America Has Always Been at War with America

I've been dithering on whether to write about the protests of the murder of George Floyd and the retaliatory police riots spreading across the country.  There's a lot of information flooding the media, corporate and otherwise, and I can't keep up with it.

On one hand I've been seeing white hipsters cheering on the People's Violence from a safe distance.  I think they've been playing too many dystopian video games, among other fictional media: one usually sensible guy on Twitter wanted to compare real life to V for Vendetta. I like the graphic novel, but it's not reality.  I suggested that the guy look at real-life parallels, such as the successful history of protest and resistance in South Korea; and I went back to reread my own coverage of the candlelight vigils there from 2008 onward.  (Which reminded me that I was unable to interest leftish bloggers and independent media in those events at the time.  Not as exciting as V for Vendetta, I guess.)

"Let's You and Him Fight" is one of the creepiest things I see on the white left, especially when it buys into the Right's narrative that the protests are predominantly violent.  It's hard to say for sure, but it appears to be the other way around. No one has access to the opinions of all African-Americans, but I see indications that the community is not united behind burning it all down.  I'd be surprised if it were. Those whites calling for more destruction are doing so, not because they stand with black people, but because they enjoy fantasizing about it.

The mutual aid and support, the caring for each other that is turning up everywhere - sometimes looted by the police -- are to my mind much more newsworthy than the violence, wholly justified though it is, and the mutual aid is not going to get the same amount of coverage by the corporate media.  There's also the near-certainty that a lot of the violence is being incited and committed by police agents provocateurs, just as we've seen in the past.  But you can't eat violence, you can't live on bricks, and nobody on the ground or in the streets wants a permanent diet of tear gas and pepper spray.

Except the police, of course.  Even the corporate media are recognizing that, as they are targeted for harassment and violence by the police.  The spectacle of heavily armed gangs of racist goons prowling the streets, assaulting bystanders and driving their SUVs into crowds, is going to get harder and harder to frame as keeping the peace.  So now the police are unlawfully ordering reporters to stay off the streets, to hide their criminality.  I'm not optimistic about how this will turn out.

Sinking to Whose Level?

I'll probably finish it, because it's a breezy, fluffy read, but there are real problems with Linda Hirshman's new Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution (Harper, 2012).  I happened on a copy at the public library a few days after Band of Thebes touted it, and it looked like fun.  An admitted heterosexual, Hirshman's also a lawyer and a pundit according to the bio on the dust jacket, but "pundit" predominates.  The book is excessively US-centric, as though European gay organizations didn't exist.  (Magnus Hirschfeld gets one passing mention.)  It's also full of errors large and small (the cutest, so far, is when she misnames poet and troublemaker Tuli Kupferberg "Tilli", in the text and in the index); she buys into a half-understood pop Foucauldianism, and for the history of religious prohibitions of male-male sex she draws on folklore.

The roots of the injunctions against nonreproductive sex go back to the story of Sodom in the Old Testament (that's why they call it sodomy) [72].

First, just how far back is the story of Sodom?  I have the impression that she thinks it was written at the time of the events it describes, but it's almost certainly a thousand years later.  And while I disagree with Christian apologists who deny that the story has anything to do with buttsex, it's not clear that the point of the story is that nonreproductive sex is bad: it's more that the Sodomites were so depraved that they'd violate the laws of hospitality to strangers.  Wouldn't Abraham and Sarah (half-siblings, according to Genesis) have been committing nonreproductive sex during all the years when they thought she was barren?  The first real biblical story about nonreproductive sex would be the story of Onan in Genesis 38.  Onan, you may recall, was struck dead by Yahweh for refusing to inseminate the widow of his late brother; the poor woman had to go so far as to pose as a roadside hooker and trick her father-in-law Judah into giving her a baby.  Onan's name was appropriated in the 1800s for "onanism" or masturbation; but his transgression had as much to do with Onanism as Sodom had to do with Sodomy.  The sexual values enshrined in Genesis have not, by and large, been considered normative in the Christian West.

And so on.  But sometimes Hirshman gets downright offensive, as in her account of the first night of the 1969 Stonewall riots:

When the tactical policemen lined up in the traditional phalanx formation to clear a street, the gay street kids lined up opposite them in Rockette formation performing high kicks and singing mocking songs.  "We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls."  The tactical cops went nuts, clubbing the dancers, which, of course, only reduced them to the level of the people they despised.  New York's finest backed down by the queers.  They were murderous with rage [99]

Now, the first thing to be pointed out about the words I've put into boldface is that New York's finest had been clubbing, even killing impertinent gay street kids for many years.  Hirshman knows this, she's read the history and she cites it, she even mentions some cases.  So clubbing down the Stonewall girls was strictly business as usual.

The second and more important thing is that those street kids were above their attackers, on a level the Mayor's thugs couldn't hope to reach.  (Perhaps she feels the same way about Bloomberg's storm troopers beating up and gassing Occupy protesters and bystanders.)  I recognize that there's a thin layer of irony on Hirshman's prose in that passage, but it doesn't work.  Fie on her.

She goes on from there to a confused account of changing protest tactics in the late Sixties, conflating nonviolence with nonresistance.  As a whole she knows better, and she sees the value of confrontational activism, as well as the weakness of rejecting it.

