At 11:04 28/4/2001 -0400, Tom Wheeler wrote to Positive Futures list {at:
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001II/msg00664.html }, with
Subject: Re: [pf] Smashing Windows for a Better World? :-
[Betsy Barnum: ] >> Those were not anarchists. They were Nazis. Huge difference. > [David Appell: ] >Not really. Both see violence as a way to accomplish their ends. >Both think their violence is justified. At base, >they have the same Neanderthal mentality -- might makes right.[Tom Wheeler: ]
As Betsy said there is a huge difference between the Nazis and anarchists.
Most anarchists OPPOSE violence. ... A good number of anarchists are pacifists. ... The Nazis were firm believers in hierarchy and domination. They believed in a strong state. Anarchists are opposed to all forms of domination and seek to elimate, or at least reduce as much as possible, all forms of hierarchy. Anarchists that do not oppose violence generally only consider violence a valid tactic as a form of self-defense.
Also, anarchists make a distinction between property damage and physical violence against actual people.
Tom
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[Tom Wheeler: ]
>... anarchists make a distinction between property damage and physical violence against actual people.
>
I also make this distinction. I find that in our present US political and corporate climate, that property has taken on more value than people - and that valuing property so highly has resulted in violent repercussions for people - sickness, death, poverty. Even intellectual ideas are valued more highly than people.
Jill
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At the same time, if one condones violences against property as being acceptable while violence against humans is not, then one must make distinctions among violence to property that is "useless" and property that is necessary.
If one destroys property involved in another's livelihood or health, that indeed can lead to "violence" against a person.
I can understand that people think violence against coffee shops does no real harm. (Which makes me then think, how can it be a force from change if no one is "hurt?") But if a factory is shut down, throwing people out of work, are they harmed?
Diane Fitzsimmons
Norman, Okla.
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Diane, how is it possible not to make a distinction between "violence" against property and violence against humans?
I think we are nearing a cultural shift about property, myself. I think the young rock-throwers and window-smashers are raising this up in our collective consciousness. Why should breaking a window of a corporate-owned coffee shop on a downtown street be considered "violence," when displacing thousands of people from their homes for a new dam project is not considered violence? Because those people didn't have paperwork claiming that land, that property, as their own, and Starbucks Corp. did claim the window as its own?
What is property, anyway? And why do we accept that it is valued more highly than life, as it clearly is in our economic system? Or even that property and life are mentioned in the same breath? Why is it that breaking a window can be thought of in any comparative way at all to firing teargas into a person's face at point blank range, or to driving a peasant off her land so a wealthy person can graze his cattle on it, or to that peasant's 7-year-old son working in a factory in the slum-ridden city they migrate to? What does breaking a window have to do with the institutionalized, accepted violence *against people and the Earth* of the very workings of our economic system?
[Diane Fitzsimmons: ]
> If one destroys property involved in another's livelihood or health, that indeed can lead to "violence" against a person.
>
The property targeted in recent demos has, as I understand it, always been storefronts of luxury-product retailers who symbolize the worst of global corporatization. No health institutions have ever had windows smashed. I can hardly believe that the coffee clerks who miss work for a few days while the window is replaced are suffering violence.
[DF]
> I can understand that people think violence against coffee shops does no real harm. (Which makes me then think, how can it be a force from change if no one is "hurt?")
>
Are you implying that in order for there to be change, people must get hurt? I don't think many people involved in the social movements over the past couple of centuries would agree that it is necessary. Inevitable, history vaidates that, due to the response of the owning class and their protectors to any challenge to their power--but not necessary. And certainly not perpetrated by the people in those social movements.
[DF]
> But if a factory is shut down, throwing people out of work, are they harmed?
>
Of course they are harmed. I'm not aware of any factories being shut down due to being damaged by demonstrators. I'm only aware of factories being shut down when their corporate owners decide to move the plant to a cheaper country. Is this *ever* called "violence?"
