This book warranted not only a review, but a chapter by chapter review, substantial analysis, ridicule, and countertheory.  I bought my copy at Harvard Book Store.  It sat on my bookshelf for a week as I finished reading Uberpower by Josef Joffe.  Incidentally, Josef Joffe juxtaposes hard and soft power in a credible way, whereas Peter Gelderloos makes a mockery of hard power by posing as a hard power himself and arguing stridently for unbridled violence in the activist community. As you can see on the cover, he is a douche, but this is no reason not to read his book which at first glance seems to be a Straussian ploy to rally all the stupids with a one centimeter block of paper inked in inflammatory language and taking into consideration all of the salient points and icons of liberal education on the skids. Ultimately it proves to be a big put on, but the author falls for it.  Here is a comprehensive review of the worst swindle since Rock n Roll:

Intro:

How Nonviolence Protects the State is an amusingly titled manifesto by a white boy anarchist and anti-capitalist which argues in favor of violence and property destruction and blames the prevalence of nonviolence in protest movements on a conspiracy by white male racists to falsify violent struggle.

Gelderloos targets "White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and the state." (3)

Gelderloos has special definitions for "violence," "radical," and "anarchist" which are close to the dictionary definitions, but he defines anarchists as both anti-government and anti-capitalist.  He restricts the word "revolution" to its weak form, meaning wide-reaching social upheaval.

The book is an anarchist's reaction to his perception of the protest community's government or way of doing things, in other words he takes the role of a misfit within the general community and also a misfit within the protest community who feels oppressed by the nonviolence of protesters.


Chapter 1: Nonviolence is Ineffective:

Citing a historical "whole spectrum of tactics," Gelderloos argues that nonviolent protest requires at least the threat of violence, or the fear of violence, or a fear of the end of nonviolence where the pacification resources of the state would be insufficient to control populations.  

He calls the independence of India a myth (9) faulting them for forming their own subsidiary corporations and providing resources to the global economy. "Any liberation movement would now have to go up against the confounding dynamics of nationalism and ethnic/religious rivalry in order to abolish domestic capitalism and government that are far more developed." (10) In other words, he shits on Gandhi and curses the national and economic development occurring in India, blaming this on the pimping out of the Hindu cultural consciousness.  Thus, in his narrow worldview Indians have no genuine intellect and are merely clay golems or automatons doing the bidding of their white slavemasters.  His only hope are the Tamil Tigers and 11 year old girls wearing necklace bombs.  Somehow he does not perceive his lionization of teen suicide to be a misuse of the third world by the western intellectual elites.

Gelderloos criticizes the post-coldwar incarnation of nuclear nonproliferation as "a matter of internal policy within the government [rather] than as a conflict between a social movement and a government." (10) Here he lays out the Social Conflict Imperative, which we can describe as all changes in world politics must be the result of a conflict between a social movement and the government.  This is his attempt to foist a rather absurd imperative on the world based on his personal preference and angst -- an activity that an anarchist by definition has no right to do.  Thus is this book is not distinguished from other self-refuting anarchist drivel.

Gelderloos calls the civil rights movement a failure because it failed to acheive full economic equality (socialism) and black nationalism, thumbing his nose at de jure desegregation and the black middle class who he calls a "black petty bourgeoisie," (10) as he slips unavoidably into marxist diatribe. In his mind the civil rights era was a failure because blacks failed to form a separate nation -- but on the other hand, nations are evil and despised by anarchists.  This glaring contradiction is compounded by Gelderloos' support of "intercommunalism" which is the race socialist aspect of the Zionist Kibbutz, Nazi Youth Camp, or Islamic Ummah, namely a race based communal exclusivity or tribal secessionist node.  Again, Gelderloos is faulting history for not providing him with an alternative within the black community from which to rebel against his civilization.  This makes him a reactionary and a whiner, not a revolutionary.

Gelderloos thumbs his nose at voting rights, thus also shitting on the legacy of the Civil War and the hallowed 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments for the mere fact that blacks must vote for whoever is running --or run themselves-- rather than having the intellectual convenience of voting by skin color of the candidate.  His Bazooka Joe criticism of government --that the flavor is terrible and the portions are not large enough-- conceals a belief that government would collapse and anarchists would have a field day if only more black people sat in Congress and ran for president.  His-ideally, American government would be filled with Uncle Tom Black Friedrich Eberts, allowing him to be a Rosa (Parks) Luxemburg.  Again, this vision is absurd because it requires that the "petty black bourgeoisie" that he so despises take over Congress. Gelderloos is a man of irreconcilable contradictions.

Gelderloos goes on to advocate illegal immigration and proclaim the unfairness of targetting the Muslim world in the War on Terror.  In this part of Chapter 1 he loses his reason as a scholar and is merely whipping himself up into a frenzy of moral outrage so that he can be fluffed enough to support his thesis that violence is better than nonviolence.

He holds up the fetishes of the Black Panthers and Mumia Abu Jamal against the fetish of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  He is correct in the matter that militant and reservedly violent black political groups made the nonviolent ones look more acceptable to whites.  But in most cases, black groups did not initiate the violence, and it did not prevent the wholesale attack and assassination of both activist and pacifist black leaders and organizations.  Thus Gelderloos sticks to the ideal of anarchist reactivity and losing games, and in the cases he mentions he is but a voyeur. It is romanticized violence emanating from a comfortable position behind a typewriter.  

It is also important to note that The Civil Rights Act --which was a result of a Social Conflict Imperative-- only resulted in a change in, not a reduction in government. It also did not produce a more limited government. Or rather, it limited the local government's ability to enforce apartheid, but strengthened the ability of federal troops to enforce the Constitution on behalf of minorities providing a precedent for other groups to lobby for SCOTUS/ARMY backed enfranchisement. It enfrancised more people, but increased government and diminished Gelderloos' own franchise, that of violent anti-state revolution, thus vexing him as an issues nomad and publisher of revolution porn.

Gelderloos' take on the Vietnam War is that the peace movement was a failure and the US was primarily defeated politically and militarily by the violent resistance of the Vietnamese. He adds to this image, the image of officer fragging and the Weather Underground bombings.  He shits on the Iraq anti-war peace movment and United for Peace and Justice, comparing them disfavorably with the Socialists who took over Spain after the Al Qaeda train bombings in Madrid threw them into power. Thus is Gelderloos for Unity, Peace and Justice, but only if it is part of a dialectic against the state using violence and bombing to end (certain kinds of) war, change governments to socialist governments and collapse those governments.  To this end, he thinks Al Qaeda (though sexist) is to be praised for facilitating widespread social change in Spain.  "Where millions of peaceful activists voting in the streets like good sheep have not weakened the brutal occupation in any measurable way, a few dozen terrorists willing to slaughter noncombatants were able to cause the withdrawal of more than a thousand occupation troops." (17)  

Gelderloos criticizes Al Qaeda for for being authoritarian, patriarchal, and fundamentalist, but we see here the idealism at work, that somehow anarchists could have the violence and radicalism without the authority, masculinity and fundamental beliefs of angsty males.  Here he is simply an ass.

What Gelderloos would like to do is hitch the the ass of violence to the cart of non-authority and the extirpation of all Western roots. Thus does he usurp the image of Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Guerilla and improvised explosive device as the inevitable alternative to his western sensibility which he is at pain to shed at all costs.  It is another (mis)use of the noble savage in the identity (mal)formation of a member of the college/radical press, in this case South End Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

No absurd thesis of grandiose scale is complete without a reference to The Holocaust. A Christian fundamentalist cites the Banana as evidence of God's Intelligent Design for the universe and his plan for mankind.  Gelderloos cites the Holocaust as example of the failure of nonviolent protest. "The Holocaust was only ended by the concerted, overwhelming violence of the Allied governments that destroyed the Nazi state" (19) albeit for geopolitical, not humanitarian reasons.  Amusingly, Gelderloos notes the advantages of military force, though militaries are by and large products of the state.  However, he blatantly overlooks the violent acts of lone angsty men that served as stimulus propaganda for the incineration of the Warsaw Ghetto.  

This is a problem with Gelderloos and with anarchists generally. Gelderloos holds up the piss poor image of the lone violent rebel and the secret collective in the context of the Holocaust and then overlooks aspects of the entire war, like the Warsaw Uprising.  In that case, Mordechai Anielewicz of the Zionist-socialist movement Hashomer Hatzair committed suicide in a bunker (a universal dyslogy for fanatics), Tosia Altman died of burns in a Gestapo Prison, Adam Czerniaków took a cyanide pill, and Itzhak Katzenelson and countless others died in prison camp.  Many of the people of and not of the uprising were killed as a result.  Those who survived testified in the Nuremburg Tribunals and went on to help form a state in the Middle East.  In short, many were killed, many killed themselves, and others embraced nationalism and set up the mechanisms of state and state oppression elsewhere.  Thus Gelderloos' upheld image is the faulty product of a selective and facile suicidal and group-suicidal reasoning which could be characterized as wasteful, western and utterly Hollywood. "They knew they would be killed whether they were peaceful or not.  By rebelling violently, they lived the last few weeks of their lives in freedom and resistance" (21) It is no coincidence that anarchist groups sponsor so many movie nights.

