A-Infos (en) Thral #23 May/June '02 - Anti-War Rant - social war by other means

[Worker <a-infos-en@ainfos.ca>(http://free.freespeech.org/thrall)]

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  I believe it was Clausewitz who said that war was simply politics
  carried out by other means. I think that the reverse is a truer
  expression of social reality. Politics is simply the social war
  carried out using less bloody means. If we consider that it is always
  the ruling class and its lackeys who call for social peace,
  demanding that the exploited and excluded refrain from violence
  in dealing with their social condition, it becomes obvious that
  social peace is simply part of the strategy of the social war. For
  this reason, the peace movement must be rejected as a way of
  dealing with the current American call for war.

  examining real relationships of power

  The peace movement is based on an ideology of nonviolence, a
  pacifist moral stance that ignores the reality of social
  relationships. Rather than examining real relationships of power,
  of domination and exploitation, it simply demands that the state
  continue to carry out its functions, but without violence, without
  bloodshed. But what are those functions? Are they not the
  maintenance of order, the protection of property, the
  enforcement (selective, of course) of the rule of law? And such
  activity could only be necessary if there are those who find that
  this social order does not meet their needs, does not offer them
  the lives they desire, puts them in the position of having to choose
  between resigned acceptance of often unbearable conditions or
  defiance of the rules and a constant battle of wits or arms against
  the dominant world. But these excluded ones did not begin this
  social war.

  behind the ballot there is always the bullet

  The ruling class has always used violence or the threat of violence
  to lay claim to all of our lives. If the democratic regimes have
  managed to create a more sophisticated method of participatory
  domination, this does not change the fact that behind the ballot
  there is always the bullet to guarantee the maintenance of social
  peace, which is thus clearly the public face of the social war that
  keeps most of us passively in our places even claiming to be
  content with this obedience that is freedom. So whether the state
  goes about its activities peacefully or through blatant violence, it
  is still carrying out the policy of the social war that keeps us in our
  place.

  pacifist protests become a farce

  In this light, the pacifist protests become a farce. The demand
  that the American state and the states of the rest of the world
  carry on their current `war against terrorism' peacefully assumes
  that the state should indeed exist, and thus that the violence
  implicit in the present social order should continue - the violence
  that kills millions daily whether from starvation like in Northern
  Africa and numerous other places, from poisoning by pollution
  and processed foods, accidents on the job, new, increasingly
  virulent diseases, the spiritual desolation of the culture of the
  market or the bullets of the state's uniformed guard dogs. The
  current `war against terrorism' is nothing other than the
  continuation of the daily policy of low level terror used by the
  state to guarantee we stay in line. It matters little whether the
  state uses bloody or bloodless means. The result is the same: our
  lives are not our own and we die, sooner or later, without ever
  having really fully lived.

  pacifism ultimately serves the state's ends

  Opposition to the current war  can only make sense as
  opposition to the entire social  order from which it has arisen.
  Such opposition cannot spring  from a movement dedicated to
  nonviolence. Pacifism  ultimately serves the state's
  ends by making us blind to the
  nature of the state. Against the violence of terrorism, the violence
  of war, the violence of the state, it is necessary to embrace
  revolutionary violence - the complete upheaval of all social
  relationships that maintains the institutional violence of those
  who rule us. We want neither their war, nor their peace, but their
  destruction.

  AGAINST PACIFISM
  AGAINST MILITARISM
  AGAINST TERRORISM
  AGAINST THE STATE


  - reprinted from Willful Disobedience (2001)



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