#144 Non-Violence is still Violence - Too Black

Speaker 1: As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat. Welcome back to another episode of The Malcolm Effect and it feels so good to be able once more to

Speaker 2: producing this content or for my channel in a consistent way. Joining me is a voice that hasn't been on the show in quite a while. You might have heard me on his show. And I believe it was not the last show, but the second to last time I was with 2Black is what all the Zionists use whenever they come to attack me. So welcome. Welcome back to the Malcolm Effect 2 Blacks.

TooBlack: How are you? I'm all right. You know, proud to be on the list, I guess. But yeah, I'm good. Glad to be back.

Speaker 2: Nah, it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. Thank you for, obviously, again, we have so much conversations offline. And I mean this not as to just say this because you're my guest. And I always think I have amazing guests. I genuinely appreciate you as a theoretician as well, actually. So thank you for joining me.

TooBlack: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Okay, so you sent me two pieces, and I think were brilliant. Nonviolence, titled Nonviolence is Violence 2. Somebody's gotta die. And I don't know why I read that in your accent, so I think that's pretty cool. And the second one is... And the second title is Nonviolence is Violence 2. We're all in the gunk. I will highly recommend people engage this, and I... would say that, and first and foremost, I will place the link of the articles in the episode description. And my reading of these articles straight away, and why I said that, I'm not just saying in the beginning, I appreciate you as a theoretician, because I read both of these pieces as a dialectical treatment of the paradigm violence and nonviolence. And throughout it, I'm kind of seeing you work through this dichotomy. And I'm seeing this interplay or what Marx will say, what we understand from Marx is interpenetration of opposites, right? And that violence and nonviolence are not really these separate categories when we really dig into the materiality of it. So before we even get to the weeds of the articles, my first question is, as I think it's always good to just ground the listeners, why did you write these pieces?

TooBlack: That's a good question. I mean, I think I've been telling folks, and I was having a conversation with, I do defense work for political prisoners here. I'm based in Indiana, United States, and I'm on a defense committee for the Pendleton II. There was two political prisoners that basically got life for intervening to save a fellow prisoner who was being beaten by the guards who They later learned were literally a part of the Ku Klux Klan. And even though no one died in this incident, they still received life, basically. De facto life. One got 142. The other got 84 years. It's John Balagoon Cole and Christopher Naim Trotter. So check that out, Pendleton, too. I did a documentary on that. But we were, you know, I was talking to one of my comrades, we were actually talking about Palestine. And I was like, it's interesting, you know, we were, you and I were talking about this stuff offline as well. But there was this weird aversion to recognizing like the importance of violence, force, resistance, whatever you want to call it, within groups that would even be considered like pro-Palestine or something, right? Yeah. So one of your former guests, Bikram Gill, talks about how there's a tendency in the West to be able to see people as victims, to sympathize with them as victims. If it's women and children who are dying, who are being starved, who are not involved in a conflict. But there's this weird aversion where we're going to somehow stop the bombs from dropping without any force being applied. Right. And I was just like, that doesn't really make any sense. Right. You know, whether you support this group of resistance or not, I'm just saying on a very basic level, that's not how any of this ever has worked. So then we moved to we were talking about nonviolence. I'm saying even in the case of the civil rights movement or in the case of, you know, I use three different movements throughout the pieces, India, India independence and then positive action within Ghana. Even these these movements that are known more broadly as as nonviolent. there's always a component of violence to them that makes them successful. And there's multiple fronts in which this occurs. So there was basically three main arguments. So one, even in the case of someone deciding, we'll just use Iran. They were before Tuesday when Trump was putting out this, I'm going to destroy the civilization narrative or message to the country, there were human shields forming around critical infrastructure in the country. Those people in and of themselves, they weren't firing any bombs, any weapons, or anything of that nature. But the point of them standing there was they knew it would hit the United States a different way if they hit a building that had humans literally standing around it. But it would require the violence, right, of them shooting a bomb on the building with humans surrounding it. And the spectacle that that creates, that is what would cause a national or the international outrage if that was to occur. Right. So this one is violence. You are in a way provoking or even if you are not intentionally provoking violence. The when the opponent responds violently, that tends to benefit the cause because that brings more people to your side. So even if you're saying it's not violence, you actually need your opponent to be violent. Otherwise, it's not nearly as successful. So you need some kind of you need a state. more broadly or more narrowly a government to defend it in some way, shape, or form. So for instance, in the civil rights movement, yes, they did not, for the most part, most people would sit and take the beatings of the Klan or the white supremacists or something of that nature. But they were doing that in some way to get the federal government to intervene. And that's what ultimately was able to to help them. They've got the federal government to intervene, to pass laws against it. And laws aren't backed up on paper. Laws are backed up by guns. Laws are backed up by weapons. Laws are backed up by force. And the state has a monopoly on violence. So they needed the government to back them up. Now, in the third example, when the state is not backing you up, Then it requires insurgent violence. Right. That is the violence that doesn't come from directly from the state, but is done by the people themselves that forces the opposing forces the enemy to have to reconsider the balance of power because it's like, well, I can I can negotiate with the nonviolent, quote unquote, nonviolent people. or I can negotiate with the people who are willing to burn down cities. But the people who burn down cities or the people who shoot back at violent police or the people who engage in whatever action are strengthening the bargaining position of the so-called nonviolent people. So this is consistent with when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, April 4th, that was just, what, five days ago, He was like the United States to try to quell all the cities that were burning. Over 100 cities went up. They passed the Housing Rights Act, which, you know, has a lot of flaws to it. But Dr. King had been pushing that bill since 1966. All of a sudden, people burning down cities, they start passing that. They don't just pass that. You start seeing affirmative action being passed more so, and Black capitalism being pushed. You start seeing these reforms that had been developing for a while, but they accelerated upon growth. That upon that, that kind of response from people, you see it as surge and people joining the Black Panther Party and similar groups who are willing to defend themselves. So nonviolence is in every instance strengthened. And that's why I don't even call it nonviolence, but it's strengthened by violence. violence it either it either strengthened by its opponent being violent to bring people to its side it's either strengthened by by engaging it by provoking violence it brings a violent entity to its side to defend it or it inspires its own the people who are being oppressed to act out violently right to to defend themselves um because they can't get recourse any other way and in each instance non-violence is strengthened by that that's why i call it sacrificial violence instead of non-violence because one is sacrificing themselves and willing to maybe not engage back directly with their opponent I think it's a kind of asymmetrical warfare where you're willing to you're willing to and I have quotes throughout the pieces that lead to this from James Lawson and King you're willing to make that sacrifice you know to potentially even die understanding that by through that death through that even kind of martyrdom You're going to like you're going to change the odds in your favor if you if you position it correctly. Unfortunately, nowadays, I would say this lastly, nonviolence becomes it's lost that point of it. And it's more just about the peaceful, non confrontational thing. But nonviolence has always been at its best confrontational.