Betsy
--
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[Betsy Barnum: ]
> Diane, how is it possible not to make a distinction between "violence" against property and violence against humans?
>
What I meant was that some people don't condone violence at all -- against humans or property. not that violence against property is equal to violence against humans.
[BB]
> Are you implying that in order for there to be change, people must get hurt? I don't think many people involved in the social movements over the past couple of centuries would agree that it is necessary. Inevitable, history validates that, due to the response of the owning class and their protectors to any challenge to their power -- but not necessary. And certainly not perpetrated by the people in those social movements.
>
If the windows don't have any negative impact, then why would the owners change what they're doing?
Yes, I believe that almost every change hurts someone. It's just that I hope the "hurt" is done to the person who has benefitted unfairly in the past -- in other words, to bring justice.
For instance, the civil rights movement "hurt" whites who unfairly hold an advantage over minorities. Granted, our society will be better in the long run, but I do believe that, in the short run, some people see themselves as hurt.
I am extremely sympathetic to people who have been wronged by corporations. Indeed, I myself have written how I understand how a Third World terrorist could see all of us who live in the belly of the beast as being deserving of "punishment," that we who benefit of such abundance are not doing enough to help others.
But to me it makes no sense to say breaking windows is not violence. Someone does get hurt, not physically, but someone has to pay. It's just committing violence to an acceptable victim.
I think there are better, long-lasting ways to make changes.
Diane Fitzsimmons
Norman, Okla.
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[Diane Fitzsimmons: ]
> What I meant was that some people don't condone violence at all -- against humans or property. Not that violence against property is equal to violence against humans.
>
And what I'm saying is that even using the same terminology to describe clubbing a person or depriving them of the means to life, with smashing a window or doing other damage to property, is something we need to examine. We need to question why both of these are called "violence." I don't think it's possible to do "violence" to property. And I think that using the term violence without discriminating a live victim who is injured, from a building owner who has to pay to fix the building, is allowing our thoughts to be molded to think of them as more or less equivalent--life and property. And they aren't.
[DF]
> If the windows don't have any negative impact, then why would the owners
> change what they're doing?
The point of breaking the windows is not so much to change the behavior of the owners. It is to highlight what is really going on -- to challenge the thinking of people who assume that violence done to a building is worthy of shock and horror while violence done to people, communities and the Earth every minute of every day in the name of monetary profit is just a "cost of doing business -- and doesn't even make it into our media or into our consciousness.
[DF]
> Yes, I believe that almost every change hurts someone. It's just that I hope the "hurt" is done to the person who has benefitted unfairly in the past -- in other words, to bring justice.
>
> For instance, the civil rights movement "hurt" whites who unfairly hold an advantage over minorities. Granted, our society will be better in the long run, but I do believe that, in the short run, some people see themselves as hurt.
>
Being deprived of privilege is hardly in the same category as being deprived of land, of basic civil and human rights, of personal freedom, of physical wholeness or life itself.
The demonstrators who have broken windows in recent actions have not intended to hurt people, and as far as I know they have not. The police, on the other hand, have every intention of hurting people. The forces of authority operate within the capitalist worldview, that it's okay to hurt and even kill indiscriminately to protect the system from challenge. This is the same line of thinking that allowed Madeleine Albright to say a few years ago that the 2,000 Iraqi children who die every month due to US sanctions is "worth it" for what the sanctions are accomplishing politically. There is *nothing* even remotely resembling this kind of self-justification on the part of rock-throwing and fire-starting demonstrators against globalization.
[DF]
> I am extremely sympathetic to people who have been wronged by corporations. Indeed, I myself have written how I understand how a Third World terrorist could see all of us who live in the belly of the beast as being deserving of "punishment," that we who benefit of such abundance are not doing enough to help others.
>
> But to me it makes no sense to say breaking windows is not violence. Someone does get hurt, not physically, but someone has to pay. It's just committing violence to an acceptable victim.