Gelderloos goes on to cite the example of urban guerillas composed of Jewish Zionists and Communists, which gives the reader a good idea where his head is at and what he would like to do, namely blowing up trains and factories and assassinating government officials.  One merely has to make the intellectual leap that one is fighting the Nazis and all violence is justified. Hence do there exist massive intellectual pathways, publications, and markets servicing the college intellectual's quest to convince himself that his western civilizational opponent is "The Nazis" so that he can rationalize his will to violence through an imperative to self-identify with "the oppressed" wherever they can be identified or imagined.  Add to this the anarchist criteria to identify who has authority and self-identify with the opposite party, and you have the complete -- if torturously convoluted-- anarchist cookbook recipe for leftist crackers of privilege committing acts of bombing and violence.

The way in which Gelderoos postures against "the Nazis" is to characterize western civilization as a power monopoly committing "ubiquitous structural violence." (22) In return he calls for violent attacks (soc-prog fatwas) against "militaries, banks, bureaucracies, and corporations."  Make no mistake, in the first chapter of his book, Gelderloos actively calls for violent acts of destruction and sabotage against targets within the United States and it is all neatly packaged in a full color cover, $10. retail commodity sold at the Harvard Book Store.  Capitalism and free speech prevail!


Chapter 2: Nonviolence is Racist:

According to Gelderloos, nonviolence is an "inherently privileged position" (23) originating in white middle class ideology. This exposes his intense loathing of pacifist white people from the suburbs, which simplifies to self-loathing. Gelderloos loathes himself. The facile opposite to his dystopia of pacifist white suburbanites is violent black people from the ghetto, who in order to be made suitable for Gelderloos' assimilation into their society must be portrayed as reactively violent, or counterviolent, as opposed to nonviolent.  Even Gelderloos rationalizes violence as defensive instead of offensive as he selects a domestic community to use as a surrogate identity through which to sublimate his angsty rage.  Instead of being able to engage in violence offensively, he denies himself agency and goes on to manipulate or prop himself up with the "plight" of black people who --apparently for his convenience-- have a plight handy.

Gelderloos bitches about slavery, saying that nonviolence could not have prevented it, nor can it eliminate its vestiges.  He overlooks the fact that slavery was the end product of warring between Africans, and that warring still occurs between Africans in Africa and between Africans in the United States Diaspora, and that none of this violence prevents or eliminates the vestiges of slavery either. (Hell, it perpetuates it). Nor does he perceive the "privilege" to run rampant in the ghetto committing gun murders against children and engaging in black market anarchy to be the true face of anarchy.  This other commodity does not fit in the glamorous white boy anarchist superstore.  Thus is your average anarchist a general supporter and aggrandizer of the occasional Tookie Williams, but not of Fifty Cent.  This speaks to the general conundrum in which cracker anarchists find themselves regarding Hip Hop, an art form that Gelderloos clumsily and casually dismisses later in the chapter.

In the most laughably recycled paranoid irony, Gelderloos poses as a black guy and accuses white people of swindling the leaders of nonwhite liberation movements and overstating or overattributing nonviolent characteristics to them. (e.g. descriptive vs prescriptive nonviolence).  This conspiracy view combines the Hegelian anthropomorphism of history and the projection by white people that the "anthropos" of History is a white man. This is some shameful shit, because somewhere in his media consumption Gelderloos heard that History is controlled by the White Man, and that History is personified, and put this together to mean that History is the White Man Personified.  He then rebels against this synthetic specter, but he does not negate or deconstruct the specter.  Thus is Gelderloos the white boy fighting against a giant white straw man of his own making, believing himself to be engaged in an act of negation, but really running in a vicious circle.  No wonder he feels violent! This performance act of white people being hip to how black people are hip to white people is an iterated function that does not condense into a standard knowledge primitive (Kp), and is instead a shadowboxing match between simulacrums to the point of exhaustion, but never to the point of victory or mental growth. In this sense, Gelderloos is truly at parity with racist black schizos, yelling at himself in an echo chamber.

Gelderloos has a fairly correct impression of the means by which John F. Kennedy (and King) reluctantly nursemaided the March on Washington and black protest franchise into benign state service rather than face the more militant factions on all sides.  But one is at a total loss to see the sensibility of violence as an applied goal getter (stochastic mechanism) when one looks at the demise of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X.  The civil rights era, may be called a failure, but so too was the Kennedy family, the Bay of Pigs, the Nation of Islam, and the Organization of Afro American Unity.  Sirhan Sirhan did not make life better for Palestine, the SLA was incinerated, etc etc etc.  The late 1960's, early 1970s, was a swirling vortex of death in which people on all sides including the state and social movements did not get what they wanted although violence was liberally applied by all interested parties.  The Vietnamese people won a pyrrhic victory at best.  Gelderloos is either too young or too pig headed to know why the 70's were so mellow and in many ways crappy, or else his view of the universe is unevenly informed by FOIA releases selectively read as personal narrative.

Or else, or in addition, one must view Woodstock, San Francisco, psychedelic music, etc as a pacification program by the CIA which would be an even larger conspiracy theory.  Acid laced bread and circuses to amuse the population and make them less angry and confrontational?  Lyndon Larouche would be capable of spinning such an amazing fantasy, but Gelderloos does not have it in him.  Gelderloos' fragile universe begins with the Sex Pistols and ends with Rage Against the Machine. There is not enough naturally psychedelic compound in him to foster the technicolor paranoid imagery to make the cultural failures of the 60's, 70's and 80's look like a carefully orchestrated act of counterintelligence instead of the semirandom cultural decay process that it was.

Distinct events such as what Malcolm X called "The Farce on Washington" were brokered and managed and massaged, but Gelderloos is way off base in hyping this up into a conspiracy by white people to "disappear the memory of Malcolm X."  He is simply attributing malice to ignorance and also overlooking the Hip Hop revival of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan's Million Man Farce, an activity concurrent with not only government interference, but also with black on black power struggle, drive by shootings and attempted murder within the Nation of Islam.  Even during the Malcolm X revival, there were also black people such as Khallid Muhammad slandering his memory and calling for more subservience within the organization.  It had precious little to do with white people and a lot more to do with the violence and anger that Gelderloos finds so impressive and wants mix so dangerously with his fear of control.

Gelderloos has honed his invective against "white pacifists" to the point of withdrawing solidarity with them, which is of course a major symbolic move to an anarchist.  He prefers instead a system of affirmative action whereby "the people most affected by a system of oppression should be at the forefront of the struggle against that particular oppression" (28)  e.g. blackwashing the white violence movement. Thus is Gelderloos a miniature Soviet Union seeking out groups of oppressed people and placing them at the forefront of his war against the world.  He, like other anarchists are acutely aware that they are honkey mooks coopting black liberation, so the adjustment in behavior is to create Indymedia, Infoshops, and Radical Bookstores which place the plight of the oppressed people du jour at the forefront of white and Jewish histrionics while the crackers struggle to act as behind the scenes facilitators.  It has its parallels in Rap music production with white producers and black emcees, but the self-loathing is not as effectively obscured by pot smoke.  The anarchist world has cracker activists trying to "be down" with brown revolutions.  The function of "downness" is present even in the angry skater-mennonite straight-edge militant rocker world whether or not it makes a clumsy overture to "the racially oppressed."

Gelderloos rags on for a while about how he is better than the Weather Underground because he is more racially enlightened and has fewer inclinations to retire from activism as a professor, but this is not credible given his spate of publications and interviews.  He also spits the compulsory venom against critics and posers who aren't as active as they should be.  He wants to lump them in with white privilege activists who tell black people what to do.  Gelderloos knows best because he has read Ward Churchill and Mumia Abu Jamal.  Emboldened by his reading of Mumia and by his downness, he is even prepared to levy his accusation of nonviolent pussydom on "black bourgeois pacifists."  Gelderloos is down enough to know who is an Uncle Tom and to say so.  He then boasts of his protest activity outside the School of the Americas where he discovered the reluctance of white protesters to address the glaring issue of transsexuals in the military (guffaw!)  That's street credibility! "It was quite apparent that self-criticism (and self-improvement) was an undesirable option;" (31) More like self-loathing and cross dressing were an undesirable --if not repellent-- option.