Speaker 2: And that's why, thank you so much for that. Because whilst reading your piece, I think you provide the language that effectively distinguishes between nonviolence as a doctrine or philosophy versus nonviolence as a tactic and a strategy. And I think oftentimes we find that people confuse the two, whereas one becomes, the former becomes constitutive of someone's being, at the level of the individual. We must remain nonviolent no matter what, as if to show some kind of greater morality. And I want to go into the question of morality and Toure, et cetera, a bit later, versus no, it's a strategy in a particular moment, as you quite rightly identified and said, where its deployment will increase the odds in your favor, right? And oftentimes people flatten that, I find.

TooBlack: Yeah, say that last part one more time, make sure I understand.

Speaker 2: Yeah, oftentimes people flatten that distinction, right? One is being like, I guess, doctrine or philosophy of nonviolence at the level of the individual and we must stay nonviolent to some kind of truth or claim of morality versus no, it's a deployed tactic and strategy to change the odds in your favor. And I think oftentimes I find that flatten is like, oh, Dr. King was nonviolent, but they never talk about, they never historicize that nonviolence and what it took, had to happen for him to be non-violent in the first place and the way in which the state capitulated because of the violence that took place. So what I'm essentially saying is that you don't get the violence and non-violence. They're part of the same package.

TooBlack: Yeah, that's why I say the distinction between the two is an astigmatism. It's not really a thing. It's more of a propaganda where you need to win the moral high ground to get certain things in your favor. Right. But ultimately, even if even for the folks who claim it as a philosophy, they there's a book by Domenico Lasserto on nonviolence. It's a great book. Actually, I read through some of it for the for the piece. And he talks about how, you know, there's a he traces he traces nonviolence back not to Gandhi or but he traces it back to the. American abolitionists and the pacifists here in the United States, like prior to the Civil War. And he shows how they all couldn't square being pacifists. Not all of them, but many of their leaders could not square being pacifists. and nonviolent in the face of the growing Confederacy that they could not square it. And they eventually had to align themselves with the union because they were like they were like the violence of slavery is so bad that to simply not act is is a betrayal. That was basically what they were saying. Right. And they realized you had to use some kind of force against the South. You weren't going to end it through hunger strikes or something, right?

Speaker 1: It was just understood.

TooBlack: So another philosopher, Niebuhr, talks about the challenges of living out your... I know we'll get to morality later, but the challenges of living out your... kind of your ethics or your morals in a collective society, right, where it's easy to say I'm against something personally. But that's why you were saying, looking at things dialectically, you can't just impose your individual morality onto a much more complex situation. You just can't do it. So slavery was not going to be ended by... just writing about how the horrors of slavery, right? Or just writing these autobiographies or just sharing how horrible it was. It was not going to be ended that way. And many of them came to understand that. Even the ones who were staunchly anti-violence or staunchly non-violent, right? Because they understood that the higher purpose or the thing that really mattered was ending slavery. Not just saying I'm nonviolent for the sake of being nonviolent. And so to your point, that's what happens today is the opposite of what they did, where we lose. The point is to actually intervene in this violent, this already existing violent problem that we have, whatever that is, slavery, war. you know, imperialism, et cetera. We cannot, if, if, if we need to do certain things to intervene, that's just what needs to be done. If I'm simply going to say, well, my morality matters so much that I'm going to intervene in this situation, but I'm, that I'm not going to intervene and I'm going to let people die, you know, in masses, or I'm going to let people remain under Jim Crow, you know, well, that just, it just doesn't work that way. So I, So what the nonviolence folks did in the civil rights movement, I don't even know if some of this was conscious, to be fair. They seem to have a very clear sense of what they were dealing with. I mean, people wrote their obituaries before they went on freedom rides. They were very clear that they were walking into an extremely violent situation. But they seem to understand, one, they don't have a military or something of that nature. So they had to deploy other tactics. But they seem to understand by maintaining that high ground, they could pull white liberals and people within the North into the fight to sacrifice their bodies and enforce the federal government that was at odds with the local government. regional Southern governments, they could exploit that contradiction and then force the federal government to take a side. because they're also trying to win this international war against communism. So they need to at least appear semi-humane. And they can't really do that if they have Bull Connor and the Jim Crow South running the country. It just creates contradiction. So what they had to do was actually analyze the entire terrain to figure that out. Today, people, a lot of times, I won't say no one does this now, but nonviolence, to your point, doesn't come with all those other considerations anymore. In many cases, it's just we're just going to go outside and we're just going to make sure we don't like hit back or something. Not considering, you know, not considering what is the strategic advantages of these things. So I'm not suggesting that one should like, you know, go out and just shoot up the place. I'm not suggesting that at all. But what I am because because that might just be as strategically backwards as anything else. What I am suggesting is we actually need to weigh in. the strategy and the cost of what we're willing to do versus just committing ourselves to a principle for the sake of the principle that does not actually advance humans. And that doesn't really advance the struggles that we claim we want to advance.

Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I think fundamentally it's a misapprehension of the kind of forces that we're dealing with, right? The kind of forces like the state, US imperialism, US capitalism, the states in which all of these systems are reproduced through violence, right? And I find it interesting that these people who adopt this nonviolence, which also often is just a liberal take anyway, But even before we go through the article bit by bit, quickly, I noticed that you used, I hope I'm saying the person's name correctly, Chenoweth's definition of violence. Straightforward definition, you said, right? And obviously, I guess, immediately, someone will read this and think, okay, this is violence being defined in very corporal terms, right? Corporal terms. I guess my question is, why did you opt for that definition?

TooBlack: Yeah, for me, I don't really for me, I don't necessarily object to people who maybe want to define it more broadly. And like if that's what they choose to do. But for the sake of the argument, I think we needed to stick to like I'll just read the definition in action or whatever. that physically harms or threatens to physically harm another person. So I wanted to stick to physical harm. I didn't want to get into the psychological or people talk about structural violence that happens through poverty. I think all of those things have merit, but I think when you're trying to make the case profoundly about nonviolence, I think when we get into all of that stuff, we kind of muddy the argument. At the end of the day, We can talk about how this enables that. But I'm looking at what is the actual force that's applied more directly. Right. And also, I found it was important to use somebody who, I guess, represents the nonviolent perspective. Right. Has done deep research on it. Therefore, I can't be accused of inserting somebody that I might favor more. Right. So for me, I was trying to be a bit more objective, like, we'll use the actual definitions of people who claim nonviolence because often they'll be like, well, that's not what we're saying. So I'm like, well, okay, I'm going to use your people to define what you're saying so we can all be on those grounds, right? So that was the thinking there, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. So then later on or right after in the piece, you quote, you know, the famous talk about given by Kwame Ture after the assassination of Dr. King. And something he says in that talk where he says his main assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. Actually, I don't think that talk was given after the assassination of Dr. King, for my correction. But I think what's important, just to unpack... Yeah, that was 67. 67, yeah. The other talk I'm thinking about is 69, right?

TooBlack: Yeah.

Speaker 2: So, 68. I guess the question I have here is when Kwame Ture is speaking about the assumptions, right? I guess when nonviolence to work in this regard, do you mind unpacking what are these assumptions and what are these logics he's talking about for this form of nonviolence to work?

TooBlack: Right, so I'll just deal with what he's saying before I give my take on it. He's saying that if you and I are in a fight and I'm choosing not to hit back, but you're trying to fight me and I'm... purposely choosing not to hit you back. I'm hoping my assumption is that if you, if I just let you go and there's no resistance that you will actually see how brutally you're treating me because I'm deciding to not hit you back and that you will come to, um, some kind of awareness about yourself that can lead to a better version of yourself. Right? Like that's the, the bad Rustin in some of his earlier works, uh, wrote a story about when he went on, it was before they were calling them Freedom Rides, but it was very similar since where he went on like an interstate train and he got beaten up by one of the cops, several of them actually. And by the end of it, he claims he looked in the man's eye and he could see that something had changed in him. You know, I'm not here to judge that one way or the other. So there's that's the assumption is that, you know, there's a that the human beings in this case, there is a moral and spiritual component. Human beings have souls. Human beings have spirits and that you can reach that person through through exposing their their ugliness and they'll see how ugly they are and they will stop. So Kwame Ture is saying for that to work, that person has to have a conscious. Otherwise, they're probably just going to keep going. Right. Like I'm probably just going to keep hitting you. I mean, he's saying that was the mistake that Dr. King made is that those people that America has no conscious. So there is no version of America that wakes up and sees itself for being ugly and then stops because it sees itself as ugly. And if you go back and listen to or read some of the. you know, speeches from that time, a lot of, you know, a lot of times they said, you know, Andrew Young likes to still remind us of this today where they were trying to redeem the soul of America. They were, they were fighting for the soul of America. Like this is the kind of, remember these are preachers and stuff. So this is how they put it. So, you know, I don't, I don't have a, I don't have a problem with, with that one way or the other in terms of if that's how they want to put it. My thing with the Tore quote, a lot of people often quote that as a way to talk down about nonviolence or something of that nature, which, whatever. But My thing was for nonviolence to work, it really depends on what's the target. And my thing was like nonviolence, no matter whether you're trying to target the opponent in front of you and trying to change their heart or you're trying to get the conscious of somebody else what brings both of those together whether I'm trying to bring trying to change your conscious by not fighting back or I'm trying to bring to I guess reach the conscious of someone who's watching from the outside to intervene in that fight whether I'm trying to reach who's ever conscious I'm trying to reach at the end of the day violence is required for that conscious to be reached that was my ultimate argument so like if you're hitting me I still need you to hit me To to see how ugly you are. And for me, that doesn't make sense to call that nonviolence because it actually requires you to beat up on me to be nonviolent. This doesn't make sense. Or if I if you're hitting me and I need other people to be like, man, this is terrible. I'm going to intervene and I'm also going to sacrifice my body. That also doesn't really make sense to me as nonviolence because it actually requires violence to work. Right. Like that's the that's the contradiction. I just think it gets missed. So here recently in the United States earlier this year, you know, there was the there was the I think it was Michael Preddy. He was named the the nurse in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that got shot by shot and killed by the ICE officer. And it was very clear that he was not attempting to, you know, assault any of the officers or do anything of that nature. And since it was so obviously like, quote unquote, innocent, that the violence that ICE enacted on that person did did did create such a blowback that, you know, ICE's funding got held up, that they had to retreat. You know, there's some of their forces within the city, but it required this man to be murdered after someone else. Renee Good was murdered earlier. It required it required someone dying. for this to force ICE to, at least on the surface, there's still a lot of nonsense they're doing, but on the surface, for them to retreat some of their forces, it required someone to use violence. If ICE conducted itself in a more respectable way, ICE probably could continue doing a lot of what it was doing. It's the aggression. It's the, as some people will say, I don't always agree, but the quote-unquote mask-off approach that brings people together. It's the... It's the intensity of the repression, right, that brings people together. So nonviolence often provokes more intense repression and then people come together in response to the repression. But if the repression is, if this is a violent repression, then I'm just not, I can't square how that makes it nonviolent, right? Like that's where it just loses me. I respect what people are doing. I always want to underline that I'm not trying to do shit on it. I just don't think it's nonviolence. I just think it's a noble thing to do. I just don't call it nonviolent.

