Matthew Remski: Antifascist Dad | Team Human
www.teamhuman.fm
Ep. 329 Matthew Remski, Host of Conspirituality and author of the forthcoming Antifascist Dad, helps us find a new kind of resistance to the atmosphere of violence in which we're living –  the sweet spot for a new movement of mutual support.

Learned about it from this episode of the Team Human podcast

But what is happening in Hong Kong is they come up with a slogan, which is translated as Do Not Split, which is, we know that some people are willing to be confrontational with riot police.

And when they are, that’s going to cost the state in terms of not only resources, but it’s going to cost the state in terms of political capital and support. And we know that there are some people who are not willing to do that. And we are going to abide by the protocol of Do Not Split, which means that we’re not going to criticize them openly, and they’re not going to criticize us openly.

If we’re the pacifists, we’re not going to have them criticize us for being sort of like, I don’t know, limpid or flaccid or not courageous or whatever. And we’re not going to criticize them for being more confrontational. And the thing is that the support is also tacit.

It’s not like they have to come out and tell the media, oh, we approve of our more sort of confrontational colleagues. They just keep quiet. They just keep quiet.

Understanding that a range of tactics is probably going to be necessary. Nobody really knows what’s going to work. But if everybody’s pushing back against a particularly violent state, then everybody’s really on the same side.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialOPEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Something else I appreciated:

    “You know, and this point of view, you probably came into contact with through the work of people like Gene Sharp, who was, you know, kind of the main theorist of nonviolent resistance.

    But then someone said he got revealed now that Gene Sharp, someone did a book, that Gene Sharp was revealed as a neoliberal apologist.

    Well, it isn’t a book. But what has happened is that the researchers that took up his sort of project of let’s establish that this was the goal, really. Let’s establish that nonviolent resistance is the primary way in which successful social movements are successful.

    A person named Erika Chenoweth and her and their colleague Maria Stevan wrote a book called Why Civil Resistance Works in 2011. But as a sociologist of street rebellion named Ben Case has shown, they really are working with a very poor data set because they fail to disambiguate between things like armed violent resistance from a violent militant like Gorilla Flank and unarmed violent resistance as in rioting within a protest movement where there are marches or there are protests or there are various gatherings that might involve stuff that we’re seeing in LA recently, right? Like people throwing stones at cop cars and setting waymos on fire and shit like that.

    And so the problem with with Chenoweth’s book is that it convinced a whole bunch of people that if you are trying to smash the windows of cop cars that you’re actually doing a form of violent resistance that will not work. But actually, according to the classification of their data set, smashing the windows of police cars are within the nonviolent category because they’re not armed, right? So there’s a big confusion about the actual data.