Don't Let Them Gaslight you on "Political Violence"

Pay Close Attention to When You're Told Violence is Wrong

The world's most violent people would like you to know that violence is bad. The most powerful people on earth who make a living demonizing their political opposition (when they're not trying to jail them) want you and I know to that we've got to "cool down" our rhetoric.

"Violence has never been the answer" President Biden mumbled to the nation in admonishment and with zero self-awareness or shame after his political rival former President Donald Trump was grazed at one of his fascist campaign rallies earlier this week and one of his acolytes killed and several others seriously injured.

"There is no place in America...for any violence, ever. Period. No exceptions. We can't allow this violence to be normalized," he continued. "The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It's time to cool it down."

The United States of America was founded on some of history's worst violence, and every cent of its current wealth is based on the ill-gotten gains of our founding genocide and radcicalized chattel slavery. Beyond that, we currently terrorize more of the world than any previous global empire ever has, and our government surveils, imprisons, and kills more of its own citizens than any other nation.

The true founding dream of America was previously unimaginable violence and domination. It is the only dream we've ever delivered on to our citizens and the world.

Suffice to say, then, violence is already beyond normalized in this nation. Our ruling institutions and their systems managers run the nation on our exhausted sweat, nervous tears, and drained blood.

Biden and Trump and every single member of their respective corporate parties survive off of political violence committed against the world and us. They join together to beat our children and student protestors who deign to speak out against the genocides they perpetrate abroad.

Biden and Trump join together to torture journalists for the crime of exposing our nation's war-crimes. Democrats and Republicans join together to increase the budgets of our police forces who manage to kill more than any other industrialized nation on earth, who beat and kill political dissidents, yet still somehow never seem to be able to prevent or even stop school mass shootings in a timely matter whether it's in Uvalde Texas or Butler, Pennsylvania.

President Trump was shot at while ranting against Latin immigrants like my family who both he and Biden have kept in concentration camps after illegally denying them asylum application, but we're the ones who need to be reminded to "cool it down."

Biden has called Trump a fascist. Biden said while running in 2020 against Trump that he wouldn't trust the covid vaccines that came out during Trump's term, and Democrats have said that if Trump is re-elected it would end our "democracy."

Trump's own new running mate has called Trump "America's Hitler." The ruling class couldn't be more violent in action or rhetoric, yet we're told that violence is an exceptional occurrence in this nation, and are lectured about our own tempers and word choices.

This obvious deception isn't so much a matter of hypocrisy but a matter of categorization and definition. When large corporations or our government poison, enslave, or murder millions it isn't violence - it is "protecting the bottom-line," or a matter of "national defense."

When one young man is alleged to have shot at a White supremacist, neo-fascist rally, however, that's violence. When our elected officials go back on campaign promises of promised covid-aid, debt forgiveness, the protection of women's rights, or securing peace across the world, that isn't violence or dangerous rhetoric by way of duplicity and negligence.

It is just "pragmatism" and "being an adult," or "making hard choices" that are a part of "responsible governance."

When unarmed Palestinians march towards their concentration camp fence weekly to protest their oppression and are sniped at by our weapons given to our proxy state in Palestine that isn't violence. When our children march to protest that slaughter it is political and dangerous and Democrat mayors and governors sic the police on them while Republican governors pardon people who run over and kill protestors with their cars.

When Presidents assassinate global leaders they receive bi-partisan support from their colleagues. When Presidents like Trump attempt coups in places like Venezuela, he has the support of people like Senator Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Political violence is what we do. Responsible governance is what they do.

This historically illiterate neoliberal grammar is even promoted by supposed Leftists.

The self-described socialist magazine and website Jacobin published an essay by Branko Marcetic the same day Trump's rally was shot up leaving the MAGA leader grazed, one of his acolytes dead, and several others seriously injured. The essay's message was a better crafted version of Biden's own message and would likely get the go-ahead from our State Department.

"There's one thing we can say for sure," it reads.

"Political violence is wrong and does not lead to anything good. It is morally wrong to kill people, period...Political violence rarely solves any problem it purports to be concerned with."

That type of universal condemnation of political violence may sound appropriate coming from a member of the clergy or be convincing to those with narrow conceptions of who is included among the ranks of the Human or who have a rose-colored perception of the tools available to the wretched of the earth. Condemning all political violence and all killing as equally and unequivocally immoral makes no effort to define "violence" or "political", and it certainly ignores the conditions and available options to the subaltern and colonized.

"Violence," like "crime" is a social construction within the context of politics and governance. Martin Luther King Jr. advocated for total non-violence and allowed himself to be bricked, beaten, jailed, and murdered, but his activism was still characterized by the government, journalists, and the establishment as "violent."

Palestinians simply existing in their homeland is considered violent. Opposing capitalism is considered violent extremism by this current administration.

Issuing blanket condemnations of "violence", especially against elites, lets the term be defined by the people and institutions who do the most actual violence. Equating all killings with all other killings, morally, also renders invisible any possible distinctions between murder and killing.

An enslaver murders their enslaved. An enslaved person rebelling kills their enslaver.

White, liberal writers are free to see those two things as morally equivalent, but they certainly are different things, categorically. The additional blanket pseudo-analysis that political violence never leads to "anything good" either ignores the many anti-colonial revolutions that resulted in freedom for millions of colonized people or does not consider their liberation as "anything good."

This bourgeois anti-intellectualism also ignores the lived reality for countless people throughout history who simply are not allowed to access and utilize any of the acceptable and "non-violent" means of political involvement. The point is that oppressed people utilize violence most often because they are completely excluded from mainstream politics.

The beaten, killed, and jailed White American suffragettes were treated so because their unarmed marches and pickets were deemed "violent" and "dangerous." Some people do not have any tool left to them to defend themselves but literal violence, and often times their very existence or at least objection to their mistreatment will result in civil society deeming whatever actions they take as "violent."

Just as it sounded good to the uninformed and shallow-thinking to say "All Lives Matter," it is offensive and cruel to say that all killing is bad and that political violence is always morally wrong. Perhaps one thinks that it is completely immoral for a citizen to take a shot at a former head of state who murdered thousands, ran concentration camps, and assassinated others, and who may soon again take the helm of empire.

One is free to take that position and argue for it if their conscience or social pressure demands it of them. Going a step further to condemn all political violence and equate all killings, however, ignores important historical and material realities like colonialism, and refuses to consider a difference between self-defense and aggressive murder.