The criticism levelled by Gelderloos that white activists' "frequent and manipulative usage of people of color as figureheads and tame spokespersons" (32) overlooks his own frequent, or really, constant manipulative usage of the same as figureheads of enraged underprivileged violent spokes-rioters.  This is really the equivalent of Big Willie assfucking you in jail, transposed to the street protest.  Gelderloos feeds into the misconception that black people are more real, and simultaneously more angry and violent than white people.  In fact he uses this misconception to his rhetorical advantage, but it is at the expense of stereotyping.  He is loosely aware of this and thus hastily transfers this negative charge onto the state and then lays the blame for the existence of the state on white pacifists again.  Thus Gelderloos periodically confronts the state with the self-conferred status of angry black man, and finds it necessary to harp on the injustice of the justice system and bolster his case with FOIA documentation on the murder of Fred Hampton.  Again, The Eyes on the Prize series becomes the system by which enraged white college students filter their feelings of oppression and their desire to commit violence.  It is a privilege that white people can obtain these videos on VHS tape and thus redirect their lives and energies.

According to Gelderloos, most of the prominent black organizations of the New Left collapsed because they lost white funding when they became militant.  He believes this to be a continuation of the conspiracy where the US government used the KKK to oppress southern blacks after the Civil War.  Allegedly the KKK is no longer active because the "security of the racial hierarchy [is] assured." (34)  Gelderloos then makes his cursory and limp-dicked analysis of Hip Hop as a music resulting from the failure of the civil rights era which was quickly coopted by white record label executives and for profit media. Here he selectively uses the term "white" to escape saying "Jew" and further scatters this blame with the term "capitalist cultural forces."  He does not say for example that Hip Hop was coopted by "Jewish Zionists and Communists" though he used the term previously, and though the McCarthy Hearings and the Screen Actor's Guild started their shakedown with the Jewish Hollywood media and labor cartels.  Nowhere in his one paragraph cornball analysis of Hip Hop does he note that over 80% of all Hip Hop was published on major or major-subsidiary labels from inception, and mainly consumed by white people.  He is out of his area of limited expertise.

Gelderloos continues by saying that black on black violence is the fault of the police who prevent blacks from channelling their violence on the appropriate target (whites), and that the best thing to do would be for black gangsters to kill the police.  This is somewhat of a perversion of the community policing and community self defense tactics of the Black Panther era.  In Gelderloos' universe, 1) white people --by not accepting a socialist economy-- force black gangsters to sell crack, 2) black people have muscles and pistols, but no brains to decide for themselves, and 3) white people convince them to rap about this stuff on a CD so that corporations can make big money.   He then weighs in on the caterwauling over violence in rap saying it is part of the conspiracy to disarm black people, which makes him another painfully unlistenable lunatic fringe pundit on a well abused topic.

In an amusing section Gelderloos attacks one of his own, Food Not Bombs for advocating nonviolent solutions in Nigeria.  He would prefer violent solutions, bombing and killing.  We are led to believe that FNB alone has overstepped its authority.  On the contrary, many violent communist shitheads are kicked out of --or rapidly get bored with-- Food Not Bombs.  Gelderloos segues into some rehash of Frantz Fanon whose ideas on violent revolution are supposed to "free the native [and Gelderloos] from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction [and make] him fearless and restore his self respect."  Blowing a line of coke can do the same.  I suggest a chemical imbalance is at fault.  He says "proponents of nonviolence who come from privileged backgrounds, with material and psychological comforts guaranteed and protected by a violent order do not grow up with an inferiority complex violently pounded into them." (38) These sound like the rantings of a boy who has had an inferiority complex violently pounded into him.  If on the other hand they are the rantings of a boy who comes from a privileged background with material and psychological comforts guaranteed and protected by a violent order, then the argument is self-refuting.  If it is the previous argument, then it is just projecting.

I believe it is a combination of the two.  Seeing myself in other people, I speculate an early life of privilege and calm disrupted by a season in hell where an inferiority complex was violently pounded into him, followed by a period of reprieve where a computer, typewriter, education, and publishing contacts were provided to him.  That produced the requisite mixture of entitlement, outrage, angst, and personal identity struggle necessary to lecture people in this way.  But then Gelderloos' recurrent tropes of The Black Panthers, Mumia, The American Indian Movement, Ward Churchill, Anti-Racism and Marxism speak of access to the University Bookstore, the New Arrivals section of the Library and a plethora of radical movies and radical movie nights.  Gelderloos is a member of FNB and Anarchist Black Cross, so his reading and viewing patterns are a matter of fixed knowability.


Chapter 3: Nonviolence is Statist:

The first laugh in this chapter is the accusation "statist" which is a word only used by certain cranks.  Anti-statism or abolition of the state is the objective of a very tiny minority of  persons, by my rough estimate only one in two hundred per social network judging by people I know and speak to regularly.

Gelderloos' definition of a "state" is Bakuninesque / antagonistic: "a centralized bureaucracy that protects capitalism." (45) His definition contains the moral assumption that money is the root of all evil. Alternately, Gelderloos defines the state as "a white supremacist, patriarchal order," (self-loathing again) and the "imperialist expansion" of a "sole legitimate purveyor of violent force within their territory."  Thus he also paradoxically holds the moral imperative against force initiation common to Libertarians and the passive aggressive's compulsion to use reactive force.  Here he perverts Newton's Laws of Motion believing them to be proscriptive and not descriptive.  Under this reasoning, whoever initiates force (breaks inertia) is at fault.  Whoever restores equilibrium is performing a social service.  Ironically, Gelderloos' rhetoric is not much different from the rhetoric of Anglo-American-Israeli (Palmerstonian) state powers, which he both resents and tries to emulate.

Gelderloos argues that pacifism is statist because it pacifies the opposition to the state.  Again this is a marxist-leninist-maoist assumption that social progress requires armed conflict and property destruction.  He attempts to reverse the claim of pacifists that militants are government agent-provocateurs by saying that the government only provokes what it believes will be containable violence.  He has absorbed the "all options remain on the table" rhetoric of preemptive warfare.  This makes him a left-center shachtmanite, e.g. a leftist who has absorbed some elements of neoconservative rhetoric.  He cites government monitoring of activist groups as evidence that the government prefers pacification to outright combat, and he tries to retain outright combat as an desirable option in interacting with the government.  Put another way, he embodies the slogan "regime change begins at home" and he advocates or retains the "kill the president" option.  He also wishes to retain the option of the unreasonable or angry outsider who forces the hand of the mandarins.

This view does have a form of historical validity if one takes into consideration W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Louis Farrakhan, Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X, who were ostracized from pacifist nationalist organizations but who retained the monopoly on masculinity, credibility, and appeal.  However it does not take into consideration the limited viability of open conflict and the government's willingness to execute the (statistically fewer) people who have the audacity, fortitude or balls to openly challenge the state and who use or call for violence.  Again Gelderloos is caught in the museum / oubliette of lone actors, secret cabals, celebrity heroes and dead people.  Gelderloos, like all wannabe revolutionaries of this generation recite the history of COINTELPRO (I even did my senior thesis on this topic).  Gelderloos eulogizes ALF, ELF, and SHAC in order to enumerate the government's priority in preventing (or fear of seeing) violent acts by domestic terrorist groups.  He compares this to the US Counterinsurgency in Iraq and sees himself as fomenting an insurgency in the United States and a war against US Government Psy-Ops. 

Gelderloos builds a poorly amalgamated mental artifact combining the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the Iraqi Insurgency's self-defense and the US Ecoterrorist's defensive security culture.  This syncretistic travesty gives great insight into his mental workings.  He views himself / Americans as conquered or defeated and wants to liberate himself, even voyeuristically.  To this end he tries to rationalize that he is an impoverished black from the 1970s, or an Iraqi militant, or a communist oppressed in the Red Scare, or even a rogue state.  He is endlessly trying on costumes to establish a justification for a reactively violent identity.  There is no justification for a reactively violent identity.  There is only an explanation and a constant search for an outlet.  Gelderloos confesses six ways from Sunday that the activist community, to which he is currently attracted / infatuated, does not serve this purpose without undergoing substantial alteration.  This makes him not a "philosopher of the dangerous" exploring the wonderful possibilities of proactive violence.  It makes him a validation seeking conformist.

