roachboy

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.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

mixedmedia

You make your judgments and others make theirs. One must suppose a lot to deem their judgments more meritorious. Not that i don't understand that this is what people do and is a major component of why we are so screwed up as a species.

I didn't say I didn't understand it. I say I don't accept it. Little as it means.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

roachboy

ach.
to go any further we'd have to agree about the way in which such arguments should happen. from there, criteria about claims. it'd be easy enough were there motivation i suppose.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

mixedmedia

...all I know is that once violence is accepted then there is left very little ground left with which to condemn its use by others...

...and that once one has distanced themselves from murder with a "cause" they are living within a world of their own making where its likely that justifications for the convenience of violent action become more and more blurred...such as the street executions of Palestinians who are accused of "working with the Israelis"...it's a perfect example, and I don't point the Palestinians out as being unique...not at all, I only use them because they have been mentioned in this thread...history has proven this to us again and again from all points of the planet.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

pig

i don't understand that mixed; the bit about once violence is accepted, then you have little ground to condemn its use by others...do you extend the same philosophy to self-defense, for instance? maybe if its not necessarily "condoned" or "supported," but understood as a fairly rational response to certain social situations? what i know is that i can imagine situations in which i might take up a rifle; say if my family and loved ones were threatened by out of control governments and so forth. or psychopaths with axes and machetes.

__________________
You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

mixedmedia

Yes, I would make an exception for self-defense in response to certain social situations.

Not as a means to correct social systems...I suppose.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

pig

what about the apartheid bit with the umkhonto we sizwe / anc in s. africa bit? or if some international coalition actually formed and took darfur seriously? there would assuredly be violence involved in that...but i can't say that i'd really have much of an ethical qualm about it. i can't find myself able to completely renounce violence in anything other than a theoretical sense. i can see renouncing the desire to do violence, but i don't think they are the same thing.

__________________
You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

roachboy

well, a couple things.

it seems that the debate has moved away from the op onto more rational grounds--the question of whether political violence can be justified--to my mind exclusively on the part of oppositional movements--is quite different from that of any question involving "terrorism"...what is curious is that the a priori violence=>always necessarily unacceptable seems to revert back to the logic implicit in that terminology ("terrorism")--so maybe this is the differend, from a certain angle--that the discussion flits back and forth over the edge of debate structured around political violence and one structured by "terrorism" as a substitute for that.

so i take it that you are a pacifist. mm.

i'd like to be--but there are conditions that obviate it as an alternative, i think.

fanon characterized colonialism as pathological--the context is pathological and that is reflected in the modes of thinking and acting on all sides of such a situation---all sides--even calls for peace end up having their meanings shifted, fractured in such a space. and the cause is colonialism itself, occupation itself.

i can imagine myself in gaza right now, and i doubt seriously that i would be arguing that we should all try to get along. i would be arguing for an end to the occupation. i would be arguing for a change in the political context. i'd be arguing that the israeli presence is the cause of violence and that the only way out of the cycle engendered by it would be a dismantling of the occupation itself. short of that--you reap what you sow. i'd like to think that pacifist style actions would work--but if such actions are crushed violently and remain invisible, then there is no action, there are no politics, there is only suicide. pacifist-style tactics presuppose visibility. they are theater that presuppose the dignity of the participants and one effect of them is to bring down what looks on tv like exemplary acts of dehumanization in the attempts to suppress them. but without visibility, what are these actions? it is precisely this lack of visibility that lay behind most actions undertaken by palestinian groups from balck september onward. the arguments from the balck september people hinged on this fact: that the oppression being endured by the palestinians was invisible insofar as the world was concerned--they died in great number and no-one knew. the conflict with the israelis had moved through a number of phases and no-one knew who wasnt very tightly linked to the immediate situation. had this invisibility not been the case, then i doubt the action would have happened. invisibility erases the possibility of non-violent civil actions.

do i condone the tactics (the attack on the israeli olympc team in munich 1972)?
hell no.
do i understand what lay behind it? i think so.
would i have done such an action, participated in it?
i cannot imagine living under conditions such that an action like that would even occur to me. i dont think any of us do.
but i know there are such conditions.


who's to blame then?

but you cannot fuck with people forever and expect them to simply roll over. you cannot pulverize a community forever, strip them of their dignity, offer them no recourse, put them in a situation wherein the only thing they can imagine for the future is more pulverization, more humiliation and not expect fucked up consequences. the problem are the regimes that create such situations. the rationalization that is a problem is the rationalization that allows these situation to happen, to continue. that the response is generally moves to eliminate even the minimal space for manoever that enables violent actions to take place is nothing more or less than an extension of the pathology of occupation/domination to an extreme. people who are totally dominated, who are completely broken by it at best end up the object of charity shows and telethons that allow us to sit around and deplore how bad their lot boo hoo arent you glad you arent there?

oppression breeds violence: it IS violence.
in such a context, it seems that arguing from a pacifist position is, well, i dont know what it is. i expect that anyone in their right mind would prefer peace to violence. it is not always an option, however. it simply isnt.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

mixedmedia

arrggghhh....I was writing something, very fast, but I'm running out of time and I have things to do...I'll reply to this later.

