen to anybody you know because you know this is this is a war that really doesn't discriminate right so and that death will be just as dismissed likely as the one of somebody throwing the rock or shooting a gun yeah particularly in that context right so yeah like um you're living in a situation of people who were relentless. And I think, you know, I'm curious if you think about this

and maybe this leads to even when we're talking about with this question of suffering and cleansing. But, you know, there's been in sometimes within like the humanist contemporary spaces, like, you know, there's people who don't believe in evil effectively, you know. And I don't, as even as someone who's not religious at all, I genuinely, I do believe in evil.

Like I do, you know, I think you can materially see it. think it's some, you know, spooky concept. I think sometimes us not wanting, like, everything being relative, morally relative, sometimes I just feel like we're not really grappling with evil sometimes. Like, just the depths of just how horrible and heinous things really are. It's almost as if we dismiss it for something. Like, that's, that's, even people who are materialists sometimes do that, I think, too much. That's that gross materialism Marx talks about, whereas it's, you're not really reckoning with what's really in front of you and how, how, how, how, and how much of a threat it really is.

Because when we really just, as we're talking, I'm just thinking about, like, you say you're living in a place where somebody can literally take the shit from you, and that makes you a threat because you just exist on land. Like, that's really horrible, you know, morally speaking. But, like, it's like we don't quite want to deal with how horrible that is because what you would have to do in response to that level of evil, I don't think a lot of us are willing to do. So it's easy to say I don't believe in evil in that sense, you know.

Yeah, I think there's a, there's a tendency. towards reductionism in materialism broadly that can, in its vulgar forms can try to reduce everything down to so base a substance that it collapses things like morality and its totality. And so that's, I think, the vulgar aspect you're getting at when I think dialectics re brings that, brings that back into focus and says this is a real dynamic here going on. And I think there's a moral spiritual force to seeing evil. as it is. Like, there is evil in the world, and that doesn't have

to come with a certain set of metaphysics, but it does have to come with a certain sort of moral clarity that it's not just about, you know, raw material needs, although that is the base of the conflict. There is evil. Look at the Epstein files, right? Like, there's no material need

for the ruling class to rape and traffic children, but they do it. Because they are evil. And because they believe themselves to be so intrinsically superior to everybody else that they live above not only normal morality, but normal sets of laws. And that nobody's there to hold them accountable. And because they already have everything that a normal person might want, you know, all the money in the world, all the power in the world, the desiring for more, the desire for total domination, manifests itself in that sort of profound moral degeneracy.

So yes, I do think evil absolutely exists, and it's not the whole puzzle, but it is a crucial part of it. And I think speaking in moral terms and not always centering, but always creating room for the moral critique of the system, speaks to people on a level that sometimes mere materialist analysis simply doesn't, because it speaks to your heart. It gets people emotionally invested. in the fight against this rotten, evil fucking system.

And so I do think it's important in that way. No, for so, yeah. I think it's, I think sometimes there's a retreat too much. I mean, it's not just even materialist. I was at a, I don't know how I got it while I was in this, but I was speaking for some progressive church. And I did a thing called materializing evil. That was literally the name of it.

Like, wicked or materializing the devil, that's what it was called. Like we can actually see the devil in like poverty and shit like that, right? Like we can see it in these terms. Whether we believe in some kind of force outside of nature, that's different. But like you, this is demonic in every way that your book defines. I was just trying to, that's how I was trying to like connect with the audience. So I put it in their terms. Totally.

