The Ahistorical, False Morality of Nonviolence: Interviews with Peter Gelderloos & Gord Hill
These interviews were originally published in my book We Live in the Orbit of Beings Greater Than Us through Gods&Radicals Press, which features segments of close to thirty interviews that originally aired on my podcast Last Born in the Wilderness, interlaced with commentary.
“Absolutely, an important battle was won. But first and foremost, it’s the United States government, it’s the inheritor of these white supremacists systems, that claims victory. That’s a very intelligent way to win a war: make your enemy go home, make your enemy think that they’ve already won, especially if you’re in charge of educating children.”
- Peter Gelderloos
“It’s only with pacifism that you have this belief that we have to respond only using nonviolence. They’ll present it as politically practical. Of course, there are times when you just can’t use a militant force to carry out something. That’s why you have a diversity of tactics.”
- Gord Hill
What are the actual tactics that we need, how do we hold places of power to create networks of solidarity? How can we resist and upend the systems of power that have produced the climate crisis to begin with?
Drawing upon the history of effective resistance movements and their tactics can help in this regard. To explore this further, I’d like to present a part of my interview with anarchist, activist, and writer Peter Gelderloos. Peter is the author of How Nonviolence Protects the State, which examines the most lauded “nonviolent” movements in recent history.
Peter examines two specific examples of resistance: the anticolonial movement in India in the early twentieth century (in which Mahatma Gandhi became well-known for his use of nonviolent resistance against British rule), and the civil rights and antiwar movements in the United States in the 1950s through the 1970s. As Peter elaborates, nonviolence and pacifism severely limit resistance movements in upending entrenched systems of oppression and violence, of which the State is the ultimate manifestation.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: Your book points to the anticolonial movement in India with Gandhi and the civil rights movement here in the United States from 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s, as well as the antiwar movement against the Vietnam War, and you lay out how these movements have been whitewashed. Can you talk more about this?
PETER GELDERLOOS: The book is not an apology or a call for violence. The book is a criticism of nonviolence, and a part of that is the criticism of the entire dichotomy between violence and nonviolence. In all of these historical examples that you just brought up, it wasn’t one action that brought about the change. It was a complex interrelationship of many different tactics. Unless we realize that it is uncontrollable, complex, and very heterogeneous movements that bring about profound change, I don’t think we’d be able to act intelligently within movements of social conflicts.
With the case of India, it’s no coincidence that Gandhi is the only person that we hear about in the history textbooks, that Gandhi is so famous. George Orwell said that the winners write the history books. And at the same time, proponents of nonviolence will say nonviolence in such a dangerous idea that the elites don’t want us to learn about nonviolence. This is so patently absurd, because in state-sponsored education, in corporate media, we’re again and again told how important Gandhi was.
In the actual history, though, there were a lot of other formations equally or more important than Gandhi—for example, the Indian National Congress, which for much of its struggle tended not to favor Gandhian methods. There was also an entire network of armed anticapitalists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in India. There was an international movement of Indian exiles who were very close to anarchism, who also took part in anarchist movements elsewhere while fighting for independence for India from British colonialism, like the Ghadar Party. This is something dealt with more extensively in Maia Ramnath’s Decolonizing Anarchism, a very interesting book.
There were moments, obviously, when Gandhi’s protests were extremely important. But there were other moments when major riots were important. There were moments when these huge, armed structures were more important. And there was never a need for internecine competition between those different divisions, with one exception, which I’m going to clarify in a moment.
There’s this breach of solidarity that stems from the authoritarian impulse within nonviolence: they had to claim absolute credit for any change that happens. They have to prohibit other people from using other tactics, and so they systematically turn on other people within the movement. That’s something that Gandhi did repeatedly. At times, you also see a great deal of support in India for canceling protest movements after confrontations that he didn’t approve of cropped up.
I mentioned that there is an exception to this idea that we can use different tactics, we can use different methods and still be in solidarity with one another. Those of us who might advocate sabotage or self-defense or more combative tactics have absolutely no need to prohibit peaceful marches or acts of civil disobedience. We have no need to talk badly to the people who do those things, the way that they systematically deal with the actions they don’t approve of.
