[Peace-discuss] [Peace] "...thinking makes it so"

Wed Jul 4 14:33:16 UTC 2018

Our government is now doing what it’s done for a good while.

Instead of punching a contemporary, why not organize a community you’re a part of? 

Revolutionary violence is defensive violence. "I think pacifists are mistaken in ruling out violence in all circumstances, for the very conventional reason that in the end the ruling class will always protect its interests with gunfire, as we have seen it doing throughout Latin America in recent years. In the end the workers will need not only solidarity and class consciousness but guns as well; but in this country, and in the Western world as a whole, this moment has not yet arrived; the capitalist class has by no means yet dismantled the apparatus of democracy; a certain freedom of communication, certain civil rights, despite all harassment of militants, make the class struggle a good deal easier to organise here than in many countries. While this situation obtains, our job is peaceful and efficient organisation, education and propaganda. Any adventurist violent posturings, which will merely hasten the dismantling of these democratic freedoms, are simply counter-revolutionary.” [H. McCabe]

“...one thing everyone ought to agree with is that any form of force and violence has to meet a pretty high burden of proof; the null hypothesis and assumption is that you don’t use force unless you have to, so it’s a last resort. The question is, can that burden of proof be met? Then we get to the question of tactics and consequences, and I think the record — and pure logic — shows that it’s totally destructive, a gift to the powerful, an absolute gift to them. In the region of violence they have overwhelming power — that’s where they’re strong. So if you move into that arena you’ll get smashed, and not only do you get smashed, but you lose the population.

"We’ve been living through this all my life. Take, say, the Vietnam War. It was pretty dramatic to see what happened here among students and everybody else. In around 1970, at the peak of anti-war movement, young people were getting so angry and desperate — a little like the Bernie or Bust movement ... that they said we just can’t keep doing these things like teach-ins, demonstrations, lobbying. We’ve got to do something really significant to break down the system, so let’s go down Main Street and smash up the windows, like the Weathermen.

"The Vietnamese were appalled. I remember sitting in on meetings where representatives of Vietnam were trying to urge measures that people here regarded as ludicrous. I remember a meeting when they said the things that are really good are when a group of middle-aged women go to a cemetery and pray at the graves of American soldiers; they thought that was really great.

"Smashing windows on Main Street is the worst possible thing you can do. The Vietnamese wanted to survive. They didn’t care if Americans felt good — ‘I’m breaking a window, I’m really doing something’ — they didn’t care about that. They wanted to survive. The Vietnamese recognised what was obviously true — that the women praying at the grave are appealing to people — but think about it, the kids smashing windows on Main Street are telling construction workers, ‘let’s be pro-war’. So you want to build up pro-war sentiment? Great — have a fight with the police, smash up windows, then the population turns against you, for good reasons, and for the victims that’s a disaster. This is kind of ‘feel-good’ politics; I gotta do what makes me feel good, not [engage with] what happens to the victims.

"You see this all over the place, and it’s a real defect of the activist Left. You have to think about the consequences for the victims, not whether you feel good about it. It doesn’t matter if you feel good about it. I think that’s the issue that shows up in the use of violent tactics. Take even violence in self-defence. I remember in a lot of demonstrations back in the ’60s, a lot of activists said, ‘look, we’ve got to arm ourselves, because the police are going to attack us’. That’s suicidal. If you take up a stick they’ll come after you with a gun. You pick up a gun; they’ll come after you with an assault rifle. You take an assault rifle; they’ll come after you with a tank. They’re gonna win, you’re gonna get smashed, you’ll get destroyed and you’ll turn the population against you — and for what purpose? In a brutal dictatorship you might have other arguments, but we live in pretty free societies — there are restrictions on the use of force by state power, they can’t do everything they want.

"Hume was basically right: power is not determined by brute force. Even in Nazi Germany the population was controlled by economic benefits. Germany during the second World War was never able to mobilise to the extent that the democracies were, because the leadership didn’t trust the population. They had to buy them off, so you had what we later called a guns-and-butter war — kinda like how the United States in the ’60s could never call a national mobilisation because there was too much popular objection. So you have to fight an inefficient war. Albert Speer in his memoirs talks about this. He says that Germany could never become as totalitarian as the West did, because in the West there was real commitment to the war effort: you could have tight controls, discipline and so on. In Germany they had to devote resources to trying to keep the population satisfied, away from the war effort. That may be the reason that they lost the war, because they were technologically way more advanced… but these are really serious considerations, all of them, and almost entirely they militate against violent actions…” [Noam Chomsky]

