Violence as "sacred obligation"

And something I've really needed to tell you.

Perhaps you’ve heard? The revolution has begun.

In case you missed it, this is the communiqué in which the glorious liberation of the downtrodden masses was announced last week:

On November 25^th 2023, a small group of disabled trans anti-eugenicists confronted a festival of ableist violence in so called “Portland, Oregon”. This was done against libertarians posing as anarchists whom avoid taking responsibility for the violence they have perpetrated by spreading SARS-CoV-2 and its strains without mitigation. Their violence follows the logic of settlers who unleashed smallpox on the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island…

What actually happened? Well, apparently, those courageous “disabled trans anti-eugenicists” poured liquid feces all over a playground the night before a small Portland zine fair was to take place, and then got into a fist fight with several of the attendees during the event. According to them:

Our original intentions as a group were to go in, burn their ableist newspapers, make our statement at the firepit and leave, without creating bodily harm or fighting anyone. Yet upon collecting the materials we were dog piled, beaten and swung at. This forced us to respond in self defense, resulting in at least two anti-maskers getting directly damaged by our attacks. The way these reactionaries resorted to bashing the disabled trans women whom confronted their anti-masking rhetoric does not compare to the lethal violence of their willing spread of COVID.

But, according to an attendee at the event that day:

The evidence of the anti-anti-masker (?) activists’ visit the night before was clear; there were two tags as far as I could see- “real (A)s wear masks” and “anti maskers fk off” as well as some liquid mixture of shit (literally!!!) poured on the basketball court and next to the playground.

…

I saw someone snatch several stacks of papers off a table and try to take them away, and someone else grabbed the stacks out of their hands. Then the first person yelled “Fuck you antimaskers!” and ran and flipped the fire pit. Someone wearing a helmet and big airsoft goggles pepper sprayed someone, which started a fight, and they (helmet + goggles) got shoved and hit by a bunch of people and pushed away from the fair into the playground…

Such stuff is quite easy to laugh about and dismiss as crazy. Well, it is crazy, of course, but even the author of the above quote doesn’t fully seem to notice this. Instead, there’s an attempt to engage with the ideas of the “disabled trans anti-eugenicists” and even agree with some of their positions:

Afterwards, I can’t help but think that those three, so ready to confront an antimasker event, would’ve seen what was happening at the fair when they first showed up, seen people wearing masks, and had a moment to rethink their assumptions before rushing in to pick a fight.
What if they’d tried talking to folks about it first?

Anti-maskers, those who are against masks being worn, often violently so, are absolutely worthy of hostility, even violence. The reactionaries who yell at you for wearing a mask, call you “sheep” or worse, spit on people, try to rip masks off peoples’ faces – they cannot be tolerated. (emphasis mine)

The second part of that statement is a direct response to another part of the communiqué, which read:

The way these reactionaries resorted to bashing the disabled trans women whom confronted their anti-masking rhetoric does not compare to the lethal violence of their willing spread of COVID. Yet we found it hypocritical that the TERFs who invaded town on 11/19/2023 and many local fascists were beaten less hard than what disabled trans women received for calling out ableism in this “anarchist” space, as unfortunately TERFs and local fascists rarely are inflicted the brutal retaliation they deserve here.

In other words, both sides agree on the same point: those deemed “reactionaries” or “fascists” — not just neo-Nazis and white nationalists, but also gender-critical feminists and people who don’t wear masks in public — deserve physical violence.

Portland, Oregon, has always been a peculiarly delusional place, and thus easily mocked. The problem is that the activists there, despite or perhaps because of their unhinged ravings, have always had an oversized influence on leftist narratives in the US. Portland Antifa activists have especially shaped much of the way “the left” came to understand the situation of America during the Trump years, and the most violent rhetoric against people who didn’t wear masks and those who declined to take vaccines were pushed from Antifa and anarchist accounts from Portland to the rest of the United States.

Since so many insane ideas have come from that one city, the less unhinged parts of “the left” have merely dismissed these extremes as aberrations. It’s not actually possible to do this, though: the same ideological absurdities occur anywhere people spend more time deriving their politics from the internet than from real-world interactions with other humans.

