hmmm...jesus radicals, enh...

I liked this article about non-violence aiding those who dominate us...

Police and nonviolent means: Pacifists at the service of oppression

Some Christian pacifists have worked to make the police “less violent” by advocating for less lethal weapons than firearms, such as tasers. In a recent editorial in The Mennonite, for example, Everett Thomas who is also a city council person in Goshen Indiana, claims that he raised money to buy tasers for the Goshen city police department because he felt they were trained to use their guns too quickly. Tasers, he claims, add another option on the “continuum of force” than simply reaching for a gun. This makes the police less violent, and that is the kind of thing a pacifist Mennonite should do.



Beyond the fact that as of 2008 over 400 people have been killed by police tasers in the U.S. and Canada, and beyond the fact that police have used tasers to simply torture people, the logic of the kind of argument that allows a pacifist to put more weapons in the hands of the police is radically flawed in its lack of race, class and gender analysis.

While in the Birmingham Alabama city jail, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed sadness that the white church supported the police. He also acknowledged that the police had “been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been rather publicly nonviolent.” Yet “nonviolence,” King said, is not enough to justify a Christian’s support of or participation in such a force. King said that the police had acted nonviolently, “to preserve the evil system of segregation.” Although King had always advocated that the means used must be commensurate with the ends sought after, so that violent means will not achieve a lasting peace, in this case he lamented that the police had used a moral means to preserve an evil end and denounced the police being “publicly nonviolent”: “there is no greater treason than to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

What Thomas and other Christian pacifists have missed, is the way that police are part of a system that maintains race, class and gender stratification. When pacifists argue that nonviolence is a more effective means of social control than violence, and then raise money and advocate for more effective weapons, that is, nonlethal weapons, they are in effect arguing that nonviolence can be a more effective means for controlling race, gender and class inequalities. Nonviolence, these pacifists are implicitly saying, can be a more effective tool for oppression than violence.

And they are not wrong. Nonviolence may indeed be a more effective tool for maintaining the social hierarchy than violence. Even the Roman Empire recognized that administrative justice was far more effective at maintaining Rome’s dominance than brute force. This has been the abiding legacy of the Romans for centuries. Indeed, Michel Foucault argues that governmentality in the modern age does not so much repress and prohibits actions, but disciplines, rehabilitates and normalizes which results in a population of disciplined and passive people who have internalized the power they want to be liberated from. While many people think that they can be liberated from repression by giving free reign to their desires, in reality, Foucault argues, they are only further ensconced into the system that created those desires in the first place. For the capitalist system is primarily a system that creates desires. It is a nonviolent system that creates consumers, not a violent system that brutalizes its subjects (there is that too, but that is not its primary purpose).

We are living in a Brave New World, where social control is moving not toward the most violent, ugly repression imaginable, but toward sanitized, depoliticized clean methods of control. The system wants what is effective and what is effective is nonviolent methods. That is why the video in the side to this post is just another example of capitalist, techno power: police now have weapons where they can blind people with a laser, hit people with sound waves that cause them extreme nausea. But even these weapons are not the most effective yet. The most effective weapons the technological system has are those that train us up to be tame, passive recipients who accept our place in society willingly, happy to take whatever crumbs fall from the master’s table.

Pacifism, which I hold to, should not be put into the service of the technological system. Shame on the pacifists who do this without any recognition of how their actions will play out to keep this dirty rotten system in place.

–Andy Alexis-Baker