But, you know, it was a while to know. I don't want to get too far away from the questions here, but it was just wild to see. I don't say wow, but it was odd. that even some of them in that progressive Christian space had moved away from like concepts of the devil and evil. Like they didn't really believe in it. So it's not even just like Marxists or, you know, like materialists or or, you know, atheists or non-believers or whatever, you know, it's, even in those spaces, there's a certain

agnosticism to evil, you know, which is odd to me, you know, considering the world we're in. Absolutely. Yeah, that is odd. And I totally understand your point of speaking in religious terms to that audience. And I always argue that religion is a terrain of struggle. And I think religion also represents a genuine sphere of human knowledge insofar as it's a unique attempt to try to deal with questions that are just outside of science or morality or even philosophy. It's trying to deal with the deepest existential questions and how we relate to infinity, to the eternal, what our lives, mean in the context of the cosmos as we understand it. And there is a rhetorical force, a moral force to operate on that terrain and to speak in that language. And using something like, I'll say, like, it's, you know, like this Christian nationalism is what is actually meant by using God's name in vain, right? Using God's name in vain is not say, is not like, don't say, God damn it. Right. You know, it means don't use God and Jesus's name. as a fig leaf to advance a system or a movement that stands against every single thing that a loving

God would stand for or that Jesus Christ himself spent his life messaging about. Like that is literally anti-Christ. It doesn't mean you have to believe in some supernatural force necessarily, but it's just like, even from a material perspective or just the logical coherency of the system itself, this is a anti-Christ movement that is using God's name in vain. And I think there's something powerful in putting it in those terms. Yeah, I think that's, yeah. As some people say, that's a good word.

But, yeah, I think that's, yeah, you're literally using the name in vain to, you know, to advance imperialism, to advance murder, to advance genocide. Like, that should be, that should be a poly, right? But again, if we're thinking about, like, you know, Ingalls talks about idealism is an abstraction to another abstraction. So you just don't get to, you don't get to, like, ultimately do anything about it because it's just like, that's why I'm saying only about the hypocrisy part, which might seem like I'm contradicting myself. But in terms of all you call out the hypocrisy, but, you know, you got to do something. But then I'm saying you still need to know that this is evil, but that just needs to inspire you to do more than just be like this is bad. Like I think that's also the problem with morality in a liberal sense is it's just like I said, it's just naming. It's just it's just it's just catharsis to say that it happened.

And it's like, no, this is, if someone's using your God's name in vain, like, you know, that should be the end of it. Absolutely. And I was reading some of the, like, some of the pacifists and the abolitionists. And this is reading Lasordo's book on nonviolence. And he was quoting some of them like Charles Stearns and others. And they were very clear for them. You know, they really did wrestle with their faith in, you know, facing the South. And they ultimately came to decide that we're going to have to stand with the union.

Not that the union was amazing, but at least it's going to end slavery or something. They were like, we can't do this anymore. Like they were very clear that we have to, you know, I mean, some of them are very explicit. If you read some of the language, I was reading it on the, few other podcasts, but they were like, you know, these are not even human beings. Like, I don't believe in killing human beings. These are not human beings. Like, that's how I feel about the Epstein class. Yeah. Like, these are, these are terrible individuals and they need to be taken out. Um, um, William Lord, Lord Garrison even said that he thinks slavery's directions

were an advancement for humanity because of how bad slavery was. Like, it was just, they had to actually grapple with it because originally they were like. We want to end this nonviolently. We want to end this through procedure. And they realize, like, that just can't happen. You know, like, we're going to have to do something more. And again, I had got that these things are not comfortable to really think about because it does upend a lot of the life most of us live.

But, I mean, you know, you either do it or you don't know. I don't know. Yeah. Like, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. So I have many, I could keep talking on that. But let's go ahead and move forward. Let's touch on one or two more questions here as we wrap up.

I do want to talk a little bit about your juxtaposition of Martin Luther King Jr's redemptive suffering and setting it alongside Phelan's violence as a cleansing force, right? These are seemingly totally different approaches to the very concept of violence, and a lot of people do treat them as total opposites. But dialectically, there's an interesting sort of synthesis or sort of grappling with. with the same contradiction that can be uniting of the seemingly disparate opinion. So just kind of like any thoughts on that and why you used those two figures and those two approaches in the same way in particular.

Yeah, I'll read a few things just to frame that for people. You know, some things you go into an essay, you kind of know you want to touch on. This was actually not one of them. This came up. I did read, I did reread concerning violence because it just felt like a good grounding. to write this, but I didn't really expect to quote it much. But, you know, people, a lot of people have messed with that passage of the violence cleansing. But, you know, so I had always, I've seen that.

