We Should Condemn All Political Violence

Hello, and welcome back to Anarchist Hot Takes, the newsletter of Everyday Anarchism. I wrote most of this last weekend, right as the assassination news was unfolding, but I'm just getting it out now. Here it is:

I just checked the news and learned about the horrific assassination of a Minnesota legislator and her husband, as well as the attempted assassination of another legislator and spouse.

I have a very simple take on this, one that I think will be widely unpopular but I feel compelled to share, especially as today is the day of both Trump's belligerent birthday parade and the "No Kings Protest," both of which have the potential for political violence.

It's very simple. Political violence is bad.

Truthfully, I should say that we should condemn almost all political violence. There are some exceptions. It's hard to condemn the assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler, for example.

But otherwise, we should condemn all political violence.

And - and this is where I know I'll lose most people - that includes political violence done by the state.

Condemning political violence means no more assassinations. It also means no more riot squads, no more teargassing of protesters, no more tasers, no more SWAT teams deployed against marchers, no more ziptying the arms of campus protesters. Obviously the murder of George Floyd helped people understand that the day-to-day violence deployed by the police is often also political, but we can even imagine a more perfect world in which routine cop violence is merely about enforcing laws and never about deeper political injustices. You’ll never convince me that such a world can exist, but I’m willing to concede that it’s a possibility so we can focus on the more obvious political violence we’re dealing with right now. Remember that police and politics have the same root - polis, the Greek word for city-state. Policing is politics. But again, let's leave that aside for now.

Because the recent ICE raids are overtly, capital-P, Political Violence. In fact, the Trump administration is making my position almost too easy. In the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, the administration admitted that she was kidnapped because of an essay she co-wrote that "found common cause with an organization fhat was later temporarily banned from campus."  When armed men show up wearing ski masks and kidnap people off the street because of something they wrote, you know that's political violence. When marines are deployed to the streets of an American city because someone didn't like the flags protesters were flying, you know that's political violence.

President Trump clearly thinks that when protests break out, any amount of state violence can be justified, even if the protestors are largely nonviolent. But he’s far from alone in that view. The American government, going all the way back to the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, has been happy to deploy political violence against protesters. And the tradition can be found even in mainstream institutions; during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, The New York Times published a full-throated call for political violence by Senator Tom Cotton. 

One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.

That's not a sober-minded deployment of the means necessary to restore law and order. If you call for an overwhelming show of military force to serve as a deterrent, you're explicitly calling for political violence. But although The Times received widespread condemnation for that article, they and Cotton were willing to publish it for the same reason Trump is willing to send armed terrorists to arrest graduate students: we don't call it violence or terrorism when it's done by the state. It’s part of the American tradition to deploy violence against protesters and declare it apolitical, as Cotton pointed out in his piece:

In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws”... In fact, the federal government has a constitutional duty to the states to “protect each of them from domestic violence.” Throughout our history, presidents have exercised this authority on dozens of occasions to protect law-abiding citizens from disorder.

If it’s done by the state, it doesn’t count as political violence - it can’t be domestic violence if the government itself is doing it! So according to this logic, if the national guard opens fire on a crowd of protesters, that's not political violence. And the assassin in this weekend's murder knew that we make an exception for political violence done by the state:

The suspect police encountered at the home of Hortman, the lawmaker who was killed, was wearing a vest, taser, and badge, impersonating a police officer, according to Chief Mark Bruley of the Brooklyn Park Police. “No question, if they were in this room, you would assume they were a police officer.” (from The New York Times)

So just say no to political violence. Even - or especially - if it's done by the state.