Gelderloos says "a pacifist behaves like a well-trained dog who is beaten by his master." (51)  He does not perceive that the rabid dog, or snarling dog is either a bluffing chihuahua or at least is not immune from being beaten or even destroyed.  For the common good rabid dogs are often destroyed.  Gelderloos then flashes the credentials of Frantz Fanon.  One imagines that Gelderloos is unimportant and rather Frantz Fanon is the one to debunk and demystify.  However, it is Gelderloos who holds and transmits the meme, so he too remains a whipping boy of marginally relevant significance.  He is certainly a (South End Press) commodity whose relative value must be either rated highly or lowly.  I rate this commodity lowly because it has low utility and is overly commonplace.  It is also distributed by (Alexander Dwinell's) dot org, though I still paid money for it in a store.  Thus I have invested $10 dollars in writing this article and have given it away for free, which is perhaps as strange as composing a book for little return and having a nonprofit sell it to a store to markup at a significant profit.  It is thus not a successful commodity for the producer.  We must both be members of the "bourgeois intellectual economic elite." The mind boggles at the system.

Gelderloos balks that it was the National Guard who physically desegregated American schools.  No anarchists were responsible.  No Viet Cong.  No Blackstone Rangers. All he can do is imagine "what if" some other rogue organization had done it, or "what if" the National Guard is not there to defend civil rights in the future.  I propose a counterargument:  Either you choose to believe we are in a national crisis in which everyone's rights (some strange new unenumerated infinite or infinitessimal rights) are currently being violated; or you choose to believe that we the people are largely in possession of our rights and liberties and no domestic military conflict over civil rights is imminent.  The first belief is negotiable.  The second belief is not.  We Americans are enjoying the rights dividend of the peace era and the civil rights era.  We are by and large satiated with liberty and freedom, and so in our spare time we invent things to be angry and fight about, or fight for.  That is the counterargument to Gelderloos' personal and allegedly global hysterical state of falling sky.  A good slap in the face is the kind of violence his type needs.

Let's go with the first belief and enumerate some of the strange new rights that Gelderloos feels deprived of: The right to destroy power relationships through the act of speech.  Gelderloos faults the 1st Amendment (as a failure) because free speech is not the "deplorable word" of Narnia's White Witch.  It does not cause the shackles to crumble.  Gelderloos pines about the suppression of his right to "say what we want to bosses, judges and police officers." (54)  He tries to relate this to the occasional protester arrested for holding up a placard and screaming at a political event where he trespasses.  i.e. Sabotage and trespassing are not accepted as forms of free speech, thus we should become angry and perform angry speeches endorsing acts of sabotage and trespassing.  Alas, murdering someone is also not an act of free speech either.  Gelderloos will have to stick to writing books.  But the supreme rebuttal is that we can in fact say what we want to bosses, judges and police officers.  Gelderloos is just a pussy.  I have told bosses how much to pay me.  I have made fun of police officers looking for the wrong guy.  I have told judges that I am unsuitable for jury selection because I have bigotted views.  One is free to say anything, provided one is ready to accept the outcome.  Gelderloos is part of the circa 1980 generation that doesn't want to accept the outcome that results from proclaiming to the world that one is a douchebag.  I'm from the 1970s.  I'll do it.

Another purported right that Gelderloos feels deprived of is the right to throw jersey barriers while wearing a bandanna and a ski mask.  This right is so fundamental to our Constitution and yet so frequently denied that students from Harvard have to go to Mexico to be experience this firsthand.  In Ohio, people simply travel to Toledo, where they will also complain of the violation of their right to throw bricks at people.  Did you know that scores of black hooded and bandannaed peaceful protesters and professional witnesses to human rights violation are mercilessly run down every year by policemen on mopeds?  Shocking.  In plain english, The Black Bloc and the SPUSA and its Infoshops feel that their right to smash windows and hunt for racists among the nation's suburban communities is being violated by racist neo-nazi KKK police officers and that this is happening all over the world -- so buy your ticket now for the next outrage in Genoa.

We really should see this as a form of crowd surfing, as even a cursory glance at the cover of Gelderloos' book shows that he is the typical idiot-with-a-wiffle crowdsurfer making the victory sign to a crowd of NYPD like it is a Dead Kennedys show and he's about to jump off the stage.  In reality the cover is not intended to be funny or ironic, and just looks like someone posturing at a jersey barrier.  In short is it banal and not sarcastic, humorous, or juxtaposed.  He jokes about imposing a quota at protests such that every activist breaks at least one window or hits one cop.  It is amusing, but even he admits it is fantasy.  Trying to be serious, he states or perhaps reiterates that "Modern governments, which have long studied methods of social control, no longer view peace as the default social condition, interrupted by outside agitators.  Now they understand that the natural condition of the world is conflict." (60)  This reads like bad --there is no expression for this-- like bad conspiracy drama about an alternate modernity which only discovered Thomas Hobbes yesterday.  So we can add being born yesterday to bad humor and banality.

Gelderloos continues to edutain us with the startling revelation that gubmints want "to fracture and control revolutionary movements." (62)  This is V for Victory without the popcorn.  We are led to believe that an Anarchist, who by definition senses and then cringes from the principal agent of control and division in a room, will through the miracle of violent direct action seize this control from the gubmint -- and... do... what... with... it?  Oh yes.  Form some kind of viable cooperative nongovernmental utopia where everyone is satisfied.  In other words, he will revert it back into the state of nature, and somehow the state of nature will be better under his philosophical GOVERNANCE!  Asshole.  Who just discovered Thomas Hobbes yesterday?

Of course, the Founding Fathers (Patriarchs) pulled off the grand scheme of limited government to some extent, but Gelderloos is not an American founder. He is an American by-product trying to embody the reductio ad absurdum of the limited government equation.  Even if his ideas are construed as proto global state confederalism, they still fall short of a reasoned political analysis of a world in which a superstate, federations, nuclear weapons and a global economy exist as initial conditions.  This is an unforgivable lapse of intellect common to every Anarchist.


Chapter 4: Nonviolence is Patriarchal:

Leave off the fact that a male deconstructing masculinity (unless as a ruse to get into the pants of female listeners) is nothing short of a parlor game of homosexuality.  Gelderloos platonically faults Patriarchy (rule by men) as being the cause of sexism, which according to him is a rampant social ill.  He goes further, saying that patriarchy is based on the "false division of all people into two rigid categories (male and female) that are asserted to be both natural and moral." (65) This quote expressly marks his thesis as homosexual and evidences yet another category of persona that the enraged and reactive author selects to encapsulate his feelings of oppression and angsty violence.  Act Up! Act Gay! But is he willing to fellate other males in order to gain passage into the man hut of social equality?  These are the burning questions. 

His fight against the "gender binary" reduces to the organic-adolescent rejection of the mathematical binary and rejection of the hard limit as electromechanical or mathematical function in general; a will to engage in sigmodal parsing of binaries absent the understanding of Heaveside functions and Nash Equilibria in gamespace.  These are sophisticated mathematical deficiencies common to people who believe that everything is a teleological and epistemological trainwreck.  It is likely one of the sources of Gelderloos' inability to accurately model the universe of human social interaction.   He should study polarity changes in livestock herding and flocking patterns, as well as identity transformations and invariants of the series.  These eradicate the obsessive-compulsive aversion to categories and assigned values that is common to all labelphobes.

Gelderloos claims that patriarchy makes women and gays feel "ugly, dirty, scary, contemptible and worthless." (65) He says that this falsely asserts that men have exclusive right to exercise the power of violence.  In other words it creates a deficit where women and gays are cheated of their right to commit acts of violence.  One infers from this that Gelderloos feels ugly, dirty, scary, contemptible and worthless and could only do violence as a woman or a gay.  This is pathetic.  One imagines what his music collection must be.  Considering that the majority of female violence is as a gang, scratching, kicking, biting, penile amputation with knives, and murder of children by drowning; considering that the majority of gay violence is domestic, or rape, or pederasty, or even principally hurled verbal barbs of insidious contempt , one wonders what in fuck's sake a world would look like if Gelderloos were able to rally the masses to engage in this kind of physically violent, large scale hermaphroditic theatrical catharsis.

One may consider whether a world would be better with more peace, love, acceptance, and equanimity between the genders.  But this is not what Gelderloos wonders.  Gelderloos wonders what the world would look like if we were allowed a brief period where women at large could (defensively of course) "pull the mechanical pencil out of her pocket and plunge it into her assailant's [western civilization's] jugular." (66)  He envisions goon squads of dykes mobilizing lynch mobs to "beat up and kick out her abusive husband [capitalism]."  He is a twink, living vicariously through the rage of women.  Again Gelderloos writes the fantasized equation of: oppressed, justified, defensive, angry, group, weapon, murder = liberation.  Let alone that in this fantasy he has tits.

