Category: Leftist theory

Racial Aristocracy: Nearly every polity in Asia, Africa, and the Americas was destroyed at least once by European colonialists who built an ideological edifice to rationalize their rule. Europeans, led by Anglo-America, taught this ideology – racism – to themselves and their colonial subjects. In their world view, the earth belongs naturally to the superior races, who needn’t respect law, truth, or life when dealing with their inferiors.

Sovereign States: Over a long struggle, many colonized peoples expelled their colonizers and tried to build states strong enough to defend themselves. Postcolonial states joined international covenants and institutions like the UN in the hopes that it could protect their futures from new waves of depredations. In the international order they thought they were building, concepts like sovereignty, territorial integrity, and international law were enshrined as an answer to colonialism.

But the former colonizers still have most of the power and their plan is to roll things all the way back. Better learn the rules they plan to impose.

“Grand Racial Aristocracy”

At the beginning of the 20th century a group of conspirators from Britain, the US, Canada, and South Africa, the Anglo-American Establishment as described by Carroll Quigley, advanced a plan for the world domination of their “master race”. The ringleader of the project was Alfred Milner, whose proteges, called “Milner’s Kindergarten”, filled all the important positions of England at the height of imperialism. Milner described himself as “an Imperialist and not a Little Englander, because I am a British Race Patriot.”

The geopolitical concept of these men was to embroil the Eurasian continent in perpetual war, explained by imperialist theorists Alfred Thayer Mahan and Halford Mackinder; the economic concept was to plunder the resources of colonized Africa (one of them, Schreiner, wrote in 1923 that “all white nations have regarded Africans mainly as a means of producing or procuring wealth.”), Oceania, Asia, and the Americas using colonial methods, explained best by anti-imperialists Lenin and Hobson. Racial conspirators were more public about it then than they are now. Hitler imbibed their concepts so well that his famous book was a love letter to them.

The most direct statement of their vision for the world was articulated by racialist Jan Smuts at a speech in Kimberly before the Great War. Smuts would later become a WWI strategist for Britain and still later one of the leaders of apartheid South Africa. Before all that, he celebrated colonialism: “as the new world is the home of popular democracy, so the mission of the Newer World – if I may use the term – is a grand racial aristocracy.” They believed in progress in history: If popular democracy was a high stage of civilization, racial aristocracy was an even higher stage.

And a racial aristocracy is exactly what they built. It is the world order we live in. Understood properly, it’s not a world of double standards. There’s no hypocrisy at all: the supreme good is upholding the racial hierarchy, and any other ethical frameworks are secondary.

Dan Freeman-Maloy described Anglo racial theorist John Buchan’s work in an article in Race & Class called “Remembering Balfour”. Dan describes how Buchan wrote a series of adventure novels starring the character Richard Hannay. In the novel Greenmantle, Hannay says the British are ‘the only race that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples.’ The book sold 34,000 copies in 1916. In another book, one of Buchan’s characters says: “I define Imperialism as the closer organic connection under one Crown of a number of autonomous nations of the same blood, who can spare something of their vitality for the administration of vast tracts inhabited by lower races, – a racial aristocracy considered in their relation to the subject peoples, a democracy in their relation to each other.” He also said: “Remember, our democracy is a white man’s democracy, and we are not moved by any foolish Rousseauism about the rights of man.”

Today there are people working for the dismantling of a postcolonial state like Syria on the basis of authoritarianism or human rights violations – criticisms that can apply to any state. Whether by support for partition, Turkish conquest goals, Israel’s expansionism, Takfiri sectarianism, or American theft of resources, the end result is good work for the racial aristocracy.

Genocide

Genocide is a tool of the racial aristocracy and they use it without hesitation or conscience. When committing genocide in Africa, German racial aristocrat von Trotha gave a signed extermination order. He said at the outset of the war with the Africans he was genociding that their ‘uprising is and remains the beginning of a racial struggle’. Chief of the German General Staff Schlieffen, who came up with the plan to invade France through Belgium, wrote of von Trotha that ‘He wants to exterminate the whole nation or drive it out of the country. In this, we can only agree with him … Once racial war breaks out it can only finish with the annihilation of one of the parties.’ Other German theorists laid down all the elements of Western genocidal thinking – applied vigorously now by the Israelis – at the end of the 19th century. Friedrich Ratzel made a geographical theory about the “struggle for existence” of the races and the search for “Lebensraum” – and founded the German colonial society.

Ratzel believed that inferior races must be actively destroyed by superior races – his successful examples: North America, New Zealand, Australia – and South Brazil.

In 1912 a German named Rohrbach wrote a book called German World Policies, which made arguments you could read in pro-Israel twitter, the WSJ, or an Israeli news site: “It is not right either among nations or among individuals that people who can create nothing should have a claim to preservation. No false philanthropy or race-theory can prove to reasonable people that the preservation of any tribe of nomadic South African Kaffirs … is more important for the future of mankind than the expansion of the great European nations, or the white race as a whole. Should the German people renounce the chance of growing stronger and of securing elbow room for their sons and daughters, because … some tribe of Negroes … has lived its useless existence on a strip of land where ten thousand German families may have a flourishing existence and thus strengthen the very sap of our people?”

In 1907, he published German Colonial Commerce: ‘In order to secure the peaceful White settlement against the bad, culturally inept and predatory native tribe, it is possible that its actual eradication may become necessary under certain conditions.’

Law

Apparently this is a world of international law, international courts, and a genocide convention, a United Nations Security Council that can pass resolutions that stop countries in their tracks. All are set aside if the racial aristocrats want to commit a genocide or violate the law. Anti-terrorist police are used to seize the electronic devices of ordinary journalists like Asa Winstanley while UK officials meet with the leader of an organization on their own terrorist list.

Sovereignty and territorial integrity is suspended…

… if the racial aristocrats want to redraw the map of Syria and invoke conquest to do it.

Criminal law does not apply to our racial aristocrats: it is they who define crime and dish out punishments. By definition they cannot be criminals.

Crimes on the books? Torture? Murder? Rape? All are permissible if committed by the right people and in the cause of upholding the actual world order of racism and genocide. So no, the law does not apply to all. It is just another instrument in the hands of our rulers.

Truth

The law is a marvelous tool indeed, but it’s the power over the truth that the racial aristocrats especially appreciate: what is true is what they say it is. They define “terrorism”, they define “racism” and “antisemitism”, teaching these things from childhood school textbooks to legacy and social media.

