https://americancynic.net/Ⓐmerican Cynic2023-01-02T04:08:06ZAmer Canishttps://americancynic.net/about/tag:americancynic.net,2023-01-02:/log/2023/1/1/frank_schaeffer_on_the_evangelical_regard_for_human_life/Frank Schaeffer on the Evangelical Regard for Human Life2023-01-02T04:08:06Z2023-01-02T04:08:06Z<div class="paragraph">
<p><strong>Context</strong>: Frank Schaeffer is the son of famed evangelical teacher Francis Schaeffer. The two of them helped bring abortion to the forefront of the American evangelical conscience in the 1980s. Frank has since repented of his conservatism. In May, 2022, after the leaked draft of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobbs_v._Jackson_Women%27s_Health_Organization">the Supreme Court decision overturning <em>Roe v. Wade</em></a>, Schaeffer was interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In this excerpt Frank is responding to a statement by the National Association of Evangelicals that their pro-life beliefs stem from an understanding that “every human life from conception to death has inestimable worth” (14:05 in the video):</p>
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<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Yes, well, first of all, the evangelicals do not believe that, because if they did, they would be fighting for paid parental leave so fathers and mothers could go home and be with their children instead of women going back to work, three low-paid jobs, with a terrible minimum wage, while they’re still bleeding from a cesarean section. Evangelicals don’t care about that.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>They would not have fought, as the Republicans did, against the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_tax_credit_(United_States)">child tax credit</a> that for a brief shining moment lifted millions of American children out of poverty. But they’re not going to spend that money. They want to get rid of it. They call it socialism.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>If this group of people was pro-life, and actually were consistent in their pro-life position, you could have some admiration for them, while disagreeing on the matter of choice. But they are an anti-family group of people who put the welfare of billionaires in this country ahead of children, ahead of women, ahead of poor people, ahead of families. They’re not even for paid parental leave. They’re not for the child tax credit. They do nothing for children in terms of schools and education. They have never raised the minimum wage. They believe in people working two, three jobs on the margin of poverty, and, tough luck, you’re on your own. So the minute that child is born, they are anti-life. They’re not just anti-choice.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>And so this is a hypocritical movement.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Full transcript: <a href="https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ampr/date/2022-05-04/segment/01">Interview With Director Frank Schaeffer</a></p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>For an interesting anti-parallel to Schaeffer’s trajectory, see the story of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_McCorvey">Norma McCorvey</a> (AKA “Jane Roe”) who, after winning the right to abortion for Americans, became a Roman Catholic and a paid anti-abortion activist.</p>
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<hr>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/25JyC5Whhvc" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>tag:americancynic.net,2022-04-01:/log/2022/4/1/ukraine_documentaries/Ukraine Documentaries2022-04-01T15:53:31Z2022-04-05T01:08:51Z<div class="dlist">
<dl>
<dt class="hdlist1"><a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/putins-road-to-war/">PBS Frontline: Putin’s Road to War</a> (54m; March 15, 2022)</dt>
<dd>
<p>This short documentary gives pertinent background story on how Putin rose to power in Russia (and it does so with much less warmongering than <a href="/log/2022/3/25/winter_is_coming_the_kasparov_neoconservative-thermonuclear_gambit/">Kasparov’s book</a>).
However, the thesis implied by the documentary that Putin rules Russia and wages wars alone while his staff and the Russian billionaire class are just trembling yes-men is not at all believable.
Why has Putin been so popular in Russia? Frontline doesn’t ask. Maybe because he is willing to stand up to NATO? Americans and American media are so always in such disbelief that the rest of the world is not happy with American military extending all over the place. 👍👎</p>
</dd>
<dt class="hdlist1"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzNxLzFfR5w">Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom</a> (1h38m; 2015)</dt>
<dd>
<p>After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Netflix made this documentary available for free on Youtube. It follows several participants in the Euromaidan with an emphasis on the Yanukovych administration’s use of police violence against protesters.
What it did not show at all is the far right’s involvement in the protests, which is almost like making a documentary about the January 6 capitol riots in the US and not mentioning (and even trying to hide) that the participants were Trump supporters.
I saw a few red and black flags of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera">Bandera</a> acolytes in the background of a few scenes, but for the most part it felt like I was being shown carefully selected footage by the director so that I wouldn’t realize I was being asked to sympathize at times with neo-Nazis.
Lev Golinkin provides some balance in a review for The <em>Nation</em>: <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-heartbreaking-irony-of-winter-on-fire/">The Heartbreaking Irony of ‘Winter on Fire’</a> 👍👎</p>
</dd>
<dt class="hdlist1"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_on_Fire">Ukraine on Fire</a> (1h35m; 2017)</dt>
<dd>
<p>This is Oliver Stone’s take on Euromaidan. It gives much more context than <em>Winter on Fire</em> but is an over-correction to that film’s deficiencies: it focuses on the nationalist elements of the protests and through the lens of conspiracy theories and vague religious metaphors provides a very pro-cop and pro-Kremlin perspective.
It’s one-sided, but unlike <em>Winter on Fire</em> at least it mentions some of the victims of the nationalist furor surrounding the Maidan protests like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odessa_clashes">2014 massacre of anti-Maidan protesters in Odessa</a>.
(It seems that even Oliver Stone has <a href="https://deadline.com/2022/03/oliver-stone-criticizes-putin-ukraine-1234973037/">criticized Putin for the 2022 invasion</a>.) 👎👎</p>
</dd>
<dt class="hdlist1"><a href="https://rtd.rt.com/films/maidan-road-to-war/">Maidan: Road to War</a> (53m; March 2022)</dt>
<dd>
<p>I haven’t been able to find out much about this film, but it is from <em>Russia Today</em>'s documentary channel and seems to have been released after the February invasion — apparently in an attempt to provide Russia’s side of the conflict to any English speaker who is willing to listen.
(It is <a href="https://www.bitchute.com/video/hViZui3gEWoT/">available on bitchute</a> in case you can’t access the rt.com site.)
It is similar in scope to Oliver Stone’s documentary, but despite being pro-Russian state-sponsored propaganda it came across as a less sensationalized, more balanced view. 👍👎</p>
</dd>
<dt class="hdlist1"><a href="https://archive.org/details/01.dvdripsvat.en">The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno</a></dt>
<dd>
<p>It’s not a documentary, and I have no idea how historically accurate it is, but I’ve been enjoying this 2006 mini-series about the Ukrainian revolutionary hero (the archive.org version has English subtitles).</p>
</dd>
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</div>Brief reviews of some documentaries about Euromaidan and the Russian invasion of Ukrainetag:americancynic.net,2022-03-25:/log/2022/3/25/winter_is_coming_the_kasparov_neoconservative-thermonuclear_gambit/Winter is Coming: The Kasparov Neoconservative-Thermonuclear Gambit2022-03-25T17:39:19Z2022-03-25T19:50:33Z<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain, but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and are almost trivial compared to strategy.
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<div class="attribution">
— GM Kasparov
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Twenty-two years ago the world chess champion expressed optimism that Russia’s new president would continue Boris Yeltsin’s liberal reforms.
Garry Kasparov would lose his title in a long match against Vladimir Kramnik later that year (an old nemesis, the <a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/vladimir-kramnik-and-the-berlin-defense">Berlin Wall</a>, returning to torment him in a new form), but he would never be wrong about Vladimir Putin again.
After Russia annexed Crimea and intervened in support of separatists in the Donbas region in 2014, the sort of things Kasparov had been warning for years that Putin would do, he wrote a book titled <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Winter_Is_Coming.html?id=vQMrCgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description"><em>Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped</em></a>.
I read it in March 2022, three weeks into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine which has imperiled millions of civilians (with dozens being killed every day) as Russian artillery, navy, and air force bomb city centers and neighborhoods).
The title is apparently a reference to the TV show <em>Game of Thrones</em> (though that’s never explained in the book), and in the conclusion he explains that “'Winter is Coming' is a warning, not an inevitable conclusion” (which makes the seasonal metaphor all the more confusing).</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The prescient introduction, written after Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine, reads like it could have been written today.
The rest of the book reads like a pro-war screed by an American neoconservative.
Maybe a better label would be paleo-neoconservative because Kasparov expresses a strong desire for American foreign policy to return from the murky ‘war on terror’ to the good old days of the anti-Soviet liberal war hawks like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson">Henry “Scoop” Jackson</a>, the former US Senator from <s>Boeing</s> Washington.
Kasparov writes that “I could happily fill several pages with Jackson’s powerful statements on why America had to live up to its ideals of freedom and democracy by actively promoting and defending them abroad.”
I wonder if any of those pages would mention that Jackson’s vision of “freedom and democracy” included the forced exportation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The pages that he did write contain some clear standalone statements that probably almost anyone could agree with.
I especially like his one-line zingers sprinkled throughout (like “And experience has shown that you can often do just fine being on the wrong side of history if you are on the right side of a pipeline,” and “Then the World Cup was checked off Putin’s shopping list, though it’s hard to say which side is the less transparent, the Kremlin or FIFA”).</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>But much of the book consists of Kasparov’s personal commentary on various American and Russian leaders, mostly since 1989.