The correllation of patriarchy to capitalism is clumsy at best and is part of the attempt by the allegedly radical left to fuse all the reactive and resentful fringe issues into a broad mass movement.  Gelderloos does no better to streamline these disparate stupidities into a cogent synthesis.  But he betrays more of his feelings, claiming that patriarchy creates a culture which by its existence prohibits the formation of "a culture that supports us as we build healthy relationships and heal from generations of violence and trauma." (67)  Again we see the need to eliminate this culture and replace it with that one.  Again we see the portrayal of coalition building in a reactive esoteric environment as normal social behavior and not as a diseased form of artificially autistic insularity.  Again we see the belief that codependent collectives constitute healthy relationships.  Gelderloos tactily projects the violence and trauma of his own personal family experience onto the stylized moviescreen of a decades long movie on Hegelian social history.  He personifies his angst as though a thousand Susan B. Anthonys or Farrah Fawcetts were raped and sodomized over a decades long struggle to acheive his personal healing.  This transgresses at least three boundaries of self and other including that of gender, time, and inanimate objects and exposes the morbid identity issues with which Gelderloos struggles.

Here is the kernel. Peter Gelderloos makes his core complaint and confession here:  "Pacifism simply does not resonate in people's everyday realities, unless those people live in some extravagant bubble of tranquility from which all forms of civilization's pandemic reactive violence have been pushed out by the systemic and less visible violence of police and military forces." (66)  Here is the admission of the core flaw in Gelderloos' personality which he manifests as a book purporting to be an academic work on --mind this-- not the merits of violence, but on the demerits of nonviolence.  He presents a work of anti-non, that is a reaction against the nonexistence of something that he wants expressed by a group to which he would like to belong; a double conspiracy by both civilization and the rebels against civilization, AGAINST HIM.  He is not an agent provocateur, but rather a freelance idiot provocateur.  If only the bubble of tranquility could be stolen from other people so that (in his words!) the pandemic reactive violence could be unleashed.  Only then he would be comfortable as a human being. 

That's a tall order in any era.  One asks the classically cynical or Epictetian question: Is global unrest or pandemic reactive violence internal (not external) to the agent's influence?  it is of course, mostly external.  One asks the Platonic question: Is global unrest and pandemic reactive violence part of the greater good?  One asks the Kantian question: Is global unrest and pandemic reactive violence an a priori moral imperative? One asks the Scientific question: is global unrest and pandemic reactive violence statistically possible?  The answer to all of these questions is NO!  Gelderloos does not ask these questions, but they arise of their own force or as chain reactions to his obtuse demands for oil and water to mix or for an Anselmic conceivably inconceivable event to occur and bring the rapture.  Gelderloos' attempt to parse the binary with fuzzy logic results in all fuzz and no logic.  Furthermore, Gelderloos can not relate to anyone's "extravagant" bubble of tranquility.  In the words of Bob Dylan, "That's poverty, man."

Watch out for Gelderloos.  He advocates "burning down the office of a magazine that consciously markets a beauty standard that leads to anorexia and bulima" (67)  proving that he is not entirely incapable of Platonic reasoning.  He is platonic enough to support domestic terrorism when free speech violates his ideal of fat women in burlap or hemp clothing.  He is even realistic enough to know that women are not capable of the degree of sustained high reactive violence that he wishes to harness.  But the one shred of his masculinity -- the will to violence -- only manifests in a transgendered (in japanime Bishi) form.  Women reserving the right to do violence is a necessary condition for their (read his) social liberation.  Cue the parade of burqa clad women in bomb belts.

On page 70, Gelderloos lets fly another wild claim.  Radical activist communities are voluntary, but "white supremacy and patriarchy are [not] entirely voluntary associations."  In other words, the beliefs vs acts dichotomy of Christian fundamentalism applies to Gelderloos and to all radical activist communities.  The nicest and most considerate straight white guy is still an involuntary member of patriarchy and white supremacy.  The flip side of this assertion is that the "voluntary association" of radical activist communities contains no manner of coercion and intimidation, and remarkably, has no mandate to entertain contrary opinion.  (Biz-)ergo, when pacifists want to ignore contrary opinion (his) it is a greater offense than when violentivists don't want to hear contradictory opinion (theirs).  This convolution is uniform across ALL radical activist communities, (especially SDS) where free association also includes free dissociation and shunning.  Gelderloos does not write all of this, but he projects it when he places beliefs above acts, institutions above individuals, and nurture above nature.

Identification as a feminist is a useful trope for Gelderloos because feminism is one of the recurrent splinter factions in social activist groups, and it is necessary that a wide social movement be not only as inclusive as possible (for size and mass), but that it splinter itself to ensure maximum representation of micro factions and ostensibly ward off hostile splintering by the evil forces of COINTELPRO.  True to his genre, Gelderloos provides a feminist critique of the Black Panthers and Bolivian Feminist criticism of Communist revolutionaries, and then segues into drag queen accounts of the 1969 Stonewall Riots.  These minor key shift identifications are useful because radical activists as epistemo-phobes reserve the right to change their allegiance, gender, goal or identity as --to use a neoconservative media cliche-- events change on the ground.  The "events on the ground" consist of shifting racial or gender presence at meetings, cash flow, or a sudden discovery that one's rhetorical ability and self-image do not measure up to the caliber or rank of fellow activists.  Or as in the case of Bakunin, one is simply not invited or not respected.  Subfactionalism is thus an option which must always remain on the table.  It is a form of storming out of the room without leaving.

Predictably, Gelderloos talks about Emma Goldman for a while.  He also mentions Mollie Steimer of the New York Yiddish Anarchist paper Frayhayt.  He then morphs into the Tiger Lily of the American Indian Movement (AIM), another fixation among college students.  He plays the female side of anarchist revolution citing a short list of women who were either arrested, deported or killed.  He makes some facile feminist critiques of the Weather Underground.  Ultimately at his most grandiose, he tries to undo the female defense mechanism and eradicate the female instinct to pacify, placate, "defuse and connect" (77).  In short, women are not really violent and savage enough for him, and --like his accusation against affluent blacks-- he attributes this to a bourgeois feminist intellectual conspiracy at UCLA to fabricate or exaggerate the importance of female hormones and defense mechanisms in a way that is wholly unhelpful to the effort to generate pandemic reactive violence.  He is unwittingly trying to make women more mannish.  Apparently, he is not even a true pussy but more like Jame Gumm in Silence of the Lambs.  He covets while tucking his penis between his legs and dancing in a girl suit.


Chapter 5:  Nonviolence is Tactically and Strategically Inferior:

This chapter begins with a series of definitions thereby seeking to establish that "tactics flow from strategy, strategy from goal" (81) and that violence and nonviolence are limits on the set of tactics, and that "a limited set of tactics will constrain the available options for strategies."  He also says that most people do this backwards.  His analysis here is straightforward and sound.  He has an accurate, near dictionary definition of "goal" and a moderately practical understanding that the goal of "a world without coercive hierarchies [...] the abolition of an interlocking set of systems that include the state, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and ecocidal forms of civilization [...] is very far away" (81).  He has a strong definition of strategy: "the game plan for acheiving the goal [...] the coordianted symphony of moves that leads to the checkmate." (82) The definition of tactics is sufficient: "the actions or types of actions which produce results [..] ideally with a compounding effect [...] concentrating force [...] along the lines [...] of the strategy."  He rightly observes that activists quibble over tactics without any analysis or synchronization of goal or synthesis of strategy.  He is outraged.  He has a credible sense of the construction of autonomous zones using a concert of moves designed to create areas of autarchy within a state.  He presents a decent argument that broad tactics are better than constrained tactics in goal acquisition.  His criticism that pacifists tend to coalign mainly by tactic and not by goal is a reasonable observation.

Gelderloos says "nonviolence is nothing but a severe limitation of the total options." (83)  This is an unquestionably sound statement.  In his attempt to acheive the preservation of violence, Gelderloos creates a not so extravagant bubble of tactical necessity which he links to the construction of zones of autonomy.  Here he is more mature than the sum of his personal problems and his need for membership and acceptance.  He could mature into a true human being instead of remaining an unchecked feeling.  This brief passage could be excised from the book and presented as a cogent articulation on the merit of violence.  It can be read separately from the context of anarchist reactivity and resentment as an emergent truism of human freedom sans the melodrama of liberation struggle.  It is proof that all sorts of useful ideas come from all sorts of people at all degrees of mental or intellectual stability.

