The Temptation of Violence

Back in 2003, I tried to join in the protests against Bush II's looming invasion of Iraq. I fulminated against it on my old web site and attended a huge rally in Washington. I did not enjoy the rally.

The message of the day was "No Blood for Oil." I thought and still think this was entirely the wrong framing. What I wanted to protest was the belief on the part of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz & company that the world can be changed by spasmodic acts of extreme violence. We were confronted with a deep and complex problem, the confluence of economic misery and political oppression across the Middle East that seemed to be spawning mass terrorism. Faced with this deep and complex problem, Bush & company opted for a very simple solution: smash somebody. They pretended that Saddam had some connection to 9-11, but administration insiders later admitted that this was a pretext. They wanted to change the Middle East. They fantasized that the way to do this was with tanks and stealth aircraft, by blowing up buildings and killing people.

I am not a pacifist; I supported, for example, the first Gulf War. Reversing Saddam's conquest of Kuwait seemed to me like the kind of thing that a military can accomplish. Revolutionizing a whole region, not so much.

Vladimir Putin saw Ukraine drifting ever closer to the EU and NATO and decided that he could revolutionize its politics with a three-day Special Military Operation. Have a hard problem? Just send in the tanks! But he didn't have the US Air Force, and he did not even achieve his minimal goal of taking Kyiv and installing a new government. If he had, I suspect he would have found that in solving that one problem he had only created a million more problems. He fell for the fantasy of violence, the dream that the world can be changed by smashing things. Russia is paying a terrible price for his mistake.

Although I have spent my whole adult life protesting against police violence, I hated the George Floyd riots. Bad relations between the police and the community they are supposed to serve is not the kind of problem that can be solved by smashing things.

Looking at the violence of ICE, I see the same fallacy at work. The world is not going the way you want, so smash somebody. Some of you may thing that this is a specific response to immigration, but I disagree. I think people like Trump hate immigration because they see immigrants as dirty, disgusting people who degrade the country be being here; they are just one aspect of a nebulous threat by the hippie/communist/unwashed/disgusting/gay/trans/criminal/terrorist consortium. Some of you may think it is just racism; but then why do MAGA people especially gloat when ICE beats up white protesters?

I see the fantasy of violence in action. If the world is not great, if your life is not great, you imagine that this is because of enemies, and things can be made better by smashing those enemies.

This is all wrong. It is wicked, stupid, and will drive America in exactly the direction people like Stephen Miller claim to hate: toward anarchy, turmoil, conflict, and economic decline. 

If you want an orderly society, a cohesive society, a peaceful, productive, thriving society, you must start, not by smashing people, but by listening to them.