They Want You Violent.

As we watch Luigi Mangione become the Left’s Kyle Rittenhouse, it bears constant repeating: they want you violent.

Why? Ask Palestine.

That’s as starkly as I can put it. Functionally, all Hamas has done is get tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians killed. Nothing has changed except the amount of Gaza real estate soon to be resorts and second homes for the Israeli elite. Any global goodwill that could have affected change evaporated instantly, any solidarity with non-violent movements was destroyed with each vain rocket attack, and without any real political counter-organization leveraging real opposition tactics, Hamas was free to launch absolutely useless attacks on Israel that, again, did nothing but “justify” Israel’s further repression and violence.

Let me be clear, this isn’t a nuanced critique of Hamas as an entity, nor am I glossing over the effect that generations of trauma and violence committed against a population has on the options and reaction those populations express. It merely points out that they’ve been ineffective in their tactics, in a way that highlights the ineffectiveness of ANY militant movement. So don’t @ me.

Hamas was funded in part by the very government they opposed. While there is an argument that they were splitting opposition, as articles about this often mention, the real value is that by funding a militant group intent on violence, it allowed Israel to perpetuate its apartheid state and brutal repression of all Arabs in the region. Perpetual victimhood justifies a perpetual police state backed by military force. It also allowed the militant wing of Palestinian resistance to gain total hegemony, boxing out non-violent and political opposition groups.

That’s the goal: “look at this violence, this is inherent in these people, they are all this group, and all violent, and therefore we are just defending ourselves, and if eradicating all these people is what we have to do to eradicate this threat, then that is justified.” This goes for Hamas as much as it does BLM, because they don’t want any nuance. This is how fascism works. It leverages State violence to eliminate dissent. And ANY violence of the part of dissenters puts more and more weight on that side of the scale.

The State monopoly on violence is a monopoly for a reason, and as military technology advances, the gap between State and civilian force projection widens to absurdity. This advantage always lies with the State, and they love nothing more than for angry mobs to take to the street to wield that advantage. That monopoly is the biggest tool in their toolbox, and the riskiest. The easier we make it to use, the greater the advantage they have.

The political justification of “dangerous terrorists” demanding violent reprisals and increased repression of dissent is kneejerk for the ruling class. Black Lives Matter protests were indeed largely non-violent, but the actions of the Black Bloc agitators breaking windows and chasing the cops out of the CHAZ in Seattle were leveraged by the State and Right Wing power to crack down on ALL protests, and to fearmonger to the point where non-State actors were murdering protestors, often with impunity.

Not just the aforementioned Rittenhouse, but well known incidents of driving into crowds, or waving guns outside of ones’ house, or competing groups of gun-wielding chest thumpers getting into shootouts, and of course, the stochastic terrorism of the Right Wing media, from Glen Beck’s TIDES shooter to a litany of “lone wolves” whose online presence revealed manifestos and posts referencing Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder, Tim Pool, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Fox News, Breitbart, OANN, and thousands upon thousands of violence-supporting pages and groups on social media.

This is why the apparently ideologically confused Luigi is being charged with terrorism. To justify violence against dissent, regardless of ideology. Class war is war, and they will kill to win. They already do.

Any incident, fabricated or not, is instantly folded into a narrative that is just frothing at the mouth for the overton window to be pushed far enough to not just “justify” genocide, but demand it. This is the inevitable outcome of violence.

Vietnam, the poster child for “farmers in pajamas defying empire” not only had a formal military, but lost generations of dead fighters and civilians, in a country that needed decades to recover. The Taliban might have finally worn down US political will to remain, but it took a full generation of dead Afghans to get there. Resistance in the Middle East in general was a massive tragedy with young men from all over – including the West – converging to die at the hands of the far more effective US military. Estimates of ME casualties for the time are all over the place, but there are some massive numbers up there. Some sources put deaths in the millions.

US deaths stand at 7,054. That’s what violence gets you.

Ukraine has a professional military backed by huge weapons resupplies from the most advanced military in the world, and they are fighting a losing battle, hoping to outlast Russian will. You cannot look at that and think that violence is going to get you anything but a big fucking pile of innocent dead. While Syrian rebels have finally ousted Assad, they have to face the consequences of that violence, and still find a way to come together to create a new political system. Their work is just beginning.

