Henry_
When I was lucky enough to visit Kabul in 2014, the strongest, lingering sensation I found there was the smell of burning diesel. Mixed with raw sewage, it had a kind of milky smell. If I opened a window at night, ice cold air rushed in, bringing gritty fumes of burning diesel, plastic, as well as coal as the poorest struggled to keep warm. When I got home, I realised a similar smell was present in London too, I just hadn’t noticed it before. In the decade since, there are already far fewer diesel vehicles.
This seems like a good metaphor for the militarism and state sponsored violence in the UK, which remains mostly invisible and inaudible to the ordinary citizen. There are almost no occasions for it to get too noisy or too close.
In Kabul, the remnants of the War on Terror were still present. Every morning, like clockwork, a huge U.S. helicopter flew low overhead. We saw whole city blocks flattened to concrete stumps by US bombing raids, rusting military hardware at the airport, arms and weapons everywhere, on cars, in gateways, on street corners. Armed watchtowers and high bomb proof walls surrounded all the more important houses and offices. In London, like the diesel fumes, militarism is not nearly so visible, apart from in a pantomime fashion, in the horse guards’ polished boots and sheepskin saddles and ceremonial swords. It is not so visible for one who has never felt the strong arm of the law, who believes the police are there to protect them, who believes that in exchange for taxes and obedience, the state will let them live in peace. Military bases and nuclear weapons are far away. Arms factories are featureless hangars deep in an out of town industrial estate, far from shops and cafes.
Palestine Action is a group which has been proscribed under counterterror legislation. Since the pandemic, a few years ago, it has sought to insert itself disruptively into the nexus of state and commercial violence, that encompasses the arms trade, armed forces, businesses, universities, landowners, PFI contracts up and down the country. As many others have done before them, their members have periodically inserted a symbolic jemmy into the works, to interject and object, to shine a light on the scandal of Israeli-owned arms company Elbit, whose ‘drones are battle tested on children.’ Their actions come as events, occupations and happenings, involving red paint liberally squirted about. (But is it art?) (Does it come out in the wash?) Through their actions, somehow too loud, too many and too bright, they come up against the criminal justice system. And now counterterrorism legislation. The state doesn’t like their persistence. The public don’t like the way the state has reacted; the struggle between the public’s right to freedom of expression and state monopoly on violence has boiled over.
To undertake nonviolent direct action, Graeber says, a person acts as if already free. To take this to the point of civil disobedience, let alone property damage, a person acts as if already free. It is to enter a zone which is already hazardous, into a conflict with the state. The state may or may not take kindly to groups of individuals asserting their rights to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, however clownish. Actions can range from a vulnerable couple of individuals with a lock-on tube to the more well-funded, large scale actions of Extinction Rebellion, Palestine Action and now Defend Our Juries.
The state is affronted, or pretends to be affronted, that a group of individuals is happy to break the terms of their ‘debt to society’ in which they obey laws in exchange for peace and security. But the state has not given us peace and security. It has made us complicit in the most terrifying destruction of a whole people and their land.
This is where a couple of questions from Judith Butler and Walter Benjamin come in. In their book, the Force of Nonviolence, Butler takes the concept of grievability and equality as the starting point. In considering which lives do deserve to be mourned, war is the most extreme form of inequality. They write, ‘dampening destruction is the most life affirming’ action a person can take. In a discussion on the impossibility of defining violence they remind us that the state relies on violence both physical and social for its existence. There is violence in its hard borders, its police, its investment in nuclear weapons. It follows that anything which challenges that violence, and therefore its own existence, the state sees as violent. Walter Benjamin describes the mythical violence, say, of a street demonstration, and of threat. Workers can go on strike, which is not violent and yet the threat to not return to work until their demands have been met, may be seen by the factory owners as violent. Butler calls the example of a policeman’s attack on an unarmed person of colour, racist phantasmagoria; the policeman sees reflected in the victim his own capacity for violence and reacts violently.
’Direct actionists’ as Palestine Action like to call them, and their supporters, including lawyers, are at pains to describe their actions as nonviolent and peaceful, and even ineffective and purely symbolic. And yet the state, being defined by violence, will always see an expression of dissent, that doesn’t colour between the lines, some hurriedly drawn lines at that, as a potentially violent threat and try to depict it so. In doing this it is disingenuous. Government ministers are educated people who know their history: plenty of the most famous activists were objectively violent, property damage is a common enough tactic. A good example is to be found in any ‘ploughshares’ action.
What I am saying is, don’t be surprised by the clips of elderly protesters with cardboard placards being carted off by exhausted policemen. This is the tactic, however nonviolent and vulnerable we are, in civil disobedience, the state reacts as if we are violent. Conversely however loudly we shout, we cannot shout more loudly than the billions and billions of dollars spent on nuclear weapons and a nuclear submarine lying at its mooring at Coalport.
Bad Apple Magazine 