At some point, someone on the left is going to go over the edge. The rhetoric keeps going higher and crazier.Jason Rantz reports at MyNorthwest:
Rantz: Seattle University professor promotes violent resistance, school won’t condemn itAn associate professor at Seattle University School of Law promoted the value of violent resistance in a Facebook post. The school refuses to comment.Dean Spade, a fringe and controversial and local activist who has earned the institutional support of the Jesuit university, took to Facebook on March 7 to weigh in on the death of Freddie Oversteegen, a Dutch resistance fighter who engaged in violence to fight and kill Nazis during WWII.In the post, Spade celebrated Oversteegen’s violence, but was sad to see climate activists from a group called Extinction Rebellion “parroting” pacifism.
The assertion that non-violent protest is the most effective tactic to bring about change ignores the powerful histories of armed movements for decolonization, self-defense, and freedom, and participates in the very rhetoric used to criminalize activists who have used militant tactics to oppose racist and colonial state violence.
The note is meandering and convoluted. It’s an attempt to try to turn a call to arms into an esoteric academic argument. But Spade implies the necessity of violence in order to fight back at those he perceives as standing in the way of helping save the planet.
That idea–that its [sic] only okay to fight back in limited ways no matter what is at stake–is the very idea used to criminalize movements, especially movements of people of color and colonized people. We can’t celebrate Freddie’s accomplishments and then turn around and utter pacifist nonsense that undermines solidarity with oppressed people and their struggles. If climate change is as pressing as we know it to be, why would we limit our disruption tactics in ways that maintain respect for the governments and businesses that threaten our existence?
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