Peter Beinart asks a key question in the wake of the violent assault on the Capitol by the right and the attempts by conservatives to conflate the violence that flared up around the edges of this summer’s response to the killlings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Can you really claim to be for nonviolence when you support the state’s use of it?
The question is important, not just because it gets to the heart of what the summer’s protests were about — the use of state violence against African Americans — but also because it implicates an array of other issues.
Can you claim to be for nonviolence if you support the death penalty? Isn’t capital punishment state-sanctioned murder, which would make it a particularly immoral form of state violence? (Read Camus on this.)
Can you claim to be for nonviolence if you support the continued flooding of America with cheap guns? What, after all, are guns designed for except violence?
Can you claim to be for nonviolence if you justify what often are extreme uses of force by police? If you support America’s wars? If you are unwilling to criticize the Israeli government’s use of force in the Occupied Territories? If you refuse to criticize the notion of occupation?
Can you claim to be for nonviolence if you accept the violence capitalism does to the large number of people in America and around the world who are victimized by profit-taking and extreme materialism? If you refuse to criticize the environmental degradation that leaves our air and water polluted and toxic?
Conservatives have tried to link the summer’s protests to the Jan. 6 assault, which is not wrong. Their arguments, however, are disingenuous and designed not with nonviolence in mind, but as justifications for their own brutality.
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/who-really-supports-nonviolence?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxOTM1NzY3MywicG9zdF9pZCI6MzE2MjI5NDksIl8iOiJxS3N4eSIsImlhdCI6MTYxMDk4NDM4NywiZXhwIjoxNjEwOTg3OTg3LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTA1MjYwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.6bk0cx7pFyO0Ue_pjGGKvSZg6Qo-WsxXFSu1PjjSKlA