Speaker 2: No, I really appreciate that framing. And throughout the article, Dr. King features quite heavily. And I wanted to ask then, because oftentimes he is like the flag bearer, right? Like this flag bearer of nonviolence in the United States in recent history. Insofar as, and you even find dichotomy, Malcolm King, Ture, right? Even so far as, you know, after John Lewis's death, you had Clinton come up and say, oh, you know this, Nick also almost went the Ture route, but they went to John Lewis route, right? The wrong way. Yeah. The wrong way, right? And you see the ways in which the liberal sanitization of certain figures and the liberal capture of these movements, you know, again, it's like, okay, certain violence took place. Like, again, you only get the... concessions made by the united states because there was a violence that took place or an unwillingness to deal with the violence that was what was mounting right so you again i speak to your point but i wanted to kind of hone in on dr king in this moment because he features so heavily in the piece what do people get so wrong about dr king's understanding of non-violence in your understanding

TooBlack: Yeah, I think one is a few things. One, I think people fail to recognize that he start when he was when when he starts the Montgomery bus boycott, he's in his 20s. Right. And then this goes on for that was in 54 to 55. That was a 381 day boycott. And then, you know, he's obviously assassinated in 68 when he's at that point, I think, 39 years old. Him and Malcolm are both 39 when they were assassinated, I believe. So I don't know. Let's just without even getting deep into politics or whatever, let's just think about this. If you were if you started something at 24 or 20, 25, 26 and you were. And then at 39, I don't know, does anyone think they would have the same position? It just seems like just on it. I mean, about anything, really, like, you know, you might be more reactionary. You might be more progressive. I don't know. But you just probably don't have the exact same position. It might be similar, but you probably have evolved because, you know, you've went through certain struggles in your life to reveal more details about things that maybe you had at a certain juncture. So his name is escaping me, but the author of the there's a book on the Deacons for Defense. That was a that was a civil rights group that did bring guns to protests and protected protesters. And down in the south, particularly in Louisiana and Mississippi. And in that book, Deacons for Defense. I think it's Lon's Hill.

Speaker 1: Yeah, Lance Hill.

