Violence is always an option

Because I grew up a shrimpy kid, I gravitated toward nonviolence. The Martin Luther King Jr. side of the civil rights movement made more sense to me than Malcolm X’s; aikido was my path, not kung fu. When threatened by bullies, we weaker folk had a duty to be better than them—to meet their blunt force tactics with self-discipline, moral authority, and humor. It was, it seemed to me, the only way to draw sympathetic people to our side, and therefore to win, even if it took forever. At a certain point, the bullies had to withdraw or, even better, run home in tears.

And because I was also an angry kid, violence appealed to me as well. I wanted to break things, make noise, and see my bullies bloodied. I wanted to feel the rush of adrenaline.

Somehow, though, I managed to contain this. Mostly. I was small and weak and nerdy, and I could tell that lashing out the way I dreamed was ridiculous. At best, I’d be ineffectual. At worst, I’d hurt only myself.

So I kept myself under control. I became a skateboarder to get the adrenaline out, and listened to bad music and got bad haircuts and got good grades and eventually built a life that had nothing to do with violence, conflict, or bullying. I won, right?

But I have remained angry, because there are so many things still to be angry about. Climate change, for one. Artificial intelligence. Mosquitoes. The fact that Scavengers Reign will likely never get a second season. For the most part, I’ve channeled that anger elsewhere, into running and rock climbing and cooking and having a social life and a family, and I was happy and comfortable doing that, because I felt that nonviolence, as both philosophy and practice, was the only reasonable way to cope with the forces making me angry.

You will not be surprised to learn, {{ first_name | my friend }}, that I have begun to change my mind.

My turn away from nonviolence began, predictably, with a novel. Babel, by R.F. Kuang, imagines a 19th-century world where magic exists—but magic of a particular kind. First, it requires silver, fashioned into bars and stamped on each side with one word in two languages—say, invisible and wúxíng (無形).

To make the magic happen, though, you need a magician, someone who is fluent in both languages and can say both words aloud, understanding their meaning innately but also the slight slippage in meaning from one language to the next. (Wúxíng, Kuang writes, means “formless, shapeless, incorporeal”—the closest thing in Chinese to “invisible.”) When Kuang’s hero, Robin Swift, an orphaned Chinese boy who’s been adopted and brought to London by an Oxford professor, speaks the words in one scene, he and friends don’t simply turn transparent:

The world Kuang creates is, of course, unjust. Rich nations like the United Kingdom are not only hoarding silver—which they mine from their colonial possessions and return to the capital—but also collecting from those colonies people like Robin, to train as translator magicians in service to the crown. Their efforts have already made the U.K. powerful beyond measure, with magical silver enabling factories and transportation networks and all sorts of comforts denied to the poorer corners of the earth.

The story of Babel—whose title refers to Oxford’s nickname as the headquarters of U.K. research, development, and training in silver magic—follows Robin’s discovery of the unjustness of this system, and his eventual rebellion against it. Over the course of 544 pages, Robin, a sweet kid who misses his dead mother and who wants to study languages with a close-knit circle of friends, becomes radicalized; every effort he makes to change the system fails, requiring ever greater escalation as the system—the British government—fights back with ever more brutality.

In the end, holed up in a fortified Oxford tower that controls the school’s (and the country’s) vast reserves of silver, Robin and his comrades must make a choice: Maintenance work on the Westminster Bridge is needed, which means the silver they control is needed. So, do they give up their position and allow the silver to be taken out? Or do they hold fast and let Westminster Bridge collapse, possibly hurting or killing people in the process? And after that, if they continued to deny the country access to the silver, it would get worse:

What would you do? Would you choose to give up and preserve the lives of tens of thousands of people who are not directly oppressing you? Or do you sacrifice their safety for the cause you know is just? And if or when they suffer and die, who’s to blame—you or the power that refused to accommodate your demands? Robin has an answer:

Worse, the authorities push the myth of nonviolence as the only legitimate form of resistance, even as they use violence to punish the nonviolent. In other words, they take everything—your status, your money, your networks, your voice, your citizenship, your moral standing, your high-minded ideals—leaving you with nothing but your own capacity for action: for violence, the one tool the authorities have convinced everyone is theirs alone. For you, they say, it’s off the table.

But it’s not. Violence is a tool like any other. As one character in Babel puts it, “Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock.”

Now more than ever, there are systems in need of shocking.

None of this is to say that I—a middle-aged, word-obsessed, almost-average-height wuss—will suddenly transform myself into an Antifa Rambo. I am not about to take up arms or man the barricades. (Do you hear the people sing?) I am far more likely to continue sitting here at my computer, doing my job by day and writing these essays by night, than I am to become a revolutionary.

But now, I think, I understand violence and those who choose to deploy it, whether as a last resort or as a first resort. Violence is a threat that needs to loom over the oppressor even as it always looms, and sometimes more than looms, over the oppressed. To pretend that we can win our rights back without that possibility is to remain naive, and to ignore the by-any-means-necessary movements that historically coexisted with, and enabled, the peaceful protesters our schools and our leaders like to hold up as heroes.

So, please, think of this as you watch events unfold in Los Angeles, in Texas, and wherever else anti-fascist resistance crops up next. Do not dismiss the rock throwers, the Molotov cocktail makers, the saboteurs—they are as integral to victory as the sign holders, tear-gas smotherers, EMTs, and speechifiers. And whichever one you are, know, too, you may one day have to cross that line. It’s okay: I give you permission. 🪨🪨🪨