Legendary activist and former Honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, Kwame Ture (once known as Stokely Carmichael) said in 1966, “His [Dr. King’s] major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
It is tragic that a quote from 60 years ago remains so true and prevalent today, yet is still widely ignored. We live in a time defined by the United States’ lack of conscience. Our friends and neighbors must live in fear of being kidnapped, put in concentration camps, deported, or possibly killed by ICE, a modern Gestapo, which has been allowed to carry out a blatant ethnic cleansing. Our president is internationally famous for fanning the flames of hatred and division and committing unspeakably horrible acts upon the innocent with his assorted cabal of the wealthy and elite. We witnessed in real time the United States, and its “greatest ally,” commit a holocaust upon the people of Palestine. We watched as our military was used to violently overthrow Maduro in Venezuela, all for the benefit of our oil oligarchs.
I would argue that just one of these events is enough to justify a complete upheaval of the system responsible for them, and yet nothing seems to happen, nothing changes. I believe this is because we are fighting for change in the wrong way. We expect a government that has demonstrated its apathy over and over to be moved by our protests; to recognize the error in its ways after our 20th walkout or our 100th parade. How many times do they have to prove to us that they will not listen to a peaceful protest? How many times do we have to realize that our voices will not be heard, only our actions? How many more Americans must suffer and die at the hands of the people we refuse to be violent towards? They clearly do not mind being violent with us, so why do we feel we cannot show them that same courtesy?
Every social studies or history class I took, from elementary school through high school, was filled with tales of nonviolent resistance. According to these classes, every inch of social progress this country has ever made, including women’s suffrage, civil rights, and labor rights, was accomplished through the heroic efforts of picket signs, sit-ins, walkouts, and marches. On occasion, there were mentions of “tragedies,” “massacres,” and “riots” when people fighting for change decided to fight rather than chant; and again and again, we were taught that these incidents only hindered the movements they were fighting for. The only correct way to go about protesting was to walk in the footsteps of MLK, not John Brown or Malcolm X. My point here is not to disparage the nonviolent protests or their leaders, but to make the assertion that this history we have been fed is false, and has effectively pacified the American public into only accepting resistance when it comes in a neat, legal, nondisruptive and peaceful package. This packaging is fine and dandy in theory when the stakes are low, and allows us to maintain our spirit of moral superiority over countries that fight for their rights violently, but when we are face-to-face with fascist authoritarianism, our passivity acts like a thick mud we cannot get our shoes out of, preventing us from marching towards liberation.
Suffragette, labor, and black radical struggles for the rights they deserved almost always came from disruptive, militant organizing. Despite what we were taught in school, the social progress they achieved was not a natural evolution of American morality, nor did it come from the federal government’s sudden realization of their suffering and desire to alleviate it, but rather from their persistent, and often violent, demand to be treated fairly. The Fair Labor Standards Act arose directly from generations of violent labor struggles, including the Haymarket Affair, which led to the eight-hour workday, the 40-hour workweek, and the minimum wage. The militant Black Panther Party’s survival programs protected their communities during the civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century, and its Free Breakfast for School Children Program forced the federal government to reexamine and expand its inadequate school lunch program. It was not only peaceful marches and sit-ins that led to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, but also riots, large-scale damage, and turmoil that forced the system to change.
Looking beyond American history and into the history of people’s struggle against fascism, there has never been a time when authoritarianism and fascism have been defeated through a vote or a march. In a time when being anti-fascist (ANTIFA) will get you labeled a domestic terrorist, it is urgently important that we remember this. Fascism, like we see rising in America today, is a disease on a national level, and the only cure that has ever proven effective has been to violently resist, combat, and eradicate it. The best example of this comes from Europe in the early 20th century. While the official Italian Socialist Party adopted a strategy of peace and legal resistance to Mussolini’s fascism under the Pacification Pact, allowing the fascist party to grow unchecked until his rise as Dictator, militant groups such as Arditi Del Popolo in the 20s and the National Liberation Committee in the 40s continued their violent struggle through direct combat, organized strikes, and sabotage until the originator of fascism fell. Similar resistance stories were seen in Spain against Franco’s regime, Poland and France against the occupying Nazis, and the Battle of Cable Street in London, where everyday people united and successfully combatted and prevented a fascist march in their city. Over and over again, fascism fell to a united and indomitable community who refused to allow it to exist. Even when they did not win the first time, or even the next ten, the people’s violent refusal to submit to fascist authoritarianism has always been its downfall.
So what is to be done? If we can accept that the history of nonviolence has been a pacifying lie, and the proven way to combat fascism like we see today is through violent and militant struggle, what is the next step? How do we apply these lessons of the past to our present? Our country is the wealthiest, most highly militarized empire the world has ever seen, and never before has it been more willing to turn this military on us, in the form of police, ICE, and the National Guard. That is a terrifying concept to fight against. A country with unlimited resources, especially regarding violence, which has turned to unashamed fascist methodology, is not the kind of enemy any of us wants to face. Most of us have commitments, families, and jobs that we cannot or will not set aside for the common good, especially when the answer to achieving this common good seems to be a suicidal, unwinnable fight against a system that sees us as disposable. I wish I had the answer to this; unfortunately, all I have to offer are ideas and theories.
My first idea comes from the Constitution itself; despite my problems with America, I still believe our Constitution is one of the greatest anti-tyranny playbooks ever written, if used effectively. Of course, here I am primarily talking about the Second Amendment. For so long, being pro-second amendment has been an almost exclusively right wing talking point. I believe it is time for that to change. The left, and by that I mean any person in this country who recognizes and despises our current fascist government, needs to become far more comfortable with the idea of arming ourselves and protecting our communities with militia-like organizations. Being militant is not something any of us wants to do; rather, it is what we will need to do to defend ourselves and our neighbors. Having a gun and knowing how to use it is an essential skill when facing large-scale state violence. The idea is to be on the defensive, not the offensive. No good person owns a gun for the purpose of killing other people, but rather to be able to defend ourselves from those who wish to do our communities harm, and have proven to have no problem killing us to achieve their goals. I again turn to the example of the Black Panther Party; often being armed and organized, and our opponents knowing how armed and organized we are, is enough for them to think twice about infringing on our rights.
I also believe that sabotaging ICE and military institutions is a great way to resist violently with much less risk. Instead of a direct confrontation with a highly militarized police force, which is likely unwinnable and will only serve to justify them becoming more militarized, taking a page out of the Earth Liberation Front playbook and sabotaging things like detention and data centers may be more effective.
More than anything, what will be required of all of us is bravery. We must maintain a level of revolutionary optimism in thinking that we can beat this. Fascism has been defeated before, and despite the seemingly long odds, it can be defeated again, because it has to be. None of us expected this fight to ever be ours; we were taught that fascism was defeated long ago, just like we were taught to only resist and create change nonviolently. The combination of these lessons has left us weak in the face of an existential threat to American society as a whole, and I hope we are able to learn something new, even if it’s difficult, before it is too late.
Cole Sanders is a First Year Journalism major with a History and Politics double minor who urges us to consider methods besides nonviolence to create change. He can be reached at csanders@ithaca.edu.