Learned about it from this episode of the Team Human podcast
But what is happening in Hong Kong is they come up with a slogan, which is translated as Do Not Split, which is, we know that some people are willing to be confrontational with riot police.
And when they are, that’s going to cost the state in terms of not only resources, but it’s going to cost the state in terms of political capital and support. And we know that there are some people who are not willing to do that. And we are going to abide by the protocol of Do Not Split, which means that we’re not going to criticize them openly, and they’re not going to criticize us openly.
If we’re the pacifists, we’re not going to have them criticize us for being sort of like, I don’t know, limpid or flaccid or not courageous or whatever. And we’re not going to criticize them for being more confrontational. And the thing is that the support is also tacit.
It’s not like they have to come out and tell the media, oh, we approve of our more sort of confrontational colleagues. They just keep quiet. They just keep quiet.
Understanding that a range of tactics is probably going to be necessary. Nobody really knows what’s going to work. But if everybody’s pushing back against a particularly violent state, then everybody’s really on the same side.
Solidarity forever.
If this is a difficult principal for you, remember to rank your battles appropriately:
Number One will always be the people you actually disagree with on a fundamental level, the people you mean to be resisting. Way down on the list is the people on your side who are resisting in ways you don’t condone, but resisting nonetheless.
Never fight a low priority battle when a high priority fight is still going on.
“Splitter!” as a pejorative:
Something else I appreciated:
“You know, and this point of view, you probably came into contact with through the work of people like Gene Sharp, who was, you know, kind of the main theorist of nonviolent resistance.
But then someone said he got revealed now that Gene Sharp, someone did a book, that Gene Sharp was revealed as a neoliberal apologist.
Well, it isn’t a book. But what has happened is that the researchers that took up his sort of project of let’s establish that this was the goal, really. Let’s establish that nonviolent resistance is the primary way in which successful social movements are successful.
A person named Erika Chenoweth and her and their colleague Maria Stevan wrote a book called Why Civil Resistance Works in 2011. But as a sociologist of street rebellion named Ben Case has shown, they really are working with a very poor data set because they fail to disambiguate between things like armed violent resistance from a violent militant like Gorilla Flank and unarmed violent resistance as in rioting within a protest movement where there are marches or there are protests or there are various gatherings that might involve stuff that we’re seeing in LA recently, right? Like people throwing stones at cop cars and setting waymos on fire and shit like that.
And so the problem with with Chenoweth’s book is that it convinced a whole bunch of people that if you are trying to smash the windows of cop cars that you’re actually doing a form of violent resistance that will not work. But actually, according to the classification of their data set, smashing the windows of police cars are within the nonviolent category because they’re not armed, right? So there’s a big confusion about the actual data.
Understanding that a range of tactics is probably going to be necessary.
All successful movements have to have a radical flank in order to make the moderates look moderate. Otherwise, the moderates look radical and the Overton Window doesn’t shift.
Not fighting other leftists just makes sense. What grinds my gears are people who think we HAVE to embrace Democrats. Embrace, not just vote for the lesser evil. Those people can fuck right off with their big tent politics: The EXACT thing the Democrats used to get us here.
As a non-American it’s kind of wild to me that people are still complaining about the democrats when you elected Trump.
Yeah they’re not good. And you should fight them. But if my only choice is the democrats or trump, I’ll choose the Dems and then immediately get back to fighting them.
It’s a two party system. They’re half of the entire government. It’s important. Like I said, it’s NOT the people saying to grit your teeth and vote for the lesser evil, but the people who say Democrats should be embraced. Democrats are the pieces of shit that backstabbed Bernie and surprise picachu faced TWICE against Trump. Even assuming ignorance, they’re fucking fools of the highest calibre and deserve zero respect what so ever.
Me, a nonviolent person, when someone chins a fashy cunt
Ironically you channel the Split vibes this post elaborates about: you give the same energy as someone who picks a white mage, but never casts any heal spells and just stays in the back while everyone does all the work so you can lazily enjoy the fruits of everyone elses hard work.
Pacifist ≠ passivist
And fascism respects neither. We didn’t sternly write letters to Mussolini’s death, did we? We didn’t protest Hitler to death? No, you pacifist dumb fucks, we killed them to death.
Passivist or pacifist, it doesn’t matter, both have no place when addressing fascism.
This is why it has come crawling back from the roach-infested shadows globally in Europe and the USA, we stopped at killing their leadership instead of also punishing their supporters.
There were plenty of pacifists that stood up to fascists.
The White Rose is a good example of one. The members were executed by guillotine.
Killing kids looks horrible and no doubt cost the nazi some political capital. Nonviolent resistance works just as well as other types. Non-violent and violence working together can produce great things.
My wife’s grandfather considered himself a pacifist. He drove a tank as part of the liberation of France. He also sometimes snuck up on Nazi positions, punched their lights out, and hauled them back as prisoners.
In the years before he died, he was known to say “what do you mean don’t punch Nazis? What else are they good for?”
I was honored to be a pallbearer at his funeral.
Pacifism can be flexible, which I personally think is the only way pacifism makes sense.
“He also sometimes snuck up on Nazi positions, punched their lights out”
What you just wrote is literally and factually the polar fucking opposite of pacifism.
Not to him. His viewpoint is that he wasn’t going to kill them, but there’s flexibility beyond that.
I think it’s time for you to step aside and read the definition of pacifism and try again: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifism
Oi, stop criticizing other leftists. Read the top level post again.
I’m disabled as fuck and likely won’t be chinning any fascists anytime soon, but I’m damn well gonna cheer when others do.
Being disabled does stop morbidly obese MAGA from practicing at the range.
I’m also disabled and still make time to shoot. Tired of reading excuses from my team on the Left.
And there’s NOTHING wrong with being critical of your own team. You all just aren’t used to people being critical of you, because we are infested with people who are always pearl-clutching pathetic losers.
When you discredit publicly to the point you tarnish reputations to the point of changing electoral decisions that help fascists win, you’re complicit in that.
We can hold ourselves to account to be better, but being more critical of like minded folk than fascists is dumb. We apply pressure where it’ll be effective, such as primaries or selection contests so the best candidates win.