Gelderloos enumerates four major types of pacifist strategy: "the morality play, the lobbying approach, the creation of alternatives, and generalized disobedience."  (83) This is accurate.  In fact it is not exclusively pacifist, but rather peaceful.  Or put another way, these are the soft power alternatives to obedience.  One is inclined to say there are even more than four strategies, ranging even into the economic.  Gelderloos is ignorant to matters of economy.  His is preoccupied with rejecting the efficacy of speeches, forums, pamphlets, texts, and infoshops, mainly because they do not measure up to the "elite control of a highly developed propaganda system that can destroy any competing propaganda system that nonviolent activists might create." (84) That is debatable. Who here has not fantasized about beating up journalists and blowing up news and radio stations or media guilds?  Yet, Gelderloos sorely underrates the influence of blogs, media centers, newsgroups, razorwires, and independent music labels, though he is clearly a consumer and user of them. Gelderloos is not prepared to analyze and inform himself on the cybernetic and signals processing structures of mass media or on control theory and predictive technology.  This is why, though young, he is philosophically and tactically obsolete as an activist.  His disillusionment with the lack of public response (pandemic reactive violence) to truth or facts in the media about things like Iraq WMD does not mature into an "extravagant" bubble of cynical tranquility and an impetus to educate himself on control theory and signals intelligence.  He is stuck in the mode of "Hulk mad, Hulk SMASH!"  Here his shining moment of maturity slips back into the comfortable old sneaker of emo outrage as he runs back to the info-supermarket of (A)narchist & (P)oser.

To reduce his complaints to a succinct, short list, Geldeloos says: 1) Alternative media is not a good backbone of strategy because it cannot compete with the scale of corporate media.  2) People are not equally educated.  Subcomplaint: "people will respond to radical information with syllogism, moralism, and polemics." (87) 3) There is a false assumption about the potency of ideas.  People do things by rote, and they like to lie to themselves. "people when argued into a corner will not have an epiphany -- they will lash back with a primal defense." (88) "Idly circulating subversive information [applies a force multiplier to the number zero.]"

These are valid if not astute observations, and some day Gelderloos might draw insight instead of angst from them.  There is a bribe: he could feasibly exhaust his fight response while boxing against his own shadows and disappointments and finally come back around to the bubble of tranquility if it can be seen as a didactic shift into the cold, calculating and tactical.  Here Gelderloos has another avenue to reclaiming his masculinity: the conversion process from Anarchist to Vulcan to Human. Cynically, if his opinion of fellow man and of ideas, reason, and epiphany can be diminished below a certain threshold (as they are diminishing) Gelderloos will be able to liberate himself from the need to be liberated and to liberate others.  By activating this string of supertext: (I am free from the act of freeing myself) Gelderloos 2.0 will cease to be a slave to liberation theology.  Gelderloos 1.0 would view this as selling out, or as accepting slavery and domination.  But like the episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, he is the last man on deck in the subspace rift, and everyone else has escaped or been liberated already.  By the yardstick of Epictetus slavery is defined as the individual's beholdenness to an external.  Gelderloos creates externals and then tries to liberate himself from them.  Solipsism is as Epictetus says a tactic of last resort. Gelderloos is free to abandon the tactic.  This tactic, not the tactic of nonviolence, is how "they" oppress Gelderloos when Gelderloos subliminally oppresses himself.

Playing along with the Gelderloos' solipsistic mind trap through the rest of Chapter 5, we find the statement: "Riots and insurrections are even more successful at creating ruptures in this dominant narrative of tranquility."  (89)  No doubt, riots and insurrections are sporadic, ferocious, and look great on television.  They are perhaps even cathartic. (I have never participated in a riot, so I don't know).  He also says it's harder to ignore a bombing than a protest, and "the more images of forceful resistance people receive through the media, the more the narcotic illusion of social peace is disrupted."  This is true, but it is also true of operant conditioning and Hebbian reinforcement that continuous stimulation with violent impulses makes one more violent.  Gelderloos should be seen for what he is: an addictive personality with a desire-aversion complex to controlling public violence.  What he wants and what he does not want, e.g. his desire and aversion, or Epictetus map, give insight into his will, his drive, and the absent helmsmanship not of his morality, but of his identity.  The contradiction results from the amphiboly of his personality.  How can one defend one's own identity against an other when a) the other is a fictionalized abstraction of reality or a figment of one's imagination b) one refuses to have an identity in the first place?  These problemattiques loom greater than the palintonos between violence and nonviolence that distracts Gelderloos from ending the struggle between his fictitious self and the fictitious projection of himself as state.  Gelderloos needs to read Baudrillard and Virilio.

Gelderloos finally gets around to faulting Christianity as a pacifist movement that evolved into a movement of violence, pillage, torture, and civilization in which the morality play played a significant part in whipping up foaming sentiments of xenophobia and obedience to theocracy.  Having procrastinated long enough he finally shits on the pie -in-the-sky mentality.  He begins to realize that large passive majorities are easy to control by a violent minority or a minority that uses cloaked violence.  But, he is still evangelizing to the masses, proclaming his angry desire to destroy the transmitters that he believes indoctrinated the masses contrary to his ideals and beliefs.  He says "educating and building a liberating ethos are necessary to fully root out hierarchical social relationships, but there are concrete institutions such as law courts, public schools, boot camps, and public relations firms" (92) which must also be violently destroyed.  Here Gelderloos exposes that he is a liberation theologian --but one who wants to blow shit up too.  You find at least one of these at every meeting of about 50 socialist-anarchist activists.  (At least five others are there to subvert rival activist organizations). His criticism of peaceable lobbying and alternative tactics are as plaintive as his criticism of media: we are outnumbered, outstaffed, outequipped!  This forces him to be a novice proponent of violent asymmetrical warfare, though he is ignorant of this topic and the degree to which it has already been systematically presented pre-911 by the US military academies.

Punks like to lose.  Being unsuccessful is not a total problem for Gelderloos, as he applies the term mainly to tactics.  With all the greasy optimism of an adherent to the religion of The Commune, he says that although the Red Brigades in Italy were unsuccessful, they succeeded in "expanding public education and social spending, decentralizing some government functions, bringing the Communist Party into the government, and legalizing birth control and abortion." (96)  The USA already has legal birth control and abortion, some decentralized functions, and people willing to expand public education and social spending. Therefore we have to conclude that Gelderloos really wants to use violence and the threat of violence to totally defund the military, to totally socialize incomes and redistribute wealth, to bring the Communist Party into the government, and to create an expansive abortion rights vanguard.  Therefore, Gelderloos is really just spouting off CPUSA bullshit from a series of nodes which still operate, though unfunded since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Gelderloos, though from Virginia, distributes his book from a Samizdat located in Cambridge, MA which is a home to several CPUSA samizdats.  They retain the objectives of the Soviet era, but they now fund themselves through capitalist book sales and they minimize overhead and collect donations by claiming 501 c) 3 nonprofit status.  In doing this, they hope to be "creating and sustaining a revolutionary movement and laying the groundwork for the liberated societies that will come after revolution" (96).

Gelderloos discusses the homeless shelter, free food and clothing depot that he created in Harrisonburg, Virginia which was shut down by the police for zoning violations.  He tries to compare himself to the Black Panthers and their free breakfast program.  This is a passion play!  Break the law, inconvenience the community, and then claim you are oppressed and that this oppression is linked to the historical oppression of African Americans.  What's needed, Gelderloos reasons, is to emulate Palestinians and Chiapans, e.g. throw rocks, shoot weapons, raid the storehouses.  To be fair to Gelderloos, he does not really want throw rocks.  He wants to shoot guns and blow up bridges.  He says, "blowing up a train line will scare and anger people opposed to the liberation movement more than a peaceful lockdown will." (101)  Gelderloos wants people to be scared and angered, and he believes terrorism is preferable to sit-ins.  He doesn't go so far as to say that maiming the innocent is desirable, but we are left to the altruism and inherent sense of responsibility and priority of anarchists in this regard.  I am not comforted.

Gelderloos addresses the amusing travesty that is licensed protests, designated protest pens, and prescribed marching routes.  These are of course ridiculous.  The idea of obedient civil disobedience is itself profoundly ridiculous.  Then again, knowing one's rights and having a Constitution on one's person and acting within the scope of the law is an advantage.  Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver were a greater threat to the establishment because they knew their right to keep and bear arms, and they also ran for office.  One can argue that obeying the law to the chagrin of one's opponent has even worked well for Hamas.  Of course these groups used violence as well, and some of them use violence primarily.  In the case of the IRA /Sinn Fein, they used violence and negotiation simultaneously.  None of this is in question.  What is in question is how much of being an ass is actually effective, how much being an ass creates the problem in the first place, and whether one chooses to be an ass, is habitually an ass, is a compulsive ass, or is easily made to act like an ass by his asinine compatriots.  No intellectual or analytical coating can convincingly gild a compulsive ass.