They tell lies to test our loyalty to them. The atrocity propaganda they use to justify the genocide, the lies about “human shields” they repeat after every massacre in this genocide: it is not up to us to judge their truth or falsity, it is up to them to judge us based on how intensely we express that we believe them.

Professionalism and its standards for truth are secondary to racialist loyalty. Journalistic, academic, or scientific methods for finding truth are useful but so is overriding them to uphold racial rule. Debunking lies is allowed, but only when it’s too late to make a difference. Interfering with any aspect of an ongoing genocide is a crime, whether it is through trying to boycott, trying to debunk atrocity propaganda, or trying to stop the flow of weapons.

Shiny Objects

It’s been a grand year for the grand racial aristocracy. They’ve genocided Palestine and destroyed Syria. The Israelis have targeted Iran for destruction; the Americans are aiming at Russia and then China. While it’s true that the West’s rivals are building hypersonic weapons and miraculous technologies, corridors and win-win business relationships, what do these matter when the Anglo-Americans “get into the skin of remote peoples”? Racial aristocrats convince the very people they’re destroying to do their fighting and their building for them. Iranian strategy is patient and thoughtful, Russian arms are fearsome, and the Chinese economy is without rival now. None of that will matter if they can be regime-changed and convinced to self-destruct or intimidated into retreat and self-sabotage.

Russia and China have said that they want to replace the US-centric world with a multipolar one of win-win deals, shared prosperity, common security, the UN charter, and international law. To the Anglo-Americans, these things are nothing but shiny objects to fool the stupid lower orders of the world. To them, we are dirt: the only rules left are those imposed on us by those who believe they rule by racial right.

As for those who work to destroy postcolonial states: they serve the racial aristocracy very well.

American writer Ta Nehisi Coates has a new book called The Message and has been saying some things that make sense about Palestine, apparently in the book and during his promotion of it. I am not sure what to make of Coates. He’s a writer, he teaches writing, as he’s been reminded on television recently, he’s been given great awards and accolades and publishes in the highest literary circles of America (all of which, he was reminded on CBS, can be taken away). From what I’ve seen (I will read the book but I have not yet) the book is intended for writers. I’ve always had some discomfort with the idea of identifying as a writer. Writing is a tool; you should identify with the reason you’re using the tool. Hassan Nasrallah’s principal activity was preparing and delivering speeches, but I wouldn’t have called him a public speaker. I have made a lot of youtube videos this past year, but I wouldn’t call myself a youtuber. As for the accoladed writers, there seems to be an agreed-upon illusion that their words have some kind of unique power beyond that of normal writers. You might find the same facts (with or without the citations) or the same insights elsewhere, but there is something special about it when it’s given to you by a Writer. I’m not even above that feeling – I like reading the work of an exalted Writer as much as anyone. I just think it’s a shared illusion that we’re all partaking in. And it isn’t a great time to have illusions. Not about this.

Here I’m not writing about the viral CBS interview clip where some pro-Israel TV host threw all the regular talking points at Coates, who answered them with great ease. I want to look instead about his debriefing of that and discussion of the Palestine part of his book with Trevor Noah and co-host Christiana Mbakwe Medina, on  Noah’s podcast. I think some of you may have guessed the part of it that I want to talk about.

Both Noah and Coates say a lot of good things worth listening to in here, for example:

• Noah points out that no pro-Israel friend of his can argue that Israel *isn’t* an apartheid state

• Coates points out that there can be no justification for apartheid, and that in trying to justify it, Israel’s defenders admit that they believe there can be justifications for racism, apartheid – and now genocide as well. 

But among these good things, Coates gets to a moment, around minute 14, where he talks about October 7th, and the discussion here pretty well cancels out the good he does elsewhere in the interview. 

He says, “I try to maintain my great horror at October 7th… because human life really matters to me.” A minute later, he continues, asking the rhetorical question: “Is there room in the world… to have genuine genuine horror about what happened on October 7th? And I’m not Palestinian, I’m Ta Nehisi Coates. There’s no reason that I can apprehend to justify anything like that.”

In his recent interview with Middle East Eye, Coates talks about how he writes much better when he can actually go and see for himself. Indeed Trevor Noah commended Coates for going and seeing for himself and bringing back the words after doing so. But Coates didn’t see October 7th. I have seen everything available to the public that happened on October 7th; I have heard descriptions from journalists who attended the Israeli screening of the footage they assembled for the express purpose of trying to create support for genocide.

• I collected everything that was available up to November 1, 2023.

• William Van Wagenen tried to create a complete timeline based on all information available to February, 2024

• Arun Gupta collected all the claims of rape in July 2024

• Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman used Israeli military officers’ testimonies to reconstruct the timeline of the first few hours of October 7th

• Max Blumenthal from the Grayzone made a film, Atrocity Inc., about how Israel generated a series of lies about October 7th, traced the sources of the lies, and debunked them. He’s also written extensively about it; the Grayzone has covered the whole story extensively since October 7th. 

• Asa Winstanley from the Electronic Intifada wrote about how many of the Israelis who died on October 7th were killed by Israel. Electronic Intifada has covered this story extensively for the whole year.

What happened on October 7th was an early morning raid by trained, disciplined guerrilla forces on the Israeli bases that maintain the siege on Gaza, a raid whose goal was primarily to take military prisoners that could be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian prisoners that Israel keeps and tortures. Prisoners who, if Israel has its way, will never be free. One group of fighters from the Qassam brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, were surprised to encounter a rave party, the Nova Music Festival, whose location beside an Israeli air force base had only been announced to attendees just before. Israelis trying to flee this music festival were slaughtered from the air by Israeli helicopter gunships. When Qassam fighters infiltrated into the fortified villages that enclose Gaza, Israelis were also slaughtered in these villages by tank fire from the Israeli army who happily killed Israelis for the chance to kill Palestinians – the new rules that Israel lives by, as I’ve discussed in a previous post.

The “great horrors” that circulated as stories after October 7th, about 40 beheaded babies, about rape being used as a weapon of war – turned out to be fabrications, sourced back to a small number of Israelis whose stories fell apart, as Max Blumenthal details in the film  Atrocity Inc. 

Here’s the point: Coates didn’t “go and see” for himself. He doesn’t appear to have done any investigation at all. Instead, he has simply accepted the lies told by the colonizer. Given the importance of analogies in Coates’s writing, he should know that colonizers lie about the people they oppress. He should know the kinds of lies they tell, the nature of atrocity propaganda, and the purpose of it in preparing the public for genocidal violence against the oppressed. How many times has this specific pattern of lies recurred in American history? Where has it led, each time? Coates needs to make this connection. 