>
Again, I think a distinction needs to be made between the ways that people are "hurt." The hurt resulting from a broken window--someone has to pay for a new one, someone is out of a job for a short while--simply isn't in the same universe as the hurt, including loss of life, that results from the everyday elevation of property over life that characterizes the capitalist economy. Our system's apologists including the media view the daily victims of this kind of violence as "acceptable victims," and this is what we are taught. The youth who smash windows are trying to induce us to question this.
[DF]
> I think there are better, long-lasting ways to make changes.
This issue is one that has been discussed within the anti-globalization movement ever since Seattle, and now post-Quebec I'm sure it is a major topic again. There are undoubtedly many ways to make change, and all of them are currently being used or planned somewhere. I'm not completely comfortable defending window-breaking, but I'm also not comfortable ruling it out. There's a lot to think about here, and all the thinking any of us do on this will be to the good -- any examination of what's happening is to be encouraged, in my view.
Betsy
--
Betsy Barnum
bbarnum@wavetech.net
http://www.oocities.org/RainForest/1624
**************************************
"The world, most of us would agree, is a mess: rife with murder
and mayhem, abuse of land, extinction of species, lying and theft
and greed. There are days when I can see nothing but a spectacle
of cruelty and waste, and the weight of dismay pins me to my
chair. On such days I need a boost merely to get up, uncurl my
fists, and go about my work. The needed strength may come from
family, from neighbors, from a friend's greeting in the mail,
from the forked leaves of larkspur breaking ground, from rain-
storms and music and wind, from the lines of a handmade table
or the lines in a well-worn book, from the taste of an apple
or the brash trill of finches in our backyard trees. Strength
also comes from memories of times when I have felt a deep and
complex joy, a sense of being exactly where I should be and
doing exactly what I should do..."
--Scott Russell Sanders
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I want to make clear that I do not equate breaking windows with the kinds of violence done against others cited by Betsy. Betsy didn't say I did, either, but since I'm taking an opposite view of hers, I wanted to be clear how I feel.
I feel very uncomfortable with what I consider riot-type techniques to get one's message across. I can understand things only from my world-view, which may seem middle-class and a sell-out, but here it is.
I clearly remember the student protests from the 1960s. I was a child, living in a Republican family, probably pretty much an average American family. Rock-throwing, building bombing, etc. never made me sympathetic to the anti-war movement.
What changed my mind -- and lots of folks I knew -- was more or less peaceful demonstrators being killed at Kent State. In other words, I am willing to listen to people who are willing to stand up -- whatever the cost -- in the face of overwhelming odds.
My world view makes me see window smashing this way: angry young men who want to destroy something as a symbolic way of spitting in my face. The message I get is that "we window-smashers have no respect for your rules." To me, it appears to be all part of the same continuum of pumped-up cops-on-testosterone and high-powered guys in fancy suits with cell-phones, etc., who also have no respect for rules.
Betsy tells me another interpretation of the message of window smashing. I have no doubt that hers is a valid interpretation. But I also feel that most Americans don't get the message that Betsy did.
So does it help to give a wake-up call in a language that many (if not most) Americans don't understand?
If one really believes corporations are poisoning our brothers and sisters abroad figuratively and literally, then how does smashing windows do enough? I hesitate to go down this road, because it reminds me much of anti-abortion protesters ...
As Betsy says, at least we're talking ...
Diane Fitzsimmons
Norman, Okla.
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When I facilitated workshops on violence, the first activity was to brainstorm to define violence. Every group I ever participated with -- although the paths may be different -- always came to the same conclusion:
Violence is what hurts.
This wonderfully simple definition crystalized the issues. It means that not only is a mother committing violence when she slaps her children, but when she sneers at them or dismisses their importance, or insults them.
This also makes it clear that Harvard does violence when it underpays employees and ignores the community. Corporations do violence when they ignore human needs in favor of profit. And citizens of the US do violence by maintaining our high-waste lifestyles that are not possible without causing harm to other citizens of the planet.
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