I had intended to write about this for some time. My focus was going to be mainly on the left wing protestors who claim to be non-violent. However, then the whole attack on Israel happened with part of the attack being on a “Peace” fest.
Years ago, in my youth, I was reading an essay by a British psychologist. He was saying that every sport has a certain level of violence. Rugby may be more overtly violent, but soccer (football to the Brits) was violent too. In each sport, you are trying to “beat” your opponent. In some sports, it’s more overt than in others. In boxing, the beating is more literal, in tennis, it’s more a figure of speech.
They have found that men’s testosterone levels increase whenever they win a contest. Whether it’s a wrestling match, or, a game of poker, the winner experiences a dump of testosterone into the system. Theoretically, women are more apt to pick a winner to mate with, so, it is logical that the champion quarterback experiences a surge in testosterone to get ready for the mating season. By winning in poker, or in a business transaction, the winner is better prepared to be a provider. Competition is a fundamental part of life.
When it comes to the whole non-violent movement advanced by Ghandi and Martin Luther King, are they really entirely non-violent? I remember watching the movie “Ghandi” when it first came out in the movie theater. Afterwards, as a young man, I had to think about it. There’s a scene in the movie where Ghandi leads some unarmed strikers against some uniformed guards (not sure if they were considered guards, police or military). Ghandi and company walk up to the guards only to be physically beaten back. Clearly, the guards are being violent, but are the unarmed protestors being entirely non-violent too? Is it more like one side is boxing and the other side is playing soccer?
Above, the scene of intentionally being beat.
If I’m a school bully and I put myself in front of you barring your entrance into a class, you would then have to find some way of passing around me or pushing me out of the way. Anytime that I force you to use some sort of violence in order to stop what I am doing, then I too am being violent.
Theoretically, in the image above, the little boy is being non-violent. No, he isn’t touching her, but he sure is in her personal space, and if she is to remove him, she will have to do something physical (or call him names) like slap his hand out of the way. So, while the little boy can childishly claim to be innocent and non-violent, in reality, he is being violent.
When it comes to Ghandi and the salt mines protest, he is forcing the guards to do something violent or fold to his will. He is not being non-violent, just a bit less violent. Theoretically, Ghandi’s men outnumber the guards and that fact is not lost on the guards. If the numbers were reversed, it would be more obvious.
Likewise, Martin Luther King’s Bloody Sunday march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was not non-violent. It was forcing the authorities to use force. Hence, it was passive aggressive at the very least.
Over the course of the “mostly peaceful” protests, it became a joke on the right about how “fiery” but peaceful protests. I have known relatives who went to “peaceful” protests with the intention of being arrested. They may have been sanctimonious and had a lower scale of violence, but they were intentionally defying police orders obligating the police to arrest them. They were not as non-violent as they would like to have you believe. Sure, their violence was at a lower level than someone throwing a Molotov Cocktail, or swinging a bat, but they were not the saintly little angels they would have you believe.
In Portland, Oregon, and in other jurisdictions, the “peaceful” protesters would show up early in the evening and essentially serve as cover for the violent Antifa who showed up later. Those peaceful marchers may claim to have nothing to do with the violence that followed after they left, but their claim is essentially childish. “I’m not touching you…, but he is!”
None of these protests would have worked without the complicity of the media siding with the side of the weak. As I’ve explained before, weak does not necessarily mean good.
So, that brings us to the Peace Fest that was attacked by Hamas gunmen. No, I’m not justifying what they did, but I am trying to explain their logic. If they are to remove Israelis from the disputed land, the Israelis are not going to be leaving voluntarily. Theoretically, the two sides could both try to settle things non-violently by staring at each other (itself a low level of violence), but neither side is likely to give into the other over that.
One of Joseph Campbell’s lessons in The Power of Myth was that a person can never be completely good. We can only veer towards the good side. Again, it’s a bit of yin and yang. Campbell argued that all life harms other life. He went so far as to say that vegetarians are fooling themselves in believing that they are not harming anything. I suppose if you want to be truly altruistic, you can give up that piece of corn you were going to eat to a hungry raccoon or deer. Perhaps even give the corn to the birds, the worms or the microbes that would otherwise dispense with it if you weren’t selfishly feeding your hungry belly.
No, I don’t believe that the young attendees of a music fest deserved in any way to be gunned down. However, I think they were foolish to believe that being in Israel with a hostile force who wants the land (really the barren sand) was in anyway safe. If the Palestinians wanted them to leave, the Palestinians could not pray them away. The Palestinians do not see themselves as the oppressive British Colonialists, but as the oppressed. The “peaceful” ones are now like the guards at Ghandi’s salt mine if the numbers were reversed.
Eventually and inevitably in this competition to see who can appear as the biggest victim in the media, the two sides are bound to fight again. The violence might start off on a small scale, but it was/is bound to escalate.
One of the stories coming out of Israel is about a young Israeli woman who organized the defense of her Kibbutz from the Hamas attack and is said to have personally killed five of the terrorists. She wasn’t sitting around being passive, but understood immediately what it was going to take to survive.
If the United States should undergo a supply chain disruption and food becomes a scarcity, we can expect huge increase in violence. Americans are not used to deprivation of any sort.
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century".
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
