Standing in the North Carolina woods, Chris Arthur warned about a coming civil war. Videos he posted publicly on YouTube bore titles such as “The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.” In his telling, the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.
Arthur was posting during a surge of far-right extremism in the years leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote warcraft training manuals to help others organize their own militias. And he offered sessions at his farm in Mount Olive, North Carolina, that taught how to kidnap and attack public officials, use snipers and explosives and design a “fatal funnel” booby trap to inflict mass casualties.
While he continued to post publicly, military and law enforcement ignored more than a dozen warnings phoned in by Arthur’s wife’s ex-husband about Arthur’s increasingly violent rhetoric and calls for the murder of police officers. This failure by the Guard, FBI and others to act allowed Arthur to continue to manufacture and store explosives around young children and train another extremist who would attack police officers in New York state and lead them on a wild, two-hour chase and gun battle.
Arthur isn’t an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Bolding added, archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/OOU0a
e; added a final period to the AP’s headline because it looks weird without one
Nope. Politics is an unarmed, nonviolent activity. This is something else.
In all the history of nation states around the world politics have been imposed through violence, they are enforced through violence and perpetuated through violence.
This is not to say that politics are inherently violent but the idea that they are inherently non-violent is a falacy.
The state has a monopoly on sanctioned violence, I think is what you mean. Yes, that is true.
Imposed through violence, no, not necessarily though. Unless you think politics is what gets in your way if you try to rob someone or something. Quite a few systems have changed, passing of legislative power from colonial to local control, stuff like that, nonviolently though.
I do agree that nothing is inherently nonviolent about politics, certainly.
How do you think monarchies and governments were first created? What about colonialism? What would hapen if trump becomes president and the us becomes an openly fascist state? Wouldnt it be imposed on all americans through violence?
Even if there are cases where power was nonviolently transfered to “local control” (which AFAIK its not true) the structures and institutions of government that remain were first established through violence and these countries still serve the interests of their former “conquerors” either through collusion, International laws (which those colonialist powers mostly controll) and/or the threat of sanctions and violence.
Well, yes, if you’re looking for a place where political violence has never happened, that will be much more difficult to find. We certainly do not live in a utopia and possibly never will.
Regarding colonial independence, it actually happened quite a bit, we just don’t cover it in a lot of history classes except as maybe a brief sentence somewhere. But New Zealand for instance never won any independence war or anything like that. Didn’t have to.
??? I was just arguing (and expanding on said argument) against your description of politics as “an unarmed, nonviolent activity”
Interesting wiki read about New Zealand, I wasnt aware of it. Thanks.
I was saying that just because politics featured some violence at some point, does not necessarily mean that we should associate it with violence. Violence is a thing that exists. Politics is a thing that exists. They can exist independently, or together, it varies. In some places very heavy repression is used, and the process is extremely violent very regularly. In other places at other times, the process is peaceful and people agreeably settle their differences. It just depends.
In America, where I am, the process is usually nonviolent. It does not have to be nonviolent, but we really have nothing to gain from adding violence to the mix. We’ll get the same varied sorts of results, except people will die in the process. No gain, just loss, since violence in no way ensures you will get some leader or system that is superior to another leader or system. I point to the large number of times a revolution has ushered in yet another shitty dictator who years later ended up hated by his people and eventually deposed as evidence of this principle.
And yea np.
Politics is what creates violence. Check out the wars, prisons, etc. They were all created by politicians and their politics.
It only seems nonviolent because politicians almost never experience any violence themselves. But their victims experience violence everywhere on the planet.
I do not think violence would disappear if there were no politics. Judging from archaeological evidence, people have been engaging in violence since before the agricultural revolution.
We choose to try to make politics nonviolent. It’s an aspirational goal to move in a different direction and attempt a different method from the past several millennia. Even this will not make crime and war go away, though, until we can adequately address things like sociopathy, fear and resource scarcity. And even like, romantic envy can be an instigator for violence.