And, I mean, I grew up in Christian church and suffering and redemption was very much a part of it. I had never really put the two together, you know, until this essay. So there was a quote from King that I admit it is hard to even sit with sometimes. This is something he wrote in his book, following him out, Gummery Boys Bus Boycott. And there's a, there's a chapter in it, I think it was chapter seven, I think. But it was called The Pilgrimage to My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. And he walks through his, this kind of intellectual genealogy of how he became what he is.

And he, you know, talks through different philosophies and blah, blah, blah. But at some point, you know, he's gotten past that. And he's defending nonviolence. But he says, um, Bahamar home. threaten our children, send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities and drag us out on some wayside road,

beating us and leaving us half dead, and we will still love you, but we will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer. That's a hard quote to swallow up. Anytime I read it to people, they're just kind of, you know, like, eh. Yeah, yeah.

Especially when we start talking about our children, it's like, eh, not me, you know, like that's that's just not like that was a tough one you know um and so in originally they i think i just kept riding and i didn't really like sit with just kind of how off putting that is and so first i was just trying to sit with how off putting it was and not just like you know sometimes you can drop a quote and you just keep going um and you don't really sit with what someone said you just kind of use it to reinforce what you're saying so i wanted to sit with that a little bit And then as I sat with it, that's when this idea of when Phenone says in concerning violence,

which is in the broader book of Wretches of the Earth, but the chapter is concerning violence at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. And some people take that to say that, you know, Fanon is somehow celebrating violence or he enjoys it or, but he's saying that, you know, kind of like a little bit of even what you were saying early in terms of evening the odds of big. you're reclaiming something by returning what the violence has already been imposed on you. There's a certain dignity and respect that you are reclaiming and doing it, you know, even if blood has to be shed because there's been a certain violence imposed on you

as a colonial subject. So you're saying that that violence is cleansing because I have to engage in it, nonetheless, even if I'm going to engage in it offensively. Dr. King is saying that there's a, level of violence that needs to happen to in, there's no level of violence and it's kind of suffering with violence that needs to happen to change the heart of someone to bring like respect, as he said, or to redeem his white brother from a permanent death of the spirit. So there's both

of them are acknowledging that someone has to die or someone needs to be hurt in order to restore or something. Even if it's from very different sides, and I'm sure if you could bring them back from the dead and sit them in the same room, they wouldn't really agree on that. But for me, when I read it, it was just like, yeah, King in a way is saying, and I'm not taking that, this quote is not out of context. That whole chapter has some of these, like, it has this kind of sense to it, you know, like almost daring people, you know, to kill you, right? But saying that there's a a redemptive quality that that can transform people because he felt like violence was a, it, it just had a downward spiral to it. It just, it just beget even worse things. That's how King felt.

Phenon obviously felt like violence could lead you to a, you know, in a positive place because it could, it could restore order to what he called a Mancenaean world that's been imposed on them by, by the colonial, by the colonial powers. But in both cases, there's, a certain level of violence that needs to be done to bring about a better world. You know, like they're both saying it. They're just saying one has to engage in it quite literally. Another has to, in a way, suffer through it, you know. And the Christian doctrine, particularly the ones that the kings and stuff,

in the kind of Baptist tradition, but even more broadly, this kind of redemptive. I've heard talk, I actually talked a few theologians to try to work. this out. But, you know, there's a certain, like, I think they call it atonement theology. And there's a certain way that you have to die to come back. There's a certain way that people have to go through it to then be reborn. That's even in the idea of Jesus that someone had to die on a cross very violently, I might add, to then be brought back. And that is really deeply embedded in the faith. But I think sometimes there's not people deal with the redemptive part. and all the transformative part, but to do that, violence is like the transactional thing that does it.

