Understanding Violent Protest

There are many problems, moral as well as practical, to violent protest. Violence is often counter productive and often harms the very people in whose name it is perpetrated. Violence justifies more violence. It is a fire that can get out of control, creating a conflict is about itself and about power itself and not toward any moral end. Violence loses sight of its origin. Because violence cannot be controlled, its use pulls the moral rung out from under those who perpetrate it. The founding act of Christianity is a rejection of violence.

That said, it sometimes works. Attacking the symbols of oppression gets the attention of the oppressor like nothing else. I don't endorse it. But I do understand the impulse to use it. It can also feel good. Peaceful protest is slow work, and while it is being used countless people suffer the violence of oppression. Whatever shortcut holds any promise to speed the work of getting the knee off the neck is tempting and feels mathematically justified.

The oppressor moreover has no convincing moral grounds for condemning it. The oppression is itself violent, and its violence is not merely physical violence. It is economic and psychological and moral violence. It is the violence that the poor have always suffered, that leads poor young men--and since poverty is overwhelmingly racially determined, so many poor young men are black or brown--into self-destructive gangs. It is the effect of loose gun laws and tight abortion laws. There is no hypocrisy like the oppressor's hypocrisy.

The oppressor's hypocrisy is manifest in nothing so obviously as in his own belief in violence. While he condemns it in all protestation of his own actions, he murders a foreign general as a means to better relations with that man's government. He bombs an airport in Syria. He calls out the army against his own citizens. He creates the violence he condemns.