One blog prompt for 5/20/15 that I found interesting was the following: Is a militant or violent response to oppression justified?
Ideally one would want to say that no, violence is not and never will be the answer; that peace is the best way to handle any situation at hand- myself included. It would be great if we could just let everything be happy and perfect, right? Yet, there are billions of people in the world, and many that think otherwise. Peace isn't going to be the answer, because we've never chosen peace. Peace isn't what we can have, because oppression has already altered our society far too much, unfortunate as that is. This has molded in a way where our idea of peace is wildly different from one person to the next. Essentially what I am trying to say is that we live in a world where oppression is long existent in history and has influenced much of what we have become; that oppression in itself makes any potential response impossible to be anything but violent.
There was something I was shown and found very interesting, and I bolded out some general points I agreed with and found related to how I feel with the question at hand:
"Non-violence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence.
People of color in the internal colonies of the US cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude. They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more economic privilege (the “house slaves” of Malcolm X’s analysis) and conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white activists in the US “bear witness” and write to Congress. People in Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will, one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war. Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another 500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal lands, until-well, they’re not a priority right now, so perhaps they need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait- a majority of them are already unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the system.
Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those who mutinied were as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of violence, led to more violence, and, thus, resistance led to more enslavement. Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy."
-Nonviolence is Racist, How Nonviolence Protects The State by Peter Gelderloos
That being said, we cannot erase the past. We cannot change the mistakes that we've made and the bad things which shaped our society into the position it is in today. We can't destroy the concept of privilege; it is present. Yes, a violent response to oppression is justified, because oppression is unjustifiable, and yet, we allowed it to happen, and we still allow it to continue. We are in too deep to excuse the years and years of these destructive systems lightly. This isn't to promote violence, but reiterate that being able to peacefully handle a society with years and years of oppressive history is, to a greater extent, nearly impossible. While we see cases of nonviolent actions which may somehow benefit the future, they are only a piece of the fight, and not enough to completely push it. Unfortunate as it is, violence has already been here, and will be here, whether it can be able to make things right or not.