I’ve personally known quite a few people for whom the idea that physical violence against those not wearing masks is considered not only excusable, but a moral imperative. That same logic applies also in their calculations against those they deem “TERFs” and “Fascists,” both slippery categories encompassing everyone from the most vile hateful sorts to everyday folks who aren’t as devoted to intersectional social justice identity politics as they are. The enemy is always whomever they decide them to be.

This isn’t the worst of it, though. More terrifying and perplexing is how so many adjacent to such beliefs take their primary premise as valid. At best, they merely disagree with who should be targeted with violence and who should be given a chance to convert.

What we see from the primary defender of the disrupted event — agreeing that that anti-mask “reactionaries” deserve violence, but these weren’t actually the fascists they were looking for — is the same formula we see throughout “the left.” If we include forms of non-physical violence, such as no-platforming, online and offline harassment, and attempts to get people fired from their jobs, it becomes very difficult to find elements of the left that don’t accept righteous violence against enemies as both a prerogative and a sacred obligation.

This kind of thinking absolutely rises to the ideological level of theology. It’s the same sort of fundamentalist thinking which justifies assaults against religious and ethnic minorities, as well as the indiscriminate violence against majority societies in the form of terrorism. The normal moral prohibitions that all religions have against murder and abuse become suspended because the targets are deemed unrighteous, evil, heretical, or infidels — “enemies” of the faith, agents of the devil, incarnate evil.

The more I look at this, the more convinced I become that we are not actually talking about political orientations when we talk about “the left” or “the right,” but rather political theologies. In the English-speaking world, as well in much of Europe, Christianity was the dominant theological framework for centuries. I’d argue what we have now are Christianities, competing political theologies which have both inherited parts of the Christian framework while abandoning its core message. While “the right” tends to still use the Christian label and “the left” generally considers themselves secular, the situation is a lot more like the competing Christianities (Calvinism vs Catholicism) in the 1500’s. They don’t look the same, and come to wildly different conclusions about the world and about humans, but they were both essentially “Christian.”

What particularly strikes me recently, and for a reason I feel I really must finally disclose, is that both “the right” and “the left” approach heretical ideas with the same zeal as the Catholic witchhunters and the Calvinist iconoclasts. The followers of the pope and the followers of John Calvin smashed up churches and burned books, heretics, and witches with equal fervor, and if the Catholics succeeded in attaining a slightly higher body count than the Calvinists, it’s only because they were around longer. Punishing heretical thought as “dangerous” was a moral imperative for both sides then, just as it is now.

The strange fury and zeal with which many on “the right” pursue the punishment of criticism of Israel now is of course hypocritical after years of complaining about “woke” cancellations. Just as hypocritical, though, are complaints from “the left” about having their free speech stifled and their jobs threatened. “The left” was doing exactly what “the right” is doing now, and held a particularly violent regard for other “leftists” suggesting maybe this shouldn’t be done.

Wilder still is that many on “the left” complaining about the punishment of pro-Palestinian expression now are at the very same time engaging in the same suppression of others on “the left” whose ideas they find anathema.

And that leads me finally to write about something which has, for the last four months, cast a cold shadow over everything I’ve written publicly. It’s also why so many more of my essays here have been paywalled, and why my writing has no doubt come across as uncharacteristically muted and placating.

Before the release of my recent book, there was a faction of authors associated with the publisher who were quite furious about its publication. Several of them had books also being released within a month of mine, and they made their complaints about my book quite public on social media and also to the publisher.

To be clear, I don’t have an opinion about their books, as I’ve not yet read them. Nor have I ever had any engagement with them. Several blocked me from their social media feeds after I wrote happily about a friend of mine also getting a contract with the publisher, noting also how proud I was to have my book released by a publisher who refused to listen to the cancel crusades against her.

Their anger led the publisher to warn me against writing essays at certain journals and posting anything that may seem too “triumphalist” in order to keep that faction from getting more upset. Also, as some of those authors manage the official YouTube channel for the publisher (90,000 subscribers), I was told nothing about my book would be posted there.

