Warning Label

If the person opposite an argument or discussion insists on the non-violence of [insert ennobled and revered fakir with a redline to the Allfather or the Everysoul] it might do well to remember that prayer, meditation, magicking and munificent thoughts do not actually alleviate squalor, stop the policeman's baton from completing its arc of brutality, or prevent a rapist from doing his rapey worst.

The appeal to the non-violence of sainted or holy prophets reveals the speaker for someone more interested in preserving his or her own presumed moral integrity than in opposing and ending the abuses which follow from concentrations of power and wealth. This person is therefore committed to a path of earthly or divine salvation; in other words, to the redemption of a treasured, special self from the sins of the world.  He or she is likely to abandon those without grace, and to justify that abandonment with an appeal to non-violence. It is not difficult to believe that these advocates of non-violence regularly end up betraying their own movements, because, in the end they also believe those too sinful or morally impure to seek a holy and harmonious estate of union with right living deserve the sordid fate of a dirty, quotidian world of starvation, venality and agony - one which is ruled by the violent, as a punishment for violence.  Following this logic of holiness to its verbal limits, those impure enough to resist with passion, to strike back, or to seek temporary and tactical advantage deserve to be written off for their surrender to contingency. It is a meted fate, and a merited one.

When the man who wields the baton, and the one who orders him to swing it, eventually get around to putting an end to unrest, the elect, identifiable by the sweaty stink of holy non-violence about their persons, will make their usual mewling sounds. They might even shed tears whilst they cluck their tongues at the dirty youths who brought violence upon themselves by falling from the grace of a perfect peacefulness.

They will safeguard their souls, and their good brand, leaving the dirty and impure work of actually resisting the powerful to people upon whom they heap their worst scorn. After claiming an inherently propertarian and capitalist title to the high ground, to the arbitration of right conduct, and to the soul and the purity of a movement, they will betray it to preserve their own salvation and the imagined redemptive qualities of their presence. They believe, these lesser prophets of a holy man's non-violence, that their bodies sacralize the shared space of resistance. Their mission is apostolic.

They make it holy. And that makes them one more iteration of the bourgeois, "middle class" interloper descending upon the victims of capital with a new set of tablets of the law, seeking not retribution and recompense, but converts to their faith. Armed with that faith, they believe that institutional violence can be undone with magic. They believe in presence, that the presence of saints in the chambers of power will redeem that power. When it comes to an accounting, they don't want to strike at power. They don't want to injure the beast. They want to capture it. They want to redeem it. They want to hold it in their sacred embrace, and to affirm their faith by restoring it to good and sainted purpose. They want affirmation, they want others to have mirrors for faces.

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The great thing about mirrors is that when you break them, you get dozens of cutting edges.