The United States government killed a second American citizen in Minneapolis this weekend. Video footage shows Alex Pretti comforting a woman had just been shoved to the ground by ICE agents, before being set upon by those same goons. Alex defiantly holds up his phone to record the encounter. They wrestle him to the ground, beating him violently. One agent joins the fray before backing away, holding what looks to be a gun. Moments later, shots are fired. Ten in total by two agents. Alex is already dead by the time the rest of the agents look for a weapon.

Alex had no criminal convictions. He worked in the Intensive Care Unit as a nurse. His government branded him a domestic terrorist, like they did Renee Good, the first first American citizen they murdered, and offered bare-faced lies contradicting the video evidence about him endangering the agents. Alex's final words were to the woman he tried to help: "Are you ok?"

The agents who killed him left his body on the street and drove away in their cars. Later, state police and investigators were blocked from the crime scene. The federal government has blocked them from investigating Alex's murder and won't pursue an investigation of their own, as is warranted in cases like these. The man who murdered Alex will not see the inside of a court room. There will be no justice.

ICE Terror and Minnesotan Resistance

ICE agents, who go through two months of informal training before being deployed like packs of armed rabid dogs on American streets, have been told by VP Vance they have "absolute immunity", giving them a literal licence to kill. They have permission to use lethal force even if lethal force is not necessary. They are not trained to de-escalate.

Besides murdering civilians in broad daylight, ICE has mounted a campaign of intimidation against Minnesotans who have organised a resistance. They are taking down licence plate numbers of citizens who film them in order to add them to the domestic terrorist database. They are gassing families, including 6 month old babies, just for being caught in the cross-fire. They are entering schools and daycares, and using young children as bait to detain their parents. Around the same time Alex was killed on Saturday, other agents detained a two-year-old girl.

In response, Minnesotans follow the unmarked ICE vans, honking to alert their fellow residents that the agents are in the area. They are using their bodies as shields to prevent agents from entering daycares. They are moving school students to online learning, and providing strict instructions to chaperones like bus drivers about never opening the doors to ICE. They are striking en masse – the first general strike in the past 80 years of USA history – and organising watch rotas for street corners. They are protesting, vigorously. After Alex's death, some clashed with ICE directly.

Their resistance has been praised for being an organic, leaderless, decentralised system, making it difficult for ICE to shut it down. Online, people are boldly proclaiming that the success of the movement lies in its evident principal of non-violence. Writer and editor, Osita Nwanevu, posted on BlueSky: "Nonviolence is, in fact, working. This administration is weaker than it was a year ago. More and more of the public is becoming galvanized against it; its agents are being impeded."

When I read this, I wondered: Working to do what exactly?

Trump Wants War On The Streets

The situation in Minneapolis is exceedingly complex. It seems quite obvious now that Trump is trying to incite an insurrection. He and the Republicans are unpopular with the American public and set to lose their majority in the November midterms. The only way around that is to wage war on democracy—literally through the bodies of citizens—and declare a state of emergency. This will amplify his already excessive Executive powers, which he has been consolidating with help from the corrupted Supreme Court. The Trump administration does not represent a democratic institution and has been actively undermining due process, rule of law, international order and human rights since he took power. A fascinating piece in Byline Times last week revealed the exact paths by which the Republicans take power in the USA forever. They are willing to get there by any means necessary, including tearing up the Constitution, denying elections and murdering citizens. And where they want to get to is an ethno-nationalist Christian state founded on white supremacy, male supremacy, and rape of the natural world.

This means that, at this moment, Minnesotans have the future of the Republic in their hands. If they rise to the bait and blindly fight back, they give the administration all the ammunition they need to kill dead the last vestiges of American democracy. It is critical that their protests not devolve into random acts of uncoordinated violence against the state.

However, that does not mean that their non-violence will yield a win, either. Non-violence inherently depends on the political conscience of the opponent. Ghandi is oft-cited as an emblem of non-violence, and whilst I don't ascribe to the belief that his movement was a triumph of non-violence, his very agency to practice non-violence depended on the goodwill of the beleaguered British Empire which faced increasing pressure from the British public, and especially an emerging middle class, to both release India from the burden of the British and release the British from the burden of India.

The American public are being held hostage by a ruthless, murderous, unconscionable government. Whilst I do not seek to diminish the reality of living in occupied Palestine by comparing it to the USA, I do believe the more fitting example of non-violence for America right now is the Great March of Return in which tens of thousands of Palestinians marched peacefully upon the separation fence. The Israeli state shot over 6000 of these demonstrators, murdering 183.

Non-Violence is Limited

Non-violence is a brilliant tool for changing public opinion. But if public opinion is ignored by the state, what else can it do? There is absolutely no reason to suggest that Trump and his followers care for the American people, let alone what they think. His poll rating has little effect on his decisions, and public outcry to the effects of his policies do not roll them back. He has whipped the cowardly Republican party into a slavish mass of greed, willing to back his violence and vision for the rewards of attention and opportunity. While this party holds the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court, any attempt to impeach or arrest the President is frankly impossible. Trump and his followers will not yield to the public.

Neither will they yield to the court of international opinion. Trump's pursuit of foreign sovereign territory, alongside renaming the Department of Defence to the Department of War, shows just how serious his irate message to the leader of Norway was: He is no longer thinking of peace. America under Trump is an expansionist, imperial machine with a laser focus on procuring more resources to fuel her transformation into a religious police state which drives money from the majority into the gated communities of luxury and privatised freedom that will be enjoyed by Trump evangelicals alone. While the USA still boasts the best military might in the world, and dominates international trade, the rest of the world can do little else but watch the biggest global superpower in the history of mankind break abolish the very institutions upon which their own power rests? History would tell us that, eventually, we go to war.

Non-violence is an effective tactic in the arsenal of self-defence – if history allows. If history does not allow, as it does not in this time, a time of state violence and genocide and ecocide, then the arsenal must be explored.

We do the citizens of Minnesota a disservice by describing their actions as simply "non-violent". Their decentralised network of resistance is an effective method of self-defence, a method which can evolve to match their conditions. This potential to evolve, to meet reality head-on rather than fall prey to wishful ideologies, is critical. Non-violence inherently constrains the practitioner because their liberation depends on the distant. Self-defence, in contrast, is self-liberating. It places our agency squarely within our own hands and the hands of those closest to us. It is a practice of vigilant interrelationality. And right now, it is the only thing which will protect Minneapolis from another public execution.

Non-violence is a posture which demands witnesses. Self defence is a response which demands participation. Only one can protect us in life or death situations.