Two Kinds of Non-Violence

Full piece here:

Violence has always been a useful term for governments and their allied establishment figures in media and punditry. Key to that utility is a very specialized use of the term as a descriptor for actions that don’t originate with the establishment or authorities. Police, armies, presidents and city administrators do not engage in violence. They use strategies, protocols, plans of action, deployments, operations and strikes. The people that are injured and die in those acts are not actively killed by violence. Rather, they suffer only in the passive voice. Those swept up and encaged like animals along the way, without evidence, charge or sentencing in varying degrees, are not violently deprived of their liberty by the use of threat and force; they are administratively detained, imprisoned and held.

The language imbalance is a product of who controls the discourse of dissent. For governments, and their allied propaganda aides, violence is a fluid word used only to describe the actions of those who destabilize the status quo. This has been readily evident in my experience with Occupy Oakland, wherein all that is needed to focus a discussion about violence solely on the unarmed, is a bit of smashed glass, graffiti and/or the presence of flames. While that focus remains almost exclusively on the actions of the disempowered, authorities meanwhile use a wide-range of violent tactics to get their way. In the every day policing of the population they’re meant to protect, this varies from shootings, physical blows, the use of tazers in place of de-escalation, and incarceration. In the political realm, this includes the unsanctioned use of less-than-lethal measures in lethal ways; to the illegal and unjust kidnapping of protesters asserting their rights to assembly. Authorities rarely call any of these actions violence, nor do the liberals, conservatives and compliant media that support them.