When he does make an analogy to American history, Coates tells the story of Nat Turner’s rebellion – and does so also in a way that doesn’t seem to recognize that slavers could lie about what rebellious slaves did. About Nat Turner, Coates says, “this man slaughtered babies in their cribs.” In fact, as I mentioned in our  last tankie therapy session, my first thought when I heard Normal Finkelstein first make this analogy last year (the analogy of October 7th 2023 with Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion) was that perhaps Nat Turner didn’t commit atrocities either. Having watched the construction of atrocity propaganda in real time this year, it is hard to imagine the slaver society told the truth about Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 (by the way  I covered this rebellion in my historical podcast about four years ago now). It is incorrect to rely on a history written by the enslavers about atrocities committed during a slave revolt 100 years ago as analogical evidence that atrocities were committed during a guerrilla operation last year. 

No babies were slaughtered in their cribs on October 7th. No babies were beheaded. There was, according to the Ha’aretz list, one child who was killed by accident in one of the Israeli villages of the Gaza Envelope. The Palestinian Resistance fighters who attacked fortified Israeli bases on that day were not acting out the degradation of their lives (probably neither was Nat Turner). They were enacting a military strategy and doing so according to their (Islamic) military ethics, which do not allow harm to civilians nor sexual violence. If Coates can listen to Israelis, can give them a hearing, he should also be able to give a hearing to the voices of the Resistance: spokespeople, political leaders, intellectuals. I’ll return to that point below, but let me address how Coates made it even worse: 

At 15:48, he says: “I’ve done this thought experiment for myself over and over. Does the degradation and dehumanization of slavery make it so that you can look past something like that? And I think I can accurately imagine that there were enslaved people that said this is too far, I can’t do that. Now here’s the flip side of it. And I haven’t said it out loud. Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open air jail – if my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out to the sea he might get shot, if my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the walls she might be shot, if my sister has cancer and she needs treatment and if I can’t get the right permit for it she might die? And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty. And the wall comes down. Am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say, this is too far. I don’t know that I am.”

This thought experiment has nothing to do with reality. Coates has tried to use empathy and imagination but he doesn’t have the factual foundation to get where he is trying to go. It’s true, the conditions in Gaza are like he describes – worse, in fact – but that has not installed in Palestinians a drive to go and commit “great horror”. Palestinians have a drive to be left alone in their land. Palestinians have a drive to study and pursue education. Many Palestinians have a drive to take care of the land in their Mediterranean ecosystem of olive and orange trees. The Gaza-grown, vengeful Ta-Nehisi that Coates is trying to imagine doesn’t exist. The real people weren’t waiting for a chance to get even, or inflict the degradation they’ve suffered on their oppressors. They were waiting for a chance to get their freedom and to get their land back, and they did so in an organized armed struggle, not chaotic violence. There’s no need for this kind of imaginative exercise when the facts are available. 

Immediately after this interview, some cartoonish Israeli writers took this thought experiment and ran with it to defame Coates. By using his imaginative exercise to defame the Palestinian Resistance and by avoiding investigating for himself what actually happened on October 7th, Coates rendered himself defenseless against the pro-Israel lobby’s smears. Coates first decided to believe the lies about “horrors” on October 7th, then said he didn’t know if he had the strength to not commit such horrors. This was all unnecessary: the facts of what happened don’t match his implication and the logic of the Resistance exists entirely outside of the idea of inflicting reciprocal degradation. 

Coates is a writer who uses autobiography and his background is an open book. His father was a Black Panther and the publisher of Black Classic Press, which published many important Black intellectuals. Some of what Coates says on Noah’s podcast suggests that he missed many of the important points that these intellectuals were making. He says that in Israel, he saw “some of the nationalist impulse that I grew up under”, but “taken to the Nth degree.” But Zionism is nothing like Black Nationalism taken to the Nth degree. Zionism is a form of colonialism, and Black Nationalism is an anti-colonial ideology. At 24:45, he says about Zionism:

“I can feel the parallels, the fraternity for it and the sympathy, I understand it. But you see where it goes. And a people who have been repeatedly degraded over the centuries, massacred, killed, chased, ethnically cleansed themselves out of Spain, can go somewhere and create a system of dire inhumanity against other people. That was a challenge for me as a Black person, because I started thinking, what would we be if we had power? What would we do? “

[One day I might return to this historical question of medieval Spain, which I happen to know a lot about – but it’s a huge mess and Coates bringing it in here adds more muddle to the thinking, not less.]

The belief that Coates holds that Black people, in power, would become Zionists, is incorrect. Not because it isn’t humanly possible – of course it is – but because it shows a lack of understanding of what Zionism is. Coates relies too much on the analogy he has made between two things that are much unlike one another – the Black nationalism published by W.P. Coates’s press (John Henrik Clarke, Bobby Seale, Amiri Baraka) – and the Zionism of Herzl and Jabotinsky, of Bill Clinton and of Netanyahu. Zionism, as I’ve documented here in an eight-part series, is an anti-Jewish ideology. And as I’ve documented in my historical podcast,  it was an ideology of its time – and that time was the Scramble for Africa – and that ideology was of European colonization. You can like it or hate it, but Black Nationalism has nothing to do with this. Coates knows this, but it seems to slip through his fingers in his over-empathizing and his over-connecting of these ideologies. 

The tree from which Zionism springs is the Anglo-American colonialism whose settler colonial branches live in Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, and whose devastated post-colonies in Asia and Africa continue to pay trillions in tribute (tribute given various names: repatriated profits, brain drain, suppressed wages, interest on debts…) to their former colonial masters. 

The tree from which Black Nationalism springs is the tree of resistance to all of this, and it shares much with other ideologies of national liberation from colonialism around the world. European colonization of the world is a few centuries old and in terms of technological and ideological sophistication (including specifically the deployment of lies) it is unique. When Coates says that it isn’t unique to Zionism but it is a “human problem”, it’s another case of over-empathizing, this time with European colonialism:

“This doesn’t work if you can’t see yourself within Israel and within Zionism. If you think this is just evil people doing some evil thing, you’ve missed it. This started somewhere. Once I started reading the documents about Zionism, on one level, I recognized the colonialist discourse, but the other part was I recognize the yearning.”

But Zionist yearning, for a colony, could not have been more different from Black Nationalist yearning, for liberation. To achieve hegemony over the Jewish community, Zionists had to defeat both religious and secular Jewish traditions and identities. There were Jews who yearned for liberation from European racism, who Coates should empathize with. But they were not Zionists. 

