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if you want to accept violence as an acceptable course of action to meet an anticipated end or further your "cause," then you must accept all of it as legitimate as any other
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i dont buy that either, mm.
this is why i have been posting as i have in this thread, really: my position is that there is no terrorism, only political actions and that the legitimacy of these actions is a function of who is doing them and why.
but there are problems with this, i know: for example, i might for personal or intellectual reasons focus on the political statements and modes of internal organization to evaluate a given action because i am inclined to see in the combination of the two something of what the actors are trying to bring about--so i might on that basis oppose the actions of nepalese maoists because they are maoist, or those of shining path in peru because i think they are dangerously loopy--but in other situations, i can imagine supporting the same kind of action to a point. but this is not the problem. the problem lay in assessing the contexts out of which these actions come, in working out something like a level of oppression that makes violence understandable.
sometimes i think this a dangerous place to put oneself.
mostly, though, i dont see an alternative: political judgments can be ugly messy affairs.
what is stranger still is that personally, i am not at all a violent person: i think violence stupid for the most part...but i also, for better or worse, have come to an understanding of systemic violence, banalized violence, routinized everyday violence. and frankly, i find that far more ethically repellent than i find actions against such systems. because at least with actions undertaken by small groups in opposition to colonial style violence (say) the groups HAVE TO come to terms with the fact of what they are doing--they do not and cannot blur it into a conception of "duty" or let it float away across some administrative rationality, hiding behind a notion of "doing my job"....they have to confront the violence directly--they cannot explain it away as an extension of "patriotism" or any other abstract justification to be had on such grounds.
so what i find repellent ethically and politically is organized state violence, administrative violence, administered violence.
and this predisposition itself generates certain problems--like i am well aware that the opposition i set up in the last paragraphs would unchecked tend toward a false romanticisation of small groups that would enable me to pretend to myself that they canot repeat exactly the same features that i find problematic in a state apparatus--sense of mission or higher calling or duty----so things loop back on themselves.
but all that said, i understand how it is possible that a group can be forced into the position such that this kind of action is thinkable, is possible.
but i do not accept the idea that all actions are equivalent.
so i take on the complexity of fashioning particular judgments. or try to at least.