TooBlack: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And that was kind of one of the first books that brought some of these quotes that I eventually found with Dr. King. But he makes the argument that early on in his career, King and the general kind of civil rights leadership thought they could transform the heart of the South and the people within the South. And then as time went on, they came to realize like, you know, that's probably not really going to work. I mean, if they change their hearts, great, but that's not our primary target. So as time went on, it was less about trying to like change the hearts and minds of people down there. And it was more about trying to get the people within the North and maybe some of the softer, more moderates in the South and trying to bring other people to, to support them against these like hardened races that existed throughout the region. So I think sometimes people think Dr. King's position was always just I want to change the hearts of these Southern crackers that are in front of me when that was not. I don't think their history really bears that out. Dr. King also, Lasorda puts this out in some of his work, Dr. King, even though he took the position of nonviolence, he seemed to have a more nuanced understanding than maybe people see. So he didn't criticize things like the Civil War. He was happy that slavery was effectively ended in many ways, at least. You know, he supported that. He supported he spoke positively about anti anti-colonial struggles across the world. Right. So this wasn't somebody that I think was just pie in the sky. I think people that's one of the other points. And then early on, I mentioned Bayard Rustin. But early on, Dr. King did used to have guns at his house and it was Bayard Rustin who talked him out of it. So people can feel how they feel about that. But Bear Rustin, once him and a journalist went over to Dr. King's house and he was like, you can't claim nonviolence if you have guns. And Dr. King's like, this is just self-defense. And he was like, no. And they stayed up all night arguing about it because a journalist is sat in a chair that just had a bunch of guns on it. So Dr. King used to have a security detail. And Dr. King also, at one point in time, actually applied for a gun permit after his home was bombed. This was during the boycott that I was mentioning. So people, I think... Missed that about Dr. King's position on it. He never relented on claiming nonviolence was important. But once we get to the Vietnam, you know, war, I guess he poses once he poses the Vietnam War. He's like, I have to be consistent here. I cannot say. that we should not riot in America or we should not commit violence in our protests or something of that nature. He says, I cannot say to the youth that that's okay. When I live in the most violent country in the world, like he's like, I can't justify that violence. Honestly, for years he had been pushed on this. And that's the he kind of, you know, people say nowadays the quiet part out loud. That's the contradiction as well as the civil rights movement is really just asking the most violent country in the world to also defend them. It's not really asking the most violent country in the world to stop being violent. It's just stop being violent towards us. Give us our rights back. Give us our respect. That's the kind of reformist argument that many of them are making. Dr. King steps outside of that. And it's no coincidence that a year from the day of that speech, he's assassinated. Because there was a kind of like unspoken bargain, or as I call it in a piece of gentleman's agreement that, you know, we're going to we become more patriotic and y'all like allow us to be full citizens. Right. You can't you. So Dr. King breaks this agreement in so many ways. In a piece, I think one time we were on together on my pod years ago to talk about liberalism, black liberalism in Palestine. And something I cited in that piece was how during the Cuban Missile Crisis. which was in, what, 62, Black civil rights leaders purposefully didn't say anything because they were trying to keep the government on their side. So even though that was obviously on the United States because of the failed Bay of Pigs and all of that nonsense, that was the United States trying to get into someone else's country and messing with them. They purposely like carry the State Department line because they had to to continue to get the support for civil rights. Now, I'm not even here to make some hardcore judgment one way or the other, because, you know, all these people are trying to make complicated decisions. But that's just that's the kind of that's the kind of gunk that. There's a kind of gunk that taking these positions gets you in, right, where you are forced to basically deny that you see violence on one side so you can keep it from hitting you on the other side. And Dr. King just wasn't willing to do that. So I don't think people really respect sometimes how well he understood violence. you know, ultimately how violent this country was and how violent things were. And that was what led him to nonviolence because he understood how violent things actually are. And I think sometimes people think that they are nonviolent because they're just these idealists. And it's like, no, they actually understand the nature of this. This is just how they're choosing to confront it, which whether you agree with it or not, you need to respect, in my opinion, That, you know, you need to respect the conviction to confront it because a lot of us won't really confront it either way, quite honestly.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. It was so interesting reading your piece because I saw so many parallels within the Islamic paradigm as well. So if you noticed that. If you notice when Ansarullah, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran, what is known as the axis of resistance, oftentimes when they begin their speeches from their spokespeople or their communications by letter, you often find that they begin with this verse in the Quran, which is in Surah the verse called Surah Al-Hajj, and you'll find that it says, just for the listeners, permission to fight has been given to those who are being fought. Because they have been wronged, indeed Allah is capable of giving them victory. Those who have been expelled from their homes without right, So what you find is that, and this is so interesting because not to make it like about the Qur'an, but I just think people will perhaps see this as a tactic and hope this example will illuminate some of what we're talking about. But the verses in the Qur'an can be divided into what's revealed in Mecca and what's revealed in Medina. Mecca was a place in which the Prophet Muhammad and his companions were told to have patience. God is with the patient, forbearance, right? Don't react, don't respond. And they were coming under a lot of repression, a lot of attack, right? But a point came when they were in Medina, the point came was like, no, that's changed now. right the time of being like not reactive because we had to get in the position of being of strength for example had to get into a position of being able to effectively mobilize right but the minute that was able to be done that the command came that you can knife out you can knife you can now fight back And I think it's, again, once again, it just speaks to that. You can't just have, it's a recognition that, okay, yes, even though we're being attacked right now, even though we're being attacked, it's like the strategic kind of patience, which we see Iran demonstrating so well right now, until you're able to get to a point where now, okay, now we fight, right? So there's never like a thing of like, and again, it's not unleashing unwanted violence. Because again, I think me and you will agree, Iran has been very restrained.

TooBlack: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2: Right? Iran has been very restrained, right? Even in that violence, because again, it is a war which has aims and objectives and you have strategy. And I think once again, once you couch the language of violence and nonviolence within that, it makes more sense. It becomes intelligible as to why you're doing what you're doing, as opposed to just saying, oh, at the individual level or doctrinally, I am this way inclined, right? And I think oftentimes, I think there's so many lessons to be learned. And I think in addition to that, how else do we understand October the 7th, right? And the kind of immediacy of condemnations and what happened afterwards, right? Because again, the violence, the Palestinians have been achieved, has been brought up, the violence which Israel has brought upon the Palestinians, that almost is like not spoken about as much before, invisibilized. But again, when you see that the only way, again, the Great March of Return, nonviolent 2021, they were snipered down. So when the conditions that produced on October the 7th come happen, everyone once again looks, you heard the likes of Piers Morgan and so many others. When is the Nelson Mandela or Dr. King of Palestine going to emerge? I heard that, I heard that. Because again, it's that same logic that the liberals operate on that, oh, the only way to effectively achieve your goals in this time is nonviolence. always failing to historicize, contextualize, and locate structurally what actually produces the conditions of violence in the first place. And again, people say, oh, I've had people critique October the 7th, even some people who I consider friends, right? Say things like, but why would you go against such a great force in this time when you know you're going to be slaughtered and you know what they can do to you but again that again operates on the logic you thinking that you're dealing with people that that the aim of the of october 7th was to defeat israel in one blow right that was never right it was an issue of we're going to expose not to israel because the zionists again they definitely have no morality or any conscience no conscience right yeah

TooBlack: It wasn't them.