His strongest praise goes to the “moral clarity and stubbornness” of Ronald Reagan. (“The Wall was torn down as Reagan had demanded and the evil empire fell. Lesser problems were left to lesser men.”)
His strongest condemnation, of course, goes to Vladimir Putin, a hatred to which it seems all of his other political and moral values are subordinate.
His praise for other US presidents correlates with how readily they’ve gone to war.
Bush 41 gets praise for protecting Kuwait (but he “passed on the golden opportunity to remove Saddam from power…​”), Clinton was enamored of Yeltsin but at least he came to the defense of Kosovar Albanians by bombing Yugoslavia (Kasparov says that Clinton’s justifications for that bombing campaign also apply to NATO intervention in the Ukraine crisis today, which is somewhat ironic since Putin <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220321052547/http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603">used the same argument</a> from the “well-known Kosovo precedent” as justification for Russia’s intervention in the ‘independence’ of Crimea), and Bush 43 allowed Afghanistan and Iraq to become expensive distractions from the real enemies in Moscow and elsewhere but at least he kept the idea of American interventionism alive (“Preemptive strikes and deposing dictators may or may not have been a good plan, but at least it was a plan”).
Throughout the book he non-ironically refers to the Bush Doctrine of unilateral and preemptive war as a “freedom agenda” (the sort of doublespeak in defense of war that Putin would be proud of).</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The only exception is the Obama administration, for which Kasparov has the most criticism.
The ninth chapter of the book is titled “The Audacity of False Hope.”
I remember a major feature of the Obama administration’s foreign policy to involve a complicated proxy war with Russia through its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_the_Syrian_civil_war">intervention in the Syrian Civil War</a>, so I was surprised by Kasparov’s mostly cold treatment of the 44th president.
I can think of several factors which may explain it.
The first is that Kasparov strongly preferred Republican John McCain in the 2008 elections, who was admittedly a much better fit rhetorically for Kasparov’s neoconservative instincts, so perhaps he was more biased against Obama than against other American presidents from the beginning.
The second is that Russia’s annexation of Crimea took place during Obama’s watch, and Obama failed to use it as an excuse to escalate the conflict with Putin beyond a few additional sanctions.
But the biggest factor, I think, is that for a man who demands war at every turn Kasparov also puts a surprising amount of stock in the <em>speech</em> of politicians, and he seems especially impressed by tough talk (er, “moral clarity and stubbornness”).
It strikes my cynical mind as both refreshing and naive, but he actually listens to and often believes what world leaders say.
I think the importance he places on speech caused him to mistake Obama’s approach to foreign policy of talking softly and quietly carrying out drone warfare as weakness and a willingness to acquiesce to belligerent speakers like Putin.</p>
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<p>The book’s opposition to imperialist wars extends exactly to the Kremlin, turning a blind eye to the much more destructive forces being amassed at NATO bases along the way.
Kasparov details the humanitarian cost of Putin’s invasions but ignores or excuses the cost of American invasions as necessary sacrifice.
Likewise his condemnation of dictators is conveniently limited to those not aligned with the United States (with the exception of Pinochet, for unknown reason but to his credit).</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>But for someone on such inconsistent moral ground, he holds to it consistently to the point that in some cases he seems ready to defend what even other blind adherents to American empire would rather forget.
He criticizes JFK for canceling the second round of bombings during the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA’s embarrassing 1961 false-flag attempt to overthrow Castro, for example.
(Kasparov’s grand master-level interpretation is that JFK’s “show of weakness” — and not the embedding unjustified act of aggression — is what prompted the USSR to deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba.)
He claims that “the see-no-evil Western approach to the Russian Civil War in 1919 and Britain’s Munich peace treaty with Hitler in 1938 paved the way for some of the most appalling tragedies of the twentieth century.”
Never mind the false comparison between a popular uprising to overthrow a Russian tyrant (a strange thing for Kasparov to smear given the subject matter of his book) with a treaty between two military powers, he seems to have actually forgotten that Western nations (including the USA and the UK) <em>did</em> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War">intervene</a> with tens of thousands of troops in the Russian Civil War!</p>
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<p>In chess a distinction is made between tactics and strategy.
Tactics are immediate threats, forced combination of moves that provide a clear advantage to one player.
Strategy involves more long-term planning according to heuristics and principles beyond the human ability to calculate concretely in hopes that a good position will later lead to tactical possibilities.
Because in chess, ultimately, tactics win the game and a good position is merely what makes those tactics possible.
This is the inverse of a worthwhile real-world moral and political philosophy in which a good position is the desired result, and short term tactics and compromises are mere means to that position.
Kasparov treats the moral world like a chess game: principles are subordinate to tactics and he gives no greater vision for a human society beyond what he calls ‘modernity’ and what sounds to me a lot like dismal, highly militarized, exploitative liberal empire forever.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In fairness, the book is intended mostly as a polemical tool to convince Americans to support more anti-Putin policies, a purpose which doesn’t exactly demand subtlety.
But Kasparov’s lack of political circumspection is still striking.
He seems completely oblivious to the possibility that the capitalist world order including American-led NATO wars could actually be undermining security or producing the conditions in which dictators thrive.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In the first chapter he relates that an early dissatisfaction with Soviet society was that he was made to feel uncomfortable about his wealth earned as a chess player.
“For me to say that my neighbors in Baku should see my keeping the Mercedes I won in Germany as normal, healthy thinking was radical and subversive.”
My impression is that this revolt toward materialism remains an important component of Kasparov’s political inclinations.
After retiring from chess he moved to the USA where he could enjoy his wealth and champion American empire in the name of human rights.
It’s as if Shevek, <a href="https://americancynic.net/log/2021/4/12/book_review_the_dispossessed/">being embarrassed of his orange blanket</a>, moved to Urras and devoted himself to defending A-Io’s wars, crackdowns on dissent, and colonial exploitation of Anrres while always denouncing Thu’s similar policies.
He calls himself an anti-Communist, but other than echoing the shallow Cold War propaganda of both the USA and USSR that equates Communism with totalitarianism and Democracy with capitalism, he gives little hint that those words mean anything to him.
(By those terms, who isn’t an anti-Communist?)
To underscore the confusion, most of his “anti-Communism” is directed at the privatization of Russian property by robber-baron oligarchs during Yeltsin’s liberalization and the far-right authoritarian transformation of Russian society under Putin.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Of course I hope I’m not mirroring Kasparov’s error of mistaking lesser evil for good by mistaking a lesser good for evil or minimizing the cruelty of Putin’s nuclear mafia state by pointing out that liberal republics are themselves imperfect.
My sympathies lie with all opponents of the wars and abuses of Putin’s autocracy including the work Kasparov has been doing on that front over the decades — and <em>likewise</em> those against America and its allies.
I emphasize the word <em>likewise</em> because it is a subtlety which Kasparov at times demonstrates a difficulty in comprehending.
Such a consistent opposition to state violence he tends to dismiss as “whataboutism”.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>So what is to be done about the current Russian aggresion?
In a <a href="https://www.jpost.com/international/article-698594">Twitter thread</a> after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Kasparov re-emphasized what he has said in <em>Winter is Coming</em> and elsewhere, including:</p>
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<div class="ulist">
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<p>Financially isolate Russian billionaires (most of the world is finally taking this option seriously).</p>
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<p>Produce more oil and gas outside of Russia to deprive its war machine of funding (“You can’t save the planet if you don’t save the people on it”)</p>
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<p>Support Ukraine with more weapons (“everything but boots on the ground”)</p>
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</ul>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In the book he was careful to say he did not favor boycotts that would hurt ordinary Russians, but more recently he has <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/video/russia-thrown-back-stone-age-205350104.html">said</a> the financial and trade blockade should be so thorough that “Russia should be thrown back into the Stone Age to make sure that the oil and gas industry and any other sensitive industries that are vital for survival of the Putin regime cannot function without Western technological support.”
He is now also calling for NATO to implement a no-fly zone above Ukraine (ie, to enter the war on the side of Ukraine and potentially expand the theater of conflict to the entire world).</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In other words, when Kasparov looks at America he sees a country which no longer polices the world readily enough with its extensive military, doesn’t provide enough weapons to partisans in armed conflicts, and doesn’t frack enough gas.
This is a glimpse at the world through the bizarre neoconservative lens.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Admittedly, in the immediate moment, my anti-war worldview is not very helpful.
Unilateral pacifism being impossible, the question of Should there be violence? is meaningless when the violence is already happening.
The only questions <em>are</em> tactical matters of weighing effective defenses against potential escalations.
I didn’t complain when NATO used its military might to protect Yazidis and Kurds from the slave “state” of ISIS, and I’m not going to complain if NATO thinks it can protect Ukrainian people without triggering a nuclear war.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>But to allow one’s political view to be entirely structured by these tactical considerations loses sight of a world where Putins and NATOs do not and cannot exist.
And on the last pages of the book, we get a glimmer that maybe Kasparov can imagine such a world after all!:</p>
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<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
And so my last policy recommendation is to listen to the dissidents, even if you do not like what they have to say. They are the ones who reveal to us the dark realities of our societies, the realities that most of us have the luxury to turn away from. […​] Every society has its dissidents, not just dictatorships. They speak for the disenfranchised, the ignored, and the persecuted. Listen to them now, because they speak of what is to come.
