Don’t forget about the suffergettes too.
Also when asked, “What do u think bout western civilization?”
He said, “I think it would be a gd idea!”
Gandi that is
Nonviolence is Racist
I do not mean to exchange insults, and I use the epithet racist only after careful consideration. Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence. Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement’s demands or the pacifists achieve that legendary “critical mass.”
As @anon73430903, there is no real clear divison between violence and non-violence. Take the American civil rights movement and the successes it had… first, the various riots that happened all through that period played a role in shaping anti-racist legislation. Second, there was not a complete rejection by the King led movement of defensive violence. Third, we should question how successful it was in the long run, given how things are going with race in America right now.
Just the act of trying to divide out violent from non-violent resistance to oppression is nearly impossible to do in the first place. The questions seem loaded and biased from the start, as one can ignore uncomfortable truths, like many of the people who surrounded Dr. King were carrying weapons, to focus on the “right” answer - King’s movement was successful solely because of his insistence on non-violent action.
On top of that, given the whole BS situation with Brother Cornell West, we should question Harvard’s impartiality in the first place.
in part even because different people have different definitions of these terms. property damage isn’t violence the same way beatings by police, tear gas, and rubber bullets are - but we are told the former somehow justifies the latter
Hurting protesters might be violence, but damaging business property is sacrilege. /s
@chenille’s snark hits the nail on the head of that mindset. Breaking a window isn’t the same thing as mowing down protestors. One breaks a window, the other hurts human beings.
Likewise, there is a tendency (to put it mildly) to attribute the British withdrawal from India entirely to Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns, and to ignore things like the widespread violence of the Quit India movement, which over 16 months or so saw more than 600 bombings and the destruction of more than 200 police stations, 300 railway stations, 700 government buildings and 900 post offices, and which required the deployment of 57 battalions to restore order when Britain was busy trying to fight WW2.
I was thinking that graphic novels are hella expensive, at least compared to the typical paperbacks one would find in an English class. I’m guessing there’s still no cheaply-printed student edition. Maybe they were using electronic versions? Or bootleg, partly-illegible photocopies?
… But there are much larger concerns at play here, probably.
My understanding is that works in the English syllabus aren’t typically reduced in price, but given the markup and monopolies on other textbooks, that still results in them being cheaper than the Maths or Physics textbooks, page for page.
My kids have been set Maus for English, and other schools in the state have set Persepolis. The cost of those books as part of the total textbook spend for a year isn’t the dealbreaker if that’s a problem.
They already inherit that history pretty directly … do we really want them getting more ideas from it??
Not really. They handwave a lot of it away in the NAVCO 1.3 codebook and several other versions by saying they aren’t done coding the data on what they call violent flanks. This hasn’t stopped them from making frequent public speeches that extend far beyond their data. The later versions cover different types of events and different time frames, but still suffer from similar issues.
At best this is “a story about Gandhi”
It’s not really part of the historical record
One person’s handwaving away may be another person’s deadline to finish their dissertation or publish work and hold speaking events or clinics in order to show the necessary updates and progress to their academic employers or grant suppliers so they can justify or extend their research despite having not been able to process, codify, catalog, or interpret the entirety of all the data that they have had to look up, sort through, distill and make determinations upon (or are still looking up or have plans to yet gather more information due to the annoying nature of time always going forward, but never stopping to take a break so everyone can catch up). But each to their own, as some people have said.
Also, “not really”? Did you read 1.3 or merely skim it? They quite literally address a lot of the questions and criticisms you all bring up here.
[Edit: post not deleted in order to maintain thread continuity (i.e. comments that specifically quoted off this comment), but edited to better fit in with community standards (i.e. not being as big of an a**hole). Edit notes in brackets]
This “anarchist’s” manifesto’s tl;dr [my one line summary of my reading that I coded “tl;dr” in order to indicate this as a summary for other people who do not wish to read the manuscript because they see it as too long]:
People of color, globally, can’t have nice things because white people refuse to engage in violence.
Oh man, it’s hard to even try and knock this with a straight face.
Peter Gelderloos: [my (highly judgmental)(fair? unfair?) view of Peter Gelderloos after reading his book and watching interviews with him (by way of quoting Bug’s Bunny). Retained due to being quoted in a following comment] what a nin-cow-poop, what an immbesile
[Redacted everything else]
Me: … and hypocritically engages in logical fallacies [at the cost of] my own bemusement.
[Me: justifiably slapped on the wrist. I got carried away. Mea culpa.]
Perhaps you should read it, because this
does not equal this
In fact, it’s almost the opposite. People of color can’t have nice things because white people continuously engage in violence them.
An idea I’ve heard and have a lot of sympathy for is a sort of active pacifism: violence is wrong, and therefore it is our duty to keep things from getting to the point people feel it is necessary. That’s inherently a privileged ideology because it assumes you have some sway over circumstances, but at least it comes from a place of compassion. Scolding the oppressed because they don’t protest the way you’d prefer does not.
