Open your mind. MORE!

Photo 13 Feb 24 notes

bbcity:

The thing with violence is that everyone wants to define it differently. Libertarians want to define it as “coercion” which is the proactive threat of physical force. Liberals want to define it as whatever’s the most convenient scapegoat for passing what’s, in truth, reactionary legislature in the name of “progress.”
The problem with these definitions is that they’re myopic and naive. Violence isn’t necessarily the imposition of martial law or the police state, although those are brazen examples of adoptive violence. It’s also not just coercion. Violence is structural, and the most pernicious forms of it are those that hide themselves so well that they elude our radar and become impossible to identify through a mainstream political framework. Poverty, the private property amassed by economies of scale which hoards global power, unemployment, wage wars (and all other forms of class politics such as Austerity and capital flight), are all symptomatic of a systemic edifice constructed by structural violence.
And why is that? Why is it so hard for people to see that all these facets of society and the world at large are violent? Because we’ve been taught, in the West, that whatever isn’t a gun or an army can be negotiated with. How, though, can the people of Greece negotiate with a government that has sold off their interests to a mob of bankers for the sake of nominally evading bankruptcy? How many times will the Greek people organize peacefully in the hundreds of thousands before they become sick to death of a world that’s indifferent and would much rather speculate on the best economic policy? How long?
Even before Greece became overtly police-state-esque (in the past year or two), the structural violence in imposing the faults and mistakes of the wealthy on the backs of the poor was palpably there for those who chose to peruse the situation through a different framework.
So no, peacefully standing around won’t work when the people you’re protesting against have absolutely no stake in the outcome of your life. Their only interest is in getting 15% interest on the specter of a debt you’re supposedly responsible for, as an average citizen, when all you’ve ever done is go to work and come home and asked for a raise so that you can save some money to send your kids to college. In the process of getting it back they’ll do whatever it takes to extract the humanity out of every day life in Greece.
With that, I’d like to say: Fuck peace.

The thing with violence is that everyone wants to define it differently. Libertarians want to define it as “coercion” which is the proactive threat of physical force. Liberals want to define it as whatever’s the most convenient scapegoat for passing what’s, in truth, reactionary legislature in the name of “progress.”

The problem with these definitions is that they’re myopic and naive. Violence isn’t necessarily the imposition of martial law or the police state, although those are brazen examples of adoptive violence. It’s also not just coercion. Violence is structural, and the most pernicious forms of it are those that hide themselves so well that they elude our radar and become impossible to identify through a mainstream political framework. Poverty, the private property amassed by economies of scale which hoards global power, unemployment, wage wars (and all other forms of class politics such as Austerity and capital flight), are all symptomatic of a systemic edifice constructed by structural violence.

And why is that? Why is it so hard for people to see that all these facets of society and the world at large are violent? Because we’ve been taught, in the West, that whatever isn’t a gun or an army can be negotiated with. How, though, can the people of Greece negotiate with a government that has sold off their interests to a mob of bankers for the sake of nominally evading bankruptcy? How many times will the Greek people organize peacefully in the hundreds of thousands before they become sick to death of a world that’s indifferent and would much rather speculate on the best economic policy? How long?

Even before Greece became overtly police-state-esque (in the past year or two), the structural violence in imposing the faults and mistakes of the wealthy on the backs of the poor was palpably there for those who chose to peruse the situation through a different framework.

So no, peacefully standing around won’t work when the people you’re protesting against have absolutely no stake in the outcome of your life. Their only interest is in getting 15% interest on the specter of a debt you’re supposedly responsible for, as an average citizen, when all you’ve ever done is go to work and come home and asked for a raise so that you can save some money to send your kids to college. In the process of getting it back they’ll do whatever it takes to extract the humanity out of every day life in Greece.

With that, I’d like to say: Fuck peace.