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</div>My review of Garry Kasparov's Winter is Comingtag:americancynic.net,2022-02-28:/log/2022/2/28/het_bonhe/HET BOЙHE2022-02-28T21:34:43Z2022-04-01T15:41:46Z<div class="imageblock">
<div class="content">
<a class="image" href="https://crimethinc.com/2022/02/26/russian-anarchists-on-resisting-the-invasion-of-ukraine-updates-and-analysis"><img src="/log/2022/2/28/het_bonhe/verbatim/hetbonhe.jpg" alt="hetbonhe"></a>
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<div class="title">“No to military invasion of Ukraine: peace to the people, war on the rulers”</div>
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<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_2022_03_05">2022-03-05</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>All of my sympathy is with the Ukrainian people — those trapped in besieged cities, those displaced, and those fighting to defend their homes.
It’s been encouraging to see the immediate and nearly universal condemnation of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine">Russian aggression</a>, and especially the anti-war sentiment <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_anti-war_protests_in_Russia">expressed by some Russian people</a>. (Though <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War">the largest anti-war protests in history</a> were those against the US invasion of Iraq, including hundreds of thousands of protesters in American cities, and they did absolutely nothing to stop that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War">brutal war</a> so I’m afraid a few thousand protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg is not going to stop Putin’s expansionism. I hope Russian anti-war activists prioritize avoiding arrest over empty symbolic gestures.)</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Of course I know much of the condemnation of Russia coming from Americans is from hypocrites who can’t recognize the violence of their own military-heavy society or from bloodthirsty hawks and profiteers who are actually hoping for US involvement in another war.
But one refreshing aspect of the discourse has been a notable lack of <a href="https://leilashami.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-anti-imperialism-of-idiots/">pseudo-leftist “anti-imperialists”</a> defending Russian imperialism.
I’m sure I could go find someone saying the invasion is justified by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO">NATO expansion</a> or whatever, but normally I can’t <em>avoid</em> those takes online.
I don’t know if it is just that I’ve successfully isolated myself in an anti-authoritarian bubble of the internet or if Putin’s tyranny and aggression is even too much for the usual gaggle of <a href="https://newpol.org/issue_post/internationalism-anti-imperialism-and-the-origins-of-campism/">campists</a> and tank apologists.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Other than expose the hypocrisy of American patriots who have no legs to stand on after what their country did to Iraq in such recent memory, the current crises has made plain the degree to which Western chauvinism and racism underlies media coverage and European migration controls.
We’re supposed to be outraged not that a war is happening, but that a war is happening <em>in Europe</em> (see <a href="https://spectatorworld.com/topic/ukraine-invasion-nothing-compared-iraq-afghanistan/">“The Ukraine invasion is nothing compared to Iraq”</a>).
When a white, European population is displaced, suddenly refugees are welcome everywhere, even at the borders controlled by outspoken nationalists and xenophobes like Hungary’s Orban.
Moustafa Bayoumi has a good comment on that and the racist coverage of the Ukranian crisis in The <em>Guardian</em>: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civilised-european-look-like-us-racist-coverage-ukraine">They are ‘civilised’ and ‘look like us’: the racist coverage of Ukraine</a>. (See also: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/mar/02/people-of-colour-fleeing-ukraine-attacked-by-polish-nationalists">People of colour fleeing Ukraine attacked by Polish nationalists</a>.)</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>CrimethInc has good background information on the conflict for English speakers, including interviews with both Russian and Ukranian anarchists:</p>
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<p><a href="https://crimethinc.com/2022/02/15/war-and-anarchists-anti-authoritarian-perspectives-in-ukraine">War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine</a></p>
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<p>Recent <em>Ex-Worker</em> episodes: <a href="https://crimethinc.com/podcasts/the-ex-worker/episodes/81">#81: Invasion and Resistance in Ukraine, Part I</a> and <a href="https://crimethinc.com/podcasts/the-ex-worker/episodes/82">Part II</a></p>
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<p><a href="https://crimethinc.com/tags/ukraine">All CrimethInc articles tagged with 'Ukraine'</a></p>
</li>
</ul>
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</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_2022_03_25">2022-03-25</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="imageblock">
<div class="content">
<a class="image" href="https://operation-solidarity.org/material/"><img src="/log/2022/2/28/het_bonhe/verbatim/no-war-sticker.png" alt="no war sticker"></a>
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<div class="ulist">
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<li>
<p>The anti-war movement in Russia has been more significant than I expected. According to the BBC almost 15,000 anti-war protesters have been arrested by March 15. I can’t find more up-to-date figures, but there is a good Wikipedia entry tracking updates: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_anti-war_protests_in_Russia">2022 anti-war protests in Russia</a>.</p>
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<li>
<p>I read and <a href="/log/2022/3/25/winter_is_coming_the_kasparov_neoconservative-thermonuclear_gambit/">reviewed</a> Garry Kasparov’s book <em>Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped</em>.
As I wrote, “The prescient introduction, written after Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine, reads like it could have been written today. The rest of the book reads like a pro-war screed by an American neoconservative.”
But his concluding paragraphs are worth quoting again:</p>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
And so my last policy recommendation is to listen to the dissidents, even if you do not like what they have to say. They are the ones who reveal to us the dark realities of our societies, the realities that most of us have the luxury to turn away from. […​] Every society has its dissidents, not just dictatorships. They speak for the disenfranchised, the ignored, and the persecuted. Listen to them now, because they speak of what is to come.
</blockquote>
</div>
</li>
<li>
<p>CrimethInc continues to provide good English-language commentary on the Ukraine war including voices from both Ukraine and Russia. Here’s an excerpt from <a href="https://crimethinc.com/podcasts/the-ex-worker/episodes/83">The Ex-Worker #83: Anti-War Resistance in Russia</a>:</p>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
A third option exists in addition to NATO and Putin: internationalism from below. Today, a revolutionary internationalism must call on people everywhere to defend the popular resistance in Ukraine, just as it should call upon them to support the Syrian local councils, the resistance committees in Sudan, the territorial assemblies in Chile, the roundabouts of the Yellow Vests, and the Palestinian intifada.
</blockquote>
</div>
</li>
<li>
<p>Other libertarian/socialist groups have also issued good statements. The EZLN’s communiqué (and companion <a href="https://chiapas-support.org/2022/03/12/the-zapatistas-and-the-invasion-of-ukraine/">analysis</a>) demonstrates how clearly the Zapatistas see imperial and state propaganda for what it is:</p>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
During the multinational invasion of Iraq (almost 19 years ago), with the US army at the head, there were mobilizations around the world against that war. No one in their right mind thought that opposing the invasion was siding with Saddam Hussein. Now it’s a similar situation, although not the same. Neither Zelensky nor Putin! Stop the war!
</blockquote>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_2022_04_01">2022-04-01</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="ulist">
<ul>
<li>
<p>The [Citations Needed] podcast did a great summary a couple of weeks ago on <a href="https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-5-worst-us-media-reactions-to-russias-ukraine-invasion">The Worst US Media Reactions to Russia’s Ukraine Invasion</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I’ve recently watched several documentaries about the 2013-2014 events in Ukraine and wrote some mini-reviews: <a href="/log/2022/4/1/ukraine_documentaries/">Ukraine Documentaries</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Andrew Murray, of the UK’s Stop the War Coalition, wrote a good op-ed last week. <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/03/the-iraq-war-exposes-the-wests-ukraine-hypocrisy">The Iraq War Exposes the West’s Ukraine Hypocrisy</a>:</p>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
Finally, an important difference. When the bombardment hit Baghdad we were invited by the media and politicians to be awestruck by US military power. Today, we are supposed to be horrified by Russian-wrought destruction. And in Ukraine, the civilian dead are being counted.
</blockquote>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>Ongoing commentary on the Russia-Ukraine war. No to military invasion of Ukraine: peace to the people, war on the rulers!tag:americancynic.net,2021-04-12:/log/2021/4/12/book_review_the_dispossessed/Book Review: The Dispossessed2021-04-12T16:40:14Z2021-04-12T16:40:14Z<div class="paragraph">
<p><em>The Dispossessed</em> (1974) by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin">Ursula K. Le Guin</a> (1929—​2018) is a long, slow, well-crafted science fiction novel set several hundred years in the future when the Earth (Terra) has been driven to ecological ruin by its inhabitants (the Terrans) whose population has dwindled to only 500M.
Those few survive under a totalitarian post-apocalyptic society, and only then by receiving charitable subsidies from the alien Hainish civilization.
I read <a href="http://marx.libcom.org/library/dispossessed-ursula-le-guin">the 2006 HarperCollins ePub edition</a> which is formatted well (with a table of contents) and includes a study guide by Paul Brians.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>But <em>The Dispossessed</em> is not about the Terrans and their struggles.
That planet is only mentioned a few times in the entire book.
Rather it takes place several light years away on twin planets orbiting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Ceti_in_fiction">Tau Ceti</a>.