In an article about The Message, one of Coates’s friends said that Coates goes through a very public learning process. He’s approached his study from the wrong direction, starting with Zionist intellectualism and discovering the evils that occur as it’s applied on the ground. For the next phase of the learning process, the Resistance’s intellectuals should be the avenue of approach. As a writer’s writer, how about the late Refaat Alareer? Ghassan Kanafani would be a good one to have on the shelf. Salman Abu Sitta is way underrated. Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches. Abu Obeida’s speeches. Yahya Sinwar’s novel too. Since Coates has already said that he doesn’t care about the awards and accolades, that he wants to be a writer to go into those kinds of places, that’s the direction to head in. More historical investigation. More reading the words of those who never had illusions about Zionism in the first place. 

A Black American folk singer, Lead Belly, enjoined listeners in 1938 to ‘stay woke’ in a song about a false accusation against a group of young black men in Alabama. A century later and the word is exclusively used as an epithet, a code word that identifies its speaker as someone who has some opposition to left-wing politics. 

That isn’t how the anti-’woke’ would put it, of course. Champions of the liberal value of free speech, right-wing anti-wokes believe that left-wing orthodoxies have gone too far and stifled these once widely available liberal freedoms. When asked for examples, the anti-wokes will generally present examples like drag shows, pronoun etiquette, and trans women competing in sports. 

There are details and ongoing areas of study and work when it comes to how to implement these values in a way that allows everyone to be who they are (trans rights, sex and gender equality, etc.) There’s a lot to know about these issues and readers know this isn’t my lane. But to my eyes, comparatively untrained on these issues, the selected anti-woke examples look like a distraction or an outrage engine, like the way most of these same anti-wokes talk about immigration, crime, or terrorism. 

Anti-imperialism is, and like all left-wing ideologies is based on the core value of equality. And the anti-’wokes’, whether they justify it as naturally ordained by science or divine will, generally hold a core value of hierarchy. It’s an irreconcilable difference. 

Almost all anti-woke criticism is just right-wing politics and therefore holds nothing of interest for leftists. 

There is one legitimate complaint in the antiwoke arsenal, which is against the language-policing that takes place in mainstream, liberal institutions. But language-policing in such corporate environments has nothing to do with equality and therefore nothing to do with anything truly left-wing. It is nothing more than an office game, in which the winner is the one who can master the language and the bureaucratic rules. Words and concepts that were developed in communities fighting for liberation – or even survival – have been stolen, appropriated by liberal professionals for use in their office power games. But the theft of these words and concepts doesn’t discredit the projects of liberation from which they emerged. 

Now we can come back to my lane. You know the old saying that when you scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds? The Gaza genocide has scratched the liberals and the fascists alike. Turns out that when Palestine comes up, the right wing (squealing for police to crush speech and deport protesters) doesn’t care about free speech or assembly and liberal professionals didn’t mean anything they said about the liberation of oppressed groups by race, class, gender, and sexuality. 

Anomalous exceptions aside, both antiwokes and the liberal professionals they claim to despise have revealed themselves to be enthusiastic supporters of genocide who hate us much more than they hate one another. There’s no use contemplating alliance with these people or searching for common ground. 

I have over the decades, every few years, written something to protest left-wing language-policing and the adoption of liberal professional games. But leftists will find no allies among the anti-’woke’. They don’t want us and we don’t want them. They mock social justice warriors and they mock being woke, but it’s better to be a warrior than a coward and it’s better to be awake than asleep.

False friends are everywhere. Lead Belly warned us about them, and told us the state we need to be in, to remain vigilant.

[Friends: following up the previous articles on nonviolence with this transcription of a discussion on The East is a Podcast, from 2021 inspired by Marcie Smith’s articles on Gene Sharp.]

Justin Podur: I’m here to discuss nonviolence with the panelists Sina Rahmani and Zeyad Nabulsy. And I wanted to start with the philosophical. And Zeyad is kind of a philosophical person who’s here.

Zeyad Nabulsy: Okay, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Zeyad and most of my research is on modern African intellectual history including African philosophy and history of science.

Justin Podur: It was your idea to discuss nonviolence.

Zeyad Nabulsy: I think in terms of the philosophical angle. So, so here is one way to explain why nonviolence is prevalent as a kind of trope that gets invoked in a lot of contemporary political discourse and in a lot of contemporary moral discourse. So think of like somebody who’s a Kantian, if you look at a certain approach to moral philosophy, it’s saying, okay, look, the world is a horrible place, basically, and I want to get out of this world with my hands as clean as possible. I think that’s more or less an accurate gloss of like what a Kantian would think. Once you have that point of view, I think then it becomes about fetishizing things like non-violence, fetishizing non-violence, and it becomes sort of a normative debate about what is right and wrong from a moral standpoint. And it’s not that these debates are not important, but I think when we’re talking about politics we’re talking about what is also efficacious, because sometimes the way people talk about this, they say something like violence never works, which, as a descriptive claim, is utterly false. So I that that’s where I think we should focus. That’s my view.

Justin Podur: So, normative. You mean, how one should behave?

Zeyad Nabulsy: Yes, precisely.

Justin Podur: So if you want to make the world a better place, you shouldn’t do violence. That kind of idea, because violence hurts the person you’re doing violence to.

Zeyad Nabulsy: Right. And it hurts you. So some people say, it dehumanizes you.

Justin Podur: Is that true?

Zeyad Nabulsy: Here’s the problem. I think the normative or moral standpoint becomes very inadequate for actually understanding concrete political issues. Under what conditions is violence acceptable? We don’t actually discuss any concrete case studies. So Palestine will be one of our central case studies. So my inclination is to think about how do these organizations work? What is efficacious? I know that sounds sort of Machiavellian, and it is. But I think that’s also like an element of Marxism is to, like, reject this moralistic, normative discourse.

Justin Podur: I’m all for moralistic discourse. I am. I think it’s a great thing to do to figure out how to be a good person and what what to do to be a good person in the world. You can build that abstract kind of house out of a series of premises. But when you get into a concrete political situation, then you have many, many, many more variables. And then to say that if someone is trying to kill you, if someone is doing Machiavellian, cold blooded politics against you, for you to say, I’m not going to do that in return, that could be immoral. You could be enabling something worse. So there are norms that work in simple situations or laboratory situations that don’t translate to the real world. So maybe that’s reason enough to reject starting from a normative perspective. I don’t know, are nonviolent people better people?

