A-Infos (en) US, Boston, Anarchist Newsletter BAAM Issue #25 - Page 7 - Who You Callin’ Violent? By Adrienne

Every anarchist on the internet has surely already laughed themselves dizzy at the youtube 
video of right-wing, bananaphone, Mormon, libertarian, F*x News talking head Glenn Beck 
vituperating against The Coming Insurrection in a book review [does it count as a book 
review if the reviewer goes on to admit they haven’t actually read the book in question?]. 
You can’t write comedy that good. However, I will dwell on neither the book nor the 
infamous video. What inspired this piece was Beck’s repetition of a popularly held and 
widely accepted notion, namely that ‘violence’ will ‘delegitimize your cause.’
Picture: State and corporate violence(Clockwise) Mass graves of Indigenous Americans at 
the Battle of Wounded Knee; Environmental destruction caused by tar sands surface mining 
in Alberta, Canada; The atomic bomb.

I use ‘violence’ in scare quotes because such a wide range of tactics are considered 
violent by the dominant culture, whether it’s breaking windows, setting fires, blocking
intersections, or even dragging newspaper
boxes into the street, irrespective of the
fact that none of these things involve
hurting people. More unnervingly, many
‘radicals,’ whether overtly or uncon-
sciously, buy into this framework. How
many times have you read accounts of
street actions where the writers repeat-
edly refer to ‘peaceful protesters,’ ‘non-
violent demonstrators,’ or hope to inspire
outrage against incidences of police
repression against ‘non-violent activ-
ists’? The presupposition here is that it
would be totally OK for the police to smash
the faces and ribs of people smashing win-
dows. That, as soon as someone oversteps the
bounds of law, in place to protect property
and preserve privilege, they are making an
‘illegitimate protest’ and their concerns aren’t
to be taken seriously and we aren’t to be con-
cerned when they get a judicial smackdown.
In case anyone is confused, I am not ar-
guing that people fighting for social change
should only use ‘violent’ tactics, but simply
that we should not condemn any tactic that is
effective. If a petition to the school board will
get student activists reinstated after suspen-
sion or expulsion, fantastic. If occupying your
factory will get you your severance pay
and benefits, wonderful. In France, work-
ers have learned that kidnapping their
bosses and threatening to blow up
their factories will end managerial inaction
and get their demands met.

In the Niger Delta, finding that pleas to oil
companies to respect human life and dignity
go unanswered, the Movement to Emancipate
the Niger Delta takes direct actakes direct ac-
tion and stages kidnappings and blows up
oil pipelines. In Somalia, people were sick
of multinational corporations dumping toxic
waste on their shores, so an unofficial coast
guard was set up to counter this-- you may
have heard them called ‘pirates.’
Of the examples above, most of which
would probably be considered ‘violent,’ the
‘violence’ of the resisters pales in comparison
to what they were resisting. Though systemic,
coordinated attacks on the health, life and dig-
nity of humans and ecosystems for profit is the
ultimate violence, these are seen as acceptable
when they come with state or corporate spon-
sorship. Nevertheless, to allow these attacks
to continue unchallenged is to be complicit
in them. Those in positions of social and eco-
nomic power do not generally feel compelled
to modify their violent activity against the op-
pressed classes and there is a reason that the
state elevates as shining examples figures like
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite his anti-
capitalism and questioning of dogmatic non-
violence in his later years, as well as his iden-
tification of the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today,” King has ef-
fectively been de-radicalized and sanitized to
please the dominant culture, which is a white
culture, and his legacy has been redefined to
keep the privileged comfortable in their belief
that the oppressed won’t actually do anything
to threaten privilege.
Because there is such real systemic vio-
lence present in the daily lives of poor people,
women, people of color, queer and gender
non-conforming people, children, differently
abled people, immigrants, and people at inter-
sections of the above categories, it is incred-
ibly insulting and problematic to tell us that
we ought not defend ourselves so that we may
maintain some sort of ‘moral high ground.’
Some of us face life and death on a daily ba-
sis just for existing as we do. How can it be
the ‘moral high ground’ to keep from fighting
back, individually or collectively, against the
structures that keep us subjugated within vio-
lent systems of domination?
Glenn Beck and most of the country think
that ‘the extreme left on this planet are ac-
tively calling for violence,’ which will ‘dele-
gitimize [the] cause.’ A quick glance at wars,
prisons, workplaces, extraction sites, and
dumping zones, to name a few, would render
the cause of the state and capitalism the most
illegitimate imaginable.
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