Urras is a lush planet with several competing class societies including A-Io, a capitalist state very similar to the present-day USA, and its rival, the state socialist Thu (with “A money economy based on the principle that each worker is paid as he deserves, for the value of his labor,” and apparently doesn’t even pretend to be pursuing Communism unlike its Bolshevik counterparts familiar to Terrans).
The same revolutionary movement that produced Thu as a socialist super power also produced a libertarian revolt within A-Io.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The libertarians called themselves Odonians, adherents to the anarchist principles espoused by a philosopher named Odo.
This is a little odd from a Terran anarchist’s perspective where, unlike Marxists and academics, we tend not to adopt the name of thinkers for our schools.
There are communist anarchists, for example, but not “Kropotkinists”; and insurrectionary anarchists but not “Bonannonians,” mutualists more so than “Proudhonians”…​
But the greater difficulty for me while reading was that the Odo I know is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odo_(Star_Trek)">the alien cop</a> from <em>Deep Space Nine</em>, which makes for some confusing conflations with the alien anarchist from Urras.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Rather than risking the spread of Odonian sedition, the A-Io authorities allowed any of the revolutionaries who were willing to settle with clemency on Anarres, Urras’s uninhabited (except for a few mining camps), arid moon-planet.
There, by the time the novel begins, the Odonians have established a worldwide <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism">anarcho-syndicalist</a> society on Anarres that has functioned for more than 150 years.
And, conveniently for the Urrastis, it also functions as a productive ore-producing colony that sends several full freighters back to the homeworld every year as part of the peace agreement.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The way Le Guin sets up this world of exciting hope and experimental freedom embedded in, walled in by, realpolitik considerations, both in the Anarresti dealings with the offworld capitalists but also within the nominally anarchist syndicates themselves, grants it a feeling of authenticity that a naive utopia would lack.
Even if we can defeat or at least escape from the principalities, powers, and rulers of this world, how can we escape from each other?
There’s a Pat the Bunny song I used to listen to before my overnight shifts at Walmart (“We’re up all night dreaming / We aren’t alive as long as there’s a prison guard still breathing / So we’re up all night scheming / <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2BU-BeWFLs">We don’t get tired, we get even</a>”) which speaks of this anarchist anxiety Le Guin has organically captured in her ambiguous utopia:</p>
</div>
<div class="verseblock">
<pre class="content">I’ll still be on my own
In the community we’re building.
But that could never change,
Any society is prison to me.</pre>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>One of the stranger aspects of Anarres to me is how its inhabitants, after doing their share of necessary labour, free to do anything, all seem to dedicate themselves to specialized jobs.
We meet a physicist, a fish geneticist, a truck driver, a machinist…​ but nowhere the hobbyist, the polymath, fully realized individual every Terran communist philosopher has promised.
Even the poor playwright driven to insanity by the rejection of his peers just keeps writing the same play over and over again rather than develop his interests in other fields.
These people have freed themselves from exploitative class society, but decided to take their jobs with them into their new world.
I guess that’s about as syndicalist as a revolution can get.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p><em>The Dispossessed</em> tells the life story of Shevek, an Anarresti theoretical physicist and a good Odonian who becomes stifled by his own community and travels to the capitalist world in order to work out his theories.
The Anarresti, you see, have adopted a contradictory policy of “anarchism on one planet” and have grown fearful of any outsiders.
Our protagonist eventually sets himself the task of correcting that, of abolishing borders…​ with science.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The book is structured so that every other chapter details Shevek’s earlier life on Anarres while the alternating chapters describe his time visiting Urras where he struggles to complete his theoretical work on time on time.
I enjoyed that structure, it helped break up some of the slower narrative.
But even so, the first seven chapters are very dry. Boring, in my experience.
In those chapters, on both Anarres and Urras, Shevek mostly mopes around universities.
He doesn’t have any real friends or enemies, and a major conflict in the first half of the book is when he was slightly embarrassed to live alone with an orange blanket.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>One synchronicity is that the other book I read at the same time was <em>The Man Who Knew Infinity</em>, Robert Kanigel’s biography of the Indian mathematician <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan">Srinivasa Ramanujan</a>.
That book describes the two worlds inhabited by Rmanujan: India, where nobody recognizes his genius, and university life in Cambridge where he briefly lives after being discovered by a famous English mathematician and where he works out many of his most striking theorems.
From quarrels with his mother, travel to another world, separation from his wife, return home, and mathematical glimpses of infinity it feels very similar in tone, structure, and content to <em>The Dispossessed</em>.
But I think the similarities to Ramanujan’s life are coincidence; I don’t think his story was widely known outside of India (to non-mathematicians) at the time Le Guin was writing.
I’ve <a href="http://cedarsolderthanenglish.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-dispossessed-by-ursula-k-le-guin.html">read</a> that Le Guin actually based Shevek’s character on her memories of J. Robbert Oppenheimer (with whom her parents were apparently friends).</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Even in the boring first half there were some memorable moments.
One is when Shevek and his childhood friends on Anarres learn in school what prisons are.
The other is a conversation between Shevek and a misogynist at an Anarres truck stop through which the reader (if they were like me and assumed otherwise) learns that Odo was a woman.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Once things do finally start happening toward the end of the book, Shevek seems almost irrelevant as he becomes a passive stand-in for a messianic figure.
With some inspiration from good old Einstein (Ainsetain the Terran) he is able to finish his theorems, and with the help of his servant, Efor, he is able to escape his handlers on Urras and finally meet some Urrasti anarchists and rabble rousers.
Efor is one character in the novel I almost liked.
I thought he was an undercover cop.
But it turns out he was not only legitimately proletarian, but also, conveniently, a revolutionary sympathizer (he mentions his daughter was named Laia, presumably after <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-day-before-the-revolution">Laia Odo</a>).</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The reliance on Einstein felt like a leak in Le Guin’s world building, bringing the reader crashing back to twentieth century Earth.
Her political systems don’t namedrop any real social theorist and feel all the more authentic and self-contained for it.
(Though at one point Shevek states that the technology made possible by his theories could threaten the Urrasti’s enemies “With the annihilation of space” which is maybe a reference to Marx’s description of advances in communication technology as “The annihilation of space by time.”)
Her physics, I think, would have likewise felt more authentic without Ainsetain.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>When Shevek meets Efor’s anarchists, they explain to him why the authorities have been preoccupied with confining him.
“It’s not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh. Walking amongst us.”
He then attends a large protest where he narrowly escapes being shot by police himself, but spends three nights hiding entombed in a cellar with a dying comrade as the police round people up outside.
He then emerges and appears at the friendly embassy of the totalitarian Terrans who immediately agree to publish his theories to the public domain and give him a ride home.
The final chapter is his ascension to the moon.
Easy peasy.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>True journey may be return, but throughout the book, first when nothing happens and then later when Shevek stumbles into his Christological role, I couldn’t help thinking that, like in something out of Monty Python’s <em>The Life of Brian</em>, Le Guin accidentally wrote about the wrong Anarresti and there was a more interesting story happening elsewhere the entire time.</p>
</div>I read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. This review contains spoilers of everything; read the book first.tag:americancynic.net,2020-11-01:/log/2020/11/1/defense_of_voting/In Defense of Not Voting: Frequently Answered Objections2020-11-01T06:00:00Z2020-11-03T07:00:00Z<div class="imageblock">
<div class="content">
<img src="/log/2020/11/1/defense_of_voting/verbatim/vote.jpg" alt="Vote">
</div>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?
</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— Jesus probably
</div>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
If writing changed anything, they’d make it illegal.
</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— Emma Goldman possibly
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_introduction">1. Introduction</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The following is intended to be a brief collection of frequently answered objections to voting abstention in regards to liberal politics (the current version is very American-centric and skewed toward national/presidential elections).</p>
</div>
<div id="toc" class="toc">
<div id="toctitle" class="title">Table of Contents</div>
<ul class="sectlevel1">
<li><a href="#_introduction">1. Introduction</a></li>
<li><a href="#whynot">2. Why not vote? What benefit is there to not voting?</a></li>
<li><a href="#_but_what_harm_does_voting_do_just_vote_and_organize_in_other_ways">3. But what harm does voting do? Just vote <em>and</em> organize in other ways.</a></li>
<li><a href="#_what_about_local_elections_and_ballot_measures">4. What about local elections and ballot measures?</a></li>
<li><a href="#_so_you_admit_that_lesser_evil_voting_is_an_effective_harm_reduction_strategy">5. So you admit that lesser-evil voting is an effective harm reduction strategy?</a></li>
<li><a href="#_refusing_to_vote_is_privileged_and_uncaring">6. Refusing to vote is privileged and uncaring</a></li>
<li><a href="#_i_understand_not_voting_in_other_elections_but_this_year_its_important">7. I understand not voting in other elections, but THIS year it’s important!</a></li>
<li><a href="#_you_dont_vote_look_where_thats_gotten_us_if_you_dont_vote_you_cant_complain">8. You don’t vote? Look where that’s gotten us! (“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain!”)</a></li>
<li><a href="#_i_dont_care_who_you_vote_for_just_vote">9. “I don’t care who you vote for, just vote!”</a></li>
<li><a href="#_so_you_dont_believe_in_democracy">10. So you don’t believe in Democracy?</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="whynot">2. Why not vote? What benefit is there to not voting?</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>I’ve previously <a href="https://americancynic.net/log/2012/11/1/why_i_dont_vote/">argued against voting from an egoist perspective</a> (“external authorities are less dangerous than the spooks which rule our minds” blah blah blah).