Erica Chenoweth has a wonderful book that lays out the success of non-violent movements from an empirical way. There are lectures on YouTube for free as well. I highly recommend engaging with as much content about this as you can stand.

It is vitally important to understand that UnitedHealth will soon have a new CEO making the same shitty decisions in the blink of an eye, and nothing will change except that the scales tipping towards violent repression get one more violence narrative to weigh down the side of genocide.

We have wider arguments against violence itself, as well – all violence, even when necessary, or understandable, is oppression. Even successful violent movements need to keep power through violence, perpetuating repression. Every single revolution of the 20th century resulted in a repressive regime. Violence is inherently antithetical to liberation. Liberation is fundamentally the freedom from violence. You cannot achieve liberation through violence.

How you gain power is how you’ll govern. The ends don’t justify the means, the means define the rightness of the ends. No justice through injustice. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. You cannot hold power through anything but popular consent, which you cannot get through violence. This shit is pretty obvious as soon as you stand outside the cult of violence.

Violence is ego, is toxic masculinity, is reactionary, is abusive, is easy, lazy, and has consequences to the innocent, all the time, every time, from bar fights to global war. It fits perfectly into our current overall culture of chest thumping, righteous narcissism, as attractive to Far Left posturing identitarians as the fascist MAGA crowd. It is the refuge of fools and children, whose fantasies of righteous violence are never borne out, just replicating the trauma of violence across generations to ruin lives far removed from whatever initial bullshit began the cycle.

It is a poison fed to all parties, and is inevitably fatal. The violence of WWI didn’t “solve the problem”, it set the stage for the rise of Hitler. WWII didn’t “solve the problem”, the Marshall Plan and the investment in Japan’s modernization did. We learned the lesson that victory was not enough, that punitive treaties didn’t help, and worked towards eliminating the conditions that created the rise of violent imperialism in the first place.

A one week general strike would cripple this country. Just stay the fuck home. You want to see class panic? Go see what has happened in countries that have done this. Look at what happened during the pandemic! The Capital class lost their fucking minds, and have gaslit us until we have NO IDEA how much power we hold. This is why they want us violent, because they know what happens when we stop howling these delusional rage fantasies and start organizing for real.

The first opponent we face in any struggle is ourselves. We are conditioned to be impulsive, reactionary, and violent. We are trained to be simple, selfish egotists performing idealized selves on social media, to be the tough guy images our culture fetishizes. Oh fuck, the dopamine. So easy. Coalition takes the one thing we don’t have: humility. But that’s what we need.

“Pride is not the antidote for shame, it is its source. True humility is only the antidote for shame.” The only antidote to violence is the humility to join together without ego, without posturing, without shouldering others aside to be in the spotlight, without going to marches just to be seen, without putting performativity over results.

Occupy started at the same time as the Tea Party. The Tea Party changed our whole ass country, because they leveraged collective action. Occupy did jack shit, because it was purely performative. No legislation, no candidates, no agenda. Bernie could have been a movement, but everyone got blindingly mad and gave up the minute they didn’t get the instant gratification of victory. I hate to be all “how do you know non-violence doesn’t work when you haven’t actually done it”, but my fucking void, y’all, we’re DOGSHIT at this. And we don’t have to be.

Two years till midterms. We can change the fucking world if we can grow the fuck up.

So before you post that Luigi meme, I want you to think about a dead Palestinian child, and I want you to remember that this is what they want for you and yours. They want you to pick up that gun so they can shoot you before you can even aim it, and claim self defense. They want to be able to come into your house and drag you off to ze camps, to let their cruelty and violence free, on the barest whiff that you might be dangerous, like unarmed black kids, like 4 year olds crossing the Rio Grande, like diabetics dying in poverty, like a hundred stories a day of people who have every fucking right to be murderously angry at a system that doesn’t care if they live or die.

We can’t afford violence, It’s ineffective, and makes the real work infinitely harder. We have to find a way to build solidarity and create coalition on the issues that matter to us all. Our power doesn’t flow from the barrel of a gun, it flows form our common humanity, our collective purpose, our resolution, our courage, and our faith in each other, the rightness of our cause.

They want you violent. And the only way to win is to not be.