Speaker 2: But it's again, it becomes, it's a stress test, right? It's a stress test of the international order because again, whatever you want to say, divine providence, coincidence. We saw the difference between the response to the Russia special military operation right? The same countries that say we can no longer have immigration were welcoming Ukrainians, right? We had a person on TV say that these are not ex-people. These are people with blonde hair and blue eyes. But immediately, straight away, when October 7th happens, it all changes. The rhetoric changes. People contradict themselves left, right, and center. So when you see that October 7th was actually a stress test of the international order itself, you see what that violence used strategically was supposed to

TooBlack: attempt to achieve anyway and I think to be fair I don't think we're going I personally I'm of the belief that there's no pre-October the 7th world anyway no I don't think I don't I think that's been made clear since right and it just keeps escalating so no I don't and it was also like they were trying to force they were trying to like in any kind of normalization process as well because it puts everybody in a bind talking about October 7th um with with the and now those countries are you know, going down to talk about the Gulf States. But, but yeah, I mean, send me that, that quote from the Quran. Cause I do think if I ever do get to writing a book on this, I don't know if I would not, I would actually like to use that. Cause I, cause I think that that speaks to like people are assessing material conditions and they are able to make adjustments, right? Even if they believe in a higher power, they're able to still make those adjustments and people get in these very static situations. hardline positions for really again no point other than just the position which again the position a position in and of itself is you know like it's you gotta you're trying to achieve something right so we can criticize things to your point based on you know what are the objectives of this what's the strategy and but a lot of times people try to read their own stuff into it right so you And America is very deeply involved and everybody just tries to read their own individual morals into a situation. And that's why consensus is really hard to build here because of that kind of backward thinking, in my opinion. There was also something I quoted in the piece where both Gandhi and Kwame Ture actually. So to your point about the violence, you know, being very regular prior to October 7th, but no one had much to say about that. Kwame Ture said, and this is actually in a speech called The Pitfalls of Liberalism, but the oppressor makes his violence a part of the functioning society, but the violence of the oppressed becomes disruptive. So the day to day violence, the day to day degradation, the day to day humiliation that occurs doesn't really seem to register because people come to expect it. And it's come to see is just part of what happens. So when in the West Bank, when a random kid gets shot in the head, you know, because they claim the IDF claims rocks were thrown at them or something. We just kind of shrug that off. You know, if if that rock was ever able to actually penetrate the head of the soldier, then we then that's that's when the society over overreacts. And all of a sudden that's the worst thing that ever happened. So you can keep people in an occupied space and that's totally fine. But the moment that occupied space breaks out and reacts in any kind of way, that's disruptive because that doesn't go. That doesn't fit the flow of capital and the flow of goods and things of that nature. Right. Like, that's just what it is. And then and then Gandhi, you know, this is a quote I don't think a lot of people really know he said, but and I relate this to King after. But he said, it is better to be violent if there is violence in our hearts and to put on a cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence. Right. So. The thing about both, and there's a lot of issues with Gandhi, I'm aware of them, but the thing about both of Gandhi and King, if you read their writings, they both abhorred cowardliness, right? They had no space for any of that. So for King, he felt nonviolence resolved the question of either being a coward or being violent because he felt like violence was just begets more violence and he felt like being a coward begets more violence so he thought non-violence was a way to resolve that contradiction and then like gandhi was very much like yo i i have no space for people who don't want to like sacrifice anything or put it on the line or go to war even if he says we're doing it in this particular way people forget gandhi was in the military he was an ambulance person in the military but He was in the military and actually recruited people, unfortunately, to be in World War I. So it's like these were individuals that had no love for weak, do-nothing people. They had no love for that. It was part of why Dr. King couldn't really survive in the space he was in because he was moving and accelerating at a pace that a lot of the folks around him, the civil rights leaders, couldn't really work with. So he had to go, right? Like he just wasn't, a lot of them couldn't really work with that pacing. And that's why they were telling him stuff like stay in his lane and you ain't got nothing to say about foreign policy and nothing like that. Cause you know, he just didn't see the world that way. But they both had no respect for cowardliness, impotence. That wasn't their thing. So today, it's odd to see people basically argue for cowardliness, basically argue for impotence and use nonviolence to do it. And that's what Gandhi was saying. Don't use nonviolence as a cloak for impotence. Don't use peace as a cloak for impotence or a cloak for impotence. for nothing. And that's what we're seeing in a lot of cases. So of course, people must condemn the resistance because they don't really have any plans, in my opinion, to do much of anything. So they have to say, well, this could be resolved this way or that way. And my thing is, even if there was a way to resolve Palestine, or Iran through so-called diplomacy, as some of the critics say. Diplomacy is only effective because people have guns when they come to the table. That's what I'm saying. None of this is done without violence. You can only negotiate from a position of strength when you have somebody behind you with a gun. You cannot... Like Iran can negotiate because they have like they have the ability to defend themselves. And then they also have the economic ability to hurt the world, which they've done. But they could not do the economic thing. They couldn't. If the Strait of Hormuz was simply just some people standing around there fasting. Like the United States will snatch that shit immediately. But it's like, no, they have the ability to physically defend it. That's like coming all the way back to my definition of the definition I've used of violence is because at the end of the day, people can apply physical force or they can't. You know, that's just what it is. So none of this is done without some form of violence somewhere. So even if you and I sit down and negotiate, it's because we both understand what the threat is if we don't. It's like otherwise we're not going to be able to negotiate in any real good faith. So it's like, oh, we went to the battlefield. We saw how that went. We don't want that to keep going. Now we choose peace, quote unquote. Right. There is no version of this. where peace is somehow one where somebody doesn't have some kind of weapon or some ability to apply force. And that's what I was just noticing when I first started this was this, this aversion to that reality, right? So we choose peace. Yeah. But at the end of the day, like somebody got to be able to enforce their peace, somebody, and you're not going to be able to enforce it just with prayers and fasting, right? It's just not, that's not how this works. So,