While that wording and philosophy may be somewhat obscure and have only a narrow appeal, I believe the underlying motivation applies broadly to voting absentia more generally.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Liberty is not a political program, anarchy is not some “after the revolution” end state, communism is not a form of government, and the kingdom of heaven is not a place.
These ideals are not goals but attitudes, orientations, which in every circumstance can point individuals to their own freedom as confirmed by the freedom of everyone around them.
A disciplined refusal to vote may help to produce an attitude of liberty.
But a more significant reason for not voting, I think, is simply that those who are already oriented toward liberty tend to be not inclined to participate in the rites offered (or demanded) by the social forces acting counter to that orientation.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>This is still fundamentally and unashamedly an individualist and moral defense of not voting. For something that purports to be less moral and more structural, see Joshua Clover’s <a href="https://popula.com/2018/10/21/voting-for-the-end-of-the-world/">Voting for the End of the World</a>.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_but_what_harm_does_voting_do_just_vote_and_organize_in_other_ways">3. But what harm does voting do? Just vote <em>and</em> organize in other ways.</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Regularly choosing between competing factions of the ruling class is going to work to normalize, in whatever small rote way, the wage labour and capitalist waste, social and material inequality, monstrous armaments even during quote peace times, and prisons upon which modern liberal democracies are founded.
Voting may be an <em>indicator</em> of misaligned priorities, but other than maybe contributing to a reliance on authority and a numbness to that normal violence of prevailing political systems, voting does little harm.
It can even be argued, of course (and often is), that if a lesser evil option can be identified and popularized among the electorate, then voting can be an effective harm reduction strategy.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>I don’t believe that casting a ballot represents any major distraction from more important work.
But what is so disappointing to me, on a personal level, about radicals who vote is that it feels like an admission of deep discouragement and resignation.
As if every other day of the year radicals pretend as though mutual aid is effective and social transformation is possible, but then on election day, when they come face-to-face with even the most milquetoast/Trump-style Fascism, they are forced to admit that they don’t trust any of their own ideals.
And they can’t even admit to themselves that they don’t believe their own radical rhetoric, so they invent stories of harm reduction to cling to so they don’t have to think about why they actually think voting is important.
But, again, that is just my own personal interpretation of some voters I’ve observed.</p>
</div>
<div class="verseblock">
<pre class="content"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-blO7TGTI1E">So vote November 2nd if it seems right to you
Don’t vote if you think it just holds us down
Just tell me what we’re gonna do on November 3rd
To make sure there’s no government left to elect two years from now</a></pre>
<div class="attribution">
— Pat the Bunny
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_what_about_local_elections_and_ballot_measures">4. What about local elections and ballot measures?</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>To reiterate the first two answers, there is nothing magical about voting or not voting.
What is important is how you are oriented in your political engagements, and how your political engagements tend to orient you.
Participating in government at any level will usually be counter to any orientation toward liberty and equality.
But voting or otherwise, remaining completely untangled in the messy social structures as they actually exist is impossible.
And at some point you’ve got to stop worrying about orientating and actually do something where you are, and it is ultimately your own judgment that must guide you.
This is our world to gain, but remember it is your soul to lose. Good luck.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_so_you_admit_that_lesser_evil_voting_is_an_effective_harm_reduction_strategy">5. So you admit that lesser-evil voting is an effective harm reduction strategy?</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>It can be, yes, but probably not to the exaggerated degree many voters imagine and not without some drawbacks.
Every four years in the USA, leftish intellectuals like Noam Chomsky make the rounds encouraging people in swing states to strategically go against their better instincts and vote for the Democratic candidate (the lesser-evil of the American capitalist parties) because even a small change in those districts may have major impacts on the outcome of the election. (This is a quirk of the American electoral system, but I’m sure similar phenomena appear in other systems.)
If you’re a radical looking for a justification to vote, Chomsky’s approach is probably about the best you will find.
But even here, there are two objections that should be noted, one logical and the other on strategic grounds.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The fact that major elections usually have narrow margins is seized upon by voting advocates to drive the point home that “every vote counts.”
However, the logic of elections vis-à-vis democracy becomes paradoxical here.
In cases where there is a clearly popular choice, voting is unnecessary.
The lesser-evil argument for voting only applies to close elections.
But if the purpose of democratic elections is to prevent a small number of people from making important decisions on behalf of everyone else, then isn’t a democratic system which often produces narrow margins self-defeating?
While I was writing this I received a spam email from Twitch.com (yes, the video streaming service where people watch other people play video games) urging me to vote.
“Most elections are decided by the slimmest number of votes. Your vote can be the one that tips the scales!”
But isn’t the whole point of electoral democracy that I, personally, do <em>not</em> get to decide for everyone else?</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The above is perhaps more of an amusing observation than a defense of not voting, and voting for a lesser-evil is still strategically sound even if the electoral system is logically unsound.
But we should be clear that it is a strategy which in essence advocates nonsense out of fear (and that is not a terribly compelling reason to me).</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The second objection to lesser-evil voting is that lining up behind your lesser-evil class enemies every election cycle is bad strategy.
As a recent pamphlet from an anti-colonial group called Indigenous Action put it, <a href="http://www.indigenousaction.org/voting-is-not-harm-reduction-an-indigenous-perspective/">“If voting is the democratic participation in our own oppression, voting as harm reduction is a politics that keeps us at the mercy of our oppressors.”</a>
Back in 2004, Ralph Nader, who is in favor of voting but against lesser-evil voting, correctly described the American left’s traditional four-year shift rightward to support the Democrats as “a total loss of nerve”:</p>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
I mean first of all, they didn’t ask anything of Kerry. …​ They have in effect put a figurative ring in their nose, and they’ve said to the Democrats, because the Republicans are so bad, we collapse and we’re going for the least worst. When you don’t make any demands, when you engage in unconditional surrender, why should Kerry ever look back at you? Why should he give you the time of day?<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_1" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_1" title="View footnote.">1</a>]</sup>
</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— Ralph Nader
</div>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Now, 16+ years later and leftists are still voting for lesser evil candidates, and they are still getting few political concessions from their lesser-evil masters for some reason.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_refusing_to_vote_is_privileged_and_uncaring">6. Refusing to vote is privileged and uncaring</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The argument here is that the stakes of voting are so high — including the availability of food stamps, health insurance, and affordable housing — that anyone who would refuse to vote must be either callused to the needs of the poor or so insulated by privilege that they are unaware of the vital importance or nitty gritty requirements of the welfare state.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>This objection is wrong demographically. Surveys consistently find that voters in the United States are more wealthy, more educated, and more white than nonvoters.
In <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/04/09/nonvoters-are-not-privileged-they-are-largely-lower-income-non-white-and-dissatisfied-with-the-two-parties/">an opinion piece in The <em>Intercept</em></a> summarizing the results of several such surveys of nonvoters, Glen Greenwald concludes that:</p>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
Whatever else is true, those who make the choice to abstain from voting in presidential and midterm elections are overwhelmingly anything but “privileged.” The claim that they are is deliberate disinformation spread by the political and media elite class to suppress the reality of their own systemic failures when it comes to serving the needs of the vast majority of the population and to try to shame, rather than persuade, disaffected people to vote for their candidate.
</blockquote>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>It is also wrong conceptually.
People in liberal democracies don’t starve and go without shelter and healthcare because of non-voters. People in liberal democracies starve and go without shelter and healthcare because of the exploitative economic system which serves the very politicians trying to shame you into voting for them by calling you “privileged” for having principles.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Finally, it is an objection almost always made in bad faith by shameless evangelists willing to use both your empathy and other people’s misfortune to promote their own causes.
It is a Machiavellian argument in favor of voting made by supporters of political parties and systems which produce a society with many millions in precarious and desperate situations which they can then point to as a reason why it is imperative to lend them your support.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_i_understand_not_voting_in_other_elections_but_this_year_its_important">7. I understand not voting in other elections, but THIS year it’s important!</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>To a voting advocate, every major election cycle is the most important one in living memory.
If you don’t vote then the worst fears of all the scientists and priests together will be unleashed on the wretched of this earth and there is nothing that could ever right things again…​ until, conveniently enough, the next election rolls around.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Of course some political climates <strong>are</strong> more unstable than others.
I’m writing this just before the 2020 presidential elections, during a pandemic-fueled recession in the United States when Trump is expected to reject the results of the popular vote and armed contingents of Trump-supporting “patriots” and “western chauvinists” have been taking to the streets to threaten their political rivals.
But only an advocate of voting would look upon the violence periodically revealed by electoral crises and find in it a legitimacy that demands participation.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_you_dont_vote_look_where_thats_gotten_us_if_you_dont_vote_you_cant_complain">8. You don’t vote? Look where that’s gotten us! (“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain!”)</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>In the United states, the presidential election years bring out the biggest number of voters.
2016 had a decent voter turnout (it was the most important election of our lives, after all): almost 55% of adult Americans cast a ballot for president.
