On violence

Violence becomes more and more the predominant feature of global politics. International violence takes on the form of war, for instance in Israel’s attack on Palestine, resulting in a genocide. Simultaneously, Western countries increasingly use the threat of war to pursue their interests, be it with NATO threatening to mount up at Russian borders, the US and allied navies patrolling Chinese waters or as recently, the cannon boat policy exercised by Washington against Venezuela.

At the same time, these countries’ governments increasing mount up violence inside their own nations, both with the society’s militarization and increased repression against opposing forces.

A stunning example came from the United States, where the Trump Administration deployed the national guard to federal states, such as California. Trump threatens to continue this policy.

We spoke about the role of violence, from the perspective of those that suffer it, with Austin Cole, Coordinator of the US Black Alliance for Peace.   

The struggle for multipolarity is completely intertwined with the struggle for popular movements and the achievement of human dignity, of collective self-determination, and of our people-centered human rights that requires support for social movements, grassroots civil society, and the popular struggle, not just on states.

It is important to ally with states, progressive, radical, revolutionary states, but we have to also link that struggle with the struggle for popular movements or else there will be no basis from which we can transform society, transform our economies and transform this world and develop on the basis of mutual respect and dignity.

You also make an emphasis on violence, saying that violence is part of this struggle, actually. Can you explain that?

Yes. So, we support peace completely. But peace also does not mean the absence of conflict. Peace does not mean that we are bombed into submission, and peace does not mean domination. Peace means the ability to achieve self-determination, the ability to achieve human dignity. And in doing that, we have to defeat the systems of imperialism, of colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy.

And sometimes, that process is violent because, and I insist, it’s not a violence that we want. It is a violence that upholds colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism. It is a violence that is put upon us, right? And so our choice is not violence. Our choice, ideally, we would love our choice to be non-violence. We want a world that is based in mutual respect, that is based in cooperation, that has no place for violence among, you know, mutual respecting people, right?

But unfortunately, the world that we live in is not that world. I think something that is oftentimes discounted. For instance, historically in the liberation of Haiti, people say that these were savages, and they murdered all the white people, all the Europeans. That’s not what happened. They murdered all the people, they killed all the people that refused to give up the European colonial project of white supremacy and colonial domination. They allowed other white people, there was an entire Polish community that changed sides from the French to the Haitians because they believed in this idea of human dignity and self-determination and true emancipation. So if you uphold slavery, if you uphold colonialism and imperialism, those are violent institutions.

And so, what has to respond to that, to destroy those systems, has to be determined by the people. There’s no single answer in every time. I think it’s important that we don’t fetishize violence.

We should be aiming again to solve our problems with cooperation which moots dual respect, but we can also not demonize violence because we are peoples that have had violence forced upon us for hundreds of years.

Violence in the United States recently was observed, with even the military being deployed against the people of the United States. What do you comment on that? What’s going on there?

Yeah, this is something that’s critical, and I mean, the US society is violent to its core. The US was formed on indigenous genocide, the enslavement, and capture of African peoples, the colonization, the neo-colonization of the Americas, right, and then what they call ‘full spectrum dominance’. That’s the actual words that they use, full spectrum dominance of the entire world, right, and so it’s no surprise that back in the US now, where I live, we also see the military increasingly employed in our streets. We saw that after Ferguson and the death of Mike, the murder of Mike Brown, we saw that in 2020 after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and many others.

And we’ve seen it historically as well, not just with African peoples, Black peoples, but against radicals, against trade unionists, against anarchist socialists, right? We’ve seen it against indigenous people as well. We’ve seen it against immigrants, and we’ve seen that very strongly against immigrants. A student was kidnapped about half a mile from where I lived, right?

And that is violence. And so for us, that the idea of demilitarization is not only about this abstract, again, understanding of peace, but the violence that the U.S. sows abroad doesn’t just come back home. It has always been at home, right? It’s coming back in certain forms, in a stronger form, because the violence has increased so much across the world by the U.S. and by U.S. and NATO and U.S.-led imperialism.

So for us, understanding that, understanding things like the 1033 program, which allows local municipalities to get tanks and weapons of mass civilian casualty and death from the military, right, for free, because they need to continue the military-industrial complex. So a small town can for free get a tank that would have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan to use against their people. And that’s a program that has been going on since the late 90s, but has increased significantly since 2009 and the decrease in troops in Iraq.

We know things like the deadly exchange, where many, many police departments in the U.S. train with the Israeli occupation forces, with the Zionist forces there. Even the NYPD has an office in Tel Aviv, right? And so all of these things, and there are many more programs, many more examples, particularly of surveillance, that many of those surveillance companies have been established in the Zionist entity as well and then brought to the U.S. right and so all of these different forms of violence are no surprise right because the U.S. has been again the purveyor of violence throughout the world and so when we come back and see that happening in the U.S. we have to fight that militarization, we have to fight that, and we have to be strategic about it, but we also have to understand that there is no way around ending that form of militarization because it threatens not only our movements, it threatens not only the most vulnerable or the most vulnerable lies among us, the most oppressed people in our communities, but it threatens all of us because violence begets violence, right?

Our communities are violent because of colonialism and patriarchy and white supremacy and imperialism, right? That is why our communities are violent, not because of us, right? And so if we are going to resolve that, we have to defeat those systems that create violence, that create these ridiculous programs that want to suppress and oppress our people. And we have to link up with our siblings across the United States, across the Americas, and across the world who believe in dignity and self-determination and in a world where we can actually experience liberation.