> On Jul 4, 2018, at 9:04 AM, Harry Mickalide <mickalideh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It's a chilling understatement to call Nazis "people with the wrong ideas". How bad does it get before we consider tactics besides flyering? Our government has banned people from Muslim countries and is now keeping immigrant children in cages. 
> 
> That's it for me. I'm outta here!
> 
> On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 8:59 AM, C G Estabrook <cgestabrook at gmail.com <mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com>> wrote:
> They’re “creating a just world" by beating up people with the wrong ideas? That’s an organizing gift to the Right.
> 
> 
>> On Jul 4, 2018, at 8:53 AM, Harry Mickalide <mickalideh at gmail.com <mailto:mickalideh at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> It's not that Antifa doesn't expect punishment. It's that they risk punishment in order to defend us and fight fascism.
>> 
>> In fact, if we're going to compare the difference between thought and action, we here on the Internet are thinking about creating a just world, while people in Antifa are in the streets actually doing it.
>> 
>> Here is an article where multiple people thank Antifa for defending them from Nazis. 
>> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/what_the_alt_left_was_actually_doing_in_charlottesville.html <http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/what_the_alt_left_was_actually_doing_in_charlottesville.html>
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 11:06 PM, David Green via Peace <peace at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>> I'm not sure of the precise origin of the notion of "hate crimes" in the law in our own country, if there is such an origin; but my sense--perhaps more directly applicable to European and Canadian laws that directly monitor speech--has long been that what Norman Finkelstein has called the "Holocaust Industry" contributed to the development of such a notion, by equating the actuality of the Holocaust, anti-semitic beliefs, and criticism of Israel's very real crimes.
>> 
>> DG
>> 
>> On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 9:47 PM C G Estabrook <cgestabrook at gmail.com <mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> It might mean
>> (a) opinion constitutes moral worth - "it’s good/evil if you think it is”; or
>> (b) opinion misinterprets moral worth - "it’s good, but you mistakenly think it evil.”
>> 
>> HAMLET, 2.2=================================================
>> 	• Hamlet. ... What news ?
>> 	• Rosencrantz. None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.
>> 	• Hamlet. Then is doomsday near! But your news is not true. Let me 
>> question more in particular. What have you, my good friends, 
>> deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison 
>> hither?
>> 	• Guildenstern. Prison, my lord?
>> 	• Hamlet. Denmark's a prison. 
>> 	• Rosencrantz. Then is the world one.
>> 	• Hamlet. A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and 
>> dungeons, Denmark being one o' th' worst.
>> 	• Rosencrantz. We think not so, my lord.
>> 	• Hamlet. Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good 
>> or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
>> 	• Rosencrantz. Why, then your ambition makes it one. 'Tis too narrow for your 
>> mind.
>> 	• Hamlet. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a 
>> king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
>> 	• Guildenstern. Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of 
>> the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
>> 	• Hamlet. A dream itself is but a shadow.
>> 	• Rosencrantz. Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that 
>> it is but a shadow's shadow. 
>> 	• Hamlet. Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretch'd 
>> heroes the beggars' shadows. Shall we to th' court? for, by my 
>> fay, I cannot reason.
>> =========================================================
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jul 3, 2018, at 9:08 PM, David Green via Peace <peace at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> How is the line from Hamlet misunderstood?
>>> 
>>> On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 6:57 PM C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
>>> One of the most misunderstood lines in Shakespeare is Hamlet’s “...there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
>>> 
>>> Here a FOA (Friend of AWARE) brilliantly applies it to current US politics (h/t K. Aram):
>>> 
>>> "Today I had two discussions, one with people advocating hate crime laws, and another with people defending Antifa, and it occurred to me that they were pretty much the same people.
>>> 
>>> "Hate crime laws are actually thought crime laws, in that they take what is already a crime, and add years to the sentence if the perp was thinking bad thoughts when they committed the crime.
>>> 
>>> "Antifas are people who commit crimes, and expect to go unpunished at all, because they were thinking good thoughts when they committed the crime.
>>> 
>>> "This is magical thinking, the idea that thoughts are more important than reality. This is very American, since we have had multiple Think Yourself Rich fads, from Napoleon Hill to Oprah. And we are earnestly told that having a president who 'believes' in climate change is more important than actual policy changes. And, of course, the latest fad in which you can think yourself right into the opposite sex. (And not in the old 'think yourself irresistible' way.)
>>> 
>>> "I think I'll just be over here, in the corner, visualizing peace.” --Paula Densnow
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
>> 
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