Sina Rahmani: This is bullshit. This is all bullshit. Like this entire idea, the world is this infinitely diverse place full of thousands of years of civilizational violence and and terror. The idea that you can break off history at a nice fictional point and say, oh, from now on, we do no violence. It’s a stupid liberal idea that ultimately says more about the discourse itself and the people who are trapped in it, i.e. all of us. Because once again, we have to realize that, like we talk about politics, we actually live in extremely depoliticized societies. All of us, especially in the English speaking world at least, whereby corporate media and the cultural wars that are curated by corporate media in alliance with academia curate a set of talking points for every semester, all pre-prepared. There’s a very small agenda of what gets discussed and it’s all done within this tiny bandwidth or narrow spectrum of this option. So all of this entire discourse is itself false, because what we’re doing is just doing political theory. The political theory of what is good and what is bad, which is totally stupid. And especially when it comes to the question of violence. A definition of violence is the guy with a Kalashnikov and a Keffiyeh as if that’s the only form of political violence, as if there isn’t political violence unfolding every day in late capitalist society everywhere. And it’s class and it’s race and it’s gendered, and it’s got all kinds of all kinds of complications and nuances based on the social context. And so the very idea that we can speak in theoretical terms, global theoretical terms about a stupid fake thing called nonviolence, it’s one of the one of the weird things that we absorbed as radicalism, which is sold to us as radicalism. So like WTO protest and all that stuff that the Gen X kids did. My contention is that this is just this is the conversation itself is false. But we should read this article.

Justin Podur: To skip ahead to the conclusion of this whole discussion from my perspective, is that the entire dichotomy is fake. The debate is fake, the dichotomy is fake. There’s no meaningful way to debate violence versus nonviolence in politics.

Sina Rahmani: It’s all a big red herring conversation.

Justin Podur: Violence. There’s no nonviolence. Both are always present. To divide it artificially into one and the other, it’s like, I can’t think of a great analogy. I’ve been thinking about analogies, and I think it’s like, imagine dividing fighting into punches with your right hand and punches with your left hand, and saying punches with your left hand are off limits, but punches with your right hand are are fine. You create this taboo when there’s no meaningful difference between those two things.

Zeyad Nabulsy: And can I just add something with that analogy? You’re banning using your left hand only on one side. So it’s asymmetric. That’s very important because your opponent doesn’t care. They’re like, okay, you’re an idiot, then I’m going to take advantage of it. Thank you.

Sina Rahmani: It’s a symptom of the fact that our depoliticized era is trapped under this stupid memorial rubble of World War two, the defeat of the Nazis and the rise of American Pax Americana as some kind of end of epoch in human history. Nonviolence and the institutionalization of it through activists and through the work of Gene Sharp, specifically the the presentation of the Third Reich as the antithesis to liberalism itself, with its with its weird, diabolical cousin, communism. Both of these are two wings of authoritarian politics that were thorough handedly defeated by liberalism in 1991, such that mediocre neocon philosophers were announcing the end of history.

Justin Podur: Let’s take it back to Domenico Losurdo’s book about nonviolence. Losurdo is a philosopher. But great history. He wrote The Counter History of Liberalism, which I would highly recommend to everybody. And then he has this book about nonviolence. And a lot of it’s got Gandhi, but the the chronological thing that he starts with is the so-called non resistors. So there were these abolitionists, white abolitionists, Christian religious people who were against slavery in the mid 19th century. You know, it’s from 1808 when when Britain, stopped the slave trade, they were pushing for abolition in America. And these people were they were very, very specific that they did not support any slaves uprising. So they were very careful. They broadcast that from everywhere. They were like, we don’t want slaves to take up arms. We don’t want slaves to rise up. Slaves should suffer and show their by their suffering that they’re human beings, Christians, etc and Losurdo talks about what happened in the 1840s. There were these thousands of riots, most of them against abolitionists, lots of them to do with politics and elections and stuff. And some of these some of these white abolitionists were lynched. They were killed by pro-slavery people. And he kind of tracks some of these non-resistance people. And the changes in their views as more and more of them are getting killed by pro-slavery and they gradually start at least supporting some kind of defensive violence, at least for themselves. They may not support a slave revolt, but they start saying, well, these people are, you know, we’re against violence, against human beings, but these are not human beings. William Lloyd Garrison being the the biggest example of this. Of course, there were black abolitionists like the people described in a book called Force and Freedom who were always about armed abolition, and John Brown put an end to the debate. He was like, “yeah, we’re not going to have this nonviolence debate anymore.” And, you know, so that that kind of was the closing of that chapter of nonviolence.

Sina Rahmani: But then they had an entire war about slavery. That’s how much nonviolence means to the United States. They had a full scale war across the entirety of their country.

Justin Podur: You know Brown wanted to start that war sooner, right? Brown was like, “we need to get this war going.” And a lot of his abolitionist Christian comrades were like, no, we we can’t have slaves, doing violence. That would be violence, right? And Brown just wasn’t having it. He didn’t win that debate at the debating society. But he did win it.

So the next time we pick up the nonviolence thread in terms of global movements is Gandhi. And Losurdo talks about how Gandhi wants organized medics, medical brigades to fight for the British in World War One. And his whole thing was like, we don’t have to shoot or kill people, but we can show how courageous we are on the battlefield. And by showing that we are real men, we could convince the British to let us free, give us freedom. Losurdo says that it’s more about co-optation than nonviolence than nonviolent resistance. There’s a whole discussion worth having about what the difference is.

So now we’re into modes of resistance. So if we’re talking about resistance we’re talking about trying to fight back. And, you have Gandhi, you have Martin Luther King a little bit later. And these people are talking about fighting back. So how about how about the efficacy of nonviolent resistance?

Zeyad Nabulsy: We can’t really discuss efficacy without talking about context. So global context is one factor. So for example in evaluating the success or failures of Gandhi, the movement for independence in India, you have to look at the global context. You have to look at like the internal balance of power. But people just want to talk abstractly how “nonviolence works”. Maybe under some circumstances it does. Other circumstances, it simply doesn’t. I’ll give you an example where it didn’t: in the 50s, the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), the party which liberated Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde eventually from Portuguese rule, at first they tried having, peaceful worker strikes and so on. In 1959 [note: the Pijiguiti massacre in Port of Bissau, August 3, 1959] there was this massive massacre, basically the Portuguese just shot the protesters. And after that they turn towards a people’s guerrilla war because it’s clear in this context that the Portuguese will not give up without a struggle. And there is a political economy explanation for that. Because Portugal was so weak as an economic power, it couldn’t have a neocolonial relationship with its African colonies. It’s not like France, not like Britain. So after the Portuguese left they were not the main neocolonial power in either Guinea-Bissau or Cape Verde or even Angola. That’s why I think the history itself is very important beyond just the normative philosophical debates about “is nonviolence good or bad?” They’ve been given an outsized importance.

