This YouTube video is another important and excellent presentation by Tad Stoermer, public resistance historian. It gets in to some of the nuances of this topic - to which I would add that drama is often emotional violence, and people of all genders tend to be drawn to the form of violence they are either best at, most comfortable with, or least likely to recognise as violence.
“Why Abusive Authority Always Tries to Make People Afraid of Resistance - YouTube” https://youtu.be/geoe6dDMqgs “Every time authority needs the public to stop paying attention to what it's doing, it reaches for the same names. King. Gandhi. Mandela. Not to reckon with what they did or what they were up against. To weaponise them. To reduce three of the most consequential resisters in modern history to a single, serviceable instruction — be peaceful, don't provoke, know your place — and then aim that instruction at whoever is currently in the way. It is one of the oldest operations in the authoritarian playbook, and it has nothing to do with nonviolence. The British Parliament ran the same move against the American patriots. Southern moderates ran it against abolitionists. The defenders of Jim Crow ran it against the civil rights movement — including against King himself, in real time, while he was alive and the FBI was building a file on him as a threat to national security. The operation does not require the names to be accurate. It requires them to be familiar enough that the comfortable will accept the lesson without examining it. That is the mechanism. Abusive authority does not need to convince the majority that what it is doing is good. It only needs to make resistance look frightening. And nothing does that more efficiently than invoking moral giants, stripped of their actual radicalism, as a rebuke to the people currently resisting. You cannot argue with King. You cannot argue with Gandhi. So the argument is foreclosed before it begins, and the underlying abuse never has to answer for itself. What gets erased in that operation is everything that made those men dangerous when they were alive. King was not surveilled by the FBI because he was a calming influence on American politics. Gandhi was not imprisoned repeatedly by the British Empire because he made colonial authority comfortable. Mandela did not spend twenty-seven years in prison because the apartheid government found his methods acceptable. Authority was afraid of all three of them — genuinely, operationally afraid — because their resistance was working. The governments now laundering their legacies through senators and press conferences are the direct institutional descendants of the governments that tried to destroy them. That is what I want us to work to understand. Not just the rhetorical trick, but its history. Where it came from, how it has functioned across two centuries of American resistance, who it has protected, and what it has always been designed to hide. The sanitised martyr has always been more useful to power than the living resister.” The other comment to be made here is that the opening claim that ICE and police leave people unless they do illegal stuff is clearly so wrong it is absurd and quite possibly a lie.
Possible flaws
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).
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Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here, and Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear
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