You know, you have to die. You have to be killed. You have to be, you have to suffer. You have to go through something very horrible. You know, Job's family is killed, you know, which I never really could wrestle with in the book. But Job's family is killed to prove that, you know, that he's faithful. Like, there's this certain kind of suffering that you have to go through. And there's certain scholars that have written and that have criticized that even with. than the Christian doctrine. Like, my girl's a womanist theologian. She's criticized that. But,

yeah, but suffering becomes a, a kind of, like, thing that you have to do. But Phanan is not saying, we've suffered enough. So,

we're not suffering any further. So it's a cleansing force because it awakens somebody to the reality that they have to face. Like, I don't know if that makes sense, but that's what I was wrestling with. the scene like, damn, these things are actually speaking to each other in ways that I don't think

we've really sat with before. I think that's so deep. It literally takes me aback and makes me start contemplating and being forced to sit with that and these two seemingly oppositional traditions that dovetail in that incredibly interesting way underneath all the rhetoric. And I kind of think, you know, you talk about Job or Abraham having to sacrifice Isaac or Socrates, drinking the hemlock, willing to die for his beliefs, or in the Christian tradition explicitly, right, Jesus Christ being nailed to the cross, screaming out, forgive them,

Father, for they know not what they do, telling his disciples not to resist to allow his own suffering to occur, to play out. And there's a truth in our lives in a micro way that in order to become deeper people, in order for our character and our spiritual depth to grow. like we have to go through suffering, right? A life of comfort and ease and frictionlessness does not produce a strong character. And, you know, the weakest characters are often had and embodied by the most pampered and luxurious people, even in our own society. Look at a figure like Elon Musk, he has all the material comfort he could ever want and has the character that has never grown past the age of 13, precisely because he hasn't had to suffer or when he has, he hasn't faced up to it or lived to it in any way.

way that would be a catalyst for depth or growth. And then on Phonan's side, there's a, there's a dehumanization. Think about slave revolts, right? A dehumanization in total domination. Like you are stripped of your humanity by being so firmly under the boot and to rise up, to rip the boot off of the foot and to stab the throat of the owner of that boot. There is something redemptive and something rehumanizing by that act of extreme fucking. violence. So it's like, I don't have an easy answer here. And I'm just kind of restating things that you've already said. But it is, it is quite profound to really think through that seeming dichotomy. Yeah, like, that's what I'm saying. Violence is, because what I'm saying unites

it is the, the cleansing part is that in some way, violence is cleansing, um, whether it's through literal death or whether it's through, you just sort of forms of struggle. Um, but it's, seems to be that King is saying, like, you can do all these things to us and we will still wear you down, right? And that's where you got to respect it, even if it sounds crazy to some people, like the capacity he says to suffer, the capacity to overcome, you know, whatever you might throw at me. But it's saying that's the way we're going to cleanse away violence is our capacity to suffer. That's what they, that's what the philosophy firms. believed in. And Phanon is saying, you know, we're going to, we're going to cleanse away

violence by your capacity to suffer. We've already suffered. You're going to suffer. You know, like, we're going to wear you down through your capacity to suffer because we have experienced such total, as you said, the total boot on our neck. We have nothing left to hold on to. We only thing we have left is to reclaim it. And this is one way we will reclaim it. You know, we, we, you, you've stripped this of so much, you know, that, that, yes, I will reclaim it. And I don't care. Like Malcolm said, you know, we don't care about odds. You know, we don't, we don't care about the, we don't want to hear about that, right?

Like, this is, this is, this is, even, even that is somewhat, I don't think for known was trying to be spiritual, but you can make a spiritual case even for that because it's to say, I know people will, you. you know, they'll take issue with the maybe gendered language, but when folks say I'm a man, or if you want to take some of that out, I am a human, like you're not going to, I'm still like a living, breathing being and you're not going to like step on me like I'm not. And that is a reclaiming, you know, and not only you're not going to step in me, like, I'm going to get back at you, you know. It's like some people think revenge is inherently bad or vengeance is inherently bad. I think Even on and saying not really, you know. Yeah.