That means about 25% of adult Americans voted for President Trump (and about 26% voted instead for Hillary Clinton) that year.<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_2" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_2" title="View footnote.">2</a>]</sup>
Is the argument that the nearly 115 million adult Americans who did not vote at all are somehow to blame for the 60 million who voted for Trump?
Blaming people who <strong>don’t</strong> vote for the results of your political system, which you choose to participate in, is just confused logic wrapped around a core of victim blaming.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The refrain that “if you don’t vote you can’t complain” brings the absurdity of that victim-blaming logic to such a pithy point that the first time I heard it I thought it was supposed to be a joke.
(I am sure I have since heard people say it in earnest.)
It is fitting that its bizarre logic has been set straight in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk">a stand-up bit by George Carlin</a>:</p>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent people, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You caused the problem. You voted them in. <strong>You</strong> have no right to complain.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p><strong>I</strong>, on the other hand, who did not vote — who in fact did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for what these politicians have done and have every right to complain as loud as I want about the mess you created that I had nothing to do with.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— George Carlin
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_i_dont_care_who_you_vote_for_just_vote">9. “I don’t care who you vote for, just vote!”</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>This level of overt blind fanatical allegiance to civic religion seems less common during highly divisive elections (though I have heard it from one source even in 2020!).
But it is implied in some form by all of the “get out the vote” campaigns.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>There are two kinds of people who might plead with you to vote in this manner:</p>
</div>
<div class="olist arabic">
<ol class="arabic">
<li>
<p>A liar. Of course most people who want you to vote don’t actually want you to vote for their enemies.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A devotee. To many patriots the efficacy or outcome of voting are unimportant, electoral engagement is a virtue in itself and the act of voting one of the highest sacraments in their religion.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Vote if you want to, but please don’t take any other voting advice from those kinds of people.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_so_you_dont_believe_in_democracy">10. So you don’t believe in Democracy?</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>As I have <a href="https://americancynic.net/log/2020/8/7/homelessness_and_the_desecration_of_democracy_in_denver_colorado/">written</a> elsewhere, if democracy, the “rule of the people,” means anything of substance, then it can’t mean mere majoritarianism and instead must refer to a society which, in the words of Kevin Carson, tries to “<a href="https://c4ss.org/content/49295">maximize the agency of individual people, and their degree of perceived control over the decisions that affect their daily lives</a>.”
I’d go farther and say that any worthwhile version of democracy is one guided by something like a Rawlsian difference principle whereby social and economic institutions work “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>However, even a vulgar “majority rule” plutocratic democracy with very little independent choice like America is a starting point, at least.
The Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta made this point well toward the beginning of the twentieth century:</p>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>For me there is no doubt that the worst of democracies is always preferable, if only from the educational point of view, than the best of dictatorships. Of course democracy, so-called government of the people, is a lie; but the lie always slightly binds the liar and limits the extent of his arbitrary power. Of course the ‘sovereign people’ is a clown of a sovereign, a slave with a papier-maché crown and sceptre.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>But to believe oneself free, even when one is not, is always better than to know oneself to be a slave, and to accept slavery as something just and inevitable.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy; that is, government by the few to the advantage of a privileged class. But we can still fight it in the name of freedom and equality, unlike those who have replaced it or want to replace it with something worse.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-democracy-and-anarchy">Democracy and Anarchy</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>It may be a suitable starting point, but whether you vote in any given election or not, don’t mistake liberalism’s faux democracy for the real thing.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="footnotes">
<hr>
<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_1">
<a href="#_footnoteref_1">1</a>. See <a href="https://americancynic.net/log/2013/11/30/chomsky_and_zinn_and_a_total_loss_of_nerve/">Chomsky and Zinn and a Total Loss of Nerve</a>
</div>
<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_2">
<a href="#_footnoteref_2">2</a>. Election data from the <a href="http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout-data">United States Election Project</a>
</div>
</div>Frequently answered objections to voting abstention.tag:americancynic.net,2020-08-18:/log/2020/8/18/a_review_of_jesusa/A Review of J.E.S.U.S.A.2020-08-18T15:54:01Z2020-08-18T15:54:01Z<div class="paragraph">
<p><em>J.E.S.U.S.A.</em> is a documentary film that attempts to counter naive, militarist, patriotic American Christianity with a version of Christianity that is more peaceful and transformative.
I paid four bucks to watch it on Youtube. Unfortunately the rental only lasts 48 hours and it expired in the middle of my second viewing, so this review is written mostly without notes and remains incomplete.
The entire movie is clips from interviews interspersed regularly with what appears to be (often only vaguely relevant) stock footage.
The first 13 minutes of the film consists of proponents of violence giving various Biblical justifications for their religion.
The next 80 minutes is dedicated to several authors and pastors who give their nonviolent understanding of Jesus.
None of the dozen or so interviewees are given any sort of introduction other than, briefly, their name and occupation appearing once on the screen during their appearance (and not always during their first appearance).</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The film suffers from poor framing in general.
Members of the first group of interviews are proponents of gun ownership and violent policing, and they seem ready to kill their neighbors at a moment’s notice, but they rarely if ever even mention the military or war.
The second group, the nonviolent Christians — including a former SEAL, a former Marine, and a war journalist — focus their denunciations of violence mostly against national militarism and war, and at least two of these advocates of nonviolence make explicit exceptions for police and gun ownership.
It’s a confusing disconnect.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The selection of the ‘pro-violence’ representatives is also confusing.
The movie opens with a clip of a service at Sanctuary Church in Newfoundland, PA.
It then cuts to an interview with the pastor, identified as “Sean Moon,” explaining how Jesus taught his followers to manufacture “assault weapons.”
What is never mentioned in the film is that Sean Moon is the youngest son of Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_movement">Moonies</a>,” a religious sect most famous for their mass weddings.
Moonies view the late elder Moon and his wife as the True Parents, messiahs, who are continuing the work Jesus meant to do before he unexpectedly died.
After his father’s death and a family disagreement about succession, Sean Moon started his church (and his “<a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwep53/we-spent-a-wild-weekend-with-the-gun-worshipping-moonie-church-thats-trying-to-go-maga">Rod of Iron Ministry</a>”) as a Moonie splinter group.
The young Moon’s church is even more anticommunist than his father’s, and uses pro-Trump rhetoric and outright worship of rifles in order to appeal to the conspiracy- and fear-addled minds of American conservatives.
If <em>J.E.S.U.S.A.</em> is out to investigate the relationship between mainstream American Christianity and empire, using a small offshoot of a South Korean cult is not a representative example.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The other pro-violence Christian speakers featured in the film are mostly just ex-police grifters trying to sell defense services and training to churches.
This includes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Grossman_(author)">Dave Grossman</a> who shares his groundbreaking juridical expert opinion that the Bible is against “murder” but not against “lawful killing.”
Not mentioned in the film is that Grossman is most famous for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETf7NJOMS6Y">his controversial training seminars</a> where he helps American police officers get over their hesitation to kill.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>I don’t think Kevin Miller, the film’s director/writer/producer, set out to create an intentional straw man through his selection of Moon, Grossman, et al.
I suspect the motivation was rather a mixture of spectacle (he wanted shots of people holding AR-15’s in church) and laziness (finding actual representatives of mainstream or even evangelical Christianity’s entanglement with empire would have required more work and subtlety).</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Fortunately for the film and its audience, despite the framing, the heart and redeeming aspect of the documentary has nothing to do with the first group of interviewers or the U.S.A.
About halfway through, the film pieces together several interviews which give quite a decent summary of mythic Christianity.
The documentary’s theology is much more interesting than its politics.
With a focus on a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWTtibmV1IE">Girardian/non-substitutionary</a> theory of atonement, the film presents Christianity as an evolutionary road toward a nonviolent society.
In this view, Christianity with its Abrahamic roots reverses other ancient religions in its recognition of the victims of violence at the foundation and maintenance of society, and founds a nonviolent counter-society, a kingdom of heaven.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>But then, in conformance to the gospel form, betrayal: Brian Zahnd, a pastor who is one of the main interviewees throughout the film, states that being against violence doesn’t mean he is against police (??).
Someone else cites Romans 13 to similar effect.
After explaining for an hour how Christianity exposes and works against violence, they find a little whitewashed urn to sneak it all back in.
(To be honest, I was so disgusted at this point in the documentary that I’m not even sure if I watched the last few minutes. It’s possible these comments were clarified in that time.)</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>If God’s refusal to accept human sacrifice from Abraham founded a religion that exposes and rejects radical violence, and if the execution of Jesus at the hands of political and religious leaders clarifies the subversive road to the kingdom of heaven, then <em>J.E.S.U.S.A</em>, true to its mismash of a title, is stuck somewhere between Isaac and the cross.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>For a more positive and complete review of <em>J.E.S.U.S.A.</em> see <a href="https://orthodoxyindialogue.com/2020/04/22/documentary-j-e-s-u-s-a-reviewed-by-andrew-klager/">Andrew Klager’s review for <em>Orthodoxy In Dialog</em></a> (April 22, 2020).</p>
</div>An incomplete review of a recent documentary about nonviolent vs American Christianity. It is confusing in the opening, good in the middle, and disappointing at the end.tag:americancynic.net,2020-08-07:/log/2020/8/7/homelessness_and_the_desecration_of_democracy_in_denver_colorado/Homelessness and the Desecration of Democracy in Denver, Colorado2020-08-07T15:27:42Z2020-08-07T15:27:42Z<div class="paragraph">
<p>Denver Municipal Code <a href="https://library.municode.com/co/denver/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TITIIREMUCO_CH38OFMIPR_ARTIVOFAGPUORSA_DIV1GE_S38-86.2UNCAPUPRPRPR">§ 38-86.2</a> — known locally as the ‘urban camping ban,’ <a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2012/05/14/denver-city-council-votes-9-4-to-ban-homeless-camping/">enacted by the City Council in 2012 (in a vote of 9-4)</a> — makes it unlawful for any person to sleep on public property with a blanket or “any form of cover or protection from the elements other than clothing.”