I do want to.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

Ourcrazymodern?

It seems to me that the tragic circumstances that much of our species endures are the result of our inactions rather than our actions.

"Who has the gold makes the rules" & "Love your neighbor as yourself" are mutually exclusive.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

mixedmedia

Well, I wish I were in more of a frame of mind to write about this right now...I'm just not...perhaps later tonight.

But, I will say again that I am aware of WHY people living under oppression resort to violence. That is quite different from supporting and/or justifying it, which has been my sole point of departure on this thread.

But rb, are you suggesting that spasmodic and arbitrary expressions of violence are somehow virtuous or productive?

And arguing this from a pacifist position, even though I really don't consider myself one, is perfectly rational considering there are people currently living under oppressive circumstances who find it in themselves to indeed be pacifistic. Unlike violence, pacifism IS NOT a means to an end. It's a commitment. It just is. And in my estimation, we need more pacifists, not fewer.

Lot of fucking good all this killing has done for us, yeah.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

roachboy

uh....no.
the argument is basically in two parts:
first that i understand the types of political action grouped conventionally as "terrorism" to be reactive to particular contextual factors.
the justification, if any, for a particular action lay in the question of who is doing it (which organization, how it is structured) and why (its politics).

the move from 1 to 2, and the content of 2, indicates that central to any possible justification is not only planning but symbolic/political narrative.
so no: nothing about spontaneity in that. rather the inverse. i assume that an action that could possibly be justified ethically would have to be deliberate.


i used fanon to talk about the pathology of domination--you're right to take the next step within that framework----but that is also the place where i totally disagree with fanon and find his conception of revolutionary action as therapy (the "new man" emerging as a function of the violence itself, as if that violence was purgative) to be dangerous.

as for a committment to pacifism, i agree with pigglet in no. 47 on that.

no-one likes any of this.
i dont think the question of how one evaluates such actions politically and ethically is linked to whether one likes any of this or not.
like i said, i dont think anyone in their right mind would not prefer peace to its inverse.
but not all situations allow for it.
and the root cause of this sort of violence is the systematic oppression of people.
it can become so bad that folk are able to imagine that violence is a way of asserting their dignity: pacifism assumes people already have dignity---but there are forms of domination that strip that away, such that the principle "i am a human being and as a human being i have dignity" becomes a motor for violence.
it sucks that these situations exist.
thinking about them does not make me--or anyone else who looks at them--a happier person.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

mixedmedia

Ok then, do you find planned and deliberately arbitrary politically motivated violence to be virtuous and productive?

I agree with pigglet, as well. I've stated before on other threads that I'm fully behind military intervention in cases of genocide, such as Darfur and Rwanda. But those sorts of collective interventions on the behalf of defenseless people are wholly different than using violence as a political statement in and of itself. For instance, I would support a collective intervention on the behalf of the Palestinian people in order to force their rights to life and sovereignty on Israel and surrounding nations, but I will never support or justify the bombing of a bus or a restaurant as a means of asserting one's group or cause into the province of politics. And I do believe that to do so justifies any group's similar actions on the behalf of their cause of choice. To me it is insane to pick apart the carnage and proclaim that this death was justified, but this one was not. Not to mention that it justifies the resulting backlash that is certain to follow in which even more people will die for nothing. And it is for nothing. It's a cycle of revenge and retribution that will never end of its own accord.

I think it also bears mentioning that what I consider to be acts of unjustified violence are never free from the very compelling element of hatred.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

roachboy

i take it that you want to do this as an ethical convo. i see this as a political matter.
so you are looking for a particular type of response from me.
it ain't gonna happen.

let's step back a level:
if your take on this question is primarily ethical, it follows that you have a particular view of ethics and that view (from what i can tell anyway) seems to turn on a requirement for a priori principles. without them, presumably, you tend to see only the inverse--anything goes.

to my mind, ethics applies primarily to what i would do.
right now i am---once again---sitting in a chair in chicago.
that means, again, that i occupy a particular space that is shaped by a host of ambient factors--so the situation in which i am is particular. i might prefer to pretend that it isn't--and there is every ideological reason to do so---but once i make that move, i abstract myself from exactly the types of parameters that throughout this thread i have been arguing are fundamental, that have to be taken into account in the fashioning of judgments about the nature, meaning and justification of any given political action that unfolds in a context which differs fundamentally from my own.