Sina Rahmani: In 2021, the idea that you can confront some of the most powerful police institutions, instruments of state violence, most advanced in the world are deployed on any population. Modern police is two centuries old. It developed in the colonial setting. The very fact that we can even be at this point where where the tiny, irrelevant class of eggheads and liberals and writers and journalists and all of their hangers on, the tiny class of them, circulate position papers around this abstract topic as if it means anything to anyone. It’s more of a reflection of the poverty of our discourse. Our understanding of politics is so juvenile that we could even entertain this logic, that if you just protest enough, the state will change its mind, because that’s how democracy works. This is not how states work.

Justin Podur: We have Gandhi and Gandhi’s got a really interesting history because he joins the Congress when the Congress is really like a loyal opposition talk shop. So they’re just talking, right? They’re signing petitions, they’re writing letters. It really is a cooptation machine. And Gandhi gets them into so-called organizing, mobilization, mass mobilizations. He involves millions of people. That’s a whole other level above what they were doing. Right? But there is another history of the Independence movement, outside the Congress Party, over the decades that Gandhi was involved. And I have yet to study this properly. I have been trying to find sources. It’s hard to find sources. But there was lots of terrorism. There was lots of bomb throwing. There was lots of violence. I mean I’ve talked about 1857. I’m trying to sort out what was going on prior to Indian independence in the decades before. There was Bhagat Singh, who threw a bomb and was hanged. There were lots of people who were hanged. During World War two, there was the Indian National Army of Subhash Bose, who was trained by the Japanese.It was a sign to the British that he was able to recruit and organize an actual military invasion of India. There was apparently a mutiny in 1946 of sailors in India.

So the writing on the wall in terms of violence was also going on. And there’s also critiques of Gandhi by people like Ambedkar, who was one of the leaders of the untouchables, who was saying… Gandhi would go on a fast to try to coerce untouchables not to seek certain affirmative action type provisions in the law. And Ambedkar had this thing where he was like: that’s great, Gandhi, that’s so great that you’ve chosen this non-coercive method of, non-violent coercion against me and the untouchable community. So what happens if you finish your fast and die of hunger on your hunger strike? Do you think that all of your gentle, kind supporters will not be enacting reprisals against the untouchable community? Because I sure think they will. I sure think this this non coercion threat is actually a massive gun pointed at the head of our community if you die.

On the Martin Luther King front, there’s a book called Negroes with Guns. There’s a book called We Will Shoot Back. There’s another one called This Non-Violent Stuff Will Get You Killed. They talk about how many of these Martin Luther King followers were actually armed and walked around armed because they’re like, are you crazy? Of course I’m armed, you know? But so for them, nonviolence was not a way of life. It was a very specific tactical choice.

Sina Rahmani: We know so little about the outside world that we could go so far and tell things to other people that, oh, this kind of politics is bad. This kind of politics is good. But of course, what we are doing is reacting to the media we consume. Right? Which is itself ridiculous. No, you’re not talking about world politics. You’re talking about the thing you saw on the nightly news broadcast.

Justin Podur: So fraudulent liberals in the US, these non resisters were saying it’s wrong to do violence to try to change slavery. But they’re not counting the lashes, right? Like every lash. You would think that every lash that takes place in the field to get somebody to speed up their cotton harvesting, you would think that would be considered violence, because if someone’s lashing a white person, that sure as hell counts as violence, right? Does daily violence count?

Zeyad Nabulsy: Does it count? I was reading this this book, it’s sort of like an oral history of Nasserism, in Arabic. He talks about these villages in Upper Egypt or southern Egypt where up until like the 50s if you’re like a regular peasant or something, if you’re walking and you see one of the notables of the town, you have to dismount, you bow down. That’s a form of violence!

Justin Podur: Of course it is. What if you don’t do that? What if you are walking along and don’t do that? What will happen to you if you don’t do that?

Zeyad Nabulsy: Imagine you’re a dad with your kids and then you have to grovel in front of this guy, just like on a daily basis. But this violence is rendered invisible.

Justin Podur: Okay, so when you first brought up the idea of doing an episode on nonviolence, I immediately thought of this two part article by Marcie Smith on the non-site dot org (part 1, part 2). And it’s about Gene Sharp. And Gene Sharp is what Marcie Smith describes as a defense intellectual. He worked at Harvard his whole life, starting in the 50s. And there’s a whole ideology, a really well developed ideology from the 1950s on that Gene Sharp takes up. He calls his institute the Albert Einstein Institute. He gets some kind of early endorsement from Einstein, and he takes up these symbols: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, these different nonviolent icons. But he develops a whole system. The ideological system is: the contradiction in the world is between violence and nonviolence. Violence is when you impose your will on someone else, when you do harm, to impose your will on someone else. And out in the world, the people that are doing this the most are states, regardless of their political orientation. Nation states are doing violence to people every day. And the way to combat this violence is by overthrowing these states in a nonviolent way, through non-revolutionary nonviolence.

So under this rubric of revolutionary nonviolence, there’s a whole playbook of 198 tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the regime. You go and you get beaten up before the cameras to show the regime no longer has legitimacy. You involve more and more people because it’s nonviolent. So more people can, in theory, get involved than if it was a violent struggle where it biases it towards men. They do training in, in nonviolent skills. And we’ll get to like the effect on the American movement first next. But one important premise in Gene-Sharpism is: the contradiction is not class, okay? The contradiction is violence and nonviolence. It’s states. It’s dictatorship versus something called authoritarianism.

Sina Rahmani: Stupidest fucking premise in the world. It’s such a liberal view of the world, a bourgeois liberal. Exactly what Marx talks about: this bourgeois reification of the world as located in this private individual, circulating freely as a commodity, as an object of the market, and subject to the rules of some kind of agreement or like whatever social contract with the state.

Justin Podur: And Smith also puts it in a Cold War context where because there’s this danger of nuclear war with the Soviet Union at any point and because there’s McCarthyism, so you can’t be a communist in the US. The result is that to make an assault against these communist regimes, the US is very interested in nonviolent organization and nonviolent movements that are not going to escalate into war, but they’re still trying to overthrow the regimes. They’re trying to take away the ability of communist states to do both good things and bad things, destroy the whole state.