The exception to this is when you have a partisan movement that is authoritarian, that is trying to seize control. You can see authoritarian currents within the anticolonial movement in India and in other movements in the world that are only trying to take over state power, to put themselves in charge to reap the benefits of struggle. You also have antiauthoritarian currents which are trying to decentralize power, so that power can become a collective process in which everyone takes part in shaping your own life, shaping the world around them rather than living according to somebody’s plan of a better government or a better society.
So really, the only moment in which there isn’t a possibility for solidarity, despite difference for heterogeneous struggles, is when a current of the struggle doesn’t respect the basic legitimacy of other currents in that struggle and tries to dominate the entire struggle. Authoritarianism is the only element that makes that kind of heterogeneous solidarity impossible. Authoritarianism can certainly be found in a number of armed or otherwise combative movements throughout history. But I argue that it’s a systematic part of most iterations of nonviolence throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: It seems, as with Gandhi, some try to co-opt the movement and to distance themselves from what they consider to be the more violent elements of a movement. But as soon as things move in their favor, they tend to take control of the power structure. They become the new state, and I think we need to remind ourselves that’s a thing that happens over and over again.
I was thinking about people who don’t want to engage in what they consider to be violent behavior when it comes to protest, and want to distance themselves from that. But do you think there’s often within these more nonviolent segments a more cynical element to that? Because I actually have sympathy for people who say, “I’m a pacifist. I don’t want to hurt anybody, not even the people oppressing me. I just want to use nonviolent tactics to get something done here.”
It seems like the people you’re talking about are willing to take advantage of the momentum generated by the diversity of tactics in order to gain power and control over others. Is that something you see implicit in nonviolence itself, or is that something you see within particular groups that use nonviolence as a platform to get into positions of power?
PETER GELDERLOOS: I think there are a great number of people within nonviolent movements who are committed to making the world a better place. They’re committed to whatever cause they’re a part of, they’re sincere. Some of them have a personal preference to avoid certain types of situations or certain types of conflicts, and they try to extend that as practice. Others have a certain ideology of “do no harm” and they’re coming from a more radical Christian background or similar. I see nothing wrong with that. I’ve had a number of friends from this movement.
But those movements also tend to provide useful platforms for what we could refer to as the politicians of the movement, the ones who want to win the role of respectable intermediary, the ones who will be quoted by the media, the ones who will get to negotiate with institutions of power. Sometimes people launch their careers from nonviolent campaigns of civil disobedience and end up becoming politicians.
I would say that there’s room for cynical or authoritarian people to take advantage of nonviolent platforms, without a doubt. But by no means would I say that every or even the majority of proponents of nonviolence do it for those cynical or self-interested reasons.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: You make this claim that the civil rights movement really didn’t meet its stated aims and goals. What were those goals, and why would you say that they did not meet them?
PETER GELDERLOOS: Of course, legal segregation was ended by the U.S. government in response to the civil rights movement. But if you take economic indicators, access to education, and other things like that, in a lot of ways things for black communities have gotten worse.
If we talk to the veterans of that movement, if we read the writings and the testimonies of those who are no longer alive or those who were in prison, we can see the movement was, in their own words, about a lot more than just a couple of laws on the books. It was about an entire white supremacist system and its effects on everybody’s lives. That system hasn’t gone away. So it seems a little bit insincere to claim victory for the civil rights movement.
Absolutely, an important battle was won. But first and foremost, it’s the United States government, it’s the inheritor of these white supremacists systems, that claims victory. That’s a very intelligent way to win a war: make your enemy go home, make your enemy think that they’ve already won, especially if you’re in charge of educating children. It was a very cynical maneuver to co-opt Martin Luther King and claim victory there, precisely so that people would stop fighting against the continuing forms of white supremacy.
The boycotts and the peaceful protests were an extremely important part of the civil rights movement. But that’s not what won an end to legal segregation. In Birmingham, Martin Luther King was basically repeating the Albany campaign, which was a total failure. The tactics of civil disobedience didn’t work there. All of the organizers ended up in jail without changing anything. The difference is that in Birmingham, the local youth started fighting back against police. They didn’t consider it dignified to just let themselves get beat up and jailed. And they didn’t find it dignified to listen to these college educated, out-of-town professional activists who were telling them how they should resist.
