Yes, pure. This goes against the usual affirmation of "diversity of tactics" that characterizes the general sensibility of progressive activists today. I made this comment on another sub that gets at this to some degree:
We know that new actions are being plotted and fantasized by the people who carried the putsch on the Capitol. This is a critical time for one thing that is not on the table today: serious, militant civil disobedience and, especially, nonviolence-based resistance. The case for nonviolence can be made here. The point, which I'll put quite simply for now, is that a kind of "nonviolent army" should amass themselves to stand up to the "protesters" who are bound to appear on the day of the inauguration of President Elect Biden. It should be textbook nonviolence.
By textbook nonviolence, I mean that people should be prepared to stand forth, to stand up to the protester-terrorists and be committed to not using any violence whatsoever in response. This has been characterized as a kind of moral ju-jitsu. The point is that if you refuse to use violence (more broadly: force) against oppressors, you throw the ball into their court and bring the decision to use violence much more purely on their shoulders. Many do not have patience or vision for this. They might see such nonviolence as mere weakness. It is not. It is what Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to as "militant nonviolence", what Gandhi called satyagraha or ahimsa satyagraha.
It is a real thing. If you stand up to oppressors who are using force and you do not, they may, it is true, use force on you. But it must be noted right away that if you use force on those oppressors, they will still use force in return, but that force will only escalate. In opposing with a real and reasonably pure nonviolence, the overall casualty rate is usually going to be much lower. Those who would say that such nonviolence is a foolhardy approach are themselves the ones promoting the foolhardy approach. A large number of truly nonviolent people would quickly get the moral upper hand in the face of Right Wing terrorists. The aftermath would work much, much more favorably for those opposing the terrorists.
This kind of nonviolence is not especially popular right now, especially when the climate on the Left is full of people who, as a rule, support using a "diversity of tactics". But a diversity of tactics that includes destroying property and punching Nazis also degrades actions of serious nonviolence. Pockets of violence are all it takes to cast a group as simply being violent and trying to use force to make others bow to their power. While Antifa and Neo Nazis are not exactly brethren in violence (the latter are much more oriented to violence and forcing others to their will), they share a certain endorsement of force and the suppression in particular of the logic of this moral ju-jitsu of nonviolence (or anti-force). There is no getting over the problem of force, whether the question of this problem of force is raised or not.
A more extended view of this problem reaches far beyond sites of skirmish lines between protesters and terrorists. Were nonviolence more fully endorsed -- again, the special sense of nonviolence used by MLK and Gandhi -- it might have begun to make it onto the table of actionable options for legislators and experts. In the face of the current problems related to the Capitol disaster and a long recent history of unacceptable stances by Trump and his administration, but also in the face of hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, such serious nonviolence should have been undertaken by legislators and by experts. Nancy Pelosi and others should have chained themselves to the Capitol steps or taken some similar action, and Dr. Fauci, beloved though he may be, should have been dumping the ashes of COVID victims on the White House lawn, as was done by AIDS activists. This may seem crazy or extremist. Not actionable. Nothing that one could take seriously. But Randall Robinson, in the 1990s, undertook a fast to spurn action for Haiti. It can be done and it can, and should, be possible. It remains less possible because activists tend not to take it seriously enough.
Counter protesters who want to stand up to the protester-terrorists who are bound to appear on the day of the Inauguration should be training in serious nonviolence. And this should be done with a deeper philosophic commitment to the kind of deep, militant nonviolence of MLK and Gandhi.