Speaker 2: so absolutely yeah and that's why i think in this time our good friend kim jong-un in the democratic people's republic of korea has been absolutely vindicated honestly yeah like you know whatever you can talk about the country whatever people have i don't really care to be honest but i think the fact that he has nuclear deterrence is the only reason why he's not been attacked and We've seen what happens when you don't, right? We've seen, I think that has become so abundantly clear. And then finally, onto your point of this point, when you mentioned negotiations, right? And I think Ghassan Kanifani will say that's a negotiation between like the sword and the gun, right? Or the sword in the neck, sorry, right? Because again, when you think of Oslo process and all these acclaimed peace processes, right? Or border of peace, what's the call here? The call is Israel maintains a monopoly of force, And you have a disarmed people who we might grant you rights in some near time future at our choosing, right? That is what the logic of, and Vikram Gill writes about this in Two Logics of War, right? He goes, the only way in which this peace can come out for the terms of Israel's vantage point is that we apply overwhelming force that you accept our conditions of what we say it is to be peaceful.

TooBlack: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Right.

TooBlack: Yeah. But this is all achieved through weaponry. And so, yeah, even an even a bad deal is because I don't have the power. I don't have the I don't have enough monopoly on violence to overcome it. So, yeah, you can impose a deal where I have to disarm and Tony. Well, Tony Blair gets to rule over my like, which is crazy to me. But like Tony Blair gets to rule over where I live. That's if I if I'm willing to disarm, which, you know, Hamas has refused to do. But if I disarm like, yeah, you're you're asking me to disarm, but you're not disarming. You know, I mean, that's the whole hypocrisy of this. Right. Like you want this country to not have Iran and I have missiles, nukes, nothing. But you get to have all that because somehow in your hands, this kind of racist belief in your hands, it's safer, right? than it is in my hands. But again, none of this moves violence out of the conversation. It's a fact of life at this point. Now, maybe in some far future, it won't be. There were definitely times in human history where things were not this violent, right? In terms of just straight up wars of this level of aggression. Nonetheless, that's the world that we live in. So I don't understand if we want to actually advance things for people, why we immediately take that off the table. I get individually why people take it off the table. People, as you know more than most people, have suffered great cost for simply just supporting even just rhetorically. And more people will continue to, right? So I get individually why those of us are scared to speak on this thing or that thing. I get the fear of what could happen to you. But even that... is an acknowledgement of violence. Right. So it's just like, so I'm just saying if people want to be scared or don't want to deal with something because it, it threatens their lifestyle or whatever, like whatever. So be it, but stop lying. Like, don't come out here and tell me that, you know, I could do the resistance. You condemn the resistance because you have a job and you want to keep it. That's why you condemn the resistance. Yeah. You don't condemn the resistance because you are just so opposed to violence because you don't seem to have the same smoke for the United States. Right. You don't seem to have the same smoke for general imperialism, like at least be consistent if that's what it is. But now you condemn this stuff because you understand there's a certain social order and you don't want to get kicked out of it. And again, I'm not here to judge people for that. That's whatever. But I'm just saying at the very least, my thing is always with anything I do, can we at least just be honest about this? Because if we can't be honest and acknowledge the material conditions of what they are, we can't even arrive at any other position that's going to move things forward. So other people in the world have acknowledged that a lot of that stuff is nonsense and they're going to defend themselves however they see fit because they have to. They don't have time to wrestle with these silly questions. So, but over here, particularly there's this tendency to, you know, be like, well, I don't know if it had to go there. Even when I was talking about the Pendleton too, I remember I was reading the descriptions from some of the jurors in that case. And they're like, we thought when it, we understood why they initially went to check on the prisoner, but when it led to a takeover of the prison and went too far. But when you talk to the Pendleton too, they're like, the guards was going to kill us. Like we had to take over the prison. But there's just this sense I went to the parole hearing on one of them and they it's like people just refuse to understand that. Like they're like, well, don't you have to see how it escalated, Mr. Trotter? He's like, yeah, I understand that. But like they said they were going to kill us. Like, what do you want me to do? So it's also just like, that's where the racism for me comes in. It's like certain people are not allowed to defend themselves. They don't have a right to that. We just don't see people in certain contexts. They have no right to that. They have to bow down to authority, even if it means their death. That's what a lot of these folks are really trying to tell us. That you you you just don't you don't get that you don't have the right to claim that level of space and respect for yourself. You just don't have the right to do that. Like only that's only reserved for certain types of people. And you're not one of them because you stabbed a guard and the guard is part of the state and our violence and all of our you know, we can't let that be ruptured. And they and it's like some of these bureaucrats, I think, genuinely don't. They're so programmed in that space, they actually don't understand why anybody would reject that order. Like they just, you know, like just that far gone.