so sitting in my chair, staring (AGAIN--geez, where did my life go?) at my computer monitor, can i imagine myself initiating a violent political action? no.
why?
well....my situation is such that my personal aversion to violence can remain operative.

at the same time, i do not understand my situation as self-contained--it is a function of a particular socio-economic and political system that has among its features a particular geography of oppression that functions so that the fact of it is, as they say, experience-distant.

if i think about the types of contexts that i have been referencing here, that thinking involves a degree of empathy or projection--these contexts are not mine.

if i imagine action in those contexts in a way that maps onto them the dispositions i am in a position to maintain in this one, then i am substituting the arrangement of dispositions it is my luxury to maintain in this space onto actors in that other space (x) who do not have that luxury.

the inverse does not follow (that i am therefore unable to make any judgment at all)----and while there are problems (i do not have and will not have complete information)---i nonetheless KNOW that if i approach these contexts with a priori assumptions about what i would or would not do in what i imagine that situation to be like, i am just mapping my dispositions onto those available in another context and erasing fundamental dimensions of that context in the process. i presume to know better than the people who live that context what the meanings of actions are. when i do that, i am no different from any other colonial boy.

since the parameters for thinking about this sort of situation are not in any way delimited for me by what i take to be the fundamentally bourgeois category of ethics (sorry, but sooner or later my inner residual marxist is going to surface in this kind of debate), i retain the prerogative to look at the situation to the extent that i can, decide on what kind of information is relevant and make a judgment about a given action--on political grounds.

this is not to say that there is a basic separation between politics and ethical committments--but as general ways of thinking that allow for integration of different types of information, they are separatable from each other. the converge again in the problem of fashioning judgements that speak to questions of whether i would consider action x justified and action y not justified.

there is a consideration that cuts across this: i find state violence, routinized violence administered via a bureaucratic apparatus FAR more ethically and politically problematic than i find response to that violence.

2. i agree with you (and pigglet) re. the desirability if international interventions in situations like darfur. but that is a scenario within which the people there are already pulverized--and the central cuase of that pulverization is the civil war in the sudan and the apparent collusion between the janjawid (i keep thinking ganga weed, as i suspect everyone does) milita and the sudanese government and the political situation that is being impacted upon by that collusion--which is a function of the civil war, an extension of it. were the people who have been massacred and/or herded about by this conflict in a position to react with violence to what is happening to them, i would not be inclined to see it as senseless--would you?

another problem: from what you say above, it seems that you would be inclined to blame these people were they to react with violence to what has happened to them. well, so far they really haven't--they are not in a position to---in what way is the situation improved by that exactly?

it also seems to me that to treat the cycle of violence as if it were autonomous, independent of choices made by actors on the ground, as it sounds like you do here:

is WAY too simple. so the jangawid are simply reacting to some climate problem, their actions are like the weather and so they bear no particular responsibility for anything? the primary point of an international intervention in that region would be to disable that militia, by military means if that is the only way to do it. THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE VIOLENCE IN THE REGION and behind them stands the government in khartoum. PERIOD. this is not automatic, it does not follow like the wind, building on itself and leaving people no choice but to go along with it....

god this is long.
sorry about that.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

mixedmedia

If I follow you correctly, you abstain from making an ethical argument and question mine because you and I, in our state of luxury, are not able to comprehend the forces at play that compel people to political violence.

And while I don't disagree with this (as I have said numerous times that I understand why the violence is resorted to), I don't agree that one cannot, even from the luxury of Orlando, Florida, observe that said political violence is wrong. And if to conclude so is bourgeoisie, then I feel safe in saying that intellectualizing about the acceptability of the death of folks caught in the middle of someone else's war is in itself, bourgeoisie. That is quite a luxury, too, in my estimation.

As for the beleagured Sudanese people, no, I would not be against it if they took up arms to defend themselves from the janjaweed. I would not support the bombing of buses in Khartoum as a means of self-defense.

This could become quite an involved discussion as I am dredging up all kinds of related concepts (in my mind) such as hatred, exploitation, power, money, corruption...that all contribute to the many facets of BOTH SIDES of any given political struggle - compromising and delegitimizing both. Which pretty much lends perfectly to my overall perception that people just suck.

So maybe this isn't the place for this discussion. Maybe some other time and place. At any rate, it would take me time to excavate and weigh it all...the process. It's not a fully packaged concept for me, like some other issues...