What Gelderloos lacks in self-control he projects outward as a rebellion against social control theoreticians.  He sees himself as trying to move beyond preparation and nonviolence and into insurgency.  The book, "How Nonviolence Protects the State" is an inflammatory language manifesto broken into seven clever chapter-theses designed to rope every anarcho-socialist activist into the insurgency and stimulate them into outbreaks of violence.  This is the book's true humor.  He thinks he is moving against the forces of social control.  That is to say he does not view himself as a force of social control, or more plainly a sophomoric nitwit trying to condition more violence into the population.   He is like a blinded Platonist philosopher king and polyphemos, with a single eye toward violent insurgency and a self-shielded fabric or black bandanna that prevents him from seeing that he wishes to rule by creating mayhem and destruction.  He is an unintentional harlequin ever deposing himself from his own battle throne or falling out of his director's chair.  Gelderloos the projectionist beams his self-sabotage onto "social control theoreticians," and more reductively, he screams that "social control is evil" in a voice which trembles with the hypocritical desire to wield it.

Chapter 5 predictably includes (The Passion of) The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), proving that anarchists are produced in a cookie cutter.  There is some bitching about the Palmer Raids, and some compulsory shout outs to Sacco and Vanzetti whose murder and oppression are attributed to WASP xenophobia.  There is the compusory obeisance to the Italian Commies, being that they were the primary opponents to Mussolini.  There is some racy stuff about violent acts by Appalachian coal miners killing scabs. All this stuff is anarchist porn.  After intellectually jacking off for a while into his pile of anarchist porn, Gelderloos swaggers into some braggadocio implying that compared nonviolent activists, anarchists are the cockroaches that will survive the bomb of government infiltration and intelligence gathering.  When he is whipped up into a good lather, he denounces nonviolent pacifists in a startling and amusing parallel to your average white, flanelled suburban Vietnam hawk.  He does not say the peace sign is the footprint of the American Chicken, but he is about one Coors beer and a wifebeater away from saying so.


Chapter 6: Nonviolence is Deluded:

Firstoff, you don't go using the word "deluded," or "delusional" unless you want to come off sounding like a crank.  If you are a crank, you should take pains not to sound like a crank.  Gelderloos breaks with this hallowed tradition at the beginning of Chapter 6.  The next nail gun to the head is that the first sentence of the chapter begins with "Ward Churchill says that..." which would make most people drop the book and run away screaming, thus blowing the sale if they, as I do, flip through a book in the bookstore and read the first sentence of every chapter.  In any event, "Ward Churchill says that pacifism is pathological" (117) so it must be true.  In addition, Gelderloos says it's delusional (de-l-o-o-s-ional).

Gelderloos repeats his assertion that violence combined with a variety of tactics gets the goods.  He rejects the criticism that violent movements cannot remain anti-authoritarian.  Reducing the amount of double negatives in his assertion, we can assert for him that he says violent movements do not uniformly become authoritarian.  This of course reduces to: some violent movements do not become authoritarian. He brazenly attempts to bolster this pathetically optimistic assertion by saying that violence is harder to do than nonviolence, because nonviolence is for rich cowards.  This is not a convincing supporting argument.  He borrows more brass and more testicle by claiming that he knows a black nationalist who has been in prison longer than Gelderloos has been alive.  That is not a convincing argument either.  He says that violent activists can (read should) irrevocably screw up their lives.  That is certainly not a convincing argument either.  Some people screw up their lives habitually.  In fact, these tricks are for kids. When Brer Gelderloos wants to conjure an image of harder life, greater struggle, and deeper reality, he sculpts him a tar baby.  Then he quantum leaps from the briar patch onto the fire hose sidewalk photo to shake a brace of corny rich white people telling oppressed black people to remain nonviolent.  Leaping around anachronistically, the brambles of his argument snag the distempers of four decades ago as this rabbit jacks history.

Another of the pacifist "delusions" that Gelderloos tries to dispel is that violent activists are stupid, base, impulsive, irrational cretins.  He says, "revolutionary activism, in some of its manifestations has a pronounced intellectual streak" (119) and cornily holds up several examples of prominent black activists who read books.  This is telling, as he immediately assumes it is the black activists who have to be defended as literate, and not the illiterate and innumerate Caucasian prep school and ivy league drop outs who cruised their way through school only to become junk food intellectuals, consensus organizational gang members, and narcisstic rage aggressive proto-terrorists.  We are left with a Farrakhanian rhetorical intellectualism, a dumber, pseudo-baptist soapbox intellectualism, an educated house slave intellectualism that is readily adaptable to the narcissistic rage of angry white college students.  Imagine a white boy in an "Educated Black Man" T-Shirt.

Leaping from from Black Man to Black Bloc, Gelderloos tries to show that the Black Bloc is more effective than peace marches because it frightens the police.  That is an abject crock of shit.  Then, changing his bandanna from black to green, he is off to Palestine, explaining how the Palestinian Intifada has made every second of the Israeli Occupation hurt.  This is a true fact, but it does not correlate to the Black Bloc unless you consider similar costumes to constitute similar circumstances.  It is also an atrocity that Gelderloos compares crackers who go on vacation to Genoa in black hoodies to people living in apartheid and trying to maintain a scrap of cordoned living space beneath a bulldozer.  It is one in a litany of Gelderloos' pompous comparisons and situationist swindles.

Still donning the dishcloth of the Intifada, Gelderloos wails that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi are revered while Leon Czolgosz is not.  Then >poof< he is in a Democracy headband in Tiananmen Square and then at Kent State taking bullets from the National Guard to illustrate the delusion of pacifists that they will not be shot or run over by tanks.  Neil gets ever Younger, and the harvest tantrum song gets crunk. Spin doctoring the tracks of mass protest, Gelderloos revises history into a song of the failures and delusions of pacifism, conveniently overlooking who instigated the violence, where and when, taking events with similar death tolls and skewing the moral lesson to the pitch of his personal preference.  This is typically how cranks use the rhetorical trope of "delusion."  Bringing it back to disco, he tries to spin his imaginary opponent's delusion into a gender conspiracy, claiming that it is hypocritical that "not racism, not sexism, not homophobia, but violence must be the critical axis of our actions." (123)  There you have it.  Nonviolence is a conspiracy against the plight of transsexuals.

Gelderloos caps off this humorous segment with the assertion that the American revulsion to domestic terrorist bombing campaigns "is largely determined by preeexisting prejudices against certain races and classes." (124) This has to be the model example of campus rhetoric at its most absurd.  Finally, in what is indeed a staple anarchist move, Gelderloos subdivides, factionalizes, deconstructs and undefines "violence," retracting his commitment terminology and breaking solidarity with the reader by saying "does it really make sense to base so much of our strategy, our alliances, and our involvement in activism on a concept that is so blurry that no two people can agree on what it means?" (125)  Swell.  Substitute "Justice," "Equality," or "Freedom" into his clever equation and you have no sense in basing any strategy or alliance on any concept offered by Gelderloos... save one: self-interest.  But even selves are relative! But only selves can commit to agreements even on terminology!  Gelderloos has stalemated himself about the nature of commitments!  Of course this is just one of my "syllogisms and polemics."  In theory, the only (Hardcore) way to adequately rebut violent revolution is with violent counterrevolution.  Again, Gelderloos stalemates himself, ruling out the triumph of intellect over violence and demanding his own destruction while slam dancing around the forces of his imminent demise.

In a worthy move, Gelderloos constructs a syllogism of his own and tries to foist the stalemate on the pacifist (125).  This is perhaps the best paragraph in the book:

Efforts to actually define violence lead to two outcomes.  Either violence is defined literally as something that causes pain or fear, and it cannot be considered an immoral thing because it includes natural activities such as giving birth, or eating other living beings to stay alive, or violence is defined with a moral concern for outcomes, in which case inaction or being ineffective in the face of a greater violence must also be considered violent.  Either definition excludes nonviolence - the first because violence is inevitable and normal, and the second because nonviolence must be considered violent if it fails to end a system of violence, and also because all privileged people must be considered complicit in violence whether or not the consider themselves pacifists.

We can strike one line from the syllogism right away: "all privileged people must be considered complicit in violence whether or not they consider themselves pacifists."  We can strike this out because "privilege" is a relativism.  I counterpropose a relativist syllogism to negate this particular line.  "Everyone is privileged. One has the privilege of violence or the privilege of nonviolence."  Not exclusive or (-XOR) means that one potentially has the privilege of both violence and nonviolence, and one chooses or alternates.  One equally has the privilege of activity or the privilege of laziness, the privilege of obeying the law and the privilege of disobeying the law. In short, every course of action carries its own set of privileges.