So they rose up, they fought back. They kicked the cops out of the center of
Birmingham. They burned all of the white businesses. And just a few weeks later, Birmingham, which was the bastion of segregation in the South, which was supposedly never going to desegregate, started desegregating. Then, the executive of the U.S. government began supporting the Civil Rights Act, even though before he kept telling Martin Luther King that now wasn’t the time. So it was also the fear of the reality of combative collective self-defense by black communities in the U.S., and the very real and growing possibility of black uprisings in the U.S., that accomplished that partial victory.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: I remember when the Occupy movement was happening, and there were real debates about this, that sitting in a park all day and trying to not get arrested by the police isn’t going to really do anything. Many were saying the movement needed to evolve, to move in a different direction, to incorporate different tactics. I remember that was really when the division within the movement really became apparent, and then it started to disintegrate.
The argument that some nonviolent activists offer is that, as soon as movements become violent, we begin to see problems, more state repression, and divisions within the organizations themselves. What would you say to that?
PETER GELDERLOOS: I would say that the Occupy occupations that lasted the longest, that accomplished the most, and that engaged the most people were precisely those that used diversity of tactics and didn’t constrain themselves to nonviolence. I would also say that argument reflects an extremely naive and reactionary view of the state. The state is not a passive set of institutions. It doesn’t just sit there waiting for people to start misbehaving before punishing them.
All modern states use a counterinsurgency philosophy with regard to their own populations. In other words, they view their own populations as a constant threat, one they have to systematically and continuously surveil, discipline, and repress. Repression is an everyday activity.
Europe makes an interesting case study, because you have a lot of countries right next to each other which are economically similar but with very different histories in their social movements and different political strategies used by their states. The countries in Europe with the most repression, the most invasive police presence, and the most social control would be the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Some of these countries have certainly had strong social movements in the past. If you look at the years in which there is social peace, in which there is not a lot of conflict, you also see state repression advancing by leaps and bounds. On the other hand, if you look at the European countries where there are constant uprisings and constant resistance, more often than not the states are less able to develop or increase their repressive capacities, because people just don’t let them.
States don’t just wait around until there’s a revolutionary movement to start being repressive.
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Along with recognizing the inherent value and utility of using a diversity of tactics to resist oppressive power structures, it’s also vital to unpack our assumptions of what forms of violence are acceptable and what aren’t. As Peter alludes to in that segment of our discussion, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the inherent “morality” of nonviolence, and the false dichotomies that attempt to present distinctions between violent versus nonviolent forms of resistance. Diversity is key here, especially when we examine what actually furthers the aims of social justice, anticapitalist, and anticolonial movements.
Continuing this discussion of violence and diversity of tactics, here’s part of my interview with Indigenous artist, activist, and graphic novelist Gord Hill. Gord is the author of 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance (which was made into a graphic novel), The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book, and The Antifa Comic Book.
A major theme in our conversation is the growing intersections between what can be defined as traditionally Eurocentric leftist political theory and praxis with anticolonial Indigenous resistance throughout the so-called American continents, from North to South. Gord, having one foot in Indigenous resistance movements and the other in anticapitalist and antifascist organizing, provides needed context on how radical leftist theory and practice (for the most part, European in origin) increasingly works in tandem with anticolonial Indigenous resistance movements.
Various strains of resistance—anticolonial, ecological, anticapitalist, antifascist—can only benefit from learning and working with each other. In great part, this is already happening. Each of these respective strains of resistance often utilize a similar diversity of tactics in resistance to the State, the logic of capital, and the settler-colonial culture that dominates the land up to the present moment.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: Before we started recording, you mentioned the Eurocentric view of anarchism, that when we talk about antifascism or anarchism, it’s often through Western theory and a Western lens. But there’s so much that can be learned from Indigenous struggles and Indigenous forms of organization in fighting oppressive power structures, and I think you’ve done a great job melding these together. In your work, in what ways have you tried to address that Western bias in anarchism?
