c/flippanarchy · by Val@anarchist.nexus · 217d

No guillotines

The first text that introduced me to crimethinc was this: https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too.

Having seen one too many posts around the leftist comms on the subject, I made my own small meme about it. A bit more violent than what the article suggests but I think that makes it just that much more effective.

After all what would the life described here be other than suffering:

The worst punishment anyone could inflict on those who govern and police us today would be to compel them to live in a society in which everything they’ve done is regarded as embarrassing—for them to have to sit in assemblies in which no one listens to them, to go on living among us without any special privileges in full awareness of the harm they have done.

69 points · 26 comments · view on lemmy.world

26 Comments

cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 12 pts · 217d (10 replies)

Yeah but why do we care that much?

They're a problem between us and a better world. Between us and the survival of the species.

Killing them is expedient. Helps dismantle their power faster.

Val@anarchist.nexus · 10 pts · 217d (9 replies)

Did you read the article? Here is a couple of sections I think put it correctly:

When we see ourselves as fighting against specific human beings rather than social phenomena, it becomes more difficult to recognize the ways that we ourselves participate in those phenomena. We externalize the problem as something outside ourselves, personifying it as an enemy that can be sacrificed to symbolically cleanse ourselves. Yet what we do to the worst of us will eventually be done to the rest of us.

Often, all it takes to be able to cease to hate a person is to succeed in making it impossible for him to pose any kind of threat to you. When someone is already in your power, it is contemptible to kill him. This is the crucial moment for any revolution, the moment when the revolutionaries have the opportunity to take gratuitous revenge, to exterminate rather than simply to defeat. If they do not pass this test, their victory will be more ignominious than any failure.

It is possible to be committed to revolutionary struggle by all means necessary without holding life cheap. It is possible to eschew the sanctimonious moralism of pacifism without thereby developing a cynical lust for blood. We need to develop the ability to wield force without ever mistaking power over others for our true objective, which is to collectively create the conditions for the freedom of all.

Have mass killings ever helped us advance our cause? [...] If we seek transformation rather than conquest, we ought to appraise our victories according to a different logic than the police and militaries we confront.

The image of the guillotine is propaganda for the kind of authoritarian organization that can avail itself of that particular tool. Every tool implies the forms of social organization that are necessary to employ it.

As a tool, the guillotine takes for granted that it is impossible to transform one’s relations with the enemy, only to abolish them. What’s more, the guillotine assumes that the victim is already completely within the power of the people who employ it. By contrast with the feats of collective courage we have seen people achieve against tremendous odds in popular uprisings, the guillotine is a weapon for cowards. By refusing to slaughter our enemies wholesale, we hold open the possibility that they might one day join us in our project of transforming the world. Self-defense is necessary, but wherever we can, we should take the risk of leaving our adversaries alive. Not doing so guarantees that we will be no better than the worst of them. From a military perspective, this is a handicap; but if we truly aspire to revolution, it is the only way. “The guillotine is the law made concrete… It is not neutral and does not permit you to remain neutral. Whoever sees it quakes, mysteriously shaken to the core. All social problems set up their question mark around that blade.”-Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

So we repudiate the logic of the guillotine. We don’t want to exterminate our enemies. We don’t think the way to create harmony is to subtract everyone who does not share our ideology from the world. Our vision is a world in which many worlds fit, as Subcomandante Marcos put it—a world in which the only thing that is impossible is to dominate and oppress.

And lastly:

Precisely because it is sometimes necessary to employ force in our conflicts with the defenders of the prevailing order, it is especially important that we never lose sight of our aspirations, our compassion, and our optimism. When we are compelled to use coercive force, the only possible justification is that it is a necessary step towards creating a better world for everyone—including our enemies, or at least their children. Otherwise, we risk becoming the next Jacobins, the next defilers of the revolution.

Or to put it in my words: Letting them live is the human thing to do, even if they pose a threat. Their power does not come from who they are but from the structures that are build around them. We have to dismantle those structures, killing people doesn't help with that. If we have reached a point where we can guillotine them we will have already won.

If you want to execute them in self-defence (as maintaining capitalism is inflecting violence on the human race, therefor killing anyone doing it is self-defence). Go for it, but make it clear that's why you are doing it, and that there is no better way. Like destroying all the methods they use and make them powerless which will also make them stop without losing your humanity (hyperbole).

cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 217d

Ididnt, I'm used to unreadable slop so I don't click article links.

lurch@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 216d (7 replies)

That's a lot of words for saying you're to uncomfortable to do what it takes to secure a win.

Death sentences are not about punishing an individual. It's about scaring ppl who consider doing the same shitless, so they don't revert your progress later.

Val@anarchist.nexus · 1 pts · 216d (6 replies)

Oh hey, I have a quote for that: https://youtu.be/xnouj9Yz-Gs?t=35

Winning? Is that what you think it's about? I'm not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, It’s kind! It’s just that. Just kind.