Speaker 2: Facts. Honestly, honestly. So I want to give you an opportunity to close us out if you want to mention anything that I have missed or something that you really want to highlight.

TooBlack: Was there anything? You said you had a question on morality. Did I miss that?

Speaker 2: Yes, yes. Sorry.

TooBlack: I know I'm rambling, so I'm probably hitting you.

Speaker 2: No, not at all. You hit a lot of my questions. That's why, funnily enough, the final one I did think of was morality. Just, you know, oftentimes we hear, we're not making a moral argument. This is not a moral critique. And then at the same time, people have this discussion about, but where does morality and ethics feature when we talk about organizing, talk about strategy and tactics? So if you wouldn't mind perhaps responding to those kind of positions and then giving your own.

TooBlack: No, I appreciate that because that's something I've been wrestling with. I don't know if I have a good answer, but I do think we can become too mechanical sometimes in our dialectical blah, blah, blah. Like we can get too mechanical because it's like even when you're looking at conditions, they don't necessarily preclude a certain outcome necessarily. Unless that's unless you're standing from a particular position and you are trying to advance a particular position. Right. So you can look at capitalism from and see that there's always going to be a contradiction between workers and bosses or whatever. But some people, many of them do. We were just talking about it. They look at that contradiction and they say, well, I'm going to make sure that me and mine are good. And they might successfully pull that off. I will make sure that me and mine are good. And, you know, if all the rest of y'all have to suffer, then sorry to hear that. But I will make sure me and mine are good. Like people make that materially do that often. That's if anything, that's actually what it encourages, right? So to look at those conditions and say, no, the world is better when we all get to eat. Basically, we all get to have what we need, not just when me and mine have what we need. Like there is a morality in that, right? Like that is like, yes, you can make the argument. mechanically that the world is better, like, you know, materially because like, there's going to be less war and less, you know, famine and all these different things. If everybody's taken care of. Yes. But yeah, you're you are you are advancing a somewhat subjective position like you cannot say that that's that that's how the world must be just because you want it to be that way like so we are making to some extent in my opinion at least somewhat of a moral case but there's a difference between a moral and ethical like position and just moralism and those things get those things get flattened So moralism, it just leads us to cherry picking the things that we believe and with very little assessment of the material conditions. Right. Moralism says, you know, we've been talking about Iran. So Iran has repression in its government. Therefore, so what if America invades them or something? Right. That's a moralism. It's cherry-picking certain facts, exaggerated things of that nature, and it's saying this is why whatever if that happens. I have no sympathy for them, blah, blah, blah. That's a moralistic argument where... you are trying to impose your position. That's a very idealistic thing as well. You're trying to impose a morality on people that doesn't really take into consideration the conditions that they're dealing with. So it doesn't mean that people shouldn't be held responsible when they have harmed someone or anything of that nature. But, you know, I think if we're doing dialectics properly, we're understanding that we can see that, but we can see that as an offshoot of a higher contradiction. And we can more so say, okay, let's deal with that first. It doesn't mean we can't deal with the second and third level things. We will have to eventually, but we understand that there's a higher thing that we got to deal with. So it's like, for me, dialectical materialism should not be a means of avoiding moralism. For me, it's more so... I'm just speaking for myself personally, for me is a better way of how do I position my morals than it is a matter of like rejecting morals or ethics. It's like, OK, I believe all these different things, but I have to take those things into into consideration when I'm looking. I have to take the material conditions into consideration when I'm trying to arrive. at these positions that I actually believe in. I cannot just say, this is what we should be doing when people are nowhere near that position and expect anything to really advance if the goal is to advance anything. Now, sometimes I don't want to go too far in that direction because sometimes if something is so backwards, I do think sometimes you simply just need to stand on your morals, even if things aren't going to necessarily advance because things advancing in the other direction are so bad. That even if you have to take an L, it's just like, I'm not supporting that. So it's like, if we're fighting for revolution and a bunch of men want to take advantage of a woman, I'm not going to just be like, well, the primary contradiction is imperialism, so I'm going to let them abuse the woman. No, that's not what we're saying. It's like we might have to go to war in that moment if I'm standing right there watching this occur, like I have to intervene. Right. So you still got to stand up for these other things you believe. So I'm not. That's why I don't want to get too mechanical where I'm going to be like, well, primary contradiction means I'm going to just let everybody shit on everybody. That's a poor understanding of what a primary contradiction is anyway. But it does mean that if I'm going to address these men, I am not simply just saying leave that woman alone. I'm also saying this is going to hurt the fight that we're all engaged in, too. Right. So these both and like you leave her alone. But also, this is ultimately going to hurt the so-called revolution y'all claim you want. Right. Like I have to understand all of those things when I'm taking when even if I'm in battle, like so that for me is how I at least for now, I'm still working through it. Try to situate morality where it's like I can't just throw it out and just be like, well, the conditions are this way. So I can't stand for what I believe. But I also have to figure out where do my beliefs lie? Where can I best position my beliefs in a situation and to actually reach people in that case versus just saying, this is what I am. Y'all get over it. And then creating all these other problems that no one should really be having to deal with.

Speaker 2: I really liked that. And I look forward to seeing you work through that some more and also putting that to paper. Cause I think that would be an important read actually. So once again, please check out to black on the black myths podcast and laundering black rage, his book coauthored book with Russell Mowat. And also I'll post the link to the articles in the episode description. So until next time, peace out people.