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Quotes from How Nonviolence Protects the State — Peter Gelderloos

born 1982 United States

← All quotes by Peter Gelderloos

25 quotes

The pacifist avoidance of self-criticism is functional, not just typical. When your strategy’s victory comes from “captur[ing] and maintain[ing] the moral high ground,” it is necessary to portray yourself as moral and your enemy as immoral.

How Nonviolence Protects the State (2007)

The tendencies of pacifism toward negotiation and centralization facilitate efforts by the state to manipulate and co-opt rebellious social movements; they also make it easier for the state to repress a movement, if it decides there is a need to do so.

How Nonviolence Protects the State (2007)

By preaching nonviolence, and abandoning to state repression those who do not listen obediently, white activists who think they are concerned about racism are actually enacting a paternalistic relationship and fulfilling the useful role of pacifying the oppressed.

How Nonviolence Protects the State (2007)

How the state can count on knee-jerk pacifist condemnation of violence and how pacifists effectively do the state’s dirty work by failing to use their cultural influence to make militant resistance to tyranny “respectable.” Instead, pacifists claim that militancy alienates people, and do nothing to attempt to counteract this phenomenon.

How Nonviolence Protects the State (2007)

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.

How Nonviolence Protects the State (2007)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Peter Gelderloos (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.