Because you've imposed, like he says, you've imposed this black and white world on me. Like, I have no control over that. So it's my job to turn it evenly. It's my job. It's actually justice to bring it back to my side. And this is a way I'm going to do it. Yeah. And at some point, right, suffering at some gratuitous point, suffering ceases to offer

redemption. At some point, total complete suffering with no end in sight fails to provide the possibility of redemption. And I think Phonon is pointing towards that. Like, you know, at the other end of total domination, we've suffered all we can suffer. There's no more suffering that you could impose on us that would have any redemptive qualities. And so at that point, the pendulum must swing back in the other direction. And I have deep love and respect for King and that entire tradition. And I find it fascinating and ponderous and it makes me want to sit back and just contemplate for sure. But like there's something deep in my belly that gets that gets lit up when Phonon talks. And like my, there's a certain bias my being has in the Phananian direction.

Yeah. Like, like yeah, because it's just, I mean, we all have a breaking point. And I think that's why that kind of stuff is relatable, you know, even when people do it much worse than like when people don't, I mean, I'll not say much worse. when people don't do it nearly as well as Phonone does it in terms of how they put it when they even appeal to, you know, the lower traits of ourselves. There's still a part of us that it all has a breaking point. And as he talks about who hasn't dreamed of doing these things back. Like they've all dreamed of it.

Like Phanone wasn't just writing out of his head. Like he was a psychiatrist. He's talking to folks all the time. He's hearing the psychology of these folks. And he knows like, you know, this is this is the world. that's imposed on you. So it's like, no, I'm not going to sit here and just let you, you know, step on my neck and I do nothing about it. And I think, again, in King's case and stuff, I do think that they're saying, and I've even heard this from, even some of the political prisoners I work with

where, you know, they're like, I'm free anywhere, right? I'm free in prison. You can't. There's like a certain thing I'm not going to let you take from me. And I think that's also what King. and saying like and others in that tradition like there's a certain humanity that your violence will not be able to beat out of me right i will still be able to hold on to it even when you do all that um so i get both sides of it i i i agree i more so ride with the phanone you know especially when it actually comes down to it like in real life like i don't think i'm going to be like you're not gonna you can't take away like i i probably wouldn't be able to take the perspective the king and take if i'm really in that position like no i'm always going to be plotting to see how i can

slight your throat you know if i'm in the j i don't know if i could really you know but also i'm not in that circumstance like to their to respect to the respect to both of them they also went through these things true you know they didn't just write about it so so i respect both sides of it you know but i found a certain unity there that i I had never noticed. That was one of the most surprising parts about writing this. Yeah. And I think it's one of the most brilliant points. And, you know, hats off to you for exploring that in a way that, you know, in these issues on these topics, covered these books, covered Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, have never really heard such a deep sort of analysis of

that particular dialectic. So, you know, hats off to you. So we have more questions. I don't know. I'm kind of up against a hard stop point on my end. I just want to make. maybe as a way to wrap this conversation up, give you the floor to say anything else that you didn't, you weren't able to mention about the essay thus far, any last words in general. And then after that, we can move into maybe lessons to take away from this and where people can find you in your work online. But I want to give you the chance to say anything that you felt like you haven't said yet. Yeah, I mean, we didn't get as much into the historical examples.

But I think people, that's why people have to actually read the essay. So we don't really have to touch too much on those. I think they're helpful to frame and ground the argument. I'm working on part two now and part two is more part of why I was willing engage more the kind of conversation we did today because it's kind of helps me think through part two because part two is more like I think I established fairly well that you know this is violence and part two is still attempted to establish that this is originally just probably one essay so I've had to kind of rework how part two was where part two is a lot of

what was supporting the first argument and now have to make a different one to an extent to make it even worth reading otherwise it's just an addendum which i don't want to write that um so part two is just wrestling with i think i might even have the opening line i'll just read the opening line let me see here here it is yeah when living under oppression even the gunk underneath its booth can become a weapon right and it's like that somehow kind of hit me as something to sit with. So on one hand, I'm trying to say nonviolence, as we've kind of already articulated, doesn't stand above anything, right?

