While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.
this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.
but at least we can all agree that killing is bad
I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.
But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.
entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.
To be honest I don’t think anyone believes that, the entire class as a literal enemy in the military sense. No ones out there shooting landlords and business owners at random. No one but the fringest of tankies imagines that any revolution consists of literally murdering the entire former ruling class.
Me thinking it wouldn’t be so bad if someone iced an oil company CEO or war criminal US official is not at all the same as thinking every human being in the entire capitalist class and state apparatus is a “legitimate target”.
right, but we’re kind of haggling over price, now.
On the contrary, I think your acceptance of a “minimal” level of state violence that’s just allowed to go on unpunished and that doesn’t reasonably give credibility and justification to retaliation by victimized nonstate actors, is an unacceptable moral imposition on my conscience, a price too high for me to pay.
I’m not willing to take the position of a black-hearted school principal who just tolerates a certain level of abusive victimization by bullies as acceptable but would never allow for a victim to hit back and “start a fight”.
I think the problem in the scenario you describe is tolerating state violence, and the solution doesn’t involve molotov cocktails.
The unprincipled principal may punish both sides equally while the principled principal assesses the situation and delivers justice, but they still have to stop the fight!
No! The fight IS justice. Justice consists of the victim delivering a well-deserved fist to their assailant. Some investigation and punishment afterward will only ever be a second-best outcome, unless in those (admittedly quite common) situations where there’s confusion about who actually did what and who’s responsible.
The partisans shooting Mussolini and the liberated Jews who picked up a cane and beat up their former SS captors were better deliverers of justice than the war crimes tribunals as far as I’m concerned.
Extreme cases make bad principles; concentration camp guards directly committing heinous crimes are clearly asking for it, yes. But that’s hardly the typical case of political violence, is it.
And ideally we would have both more and better war crimes tribunals; Saddam Hussein may have deserved the noose, but it should have been for a clear accounting of his crimes, not because he was overthrown by a different gang of thugs.
“The fight IS justice!” says political Tumblr user, “but any unpunished incorrect state violence is too much.”
Yeah, that’s just acceptance of a minimal level of violence by another name. Confusion of who intiated what violence and/or manipulation by social adepts is the dominant case, not the edge case.