Here is a section of AFAQ as well: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionJ.html#secj73

And we don't need to scare people. Fear shouldn't be among our weapons. It creates conformity, timidness, a desire to cower and hide until it goes away. Values that are antithetical to anarchism. Or in the worse case, fighting, attacking those creating fear ruthlessly and without mercy. Nothing is more scary than someone backed into a corner. How many innocent people would be killed by rulers who want to go out in a blase of glory because they know they'll die anyway? Their power comes from the people that uphold the social structures. To win we need to destroy the ideas that justify their power. If we can do that, we don't need to kill them, and if we can't, killing them will accomplish nothing, the people will just fall behind another leader, one who will now try and enact their revenge.

Revenge is a cycle, "Eye for an eye and the world would go blind". The only thing killing will accomplish is more killing. Our success is dependent on our ideas winning, and nothing destroys peoples willingness to listen than ruthless killing.

lurch@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 216d (5 replies)

I get the feeling, you're not part of the "us".

Val@anarchist.nexus · 2 pts · 216d (4 replies)

What do you mean by this?

lurch@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 216d (3 replies)

You sound like someone trying to make sure they don't get beheaded in a potentially upcoming revolution.

Val@anarchist.nexus · 3 pts · 216d

Of course I am. Aren't you? Being considered not anarchist/revolutionary enough and killed to maintain the purity of the anarchist/revolutionary vision². This is exactly what happens once you start considering some people as killable. The definition expands and expands and you end up with the same authoritarian structures that we try to escape from.

This kind of othering is exactly why we cannot use violence¹ as a means to advance our cause. It gives an easy solution to disagreements, fuels tribalism and sows discord.

¹: on people, property destruction isn't violence. Killing of cops, CEOs, and politicians is always self-defence as they maintain the status quo that is killing us. Although they should always be given the option to quit.

²: kinda like what the bolsheviki did by calling everyone counter-revolutionary. This kind of thinking leads to Kronstadt.

ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.ca · 5 pts · 217d (4 replies)

Except that will never happen. It's unrealistic. There will still be people who will support them and their policies and will try to defend them and would still vote for them if they represented themselves again. It's best to just kill them.

punkisundead@slrpnk.net · 2 pts · 216d (3 replies)

It’s best to just kill them.

How is killing them better than just throwing them out of the community or spending the effort to educate their supporters? Also would you personally pull the trigger, potentially more than once, maybe a few hundred times? And where would you draw the line on who to kill? How high has simeone to score in the anati anarchist scale to score to get a death sentence? And who get to decide who should die? How would you organize this in an anarchist way? Like I struggle to see how this is actually the best way when I try to think it through.

ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.ca · 2 pts · 216d (2 replies)

For some people, I'd pull the trigger, no doubt.

If you were face to face with Hitler. Wouldn't you pull the trigger? We're living in a time now where that type of character is back. There are some leaders who are responsible for hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths because of their policies and actions. The suffering they've caused is incalculable.

And there are others who just hoard an insane amount of wealth that they won by exploiting people and causing misery. Not only is it incredibly grotesque, but they literally have the power to save the world with all that wealth and not only do they choose not to, but they actively try to make it even worse by enabling the aforementioned leaders, destroying the environment, and continuing to needlessly exploit people. They get no sympathy from me.

Val@anarchist.nexus · 1 pts · 216d

It's not asking for sympathy. It's asking to understand that killing them won't fix anything. We are up against ideas. You kill Hitler, someone takes his place. The world isn't being run by great men who we can't do without. It's run by people. Shuffling the names around won't really achieve anything, you need to destroy the thing that is giving them the power. The Ideas inside peoples heads that they need to be governed. As I put very succinctly in another comment. If we can destroy those ideas we don't need to kill anyone as they would be powerless and if we can't killing them won't change anything. In fact it will just allow whoever comes after to use their death as a way to drum up support for wiping you out.

If you want vengeance then lets enact it on this plane of existence, where we know what is happening to them. If you want things to change killing individuals is simply not productive.

punkisundead@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 216d

Of course I would have killed Hitler if I could. But I would have done so when he was actively doing harm, being the leader of genocidal movement / state etc.

I wouldnt pull the trigget when we already removed similar people from power, redistributed all their wealth, destroyed the institutions that they used to stay in power etc. I would have better things to do in that situation.

Also I think there is a difference between building some kind of system to choose, detain and kill those people on bigger scale and just doing some revenge before, during or shortly after a social revolution. I wouldn't stop anyone from doing it, its just not something I would support as solution to a problem.

LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 217d (6 replies)

Excellent article. Not sure if it's just me but I can't see your meme.

Val@anarchist.nexus · 10 pts · 217d (1 reply)

Apparently slrpnk.net has a problem with svg files. Here is a screenshot png: