Thank you for this powerful statement. I too was a follower of Martin Luther King in the 50s and 60s, helped raise money and marchers for the sit-ins in the South, supported SNCC then and Ghandi-style protests later against nukes, war, environmental destruction up to and including climate change. And I still do support non-violent mass action against the powers-that-be destroying human and non-human life and liberty. People in the streets is a necessary tactic. Ketters to the editor do nake a difference.
But I also support self-defense against those powers, and as an author, a word-guy to the bone, recognize that resistance requires more than words and wishes, more than pious hope and cringing obeisance. We are at war, the real third world war, the war against our real estate, the world's body, our bodies. We are not obligated to be docile, to passively, abjectly, accept the violence against ourselves and our loved ones. Giving in to abuse becomes self-abuse, co-dependence; fosters more abuse, encourages greater violence. Speaking truth to power is one tool in the monkey-wrenching kit. We need to use them all.
Thank you, Rachel, for so powerfully, with such clarity and conviction, expressed a bottom line truth of our situation: life versus power. Brilliant essay.
Rachel, you are absolutely right of course. Sabotage and self-defence are completely justified when you are under threat. I think I just got hung up on the boundary between violence and self-defence when I've never actually had to make the distinction in my life. Apologies for my rather glib and trigger-happy comment on your previous post regarding this.
Kwame Ture said decades ago that people are trying to appeal to America’s conscience when it has none. I would respect if people simply said “I don’t want to fight because I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be up against the most powerful police force and military in the world.” But to say that defense is not necessary or would only do more harm, I simply can’t understand that. If someone tried to harm your children you have every right and every obligation to defend them. That is what the current government is trying to do. We have every obligation to protect our children, who did not ask to be brought into this world, from people who want to rob them of a future. And like Malcolm said, Power responds only to Power. Sometimes power is violence.
Thank you for you words Rachel they are very powerful and necessary.
I appreciate your willingness to be so open with your past and honest about what people need to see. I also find it difficult to square the circle of complete adherence to nonviolence. It's a wonderful ideal and would be everybody's default setting. But it isn't. And hesitation in the moment can, as you pointed out, be very costly.
And really, it's all another form of victim blaming, right? Your heart wasn't pure enough or your words weren't eloquent enough to stop someone isn't that far off of "why was she out so late dressed like that?"
Thank you, Rachel, for this. Your clarity—moral, intellectual, and somatic—invites readers to engage with the same level of authenticity and critical analysis. I deeply appreciate your willingness to write this because I recognize the tremendous energy required to do so. Essays like this require effort even for the most gifted writers. That you expend your time and energy engaging with us is an act of stunning generosity I hope to reciprocate.
I couldn't agree with you more. Your arguments are clear and undeniable, and beautifully written.
And. While I understand the reason for framing fighting in self-defense as not being violence, I feel that only hurts obfuscates things and plays into the demonization of violence that allows the state to maintain it's monopoly on it.
As long as we agree that violence is bad, we disempower ourselves and play right into the hands of those who use violence to oppress us. Rather than try to claim that fighting in self-defense isn't violence, I find it far more helpful to simply point out that the state's monopoly on violence is precisely what allows it to oppress us. Justifying that monopoly is no different than claiming that only rapists are allowed to use violence, and that their victims cannot.
It's easier and more logical to simply pull violence out of the collective shadow by acknowledging all the countless forms of it that humanity engages in, both justly (as in killing to eat) and unjustly. If we acknowledge that violence, like killing and death, is simply a part of life, a part of nature, and actually essential for the web of life to continue, then we can reframe the question not as whether or not to do violence, but as whether or not said violence is JUSTIFIED.
The cause of self-defense clearly proves that violence is sometimes justified. The problem isn't violence itself, the problem is using violence to oppress and dominate. This makes it much easier to argue in favor of self-defense, because if violence isn't inherently bad then non-violence isn't inherently good. And if the problem is oppression and domination, then NOT using violence to stop those things is actually part of the problem.
This is totally brilliant beyond words, Rachel... Once again the only direct response I can come up with is Wow, with much, much gratefulness for such a magnificent rendering of what needs to be understood more and more deeply and broadly by all of us... 🙏🌻💕
Thanks Rachel, a very valuable continuation of last week's piece. The Suffragettes well-understood the need for physical defense training and the likes of the feminist self-defense movement plus anarcha- and radical feminists have all made strong arguments for bodily resistance to violence. I suspect there are links here between bodily sovereignty and ecological sovereignty that you explore in the forthcoming book.
A quick scramble for a quote and something I wrote a few years ago hasn’t turned up what I was looking for, but it was responding to an article by Ann Cahill and Grayson Hunt. I’ve pulled a couple of sentences from the article that chime with what I was thinking and some of what you may be suggesting here. First: ‘feminist self-defense training should be understood as a bodily intervention that seeks to interrupt, undermine, and provide alternatives to the corporeal habits that assume and perpetuate rape culture’ (2016, p.179). Second, ‘a femininely gendered person that has the capacity and disposition to react with anger and physical force to sexually violent or harassing acts already inhabits a world slightly more just than the one bequeathed to us by patriarchal social structures.’ (p.180).
Non violence is my teacher Martin Luther King Jr.'s way of demanding change in a system predicated on violence and domination that you write about so eloquently.
I'm born of the 60's civil rights movement and anti war organizing. I see what you're saying about self defense and understand you are right.
I just wanted to step out of the binary boxes created by our ruling class online and say I see you. We live in fields of ambivalence. And for myself as an old fart, I'm pretty much set in my ways and will keep practicing being loving in response to evil. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/nonviolence
Hope you organize to protect yourself and keep a joyful mind at all times.
Outstanding. People forget Ghandi was up against the British who, at least had a modicum of decency. How long would he have lasted in Nazi Germany? Violence is sometimes the answer when other methods have failed. And I say that as a Buddhist, but even the Buddha recognizes the need and duty to protect oneself from the harm of others (self defense)
I am naturally anti-violence and have always tried to understand, persuade and -yes, often given in to avoid it. That was usually about surviving. I have no doubt I would have benefitted from a greater belief in myself and the more assertive response that would have afforded me.
The natural world is full of violence or threatened violence with lethal or non-lethal points and poisons all designed to help fauna and flora to survive. But the violence is only sufficient to fend off the threat and no more. Animals do not attack unless they feel threatened.
I find the comment about violence as a thing being neutral in moral terms helpful as it also supports the Buddhist stance explained in another comment about intent. What we can perhaps conclude is that it is not desirable but sometimes necessary.
While we can all have our own personal views on the subject there is an irony in the fact that if we came together in sufficient numbers to counter the neoliberal power we could easily depose it without the need for violence, particularly if we had sufficient support within the instruments of power such as the armed forces.
The necessity for violence is therefore to some extent a function of the numbers involved. For a variety of reasons, though, it appears almost impossible to unite people in this aim and time is running out. In the end we each have to search our conscience to determine what we are prepared to do to achieve our goal and history will determine how effective it is has been.
I am so sick and tired of the nonviolence purists scolding anyone who even DISCUSSES the inescapable reality that at some point, the way things are going is probably going to come to blows, and we will all have a choice to make about whether we go quietly to a Salvadoran death camp or fight back with everything we have.
Anyone who wants to leave pretentious and condescending comments channeling Gandhi needs to shut the fuck up and look up the Chatham Islands (South Pacific, east of New Zealand). The Chatham Islanders had a beautiful commitment to nonviolence and a wonderful, egalitarian society, which they refused to abandon even when they were invaded by the Maori. You know what happened?
The Maori slaughtered them. Every. Last. One. Of. Them. The use of nonviolence is only ever a STRATEGIC choice, and sometimes, it is not the correct one. I will not be scolded for discussing the defense of the people and community I love, or my own person, because Henry Hippy wants to virtue signal about how fucking holy he is. UGH
So inspired by your writing Rachel and it has come at a timely moment. Tonight I will be joining a zoom with Nemonte Nenquimo, the Indigenous Waorani activist and a defender of the Amazon rainforest. Most of your listeners and readers will know that in 2019 Nemonte led an historic legal victory, protecting half a million acres of Indigenous land from oil extraction. She has received multiple international awards for her work on Indigenous rights and environmental justice - but awards and recognition for her non-violent fight don't cut it. The right wing victory in Equador is a clear message that her legal, non-violent approach is unlikely to save the 8 million acres of rainforest now up for auction. I have been wondering what it would take for this new chapter of Indigenous resistance to win. Having been so inspired by her successful, peaceful campaign to defend her home and her people from the rapaciousness of global corporate capitalism, I now feel pessimistic and afraid. I've been asking myself how best to support her - this is not just the fight for Nemonte's land, it is the fight for our survival as a species, as quantum theory and systems theory are telling us, we are the planet: our body is a microcosm of the macrocosm. This is a life and death struggle. I have spent 50 years as an educator seeking to develop understanding that the oceans, the coral reefs, the mountains, deserts, tundra , rainforests, temperature forests, soils, birds, creatures, bacteria are us. To help build that sense that we are symbiotic with our planet, we are living inside the planetary body of Gaia. Gaia, our own Earth, whom we have failed to protect even though our own self-interest and well-being are at stake. Alongside education I have been a non-violent activist but I see that all my efforts in education, all my activism, hasn't been powerful enough against those who control power and wealth. Now I have to ask myself, am I going down without a fight? What is mine to do faced with this existential threat? Your article has stirred up some disturbing thoughts. Thank you.
Superb. Deep bows. Many words from everyone else, well done for stirring the pot. It all comes down to appropriateness of response in the end, on all levels, in all things.
The tricky question is- can we engage enough with compassionate equanimity to feel the harm and violence being done to Mother Earth and her children right now, and can we respond wisely instead of react?
What are we each doing every day to ensure we have a well of compassion to draw upon to be restrained in our use of opposing force when the time comes, so as to not become our own enemies. To be able to see when a word will work, a kindness or a threat, and when an axe is needed.
How messy we humans are. Keep the hackles and claws ready, and keep loving. In balance we thrive.
Thank you for this powerful statement. I too was a follower of Martin Luther King in the 50s and 60s, helped raise money and marchers for the sit-ins in the South, supported SNCC then and Ghandi-style protests later against nukes, war, environmental destruction up to and including climate change. And I still do support non-violent mass action against the powers-that-be destroying human and non-human life and liberty. People in the streets is a necessary tactic. Ketters to the editor do nake a difference.
But I also support self-defense against those powers, and as an author, a word-guy to the bone, recognize that resistance requires more than words and wishes, more than pious hope and cringing obeisance. We are at war, the real third world war, the war against our real estate, the world's body, our bodies. We are not obligated to be docile, to passively, abjectly, accept the violence against ourselves and our loved ones. Giving in to abuse becomes self-abuse, co-dependence; fosters more abuse, encourages greater violence. Speaking truth to power is one tool in the monkey-wrenching kit. We need to use them all.
Thank you, Rachel, for so powerfully, with such clarity and conviction, expressed a bottom line truth of our situation: life versus power. Brilliant essay.
Rachel, you are absolutely right of course. Sabotage and self-defence are completely justified when you are under threat. I think I just got hung up on the boundary between violence and self-defence when I've never actually had to make the distinction in my life. Apologies for my rather glib and trigger-happy comment on your previous post regarding this.
Tim, I always appreciate your commentary! Thank you for reading this and reaching out.
Kwame Ture said decades ago that people are trying to appeal to America’s conscience when it has none. I would respect if people simply said “I don’t want to fight because I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be up against the most powerful police force and military in the world.” But to say that defense is not necessary or would only do more harm, I simply can’t understand that. If someone tried to harm your children you have every right and every obligation to defend them. That is what the current government is trying to do. We have every obligation to protect our children, who did not ask to be brought into this world, from people who want to rob them of a future. And like Malcolm said, Power responds only to Power. Sometimes power is violence.
Thank you for you words Rachel they are very powerful and necessary.
I appreciate your willingness to be so open with your past and honest about what people need to see. I also find it difficult to square the circle of complete adherence to nonviolence. It's a wonderful ideal and would be everybody's default setting. But it isn't. And hesitation in the moment can, as you pointed out, be very costly.
And really, it's all another form of victim blaming, right? Your heart wasn't pure enough or your words weren't eloquent enough to stop someone isn't that far off of "why was she out so late dressed like that?"
Thank you, Rachel, for this. Your clarity—moral, intellectual, and somatic—invites readers to engage with the same level of authenticity and critical analysis. I deeply appreciate your willingness to write this because I recognize the tremendous energy required to do so. Essays like this require effort even for the most gifted writers. That you expend your time and energy engaging with us is an act of stunning generosity I hope to reciprocate.
I couldn't agree with you more. Your arguments are clear and undeniable, and beautifully written.
And. While I understand the reason for framing fighting in self-defense as not being violence, I feel that only hurts obfuscates things and plays into the demonization of violence that allows the state to maintain it's monopoly on it.
As long as we agree that violence is bad, we disempower ourselves and play right into the hands of those who use violence to oppress us. Rather than try to claim that fighting in self-defense isn't violence, I find it far more helpful to simply point out that the state's monopoly on violence is precisely what allows it to oppress us. Justifying that monopoly is no different than claiming that only rapists are allowed to use violence, and that their victims cannot.
It's easier and more logical to simply pull violence out of the collective shadow by acknowledging all the countless forms of it that humanity engages in, both justly (as in killing to eat) and unjustly. If we acknowledge that violence, like killing and death, is simply a part of life, a part of nature, and actually essential for the web of life to continue, then we can reframe the question not as whether or not to do violence, but as whether or not said violence is JUSTIFIED.
The cause of self-defense clearly proves that violence is sometimes justified. The problem isn't violence itself, the problem is using violence to oppress and dominate. This makes it much easier to argue in favor of self-defense, because if violence isn't inherently bad then non-violence isn't inherently good. And if the problem is oppression and domination, then NOT using violence to stop those things is actually part of the problem.
I wrote about all this more thoroughly here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/earthkin/p/demonizing-violence-alienates-us?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2jbi5z
This is totally brilliant beyond words, Rachel... Once again the only direct response I can come up with is Wow, with much, much gratefulness for such a magnificent rendering of what needs to be understood more and more deeply and broadly by all of us... 🙏🌻💕
Thanks Rachel, a very valuable continuation of last week's piece. The Suffragettes well-understood the need for physical defense training and the likes of the feminist self-defense movement plus anarcha- and radical feminists have all made strong arguments for bodily resistance to violence. I suspect there are links here between bodily sovereignty and ecological sovereignty that you explore in the forthcoming book.
A quick scramble for a quote and something I wrote a few years ago hasn’t turned up what I was looking for, but it was responding to an article by Ann Cahill and Grayson Hunt. I’ve pulled a couple of sentences from the article that chime with what I was thinking and some of what you may be suggesting here. First: ‘feminist self-defense training should be understood as a bodily intervention that seeks to interrupt, undermine, and provide alternatives to the corporeal habits that assume and perpetuate rape culture’ (2016, p.179). Second, ‘a femininely gendered person that has the capacity and disposition to react with anger and physical force to sexually violent or harassing acts already inhabits a world slightly more just than the one bequeathed to us by patriarchal social structures.’ (p.180).
Non violence is my teacher Martin Luther King Jr.'s way of demanding change in a system predicated on violence and domination that you write about so eloquently.
I'm born of the 60's civil rights movement and anti war organizing. I see what you're saying about self defense and understand you are right.
I just wanted to step out of the binary boxes created by our ruling class online and say I see you. We live in fields of ambivalence. And for myself as an old fart, I'm pretty much set in my ways and will keep practicing being loving in response to evil. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/nonviolence
Hope you organize to protect yourself and keep a joyful mind at all times.
I expect you are full reading, but I love this sister's take on the collapse we're seeing and experiencing. https://thehoneyedoracle.substack.com/p/the-entropy-of-empire-and-the-return
Outstanding. People forget Ghandi was up against the British who, at least had a modicum of decency. How long would he have lasted in Nazi Germany? Violence is sometimes the answer when other methods have failed. And I say that as a Buddhist, but even the Buddha recognizes the need and duty to protect oneself from the harm of others (self defense)
I am naturally anti-violence and have always tried to understand, persuade and -yes, often given in to avoid it. That was usually about surviving. I have no doubt I would have benefitted from a greater belief in myself and the more assertive response that would have afforded me.
The natural world is full of violence or threatened violence with lethal or non-lethal points and poisons all designed to help fauna and flora to survive. But the violence is only sufficient to fend off the threat and no more. Animals do not attack unless they feel threatened.
I find the comment about violence as a thing being neutral in moral terms helpful as it also supports the Buddhist stance explained in another comment about intent. What we can perhaps conclude is that it is not desirable but sometimes necessary.
While we can all have our own personal views on the subject there is an irony in the fact that if we came together in sufficient numbers to counter the neoliberal power we could easily depose it without the need for violence, particularly if we had sufficient support within the instruments of power such as the armed forces.
The necessity for violence is therefore to some extent a function of the numbers involved. For a variety of reasons, though, it appears almost impossible to unite people in this aim and time is running out. In the end we each have to search our conscience to determine what we are prepared to do to achieve our goal and history will determine how effective it is has been.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR WRITING THIS.
I am so sick and tired of the nonviolence purists scolding anyone who even DISCUSSES the inescapable reality that at some point, the way things are going is probably going to come to blows, and we will all have a choice to make about whether we go quietly to a Salvadoran death camp or fight back with everything we have.
Anyone who wants to leave pretentious and condescending comments channeling Gandhi needs to shut the fuck up and look up the Chatham Islands (South Pacific, east of New Zealand). The Chatham Islanders had a beautiful commitment to nonviolence and a wonderful, egalitarian society, which they refused to abandon even when they were invaded by the Maori. You know what happened?
The Maori slaughtered them. Every. Last. One. Of. Them. The use of nonviolence is only ever a STRATEGIC choice, and sometimes, it is not the correct one. I will not be scolded for discussing the defense of the people and community I love, or my own person, because Henry Hippy wants to virtue signal about how fucking holy he is. UGH
But seriously, great piece, thank you.
So inspired by your writing Rachel and it has come at a timely moment. Tonight I will be joining a zoom with Nemonte Nenquimo, the Indigenous Waorani activist and a defender of the Amazon rainforest. Most of your listeners and readers will know that in 2019 Nemonte led an historic legal victory, protecting half a million acres of Indigenous land from oil extraction. She has received multiple international awards for her work on Indigenous rights and environmental justice - but awards and recognition for her non-violent fight don't cut it. The right wing victory in Equador is a clear message that her legal, non-violent approach is unlikely to save the 8 million acres of rainforest now up for auction. I have been wondering what it would take for this new chapter of Indigenous resistance to win. Having been so inspired by her successful, peaceful campaign to defend her home and her people from the rapaciousness of global corporate capitalism, I now feel pessimistic and afraid. I've been asking myself how best to support her - this is not just the fight for Nemonte's land, it is the fight for our survival as a species, as quantum theory and systems theory are telling us, we are the planet: our body is a microcosm of the macrocosm. This is a life and death struggle. I have spent 50 years as an educator seeking to develop understanding that the oceans, the coral reefs, the mountains, deserts, tundra , rainforests, temperature forests, soils, birds, creatures, bacteria are us. To help build that sense that we are symbiotic with our planet, we are living inside the planetary body of Gaia. Gaia, our own Earth, whom we have failed to protect even though our own self-interest and well-being are at stake. Alongside education I have been a non-violent activist but I see that all my efforts in education, all my activism, hasn't been powerful enough against those who control power and wealth. Now I have to ask myself, am I going down without a fight? What is mine to do faced with this existential threat? Your article has stirred up some disturbing thoughts. Thank you.
Superb. Deep bows. Many words from everyone else, well done for stirring the pot. It all comes down to appropriateness of response in the end, on all levels, in all things.
The tricky question is- can we engage enough with compassionate equanimity to feel the harm and violence being done to Mother Earth and her children right now, and can we respond wisely instead of react?
What are we each doing every day to ensure we have a well of compassion to draw upon to be restrained in our use of opposing force when the time comes, so as to not become our own enemies. To be able to see when a word will work, a kindness or a threat, and when an axe is needed.
How messy we humans are. Keep the hackles and claws ready, and keep loving. In balance we thrive.
Thank you for so clearly putting into words what so many of us feel. 🔥