But there are hundreds of people living in Denver who have nowhere else to sleep, and must nevertheless sleep and shelter themselves, who are therefore made criminals by the municipal code and treated as such by the police (a July 17, 2020, count <a href="https://wraphome.org/2020/07/20/denver-co-denver-tent-count-facing-the-reality-of-mass-homelessness-in-denver/">found 1,328 people living in tents in Denver</a>).</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Such an inhumane law has resulted in some organized political resistance, of course.
In 2019 volunteers coordinating through an organization called <a href="https://denverhomelessoutloud.org/">Denver Homelessness Out Loud</a> managed to get a referendum (Initiative 300, <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Denver,_Colorado,_Initiated_Ordinance_300,_%22Right_to_Survive%22_Initiative_(May_2019)">the “Right to Survive” Initiative</a>) on the ballot, bypassing the council in favour of direct democracy.
If accepted by voters, the initiative would have made it legal in Denver “to rest and shelter oneself from the elements in a non-obstructive manner in outdoor public spaces.”
The potential protection of such an essential freedom was apparently too much for Denver’s business community which launched a campaign, endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce, to oppose the measure.
That campaign spent $2.4 million to try to convince Denver voters that acts of survival by some of the already least advantaged citizens should remain criminal acts (compare to the $0.1 million spent by supporters of the measure).
That campaign was successful, and on election day the Right to Survive initiative was rejected by voters 81%-19%.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>If democracy, the “rule of the people,” means anything of substance, then it can’t mean mere majoritarianism and instead must refer to a society which, in the words of Kevin Carson, tries to “<a href="https://c4ss.org/content/49295">maximize the agency of individual people, and their degree of perceived control over the decisions that affect their daily lives</a>.”
I’d go farther and say that any worthwhile version of democracy is one guided by something like a Rawlsian difference principle whereby social and economic institutions work “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>An examination of any actually-existing democratic society will make it clear that by those standards democracy is a lie.
The United States of America is both the revolutionary birthplace of liberal democracy with its dreams of republican equality as well as one of the world’s foremost engines of inequality.
American politics is dominated by two political parties which in their rivalry never imagine a world outside of a struggle over the spoils of capitalism.
The two American parties, appropriately called the Republican Party and Democratic Party, mirror the double lie of democracy itself: the promised “rule of the people,” a fair society in which we have a say over our own circumstances, is a false promise; but so too is its less lofty illusion as “rule of the majority.”
Would-be cynics hold their lanterns up to democracy and declare that it is in fact nothing more than mob rule, a majority of wolves caucusing with a few sheep over lunch plans.
But in practice even this cynical view is optimistic and democracies tend instead toward oligarchy, the rule of the few on behalf of a privileged class.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The case of Denver’s Right to Survive initiative being rejected by an overwhelming 81% of voters might seem like a counter-example to the charge of oligarchy.
I’ll concede that any electoral system that allows Denver’s wealthy residents to decide the fate of the homeless is like polling the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah to decide how strangers should be treated; it immediately puts the lie to any pretensions of a just rule of the people.
But even in this egregious case of democratic-process-as-mob-violence, the oligarchic tendency of democracy is visible in the background.
Looking at the election numbers shows that less than half of active, registered voters in Denver cast a ballot on the issue.
The defeat of the initiative was the result of a hateful minority, whipped up by a campaign funded by business owners, to preserve oppressive legislation originally enacted by nine city council members.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Eight years (and counting) of the urban camping ban has not reduced homelessness in Denver, but it has exposed some of Denver’s most disadvantaged residents to increased stress, danger, and police harassment.
More recently, amidst a nation-wide rebellion against <a href="https://americancynic.net/log/2014/4/16/when_police_kill_the_homeless/">murderous police</a> and a pandemic-fueled recession, Colorado’s capital has been rocked by protests and shifting homeless encampments as city police sweep one location after another.
In June Colorado Governor and millionaire Jared Polis opted not to renew an emergency moratorium on evictions.
After protests against police in Aurora (Denver’s most populous suburb), the governor also re-opened an investigation into the 2019 killing of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elijah_McClain">Elijah McClain</a>, an unarmed black man who was attacked and killed by police while walking near his home.
The officers involved in McClain’s death remain at large, and protests are ongoing as I’m writing this.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>By July the state capitol building and other state property in Denver were marked by substantial vandalism and encroached by growing tent cities.
In response to questions about these scenes during <a href="https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/coronavirus/we-aint-going-to-wait-colorado-will-ramp-up-testing-processing-as-national-lab-backlog-grows">a press conference</a>, Governor Polis pressured the city to grant authority for his state troopers to help enforce the urban camping ban and likewise encouraged city police “to come onto our property and remove tents.”
The city immediately granted the requested authority and a few days later <a href="https://coloradosun.com/2020/07/29/denver-tent-city-cleared/">state troopers effected a sweep of the homeless camp in front of the capitol building</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>During the press conference, the governor offered these words to emphasize the importance of more aggressive policing:</p>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
It’s not just a building. It’s a big part of our Republic. It’s who we are. It’s our state Capitol. It’s symbolic. It’s important. And frankly, when it is desecrated, we all are desecrated and democracy is desecrated.
</blockquote>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Governor Polis reveals here the actual content of democracy: sacrosanct symbols of state power elevated above struggling human life.
If ever there can be a society in which individuals have a real say over the management of their own affairs and in which our economic and political institutions benefit the worst off the most, it begins with the desecration of this present democracy.
“Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”</p>
</div>On the double-lie of democracy and the criminalization of homelessnesstag:americancynic.net,2020-06-09:/log/2020/6/9/on_supporting_riots_and_looting/On 'Supporting' Riots and Looting2020-06-09T16:47:30Z2020-09-23T22:50:57Z<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not a pious event.
</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— Alfredo M. Bonanno
</div>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
I’ve come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already ablaze!
</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— Jesus
</div>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>My engagement with political protest has been limited to a few instances of peaceful protest and light civil disobedience.
<a href="https://mretc.net/~cris/arrested-O14/">I was arrested</a> during the Occupy movement while protesting the criminalization of homelessness and the corresponding murder of homeless men by police (see <a href="https://americancynic.net/log/2014/4/16/when_police_kill_the_homeless/">“When Police Kill the Homeless”</a>).
If I had to draw a single lesson from that experience to share with novice protesters, it would be to reject the naive notion that civil disobedience requires submitting to arrest.
Even more overwhelming to the authorities than mass arrest is mass protest successfully avoiding arrest to re-convene in locations not controlled by police.
Everybody already knows about the abuses of the criminal justice system, and many simply don’t care.
Your arrest will not change their mind.
There is no social contract to uphold.
There is no one with a conscience left to whom Thoreauvian tactics could hope to appeal.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactics_and_methods_surrounding_the_2019%E2%80%9320_Hong_Kong_protests#Flexible_tactics">Be water</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>As the past two weeks of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests">protest sparked by the murder of George Floyd</a> has demonstrated, vandalism and confrontations with police are a much more effective means than mere noncooperation for winning reforms.
It might be tempting to discount the contributions of riots to the success of the current protests and attribute it instead to pre-existing favour for police reforms.
However, as reflected in <a href="https://civiqs.com/results/black_lives_matter">recent Civiqs.com surveys</a> (see <a href="https://civiqs.com/results/embed?snapshotUrl=production-model-results.civiqs.com/snapshots/38e02737-bb1e-4cee-b25c-43b6e344bf11">snapshot of graph</a>), public support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased sharply <em>after</em> rioting began in Minneapolis (see also <a href="https://www.nytimes.com./interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html">“How Public Opinion Has Moved on Black Lives Matter”</a> in The <em>New York Times</em>).</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>As time goes on, especially if property damage continues, protesters can expect a decline in popular support along with some backlash from white nationalist groups and pacifying political concessions in the form of ineffectual or never-implemented reforms.
But regardless of how the current unrest eventually winds down, these riots have already made important gains which would be difficult to overestimate: the new baseline action for future protests is now <a href="https://crimethinc.com/2020/06/10/the-siege-of-the-third-precinct-in-minneapolis-an-account-and-analysis">burning down police precinct headquarters</a>, and the new baseline demand is defunding or abolishing police departments
(see <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police">“How Much Do We Need The Police?”</a> which is one of many interviews with the author of <em>The End of Policing</em> now being published in mainstream media.)</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>So is “supporting” riots — unruly protest, vandalism, and looting — against police brutality justified?
