> Actually, dampening the fire of popular resistance may be exactly what Ken
> admires Ghandi for, since Ken wrote:
> >This is something that has been bothering me for quite some
> >time now. "Outing" someone as a racist in public
> >discourse, time and time again, has often lead to the
> >literal destruction of their lives (public and private).
> >I'm certainly not in favour of letting people off the hook
> >for saying offensive things... but we need to be careful
> >with what we say and how we approach this. There is a
> >certain lack of compassion that I've experienced in recent
> >protests. When people start chanting "kill the rich!" or
> >start looking lingeringly on rocks to throw... I start
> >getting nervous. When Serbia was being bombed, the first
> >week of protests here in Toronto began with fire bombs
> >hitting the US embassy - causing injury to people on both
> >sides of the fence, police officers and protestors.
> >Lifewise when some student protestors, in another instance,
> >started "moshing" against police riot shields.
> People who are outraged and fired up are not very good Kantians....
> Another argument for postmodern ethics: its fear of the masses and their
> actions.
I don't give a shit about people being good Kantians. You've obviously misunderstood everything I've written about Kant and Zizek and friends. And for whatever reason, you seem partial to the divide and conquer strategy (US and THEM) (sometimes known as OTHERING- a strategy which demonizes people, alienates them, humiliates them, and steals their dignity just before dumping their mutilated corpses in mass graves, all under the glowing headlights of "revolution!" Guess fuckin' what? That *exactly* what the bloody capitalist butchers do (what did you think a violent revolution entails?). You've already bought into a capitalist discourse and the Real Estate that follows (why do you think Filmer lost the debate with Locke, because he started speaking the language of his opposition by appealing to enlightenment discourses). It takes more brains to organize a boycott that pick up a rifle and fire into a tent full of soldiers playing poker.
You wrote:
>A moral or religious pacifist view may be, at bottom, more
resolutely anti-humanist than non-pacifists', and in this
sense, Orwell may be correct in the above. However, it
must be said that being a pacifist may be better than
taking a wrong side (as Orwell did, in his snitching).
Then again, it can be also said that pacifism obscures what
is really at stake in political struggles, thus disarming
the masses not just literally but also morally, as Russell
argues.
Please, run that definition of humanism by me again. A humanist is someone who kills the appropriate people? and opposed to pacifists who... lie in bed and debase themselves? which really amounts to killing millions. You polemics here are making absurdity look pretty appealing. Did you miss my post on nonviolent protagonism? I'm a nonviolent actionist by strategy, not principle, although I have my doubts about being competent enough to fire a pistol into the belly of another human being.
Pacifism, a word that I *did not use* is *not* what I'm talking about insofar as there is confusion about spelling, pacifism (peace making), passivity. What do you think will threaten an automotive industry more - demonstrations, petitions, walk-outs, picketting, marches, strikes, legal obstruction, non-cooperation, overloading, and dumping... or nationalistic hit squad with hip tank tops.
In *this* economy (a 'developed,' industrial, service oriented, consumerist economy) - nonviolence isn't a choice, it's the *only* possible means for successful social, political, and economic change. If you bring a gun to the table, someone else will bring a tank, you bring a tank, they bring a fighter plane. If you want to talk about pacifism being anti-humanist, go right ahead, but take a look at the civil rights movements in the U.S. first.
No amount of swords or guns will ever be able to overturn an economy that forges them. The target is econcomic organization. This requires nonviolent resistance. Violence stopped being a successful form of resistance for the poor when someone invented the machine gun.
ken