Demanding Protestors Be “Nonviolent” Helps the Fascists

ICE and the fascists, not protestors, are causing the violence

Whenever there are antifascist protests, there you will find concerned moderate Democrats wagging their fingers and telling the protestors not to be violent.

As just one example, this weekend California Senator Adam Schiff took to social media to warn people confronting ICE, police, and National Guard troops in LA that they needed to make sure to fall over peacefully when they got hit with rubber bullets, and/or that they needed to react with calm and only calm when jackbooted thugs wearing masks and no identification kidnapped them and threw them into vans.

LA Mayor Karen Bass issued a similar cautionary statement, insisting that, “Everyone has the right to peacefully protest, but let me be clear: violence and destruction are unacceptable, and those responsible will be held accountable.”

There are a number of problems with haranguing protestors in this way. I’ll cover a couple briefly.

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Misattributing blame

Currently the fundamental problem in LA is that the fascist Trump administration has sent unmarked, masked ICE agents to rampage through the city, arresting people in Home Depots and off the street. People are watching their friends, neighbors, and family getting terrorized and kidnapped by unaccountable armed gangs. That is the main cause of violence in the city; not citizens protesting, but federal agents behaving like an invading Nazi army.

Because people objected (peacefully!) to the invading Nazi army, Donald Trump escalated. He federalized the California national guard over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom—and possibly in defiance of the law. This led to more confrontation and more tear gas and rubber bullets. It’s also pretty obviously a terrifying step towards fascist authoritarian rule.

When Schiff and Bass rush to a microphone to warn protestors to be nonviolent, they are displacing and effectively lying about the actual instigators of the violence. They are also validating the fascist narrative about who is responsible for violence, and by doing so buttressing Trump’s case for more and more state violence in the name of quelling protest.

This is ironic, because Schiff is specifically telling protestors not to give Trump a pretext. “There is nothing President Trump would like more than a violent confrontation with protestors to justify the unjustifiable,” the senator burbles senatorially. But anyone who has watched Trump for the last decade knows that he does not need the protestors to do anything for him to cook up a justification. Trump staged a violent insurrection based on nonsense claims about a stolen election. Does Schiff think that states should have handed the election to Trump to avoid giving him a pretext for insurrection? Or what?

It would be terrible if Trump invoked the insurrection act. But you know what else would be terrible? Effectively disallowing all protest because you’re afraid of Trump. Protest is a core right in a democracy, in part because protests are a check on power.

Democratic Senators already preemptively caved to Trump because they were so afraid of what he might do that they were unwilling to use what power they had to stop him. Schiff is now recommending that same path to protestors; capitulate instantly lest the fascists do bad things. But the fascists are already doing bad things! And refusing to resist out of fear of what might come is in itself a step on the rode to further fascism and misery.

The state is almost inevitably much more violent than protestors, not least because the state has vastly more resources for inflicting violence. By insinuating, or outright stating, that the main danger of violence is from protestors, Democratic leaders like Schiff and Bass are giving the fascists the very propaganda victory that Schiff thinks he is warning protestors to avoid.

Nonviolent protest is not a suicide pact

The model for nonviolent protest globally is Mahatma Gandhi, who led a pacifist nationwide movement in India which was key to freeing the subcontinent from British rule. Gandhi inspired Martin Luther King, and calls for nonviolent protest in the US context often explicitly or implicitly are referencing the Civil Rights Movement’s principles and tactics.

Gandhi is a powerful and rightly celebrated figure. But he was human like the rest of us, and he was not always right. In particular, his response when asked what Jewish people should have done in the face of the Holocaust is quietly infamous.

Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.

Gandhi here is rebuking the Jews who fought back in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and Jewish partisan freedom fighters. He’s blaming Jewish people for engaging in self defense against overwhelming odds, and for not killing themselves (and their children?) He believes that mass suicide would have aroused the world—even though the Holocaust itself did not arouse the world.

Most people, I think, would agree that calling on people to murder themselves and save the Nazis the trouble is fucked up. Peaceful protest is a tactic to defeat fascism and injustice, but it’s not the only tactic, and it’s not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is defeating fascism.

The state in the US has vast resources and overwhelming arms. We also have an (intermittently, at least) free press, which can highlight the excesses of Trump’s regime in ways that build broader resistance. There are good reasons that most organized protestors focus on nonviolent protest as the best strategy for confronting authoritarian violence.

But not all protest is organized protest, and not all resistance is, or has to be, nonviolent. When the cops throw tear gas canisters into a crowd, if someone picks it up and throws it back, that’s not exactly nonviolent, but it’s not (in my estimation) immoral, and not necessarily counterproductive. The guy who cold-cocked neo-Nazi Richard Spencer was widely celebrated, the video of the incident became a meme and a very effective piece of antifascist propaganda. Is that a sign of the moral rot of the left? Or is it an indication that there are a range of resistance tactics, not all of which have to be completely nonviolent?

Obviously there are immoral forms of protest; harming innocent bystanders is unequivocally wrong, as just one example. But the line for moral/immoral tactics isn’t the same as violence/nonviolence—not least because fascists consider any form of protest or resistance to be violence. Currently Trump is trying to get us to treat publicizing the identities of state actors—people who literally work for us—as violence. Marching or standing in front of agents is characterized as violence. Condemning Trump’s actions is violence. This is again why Trump doesn’t need a pretext to escalate; he just makes up a pretext, or changes the meaning of words.

In that context, elected officials who oppose Trump are essentially taking the fash bait when they bang on and on and on about how nonviolent protestors need to prove again and again and again that they are really nonviolent while ICE kidnaps people off the street and cops casually shoot potentially deadly rubber bullets at journalists for fun.

Stop being quisling motherfuckers, you quisling motherfuckers

As I have said before, the best way to oppose fascism is to fucking oppose it rather than being a spineless quisling motherfucker. When there are antifascist protests against escalating, monstrous police violence, speak out against the fucking fascists.

You could even, I don’t know, thank the protestors, who are putting their bodies and their lives on the line to protect freedom for all of us while people like Adam Schiff sit on their Senatorial asses and vote to confirm Trump nominees. You could point out that protest—at varying levels of nonviolence!—are a signature American tradition from the Boston Tea Party through the Civil Rights Movement to the George Floyd Protests. You could even call for more protests, as Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has done.

What you should not do, under any circumstances, is what Schiff did; suggest that protestors are to blame for the inevitable fascist backlash. Elected Democrats should be looking for ways to amplify protests and to stand with protestors. And if they can’t do that, they should get the fuck out of the way.