I use quotation marks around the word because my thoughts here are not about supporting protesters with food, drink, a place to rest, comfort and companionship, bail funds, legal counsel, or anything of that sort (but see <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/george-floyd-protests-bail-funds-police-brutality-black-lives-matter-1008259/">"Here’s Where You Can Donate to Help Protests Against Police Brutality"</a>).
Instead it is about the much more pressing (🙄) issue of how to tell people like your facebook friends that you think the riots are justified without backing yourself into some moral corner where you are inadvertently praising circumstances where innocent people are being hurt or robbed.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The first thing is to establish the context within which we are using the words <em>riot</em> and <em>looting</em>.
Everything in this essay is directly inspired by the black liberation protests against police violence in the United States, especially the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest">Ferguson unrest in 2014</a> and the George Floyd protests of 2020, including clashes with police and commercial property damage that occurred during those protests.
The connotation of <em>riot</em> and associated looting meant here is that which takes place during those and similar uprisings.
Looting in the classical sense is stealing from a civilian population during an armed conflict, and that is specifically <em>not</em> what is being discussed here.
It is possible that political and vigilante violence committed during times of civil unrest may try to disguise or justify itself as riots, but such massacres are not what I mean by <em>riot</em> (see for example, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre">Tulsa race “riot”</a>).
Also not discussed here are sports riots, though those are an interesting corner case worthy of a future essay.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>In short, it is possible to recognize riots and looting as justified reaction to racist policing and class society without supporting <em>every</em> act that occurs during or under cover of riots.
Not only that, such a stance is probably the only defensible position.
To deny that riots are justified is to elevate the relatively minor crimes that flourish during riots above the incomparably greater crimes of the police and prevailing politico-economic norms (see <a href="https://americancynic.net/log/2014/12/7/on_camels_liberal_myths_and_ferguson/">“On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson”</a>).
But to pretend that riots and looting are completely blameless is to ignore the pain of real victims of property damage and opportunist assaults; it is to mistake looting as an end rather than a means and to mistake a mob mentality for autonomy.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>In general it is unrealistic to expect revolutionary rigor from riotous anger as it is directed by police away from legitimate targets and seized upon by opportunists to commit their petty crimes of selfishness.
But while the process at times is unnecessarily disordered, including actions that deserve no apology, it should not cause us to forget that the dis-ordering of current society is necessary.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Riots, people standing up against abusive police, are raw politics: when all of the safety valves and obfuscations of the superstructure fail, riots are the final recourse of a population facing intolerable oppression.
Smashing storefront windows and other vandalism carried out during political protest is a non-violent way to illustrate the vulnerability of the existing regime
(see <a href="http://humaniterations.net/2012/02/29/you-are-not-the-target-audience/">“You are not the Target Audience”</a> by William Gillis).
Those boarded up retail shops currently visible in almost every major US city are proof that business as usual does not <em>need</em> to continue, a point especially underscored in riots taking place during pandemic quarantines which have revealed the pointlessness of so much of the work and rent that shackles many of us for a lifetime (see <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4734-66-days">“66 Days”</a> by Joshua Clover).</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The act of looting itself is a challenge to the white supremacy historically intertwined with American conceptions of property and policing (see <a href="https://thenewinquiry.com/in-defense-of-looting/">“In Defense of Looting”</a> by Vicky Osterweil).
More practically, and at the same time more theoretically, looting simultaneously satisfies material needs and breaks the spell of an economic system ruled by commodities in which we are all trapped.
A necessity obtained for free is invaluable to anybody, but probably nobody knows better than a looter that a luxury obtained for free is worthless.</p>
</div>
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities.
They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. […​] Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take […​]</p>
</div>
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<p>Looting is a <em>natural</em> response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. (See <a href="https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html">“The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy”</a> by Guy Debord.)</p>
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</div>Trying to answer the question 'Is rioting justified?' and the follow-up 'Is it okay if I disagree with the looting?'tag:americancynic.net,2020-06-03:/log/2020/6/2/hypocrisy_left_and_right_libertarian_socialism_as_an_alternative_to_tribal_loyalty_in_politics/Hypocrisy, Left and Right: Libertarian Socialism as an Alternative to Tribal Loyalty in Politics2020-06-03T00:14:16Z2020-06-07T18:41:53Z<div class="imageblock">
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<a class="image" href="verbatim/gadsden.svg"><img src="/log/2020/6/2/hypocrisy_left_and_right_libertarian_socialism_as_an_alternative_to_tribal_loyalty_in_politics/verbatim/gadsden.png" alt="gadsden" width="Gadsden flag with an emphasis on ME"></a>
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<p>One thing that puts people off of far-leftist rhetoric is its attendant historic hypocrisy.
A Marxist-Leninist who gains political power may tell you that what they want is peace and equality, while all the time seeking war and slavery.
The far-right suffers much less from this duplicity.
A Fascist is someone who wants war and slavery, and they will tell you plainly that what they want is war and slavery.</p>
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<p>But for the more moderate positions this situation is often inverted.
Whereas a “small-government” conservative will insist that in the name of liberty, peace, and prosperity we need to submit to authority, live under constant threat of violence, and resign ourselves to owning nothing,
a “progressive” liberal will accept those conditions at face-value as the axioms of their dreamed-of society.
Conservatives believe their safety resides in the protection from the very state they are so frightened of, and progressives believe their hope for an improved future lies in the liberation by the same forces that maintain our present class society.</p>
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<p>That’s why in America the outspoken advocates of “liberty” including those gun-owners constantly on guard against “tyranny” are often the most devout worshipers of militarism and despotic policing.
And it’s also why every solution proposed by the liberal advocates of “equality” is to strengthen the same state power that maintains the systems of social control and economic exploitation they preach against.
Though they formulate their demands in terms which seem to oppose each other, what both groups mean is usually something like “more government for <em>other</em> people, so that I can have more freedom.”</p>
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<p>While these hypocrisies are mirror images of each other in many ways, there is important asymmetry.
Even the deceptive aims of the opportunistic leftist is only as authoritarian as that of the most honest and well-intentioned rightist.
A social democrat may mistakenly seek solutions in an oppressive state apparatus, but a conservative will openly embrace the privileges and inequities of the status quo.
So if one must choose a side in mainstream American political discourse for whatever reason, there is usually a lesser-evil option available.</p>
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<p>But of course one need not maintain a tribal loyalty to any political party or platform.
Instead of blind adherence to a political identity like Democrat/Republican, it is possible to adopt a deontological approach which allows new questions to be checked against a small and hopefully more consistent set of principles (like “does this stance recognize my dignity as an individual as well as the dignity of the individuals around me?”).
I won’t pretend to know of a completely coherent or self-consistent political philosophy, of course (and it is not known to be particularly difficult to confuse an anarchist).
But I have found an existing (if broad) school of political and ethical thought compatible with such a method. It is called libertarian socialism. It is far more consistent with itself and with a basic recognition of the dignity of others than anything on offer within mainstream liberal discourse — one which does not force the unnecessary choices between political and economic democracy or between social welfare and the free expression of individuality, for examples.</p>
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<p>The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin pithily summed up the position of libertarian socialists over 150 years ago when he wrote,
“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”
For a more thorough introduction, I know of two readily available resources.
Both are too long and too broad to make a reasonable first read, but skimming them should give a basic understanding of what libertarian socialism is all about, its fundamental principles and main schools of thought:</p>
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<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism">“Libertarian socialism”</a> on Wikipedia:</p>
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It advocates a worker-oriented system of production and organization in the workplace that in some aspects radically departs from neoclassical economics in favor of democratic cooperatives or common ownership of the means of production (socialism). They propose that this economic system be executed in a manner that attempts to maximize the liberty of individuals and minimize concentration of power or authority (libertarianism). Adherents propose achieving this through decentralization of political and economic power, usually involving the socialization of most large-scale private property and enterprise (while retaining respect for personal property). Libertarian socialism tends to deny the legitimacy of most forms of economically significant private property, viewing capitalist property relation as a form of domination that is antagonistic to individual freedom.
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<p><a href="http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html">An Anarchist FAQ</a> (see especially <a href="http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secAint.html">“Section A - What is Anarchism?”</a>):</p>
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Emma Goldman expressed what might be called the "anarchist question" as follows: "The problem that confronts us today…​ is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities." In other words, how can we create a society in which the potential for each individual is realised but not at the expense of others? In order to achieve this, anarchists envision a society in which, instead of being controlled "from the top down" through hierarchical structures of centralised power, the affairs of humanity will, to quote Benjamin Tucker, "be managed by individuals or voluntary associations."
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<p>Gadsden Flag image based on Wikimedia’s <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gadsden_flag.svg">"The Gadsden Flag"</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en">CC BY-SA 3.0</a></p>
</div>Navigating American political discourse toward anarchism. "Whereas a 'small-government' conservative will insist that in the name of liberty, peace, and prosperity we need to submit to authority, live under constant threat of violence, and resign ourselves to owning nothing, a 'progressive' liberal will accept those conditions at face-value as the axioms of their dreamed-of society."