 In fact, "privilege" is defined as "law for or against a private person."  Since not all advantages are conferred by state law, some of them being conferred by natural law (which is descriptive), and since all men are private persons, one may lay down (legein) the law (lex) of his own activity and reap the advantage or conferred benefit of privilege from his choice.  To rebut this, Gelderloos must make a painstaking and exaggerated situationist argument proving that for every one of his favorite groups, the members do not have freedom of choice.  Though he could do this, he will not be able to explain away the privilege of bums to drink Listerine and piss on themselves, the privilege of teenagers to pierce and tattoo their faces and beg for concert money on the street corner, or the privilege of a young black "hustla" to live off his girlfriend's bank account and drive her car.  He will also, most importantly not be able to dismiss -without resorting to moralism- the privilege of the ADVANTAGED to use violence against the disadvantaged.

As for the rest of the syllogism, let us examine:

Violence is inevitable and normal. 
Violence causes pain or fear. 
Violence cannot be considered immoral because it includes natural activities. 
The inability to ward off greater violence is considered violent.

Let us reduce "violence" to "vim" because it is the root of "violence."  Vim, or strength, or robust energy and enthusiasm is certainly not inevitable or normal.  It is an a priori condition of living beings, but it fluctuates and cannot always be summoned on command or retained.  Some have too little of it, others have excess of it.  It is more prevalent in children than in adults, and conditions such as rabies, insanity, or use of angel dust can stimulate uncontrolled peaks of it.  On the other hand, all living beings possess at least sum vim, this being measured as vital signs.  Thus is vim inevitable in a living being, but living beings do not have an inalienable right to vim.  It can be sucked out of them by sickness.  Humans can exhaust themselves.  And the tragic-comedic one, sometimes the cancer has the vim and the healthy cells do not.

Violence, if we may put it facilely, is "acting with vim" as opposed to acting with meekness or acting with finesse, or acting with a limp wrist, or not acting at all.  Violence is "acting with robust energy and enthusiasm."  Certainly this is not the way we lift our children by the arm, eat with chopsticks, or ride an escalator.  Thus it is a manner appropriate to time and place.  Ergo, it is "normal" behavior, but it's normality is contingent.  Now, were we to say "violence is normative behavior" that would seem obtuse.  There is no Violence Imperative except perhaps as a matter of self-defense, and even some people possess insufficient psychological and physiological vim to engage in violence at the appropriate time.  Gelderloos is of course in a mental position to accept all of this.

Tne statement "violence cause pain and fear" is not logically positive, because of the reference to causality.  A more appropriate statement is that "violence is the manner in which one acts when pain stimulates the fight or flight response so that it moves to the heaveside function of FIGHT."  Not all people have the same threshold of fight or flight response.  Some people have nearly no "fight in them."  Some have "no flight in them" but this is not the common turn of phrase used for hyperaggressives.  They say: "he is a brute," "he is a bully," "he has a short fuse" etc.  Some people have merely been overstimulated and conditioned to fight like pitbulls.  People are after all like animals who can be trained to put out certain responses.  People in the military are stimulated in this way.  People who live in abusive households are stimulated in this way but not according to specific, state sponsored ideology and skillsets.  In Gelderloos' case we have a civilian hyperstimulated by abusive conditioning who wants to go to the School of the Americas and pick a fight with the state sponsored hyperaggressives.  Gelderloos has crafted his own ideology, out of bits and pieces of anti-state propaganda.

The statement "violence cannot be considered immoral because it includes natural activities" is not logically positive because "morality" is relative and not scientific.  Let us suffice to say that anything can be called moral or immoral, and violence is natural to some situational conditions.  This is a restatement of "violence is inevitable and normal," so Gelderloos' syllogism further reduces.

Finally, the statement "inability to ward off greater violence is considered violent" is just too intellectually mushy to be a well defined parameter of syllogism, and furthermore it falsely assumes that violence is reasoned.  Better stated, "Violence as an output of the FIGHT heaveside function in the fight or flight response is equivalent in efficacy to nonviolence or FLIGHT as an output if the THREAT which stimulated the response is averted."  But this is not what Gelderloos proposes.  Gelderloos proposes that only destruction of the threat is an acceptable course of action, and thus has he acted the neocon again.  This is compounded by the fact that he perceives threats where none exist, and he prefers to be identifying and fighting threats than formulating a better perception of the battlespace.  He is clearly an opponent to flight or to appeasement strategies, and is thus a misplaced hawk in the peace movement.  He enjoys picking fights.  He has no right to claim that violence is inevitable or normal.  He must claim that it is his hobby or his compulsion.

An uncluttered reduction of his syllogism shows that one is not in the mental trap that Gelderloos tries to foist on the reader.  One has choices and privileges resulting from those choices.  One has a fight or flight response whose outputs are equalized or normalized according to their change of agent status relative to threat.  One is not included in a group of others by default!  One makes or retracts commitments to group consensus fight or flight responses.  One's birth, skin tone, or economic status does not automatically confer a fight or flight status on a person.  (That would be scientific racism and classism.)  However, the personal preference to commit violence or nonviolence, to act with vim, to act without vim, or to not act, are not exclusively free choices, since they are conditioned along by Hebbian reinforcement patterns.  This is Gelderloos' syllogism placed in the context of real behavioral science and excised from the micro-totalitarian, fictionalized melodrama of anarcho-socialist narrative.  What's more, this revision does not require the belief that driving a Prius is violent, or that all but a tiny minority of human beings are deluded.


Chapter 7:  The Alternative: Possibilities For Revolutionary Activism:

Nota bene: "possibilities," not practicalities, probabilities, or likelihoods.  In this chapter, Gelderloos congratulates himself on how "violent" he was throughout the book, giving a voice to the voiceless violent people, and fighting against the monopoly of pacifism.  He strives for the now decade-old cliche of "decentralization" in anti-global rioting.  In this chapter, he kisses and makes up with pacifists but implies that he clearly outranks them in his non-hierarchical fantasies.  In short order, here are the "Alternatives" Gelderloos presents:

As an alternative to totalitarian communist revolution, Gelderloos presents the now cliched decentralized anti-authoritarian grassroots movement, with "community groups" that miraculously do not function as soviets.  Thus he discards scale of civilization in favor of autonomy, but he leaves room for weak, federated, ad hoc, recallable regional and national committees with a liberation or Social Gospel ethos.  He calls for "noncoercive structures [that are] easily subverted if the culture and desires of the people operating those structures draw them toward other ends" (138).  In theory this is almost in line with the concept of limited government, and decisively in line with the principle of fluidic self-assembly in nanoscale machines.  However, it flies in the face of several naturally or periodically occuring inequalities or hierarchies which would certainly require socialism or a tyranny of the demos to subvert.  It also discards authority along with authoritarianism, which would require massive social conditioning, which in the absence of authority would be relativistic and incredible, and not reduce warring and subjection.  The most visible and tangible point of Gelderloos "alternative" is to destroy the existing power structure and reduce the United States to a chain of pueblos.

He also says "Westernized people need to develop collective social relationships." (140).  Thus is Gelderloos also an Indy-Fundamentalist.  His alternative includes compelling the public through violent bombings of infrastructure to accept the collectivized model of governance.  E.g. the structure of the food co-op, Food not Bombs, Infoshop, Anarchist Black Cross, and Indymedia.  If activities in Boston could be used as evidence of Gelderloos "alternative" then we would still have five people running the communications network, with several anonymous subsidiary groups issuing propaganda through back channels.  Everyone would be forced to eat tofu hot dogs out of dumpsters.  Folk-punk would be the musical norm.  Everyone would be using recycled technology from the date at which modern civilization stopped.  Your doctor would be a stoned Trustafarian with a M.A.S.H. bag.  Most importantly, nations would be reduced to the point where any douchebag who lifted weights and had a sharp stick could take it over.

Gelderloos says "As I write this sentence, indigenous activists, anarchists, and unionists armed with just bricks and clubs are holding the barricades in Oaxaca against an impending military assault."  (141)  As I read this sentence, I chuckle because Harvard's Mike Gould-Wartofsky and Kelly Lenora Lee are in Oaxaca as anarchists armed with bricks are losing the barricades in Oaxaca against an impending military assault.  They sent their pictures to New York Indymedia and to Boston Indymedia via their editor Eric Ginsburg who just landed a job at South End Press, whose main webpage advertises Gelderloos' book "How Nonviolence Protects The State," a book which reads like some cheeky bastard tried to rope every leftist lunatic into an agent-provocateur's thesis on how to get arrested.

Peter Gelderloos is to be commended for writing an marxist-bakuninist manifesto that did not exceed 500 pages.

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