Yeah, everything that you're saying is entirely in the abstract. Just because a non-violent revolution is theoretically possible in a given circumstances doesn't mean that a non-violent revolution is possible in every instance. I mean, do you think the French monarchy could have been overthrown non-violently? Do you think that American independence could have been achieved non-violently? The Civil War?
What you've written is basically a pastiche of Bartlett's quotations divorced from the actual material contexts that these statements were made in. It’s just a bunch of random figures whose thoughts and ideas you cram into this Procrustean Bed to give yourself authority. For example, you quote Baldwin but you don’t bother to quote what Baldwin said specifically about riots:
Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word “looter”. On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.
Do you think Apartheid South Africa could have been overthrown without violence? The ANC and the South African Indian Congress did — for about 10 years or so, but after exhausting every single avenue of non-violent resistance and getting massacred at Sharpeville, they decided first to carry out sabotage, then following more escalations and state terror, they carried out guerrilla war, then people’s war, then they won.
I think it’s just as wrong to fetishize non-violence as it is to fetishize violence. People don’t make history under conditions that they choose. It’s one thing to sit around and moralize about violence from the comfort of your home in a complete frictionless space where nothing you say or do has any consequence. It’s all some abstract moral exercise to you. Why don’t you actually go out into the streets and experience state repression and resistance first hand. Choke on some teargas and see if that makes you see things a little differently.,