Zeyad Nabulsy: The authoritarian non-authoritarian taxonomy is very interesting because this is such an abstract way of thinking about these things. People don’t think of the US as an authoritarian state. For example a black kid in some like heavily policed inner city area – for you, the US is an authoritarian state. Of course, I’m the cop, you know, like walk by something. He makes you stand there for three hours or something just to humiliate you, maybe physically beats you. So it’s always the question of where in the state is authority being used and the threat of violence is being invoked, and against whose interests and for whose interests.

Justin Podur: Us have concentration camps? Yes. The US have prison camps.

Sina Rahmani: The US has prison camps. Slave labor. But the US isn’t authoritarian because I can tell Trump to fuck off. As if that is the beginning and end point of political subjectivity. And then on top of that, the US is also the source of the world’s most nasty “revolutionaries”. So in the case of all those regime change operations that will probably get to in this conversation, those people are “revolutionaries” and the US supports them. So on the one hand, the US fights its own revolutionaries with the most violent political, legal, juridical police force that’s ever been enacted. Like if you do anything against the state in your court in this country, you are going to jail for decades, and maybe you can get five years off if you rat on all your friends and they will hammer you and they will destroy your family’s finances, your finances, your name. They’re so authoritarian. They go and fish for collaborators and get people to offer things. They conduct political assassinations, like against the Black Panthers. I remember there’s some neocon critic, some general who was critical of the neocons. He died of a heart attack. Gee, I wonder. And then this is the liberal viewpoint that no, I am civilized subject. I’m a subject, a modern subject of a civilized liberal state and enshrined in the legal fictions of all.

Zeyad Nabulsy: The funny point about this liberal approach is it’s almost like there is this idea that there is an interiority that’s not expressed in your actions. So you could have a history of like murdering people for 150 years. But you’re not a murderer. It’s what you are inside that counts. It’s this essence that never expresses itself in action. It’s hidden somewhere.

Sina Rahmani: Sharp was working directly with the American deep State. Yeah. The idea that you can have transformational change in the state apparatuses or plural of them, whatever you want to call them, that, that can take some sort of radical form like, and the symbols that we recognize to this day, like the raised fist and all that stuff, like, I mean, that has its own weird history too, right? Because it was appropriated from the Panthers. There’s probably a deeper story, probably. But like that image, though, the image of radicalism as a performance. It’s a performance.

Understanding that in how many examples could we start at the top of our head? Ukraine? How obvious is it to say what happened in Ukraine? Was this colour revolution that that the US has more or less admitted? I mean, that’s the thing, like with all these fucking deep state operations or whatever, like it’s not even like we’re the tinfoil hat. They admit to this stuff. They’re happy to because of course, the Empire, this is all in pursuit of the Empire. And fundamentally, most Americans either don’t care or approve of their empire’s actions because they implicitly understand. And this is what they realise is one of the few things they actually understand about politics, that the comforts of their lives are built directly upon the exploitation of the global South.

Justin Podur: In Sharp’s ideology, exploitation is not violence. Okay, so capitalism is not violence. All the profit and paying someone peanuts. That’s not violence, right? Campaigning non-violently to lower the minimum wage is not violence.

So everybody heard about the color revolutions. And a lot of I think conspiracy people are like, this is George Soros behind it. But George Soros may be funding these kinds of operations, but the thinking, the playbook is not conspiratorial. It’s called Strategy for a Living Revolution. And it’s a book and it’s translated. Just read it. He tells you what they’re doing.

Sina Rahmani: All of this is to say that the things that we recognized and are represented to us as revolutions fit this mold, and the ones that don’t trouble us and need to be turned back.

Justin Podur: So Hong Kong, the Arab Spring, even the Tiananmen Square movement had Gene Sharp fingerprints on it.

Sina Rahmani: Libya, Ukraine, Egypt, Egypt. Like they were getting that money, too, right? And they came out against Mubarak, their own ally. They were feeding the enemies of their own ally. This training, this cookie cutter training. They had their own satellite phones. It’s a playbook. And there’s literally an author to it. And they published it.

Zeyad Nabulsy: So it’s not even a conspiratorial thing. I just want to go back to Justin’s point about like whether exploitation is violent or not. And I think it’s not even that we have to say that exploitation is violent. But why is exploitation, a thing which might lead to massive violence or presupposes massive violence, not important for somebody like Gene Sharp?

Justin Podur: And it’s like you were saying, the threat of violence is is what underlines the whole thing. You want to find out if you if you live in a non-violent society, try to organize a union at your workplace. And tell your boss. Hey, boss, we’re a union now and we demand a raise. See what happens. So tell your boss we’re now taking over decision making in terms of investments. See what happens to you. See how that works for you, right? Any institution you’re in? It depends on the threat of violence.

Zeyad Nabulsy: And I think the point about action is really important because you could have a society that’s authoritarian, that allows some kind of freedom of expression, but doesn’t allow you to organize freely because that’s really the significant threat.

Sina Rahmani: Scream all you want about it. Nothing will change. If that doesn’t summarize American life, that they can’t even get basic health care. Like the country that crows about human rights all around the world that has a whole class of people, a diverse Benetton ad class of people, professionals who themselves identify as human rights professionals. And they’re a product of a culture that doesn’t even feed its own citizens properly. It’s a failed state, and it’s designed to be a failed state.

Justin Podur: We have gun rights in America. Do Black people have gun rights in America? Did Philando Castile not get shot for having a gun, by a police officer?

Sina Rahmani: It’s all so insulting that as if the violence of everyday life, the class racialized gendered like across these multiple axes of power and privilege and how society values certain lives and disowns others figuratively and literally, the fact that we can’t even articulate them, and instead we have these asinine conversations about other countries and then deem them to be good or bad. And then meanwhile, our state, our own state apparatus are supporting the most violent forces that ever existed, reactionaries that would never succeed by any liberal test. Like all the US academics who promoted the the proxy war on Syria as some kind of liberation, as if they would even be in the same room as some FSA people.

Justin Podur: But listen, George Lakey is the protege of Gene Sharp, that brings nonviolent revolution to America in a big way and through various movements. There’s a great letter in this Marcie Smith article by a guy who left the nonviolence movement. And he became a Marxist, and he explained why he doesn’t buy this Gene Sharpism anymore. So Lakey’s ideology, which gets into the Ruckus Society, which gets into Central America, gets into the Battle of Seattle, the anti-globalization movement. It’s full of nonviolence. So imposing your will on other people is nonviolent is violence. Hierarchy is violence. So you construct your movement out of affinity groups, and decision making is done by consensus. There’s no hierarchy, there’s no leadership, there’s diversity of tactics. And they do these trainings, nonviolence trainings. It’s always nonviolence training and skills. And they’re everywhere. And then there’s an academic component, there’s academics who wrote this quantitative study called Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolence. So they classified all these movements, hundreds of movements across the world, and they rated them as a “1” if they succeeded. If they didn’t succeed, they got a “0”. And it turns out that you’re twice as likely to succeed if you’re nonviolent than if you are violent! These are the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. So he brings it home.