It's just as much part of the gunk under the boot of oppression as, you know, violence or arm struggle is. It doesn't, it's a response to being caught up in all this gunk and you are having to use gunk as a weapon because the neck is so deeply on your neck. that you can't even reach for anything else. So nonviolence comes out of that, too, as much as it tries to be idealist, it can't really escape the fact that it's right there with everything, everybody else is trying to figure out a way.

The people who swing, stab are just as much right next to the folks that do, you know, that are willing to take the swing and the stabbing, right? Like, they don't stand above it. But at the same time, yes, that's true. But at the same time, there's a respect for, you know, people are, since they are under the boot, they have to make, they have to make concessions sometimes to get up from under the boot, right? We can, we can respect that too. Like, they're not, you know, none of these decisions should be understood since we're already critiquing idealism.

None of these decisions should be understood as these easy decisions that one should make when you are facing Bull Connor or the French or any of these entities, everything is going to be colored by that, right? Like, there's no getting around that. So trying to combine those two things, but then it also says in a way, like, nonviolence is kind of a, it's kind of more of a propaganda than it is a reality, you know, because it's like, it needs a moral high ground, but it's not to, to, like, to, like, move forward, but in reality, it's not really doing nonviolence, like I say. So the other two

arguments I'm making is like you have to either become a state or collaborate with the state. And to do that, you have to engage in violence, you know, because the state's not nonviolet. No matter if you want to call a capitalist socialist, they don't really care. It's like a state either has to defend a, if you're an independentist, move, would you have to defend your independence? And you're not going to be able to defend that through hunger strikes and, you know, nonviolent action. You're going to have a military to do that. And if you are a movement within a country like the civil rights movement, you're going to have to appeal to some extent to parts of the state to enforce the laws that protect you. And those laws are not enforced through, through

harmony and love necessarily they're enforced through the fact that someone has a gun, that somebody has a prison to put somebody in, that somebody can enforce a law, and if it's not followed, they can inflict some kind of penalty on it. Right. But as long as nonviolence can maintain a certain level of veneer of innocence,

like it can appear like it's that. It almost can disassociate from the very things it has to engage to even, like, progress or advance its own struggle. So that's what I'm working through in the next one, just to kind of get people a sense of what's to calm. Yeah. Yeah, and by, of course, you know, open invite, I would love to have you back on to discuss that piece once it's fully finished. And I'll link to this in the show notes. There is things we couldn't get to. There are historical examples that really flesh some of these lines of argument and lines of thought really out quite well. And it's really the first part is not a long read. I think you can read it in under 15 minutes, even close reading under 15 minutes. So I encourage people who have been at all inspired or motivated by this conversation to dive into the piece itself and all of your other work. Right.

I've had you on the show several times at this point to discuss your book and your other work. And I want to make sure people can find that. So where can people find you, your podcast, and your other work online? You can find me at Black Liberation Media. That's where we do our podcast on YouTube. Or you can just find Black NIFs podcast on Spotify, Apple, and everywhere else where you listen to it. You know, you can find me at sometimes I have too much. shit I'm involved in, man.

But 2-black.com. I'm also a poet. Also, I don't really, maybe one day I need to come on here actually talk about poetry, but also, had done that most of my life, don't do it as much. So you can find me through that. You can, but more than anything, like I talked about political prisoners, you can support the Pendleton 2

at Pendleton 2.com. That's just the word Pendleton and the number. number two dot com and and i'm also a member of black alliance for peace as well absolutely um huge shout out to black alliance for peace and i'll link to your podcast pendleton 2.com your website all of that in the show notes so so people can find you and of course we do have other episodes with you so um if you if you enjoy this conversation go check those out they're all on different topics and they're all incredibly important i really appreciate all the work you do as an organizer as a thinker as an intellectual as an artist. It's really inspiring. And you bring a depth of analysis

and a clarity to some of these questions that I really deeply appreciate. So thank you so much for coming on. And it's without a doubt that we'll talk again soon. Now for so, thank you. Definitely, definitely appreciate it. I would love to show.