GORD HILL: Well, anarchism is a European ideology. It arose in Europe in response to the rise of capitalism, and it was part of the socialist revolutionary movements that arose in the 1800s and early 1900s. This is a movement organized primarily by the working class to deal with this new form of economic power—capitalism. The anarchist movement (as well as the socialist and communist movement)—was born from the proletariat fighting against the rise of the capitalist state.
Some think that anarchism should also be an Indigenous thing. I don’t think that’s really necessary, but I do believe that it is useful to Indigenous peoples because we’re colonized. We’re living under the state, and anarchism is a very useful tool for understanding the modern state.
I’m involved in both Indigenous anticolonial resistance and the anarchist anticapitalist resistance. I see the importance of both, and I try to build links between them, because I think Indigenous people can learn a lot about the state from anarchism. We didn’t have the state; it’s not part of our tradition. We never had to deal with centralized authority and power, and so anarchism can give us a better understanding of the state, how to resist it, and how it works.
Anarchists living in North America can learn a lot from Indigenous people, because Indigenous people show another way of life is possible outside of the state. We existed for thousands of years without a state before colonization. Also, Indigenous culture, because of its connection to the natural world, can give a view of another way of life, another way of looking at the world we live in not based on capitalism, communism, or building better factories so the proletariat can run society. Indigenous culture would be contrary to that, because it’s about living within the natural world, not occupying it and taking as many resources as you can.
So, I think both movements can learn from one another, and both are important. In Canada, Indigenous peoples are often at the forefront of anticolonial and even anticapitalist struggles, even though a lot of Indigenous people aren’t anticapitalist. They’re engaging in struggles that limit the ability of corporations to come in and take resources. Indigenous people in Canada are a bigger percentage of the population than in the United States, and because of the location of many Indigenous communities, Indigenous peoples in Canada can have a large impact on the politics of Canada. It’s an important movement for anarchists to understand, one that will enable all of our movements to work better together once we understand each other’s politics better. I think that would be a big help.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: Do you sense that’s happening?
GORD HILL: Oh, definitely. I’ve seen it since I’ve been involved, since the late 1980s. I’ve seen a big progression over the last few decades. In the late 1980s in Vancouver, you’d ask a leftist whose Indigenous territory we are on and nobody really knew. It was never common at rallies to have a speaker from the local Indigenous nation come to the rally, to open it up and to welcome people. Stuff like that never happened.
It was only in the 90’s that it began to happen in Oka, which was a confrontation between a Mohawk Nation and the Canadian state police and military. It was a major standoff that lasted 77 days in the summer of 1990. After that, there was a big change: in a lot of cities, especially in Vancouver, there was a big push to understand whose traditional territory you’re on and to acknowledge that at rallies and events. It then became very common that you have someone from one of the local Indigenous nations open up the event.
Anticolonial consciousness has increased a lot since the 1990s. The solidarity with Unist’ot’en is the result of all that anti-colonial resistance work. Especially in Canada, I think anarchists are a lot more on top of anticolonial resistance solidarity, because of the importance of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the impact that they have on the society today. I think it’s different in the U.S., because native people are a much smaller percentage of the population. You also have much larger Black and Latino populations, so a lot of efforts of the U.S. Euro left settlers are often focused more on Black and Latino community organizing. They’re a much more significant political force in the United States than Indigenous peoples are. In Canada, there’s a different kind of context here, but anticolonial consciousness has grown a lot more since the early 1990s.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: I recently interviewed Peter Gelderloos, who is an anarchist activist and author of How Nonviolence Protects the State. I really enjoyed hearing his perspective on how nonviolence is often very limiting. I know that you can only really speak for yourself in what you’ve done as an individual within these movements, but what is your general opinion on what’s most effective? What has been most effective for these Indigenous resistance movements?
GORD HILL: People think it’s a cliché or a nefarious thing, but: diversity of tactics. That’s what works. Oka was an armed stand-off. You had Mohawk warriors armed with AK-47s, and they militarily confronted the police and Canadian forces. There were also, across the country Indigenous people mobilizing in solidarity with the Mohawks at Oka, and they used a large diversity of tactics. You had rallies, occupation of government offices, highways and railways being blockaded, as well as sabotage of infrastructure.