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

pig

it seems to me that there is some grouping of different violent acts / groups that may make the argument difficult to analyze. it would seem that lumping in 'suiciders/homicide bombers' in with all 'terrorist' actions as though it is the only type of action representative of such groups makes the positions difficult to separate. personally, i can't support or 'justify' those types of actions; i think they are 'wrong' and in fact, frequently counterproductive. but that's not to say that all violent acts committed by typically disadvantaged, militarily outclassed people can be condemned, at least to my mind. as roach stated: i think it depends who they are, why they are doing what they are doing, and how they go about it.

the particulars of the israeli / palestinian conflict get a little hairy, to mind; there is so much hatred between some portions of those populations, so much history to it, and so many different factions involved that i think its easy to simply generalize all involved as being unethical. that's a whole different can of worms - perhaps a detailed thread discussion of terrorism in that context would make more sense. taking it as a general example, however, and calling it representative of all 'terrorist' groups is dangerous. i mean, look at our own founding fathers, so to speak. not the part with the native americans; the part with the british

__________________
You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

mixedmedia

I don't think I have generalized any one group. Nor terrorist activities as a whole. We really haven't gotten that specific.

To my mind, if you view people who haven't a direct impact on the forces that are keeping you oppressed as disposable, then I do not support your actions. Period. For example, since we seem to be focusing on the Palestinian situation, I find attacks on Israeli military outposts and checkpoints to be legitimate paramilitary maneuvers. Now, of course, I realize that these sorts of attacks are inferior as such for two reasons: 1. they are not adequately equipped to fight them and 2. attacks like this don't make a blip on the radar screen as far as demoralizing their enemy. They know what works and what works is a threat to the peaceful lives of ordinary citizens. Just as we knew when we engaged, for instance, in "shock and awe" in Iraq and the firebombing of Edo during WWII. Not to mention "the bombs." Which leads to a very key point that shapes my outlook on this subject. How much difference is there, really, between the oppressed and the oppressor? Within the ranks of the oppressed you have people in power. People who will never put themselves into the line of fire, but who will recruit the ones feeling the crunch of oppression most acutely. Both sides do this. In both sides you will find exploitation of the most disadvantaged, the struggle for power and control of resources (particularly money), corruption and greed, the abuse of authority and ever escalating levels in the acceptable use of violence as a means of obtaining and maintaining order. Just because one has the means to do so on a larger scale, doesn't necessarily make the other more virtuous and entitled. And I think this observation is exemplified in the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in the middle east, as well as the key supporters of the respective sides, including the US.

...and I've already said far more than I intended to, so I'll stop now, abruptly yet without lament...

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

roachboy

i got sucked into a flurry of Activity in 3-d yesterday and will be sucked into another one shortly...this has been interesting, though. a debate here that actually pushed at my thinking--it's been a while.

on my way out: what i was trying to talk about above, mm, had in the end to do with types of statements. i put ethical statements into one category and political statements into another. the difference between them came down to basically one thing: i see in ethical statements a preference for a priori logic (general principles applicable universally) and in political statements a more situationally oriented logic. from a position informed by ethics, the assumption usually is that a situational logic is arbitrary or hopelessly relativist--to counter that, from the start, i outlined specific criteria that i would use to evaluate information.

the way i set that up, it followed that the positions we are speaking from would tend to talk past each other even if in basic ways we were in agreement.

i am really quite interested in how different frames of reference work, how they kick in, how the effects play out---often this results in my taking an observer relation in debates--set up the machinery and watch it work. this one was different, however...

anyway, it is pretty clear if you look through the posts that that the points of agreement between you and pigglet and i are multiple--and that the divergences keep coming down to the same kind of problem---(a)how far do each respective place allow us to go in thinking about the particularities of situations---in this, i dont see particular disagreement, actually---(b) what happens when you move from looking at a situation to making judgements about that situation. here is the point at which the differend comes up, and the reason for the differend, in the end, is different criteria come into play--the curious thing is that both your position and the position i think pigglet and i both come from are internally consistent, and that both enable us to push quite far into problematic areas.

fact is that when not involved in a meta-conversation (judgements abut judgements) the factors that shape my positions (at any rate) are often messier than i made them appear here. but it is really interesting that (for once) a debate happened in this space that allowed for that messiness to show up, to itself be a problem, and that because it was itself part of the conversation.

ok--i need to pull myself together and go meet a new piano soon....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

roachboy

double

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Ourcrazymodern?

Please, please stop arguing!

Violence is a bad thing?

As if I have any, my perception tells me we shouldn't be killing ourselves to kill "others". It's just us here. (Is there an echo in here?)

"terrorism" would have less power if people were less afraid.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

mixedmedia

we're not arguing, baby

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

Ourcrazymodern?

You mean we're in agreement? Whence the violence? The oppression? The 'power"? The "history"?

In this insulated environment (Meaning I was born and raised in the middle of NA) I guess I don't know how to talk about terrorism.

I also don't believe in its efficacy.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

Rekna

I and many others put our feelings on what is a "terrorist" in this thread http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=70590 a while ago. I still stand by my feelings that we have redefined the meaning of terrorism to anyone who doesn't fight by our rules (even when the rules are blatantly advantageous to us).