While I’ve had quite a few other problems (receiving my author copies four months late, having my emails about potential reading events unanswered, promotional copies to journals and prominent authors never sent), I’ve been assured these were merely due to organizational and administrative problems rather than the pressure from the authors.

To be clear, I understand the position the publisher is in. As frustrated as I’ve been by this strange position I’m in, what I’ve described as “trying to promote my book with my hands tied behind my back and duct tape over my mouth,” I’m not sure I would have done better in their position. After all, I’m a publisher myself, and I know how much damage a few unhinged people with too much time on their hands can do to an organization. I’ve had to make some awful decisions which I thought were quite wrong because of boycott pressure from both outside and from within the organization, and I didn’t often have the courage to risk standing up to the mobs

Of course, I’m risking something here by writing this, but I need to. And there’s a particularly important anniversary coming up for me in just a couple of days which reminds me what happens when I don’t stand up for myself.

Maybe you know this, if you’ve been reading me for several years. Four years ago, before dawn on the 10th of December, 2019, I snuck out of my house, closing the door behind me as quietly as I could. Carrying what little I owned in a rucksack, I walked, crying, through a driving, cold rain to a bus station, away from a nightmare and into a terrifying unknown.

During the year and a half prior to that morning, I’d been trapped in an abusive marriage to an unstable narcissist. I say “trapped,” but the truth is that we often let ourselves become trapped and, in hindsight, can sometimes come to understand how we willingly ceded our freedom to another. Of course, you cannot really see these things while it happens, and instead only feel a slight numb pain each time some part of your soul becomes enclosed by another’s desire to control you. By the end, I’d found myself accepting absurd beliefs and ideas (“I deserved to be hit,” “if I do the right things, he won’t be angry anymore,” “I shouldn’t trust my friends,” “I’m not really unhappy”) so quickly that I no longer noticed how insane they were.

That’s the same mechanism by which a group of anarchists attacked by rabid fanatics who poured their own feces all over a playground found themselves agreeing with their core fanaticism (“anti-mask reactionaries deserve violence”) and only arguing with who counts as a valid target. It’s also the same mechanism by which much of “the left” has come to accept the core justification that “reactionaries” should be silenced by any means possible, while only disagreeing on who precisely is a “reactionary.”

The primary way I was able to stay trapped so long in that abusive marriage was by not telling others how bad things really worse. My closest friends didn’t know about the physical assaults or the mental abuse, because I didn’t let them know. I thought I could handle everything on my own, and that by disclosing what was happening I would be somehow betraying him.

I think the entire “left” is in a similarly abusive situation with the social justice identitarians, just as the “right” is trapped in abusive relationships with corporations, religious fanatics, and wealthy financiers. Neither can easily speak freely for fear of angering those who’ve convinced them their feelings are more important than freedom of thought. But at least for “the right,” their abusers give them money. The abusers on “the left” offer nothing in return except the delusion of being good.

I don’t know what to do now, honestly. At this point, it feels like the two years of work to write a book that the publisher asked me to write — a point missed by the detractors — will serve as a good lesson to me later. What’s that lesson? Possibly that I should let go my hope that “the left” might ever be able to break free from its abusers.

On the other hand, I’ve received so many emails of thanks from people who’ve actually read Here Be Monsters that it doesn’t feel like a waste at all. I’ve still the sense that there are many, many people who see themselves as refugees from what they once thought “the left” was, and just as many people who still think that capitalism is destructive for the planet and for people and no amount of identity politics can change its core nature.

So maybe it wasn’t a waste of my time, but it will probably never be widely read unless something truly radical happens. I don’t know what that will look like, exactly, but I know it will definitely not look like placating ressentiment-fueled factions or muting myself out of fear.

Maybe you can also help, but I don’t know how. Reviews always help, especially since there have been some attack reviews from people likely associated with those sorts. There’s no reason to fight with them, though, as it only makes them feel more like righteous victims.

Most of all, all your kind comments and financial support over these years has helped more than I can really say. Especially it’s helped me not be so afraid of writing what I see and believe. And standing with me through anything that comes after this will be the greatest kindness of all.