That’s what occurred, and that is a diversity of tactics. That’s what prevented the Canadian state from using military force to remove all the warriors. The military were very restrained in their actions because of the solidarity coming from Indigenous people across the country. The Canadian state feared an Indigenous insurgency could arise if they used deadly force on the Mohawks. And you have to remember: at the beginning of that standoff there was a police officer who was shot and killed. Indigenous people didn’t condemn the Mohawks for defending their land militarily, though it had resulted in the death of a police officer. People rose up in solidarity with the Mohawks.
Nonviolence and pacifism are fairly recent ideologies. It’s a belief that your nonviolent tactics and strategy are morally superior, presenting nonviolence as a better way. They claim it’s morally superior, and then claim that it’s more effective. But in reality, that’s not true at all. Most of the nonviolent victories that have been claimed by pacifists actually involve a diversity of tactics.
Going back to the Mohawks at Oka: they used violence. They were armed. They dug trenches and barricades. They shot at police. And there was also a diversity of tactics that limited the ability of the Canadian state to actually repress that. But in the end, the Mohawks won.
The fight started over the township of Oka, which wanted to expand a golf course and build a condominium project over the pines, which was a Mohawk burial ground and a very important, sacred area to them. That’s why they rose up. They were trying to stop this development from happening, and they won: the golf course was never expanded, and the condominium project was never built. There’s many, many examples of Indigenous peoples using a diversity of tactics—including violent means—and achieving a victory.
That runs contrary to the pacifists’ claims. Pacifism is a recent thing, aside from some religious cults that preach nonviolence. Pacifism only really arose in the 20th century, in the 1920’s and 1930’s with Gandhi. And Gandhi was promoted by the British, who were the imperial power that ruled India. So, Gandhi was almost an agent of British colonialism, carrying out counter-revolutionary activities in India to suppress an actual revolutionary movement.
India saw massive campaigns of rioting, guerrilla warfare, and assassinations of British officials. At the end of the day, the pacifists will still say that India got its independence through nonviolence, because they’re stuck in their belief that pacifism is morally superior to all other forms of action.
So that’s my take on pacifism and nonviolence. It’s promoted primarily by middle class entities. Pacifism was never a part of our Indigenous cultures. When we were faced with a physical threat, we respond with physical force to defend ourselves. That’s common sense. That’s what any living being does. It’s just natural.
It’s only with pacifism that you have this belief that we have to respond only using nonviolence. They’ll present it as politically practical. Of course, there are times when you just can’t use a militant force to carry out something. That’s why you have a diversity of tactics.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: Something that Peter talked about in his book was the idea that if you engage in violence, you’re going to only perpetuate violence into the future. By “dirtying your hands” with violent tactics, you’re going to perpetuate violence. It’s sort of a strange logic, because it’s really obvious that that’s not the case.
GORD HILL: It’s the moral judgment that a lot of pacifists carry with them. The actual roots of pacifism are in a religious cult. Gandhi’s whole project was basically a religious cult, and Christians come to their pacifism through religion. That’s why most pacifists are so moralizing and judgmental of other people, and think they are superior. That belief has a religious basis.
Peter Gelderloos
is an anarchist, activist, and the author of numerous books and essays relating to the subjects of anarchism and resistance movements, as well as historical analysis of early state formation in human societies. Some of his works include What is Democracy?, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarchy Works, The Failure of Nonviolence: From the Arab Spring to Occupy, and Worshipping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation.
Gord Hill
who also goes under the pen name Zig Zag, is a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation along the Northwest Coast of Canada. He is an anarchist activist, author and illustrator of numerous books/graphic novels, including 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book, and The Antifa Comic Book.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH
is a long-form interviewer, occasional writer, and host of Last Born In The Wilderness, a podcast he's produced for the better part of five years. He is the author of We Live In The Orbit Of Beings Greater Than Us, published last year through Gods & Radicals Press.