The blind-violence of pacifism

I survived child molestation, severe and seemingly unending abuse, rape, being locked in closets and tied to ground for days on end, group homes, youth detention centers, involuntary commitment, foster care and being a ward of the State. I came out with strong views about what being passive, peaceful, pacifist and non-violent will get a person.

The first time I listened to a rape from across the group home sleeping hall, I had to choose between helping a person whose face I couldn't see, and getting a beating so bad I'd not only get punished for bringing attention to the house, but for costing the budget for my hospital care. I didn't exactly see it in those terms, at age fourteen, but I knew getting heroic wasn't going to earn the affection of the house staff. Or the raping rapist fuckers.

So, I chose to turn over and "ignore it," like all the other small kids who hadn't fully learned what it meant to be mean, self-reliant and vicious-as-a-defense. (I got there quick enough.) That was hard to abide in one's own self. The memory still cuts, and I'm not that boy anymore. Turning the other cheek was rational. It preserved my relative well being. But, it perpetuated the local system. Fucking hell, it did.

Anyway, I came up with a clear enough view of human depravity, cowardice and self-preservation. And of what and how much it takes to make the depraved suffer enough that they re-learn their essential cowardice. Those who've formalized their cruelty panic when it becomes personal, again. They lose their grip, because the grip has got them in its embrace. It's civilization itself, and it soothes and coaxes and coddles those who enforce its dicta.

The minority* of white, comfortable motherfuckers with vacation homes and private land lecturing the victims, the poor, the damaged, the abused, the raped, the herded, the harassed, the imprisoned, the exploited, the evicted, the institutionalized, the penalized and the discarded on what are and are not appropriate responses to victimization - that shit is rich. Literally. It takes a comparatively rich motherfucker to confuse the play-acting, submission rituals and lying of "civilized" society with any end to institutional depravity, inequity and the hierarchies which profit from the same.

You stop it by finishing off the people doing it and living off the proceeds of human suffering. You do the work, and leave it done and behind you.

And I say it's blind-violent to suggest otherwise. Pacifism is violence, itself. It's violence maintained by the posture of self-congratulation and ostrich avoidance, leaving the actual labor of resistance to people who can stand the smell of shit, usually because they've had their whole lives rubbed into the sewage of human cruelty. It's the privilege of the over spiritualized and the self-absorbed, lording over the victims of the system itself; a system which produces the safe protest as a distraction. A system which breaks a body down into persona and parts, and leaves the ghost of passion's disappearance behind as added insult, as the reminder of defeat.

It's the screechy embarrassment, this cluck-clucking faith of the fattened calf, at the refusal of the damned to learn its strictures and superstitions, to accommodate themselves to the small comfort of a moral superiority, in lieu of the materiality of a satisfying vengeance.

It's a preservative, this pacifism. It guarantees that those who feel strongly act weakly. That they codify cowardice into a prescription for self-regard. It negates rage. It mollifies hatred.

And leaves certain that those who do the worst suffer the least.


* - globally; most people lack the "civilized" self-deceptions about "civilized" goodness, talky-preachy pacifism, or the effectiveness of "witnessing for the truth" and other sentimental pap