There was a debate that I watched just before during the anti-globalization movement between Ward Churchill and George Lakey – violence, nonviolence. And unfortunately, Churchill said some of the stuff we’re saying here. Lakey said if you have a violent strategy, I’d like to hear it. And he laid out his nonviolent strategy for revolution. So it was kind of like a vacuum thing, right?

Because anti-communism clears out anything that smacks of Leninism. Build a party, build unions. Organize the people, arm the people, take over, make change. That’s what the different communist parties do. So that’s not allowed. You can’t even talk about that because of McCarthyism. So now there’s this vacuum. And then here comes Sharp and Lakey with revolutionary nonviolence, affinity groups, freedom, overthrow the state, attack its legitimacy, overthrow it and keep overthrowing it until something good happens. Right?

Zeyad Nabulsy: A game of chance, until you get a good hand.

Justin Podur: But ultimately, here’s the thing. Because I read Why Civil Resistance Works. And I looked at the data, they published their, their data set, and I tried to do some analysis of their data. And it’s interesting how you code it, right? How you code it, because I think the First Intifada in Palestine was coded as a success.

Sina Rahmani: What are they fucking talking about? American academics are so stupid.

Justin Podur: Where I’m going is this: I think that the Palestinians are the ultimate target of this whole thing.

Sina Rahmani: The US is the ultimate target.

Justin Podur: No, I don’t think so. I think the whole thing is leading to, why can’t Palestinians be nonviolent? And if you think about it, Finkelstein wrote a book about this too. Finkelstein wrote a book called What Gandhi Says.

Sina Rahmani Shut up.

Justin Podur: He read thousands of pages of Gandhi’s writings, he wrote a book about what Gandhi actually says. So he creates these tables about what Gandhi says. And he was like, I studied Gandhi because I wanted to know about the efficacy of nonviolence for the Palestinian movement. And during the brief war on Gaza in 2021, Finkelstein was in an interview, I think, on The Katie Halper Show. And he was like, I’m really sad about this because I think it’s going to discredit nonviolence.

Zeyad Nabulsy: I just pulled it up on my phone because I wanted to get the dates. Right. So if you look at the nonviolent marches in Gaza, right? March 2018. Palestinians were being shot down, and what were these nonviolence people doing?

Sina Rahmani: Collecting checks as professionals of nonviolence.

Zeyad Nabulsy: At the performative level, they remember that nonviolence is actually important to them when Palestinians fire back, when they do violence. But otherwise they have this amnesia. They’re like, oh, I don’t know, violence, non-violence. I have no idea. Honestly, it’s not even a serious project.

Justin Podur: That’s exactly what what Finkelstein said. He said, look, people, you know, Hamas people have said, we tried nonviolence in 2018. And I just think it’s a shame because now they’re going to think that violence…

Zeyad Nabulsy: …and they would be right to think that. Any rational human being faced with these circumstances would arrive at that conclusion. It’s not some crazy, fanatical thing. It’s like, okay, we tried this.

Sina Rahmani: It’s an irrelevant thing for us to even think about. The location of our critique in this conversation is always extraterritorial. his is what it’s like from outside, based in the most violent society ever to have existed, that sits atop a mountain of indigenous people’s skulls and bones.Every day that we’re digging up their children that we eradicated in schools. And then we have the audacity to sell this. The fundamental, profound, blood stained legacy of the supposed European enlightenment, as if it is ever something that could ever be even discussed, as nonviolent, as if the French Revolution was some nonviolent thing. Are you kidding me? The guillotine memes that still circulate. Politics is violence, and revolutionary violence is part of any political struggle. If it was a real struggle to overturn something important enough that somebody would fight back. If something was so easy to throw over, you could just bring out a bunch of corny ass placards and perform for the camera so you can get 30 seconds of airtime in the Buffalo fucking NBC affiliate. That’s this is about how we consume the world.

Zeyad Nabulsy: If you look at historically when Israel has made concessions, it’s always sort of in the aftermath of a war when you inflicted material damage on them or you made them think, okay, actually, we could get screwed over here. That’s it. There is no other path to success with Israel.

Justin Podur: Revolutionary nonviolence does not say we move their conscience. They attacked the regime’s legitimacy.

Sina Rahmani: Legitimacy to what audience?

Justin Podur: Orwell talks about why Gandhi worked on the British because the British have a free press. And Gandhi wouldn’t have worked on the Nazis because they were more authoritarian.

Sina Rahmani: Blah blah.

Justin Podur: So I’ve gone to nonviolence trainings. You know, when I was in the protests in Quebec City in 2000 and April 2001. April. So before September 2001. There were nonviolence trainings by people who came up from the US like trained types. The international solidarity movement that was doing nonviolence in solidarity with Palestinians. I did that in 2002. And occupy was nonviolence, too, in 2010. I was already kind of aged out. I didn’t do very much with occupy in 2010. But I did go, I visited occupy a few times. They did all those nonviolence things, the consensus process. It’s criticized by Marcie Smith in her article too. The insistence on consensus actually makes it very difficult to get anything done. It gives everybody a veto, including people who want to sabotage your your thing. And so there’s all kinds of underhanded things, I suppose, that people do to make sure that, you know, they don’t get consensus blocked. But if you’re not sophisticated enough to do that…

Zeyad Nabulsy: Can we say something like briefly about the global effects of that? Because I think one of the global effects is it’s basically hollowed out all of these historically radical parties and various parts in the global South and turned them into activists who go attend workshops. You see that in every like Communist party, in every country in the world, now I’m working for this NGO. So it has this very pernicious effect globally.

Sina Rahmani: They manufacture a class of people who have an inordinate amount of discursive power to set a kind of media agenda.

Zeyad Nabulsy: Yeah, it’s like a managerial class for politics, basically political activism. Instead of, you know, you work in a bank or something, you’re some human rights activist.

Justin Podur: You’re an organizer.

Sina Rahmani: Never trust anyone who has human rights in their professional biography.

Zeyad Nabulsy: I think that sage advice.

Sina Rahmani: Is that a good way to end this episode?