Who Throws the Most Punches?

Trey Smith

In the official narrative, the question always concerns whether anyone and everyone but the state should engage in violence. The question of whether the state should engage in violence, or whether state violence should be evaluated in terms of the same standards of reasonableness as violence by nonstate actors, never crosses the threshold of visibility. The legitimacy of violence by the state is never even articulated as an issue.

That’s a shame. The state is not a mystical entity, a sum greater than the human beings making it up. The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes — purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. And violent actions by an association of individuals who call themselves “the state” have no more automatic legitimacy than violent actions by associations of individuals who call themselves “the Ku Klux Klan” or “al Qaeda.”

The violent actions of the state deserve to be evaluated using the same criteria by which we judge the morality of the violent actions of any other grouping of individuals. Alexander Berkman, in “The ABC of Anarchism,” argued that the death and destruction caused by the institutionalized violence of the state was many times greater than that caused by anarchists or other revolutionaries. Who do you think has thrown more bombs — anarchists, or government military forces?
~ from Should Occupy Use Violence? by Kevin Carson ~

There has been much handwringing as of late because some of the protesters in the Occupy Movement -- particularly in Oakland, CA -- have employed what some folks consider violent tactics. There have been incidents in which objects have been thrown at the police and property has been damaged and/or defaced. In my book, violence to property is still violence, but I do recognize that this definition is not shared by all concerned.

However, as Carson points out, possible violence committed by some protesters pales in comparison to the institutionalized violence of the state. Just in terms of the Occupy Movement itself, there is no way to compare a few projectiles tossed here and there with the widespread police brutality being utilized in city after city and MOST of it aimed at protesters committing NO form of violence whatsoever.

In some ways, I think it is wrong to condemn protesters for violent acts. I realize this must sound strange coming from an avowed pacifist like me, but when violence so permeates a society -- as it does ours -- it becomes part of the public consciousness.

Everyday we read or hear of drones murdering innocent civilians, the president ordering a hit on someone a secretive panel has determined is dangerous or the rattling of war sabers at some nation we have labeled as evil. Our federal government has instituted and trumpeted a policy of "shoot first and, maybe, ask questions later."

In many of the Taoist texts featured on this blog, we talk about how the king/ruler (for contemporary times, the national government) sets the tone for the nation. When the tone set is a violent one, it should surprise no one that some citizens utilize this strategy as well in their activities.

While I think that the use of violence in the Occupy Movement plays into the hands of the police state -- it provides them with the political cover to be ever more violent themselves -- it is consistent with the manner in which the government itself behaves.