Slavery in the United States was a violent regime built on the systemic dehumanization of enslaved Black people. White slaveholders stripped Black people of their humanity to make the otherwise unquestionably horrific treatment of them socially acceptable. Given this, it is entirely unreasonable to expect the enslaved to have nevertheless respected the humanity of their masters. If the slaveholder could use violence to keep the slave subjugated, the slave could use violence to break free. Indeed, many American slave revolts were exceedingly violent and resulted in the loss of innocent lives. The most violent of these rebellions in the US was Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, in which 55 white people were killed, women and children included. Yet it’s not difficult to see in our modern day that, regardless of our moral positions on violence, such insurrections were justifiable: a necessary response to an institution that was deliberately dehumanizing and would not fall peacefully.
Irrespective of your personal stance on the use of violence, it has historically often been a necessary and therefore justified component of resistance to oppression.
But how do we translate this understanding of political violence to the modern day? Accepting violence as a common, normalized aspect of political discourse and change is deeply dangerous and would threaten foundational aspects of our society. It is thus crucial to be able to distinguish when political violence is justifiable from when it is evidently not.
Political violence is only justified when it serves a necessary, strategic purpose in resisting oppression. It’s easy to say that non-violent resistance is the most moral way to resist, and indeed nonviolence in the face of violent suppression can be more powerful in stirring public sympathy. In spite of this, the state (and by extension, much of the general public) generally treats non-violent movements similarly to their violent counterparts. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful protests were treated by the government almost equivalently to more radical wings such as the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam. To the state, the crux of the problem with these movements was not whether they were violent, but whether or not they challenged the rule of the state.
Indeed, systems of power operate in violent ways. States only condemn violence when it challenges hegemonic structures. Yet state-sanctioned violence in the form of war, policing, or the death penalty is generally accepted. The simple morality that tells us death and violence are wrong when done by resistance groups is applied much more weakly to state-sanctioned violence. This is because the state is the only accepted vessel of power, so its use of violence is considered legitimate and more easily normalized. This perception of a just right to violence is why 74% of Americans supported the Iraq War at the time of George Bush’s May 2003 “Mission Accomplished” Speech, for instance. People accept violence by the state under the assumption that even if violence may be morally wrong, it is enacted as a necessary means to some just end. Thus, people implicitly recognize that violence can, in fact, be justified, even if its use doesn’t align with one’s instinctive sense of personal morality.
By contrast, any non-state actors violently opposing dominant structures are often quickly labeled terrorists. Nelson Mandela remained on the US government’s terrorism watch list until 2008 for his role in the ANC’s violent resistance to South African Apartheid, even though he is now almost universally regarded as a figure who fought justly for the end of an evil system. When the state labels a group a terrorist, it relies on hegemonic norms that ensure people perceive it as the only just source of violence. If we accept that the state can act violently under the presumption that it does so justly, then we should have no trouble accepting the violence of oppressed resistance forces as well – morality is not the issue. In labelling these groups as terrorists, the state weaponizes people’s moral aversion to violence, while insulating their own actions from the same level of scrutiny.
It is, of course, problematic to accept at face value the idea that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. In particular, not all violence against the system strives to fight for the oppressed, and even when it does, it is not always necessary.
Violent terror groups like the KKK were created to prevent the United States from developing towards a multiracial democracy. While such violence opposed state hegemony, it still sought to preserve dominant norms of the past and maintain oppression. When non-state violence seeks to preserve or establish systems of oppression rather than resist them, it is unjustifiable. Recent political assassinations, for instance, fall into this category, the consequence of both a serious gun problem and a mental health epidemic in the United States. Violence of this sort is based on the problematic idea that symbolic acts of violence can be considered meaningful resistance.
Even when non-state violence is aimed at a just struggle, violence that is not necessary to respond to oppression is pointless, dangerous, and must be condemned. This is a major benefit of democracy. Where in the past all change against states essentially required violent revolution, much political change in the United States is pursued peacefully through the power of the ballot box, ideally diminishing the justifiable role of political violence in this country significantly.
However, the US is a deeply imperfect democracy, with elements such as the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United (which has given incredible influence to corporations and the wealthy over US politics) creating a significant gap between the powerful and the people. The power of “dark money” in politics is creating a cyclical, degrading effect on democratic freedoms, where the importance of wealthy donors in winning elections leads politicians to focus on their interests above those of average Americans. As this continues to happen, the capacity for peaceful, democratic change in the United States becomes increasingly unlikely. If we wish to avoid violent resistance, the United States needs to address its significant issues, including economic and racial inequality, and provide the kind of meaningful support structure for regular Americans that is evidently present for the wealthiest ones. Otherwise, as these systems become complacent and the notion of American democracy becomes increasingly a facade for oligarchy, nonviolent means may fail, widening the scope of justifiable violence.
In seeking a just world, and thus standing continuously with the oppressed, our duty as outsiders is less to condemn their violence, and more to fight against structures of oppression, however we are able. This means we must think about political violence far more critically, to understand if an act is meaningless and nihilistic, dangerous and regressive, or emblematic of deep structural problems.
It’s easy to justify the necessity of violence against the oppressors of the past. It’s far harder, and far more important, to be able to do the same for the oppressors of the present. Rather than moralizing to the oppressed, we must look to eliminate the systems of oppression that make violence necessary.
Featured Image Source: The Atlantic