As you can see, I'm about a third of the way through Victory.  I could only recommend it to a reader who knows nothing about GLBT history, as an accessible introduction to the subject for the United States only.  From there you should pay attention to the books she cites, and read them.  Hirshman did almost no original research except to interview surviving activists, so she's heavily dependent on the work of others.  Nothing wrong with that, but you should be too.

Police Violence Continues Unabated

Today a former friend, now resident in San Francisco, linked on Facebook to a Chronicle article headed "Bricks, pipes, thrown from occupied SF building." He commented: "Arrest every single person found in this building. Every. Single. One." One of his friends chimed in: "Yes...all of them. ALL OF THEM! That we're [sic] in the building illegally.. Repeat..illegally."

Of course, the rule of law is very important in Our America, which is why all lawbreakers are prosecuted, even if they are rich and powerful and white.  But I remain skeptical of the article, which was clearly written in haste and needed copy-editing.  First, I'd like to know how the reporter's single reference to one brick thrown by a squatter, who was arrested, became the plural "bricks" in the headline and elsewhere in the article. Second, I recall how many articles about Occupy have reported violence by protesters that within a day or two turned out to have been initiated by the police or agents provocateurs or just right-wing journalists out on a lark.

This time around, there's hardly any pretense in the corporate media.  An AP dispatch in my local newspaper today was headed "Stinging gas, swinging batons send May Day protesters fleeing."  Though the story reported some incidents of "mayhem" (i.e., some "small downtown windows" smashed) by "black-clad" anarchists, mostly it was matter-of-fact that the violence was one-sided and initiated by the police.  For example:

In Oakland, the scene of several violent clashes between activists and police in recent months, the situation threatened to boil over again when police fired tear gas, sending hundreds of demonstrators scrambling.

Officers also fired "flash-bang" grenades to disperse protesters converging on police as they tried to make arrests, police said.  Four people were taken into custody.

Maybe you don't think that firing tear gas is violence; what would you think if the protesters fired tear gas at the police?  Notice also those grenades fired "to disperse protesters converging on police as they tried to make arrests" -- that's to prevent eyewitnesses from getting close enough to document police abuse of people they've arrested.

Yesterday on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman talked to Marina Sitrin of CUNY and Amin Husain of Tidal magazine, both Occupy activists, and to the journalist Chris Hedges.  (I really need to reread Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and write a detailed critique of it, but its problems are summed up well by John Horgan, who wrote in his The End of War [McSweeney, 2012] that Hedges "eloquently describes war as a deadly addiction but seems to project his own fascination with armed conflict onto the rest of us.")  Hedges argued incoherently that he's not a pacifist, but "most revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, are nonviolent enterprises," and though he claimed not to be a member of Occupy, he spoke of it several times as "we."

I share Hedges's suspicion of violent tactics, as I've written here before, and still think that people who advocate violence should be presumed to be agents provocateurs until proven otherwise.  But it's absurd to claim that most revolutions are nonviolent, or even that the controlled use of violence will necessarily alienate "the mainstream."  Even very extensive property damage by college students celebrating a team victory or supporting a corrupt but venerable coach doesn't seem to bother many Americans, not even the police.  Union violence against cops and scabs didn't seem to alienate most American workers at the height of the labor movement, and state violence against dissenters doesn't seem to discredit the State either.  Student demonstrators in Asia, Latin America, and Europe have fought back against the police as a matter of routine, and Egyptian protesters in Cairo last year used more violence than the Occupy protesters have so far.  It's certainly legitimate for Hedges to criticize the movement, but he shouldn't lie in the process; it'll discredit him.

The other guests answered Hedges forthrightly, pointing out the legitimate use of masks and violence by protesters around the world.  To his credit, Hedges didn't get indignant or throw a tantrum when Maria Sitrin said:

It’s actually not useful at all, from the outside, to tell the movements what to do, especially with people who have access to publish in certain places. And there’s quite a few. Whether well-meaning—people, Zizek, telling us we must be serious revolutionaries and anti-capitalists and do this, that and the other. And, you know, with all respect, either engage in the discussion, because it is open—all of it is open, and we need to have these conversations, and we’d love to have more intellectuals who relate to the movements relating to us directly and having the discussions, not telling us what to do. That part is not useful. But we’re organizing despite all of it, and the movement is flourishing.

I still think that Hedges would do better to denounce aggressive, repressive, routine state violence rather than the small-scale violence of social movements.  There are good reasons against those movements using violence, not least that the State outguns them immeasurably and is far more heedless of human life and safety.  (Now that I've finished rereading it I can say that this idea is important in Marge Piercy's Dance the Eagle to Sleep.  It's not a recent concern.)  Anyone who attacks the Occupy Movement for allowing a few Black Bloc-ers to smash windows or "disrupt traffic" -- another high crime of yesterday's protests -- without condemning the much greater violence of the US government, the states and cities, is simply disingenuous.  By all means, try to win over the police and the army, but they are also human agents, responsible for their own choices, and "just following orders" is not an excuse.  Maybe it's been too long since World War II and the Nuremberg Trials, but "I was just following orders" used to be as much of a giveaway as "Some of my best friends are ...".  Now it turns up every time a US military or police atrocity gets attention.  That's got to be challenged.

At the same time, I'd like to know what the Black Blocs think they are achieving by smashing the windows of small businesses.  They have the same obligation to defend and justify their tactics as the rest of the movement does.  To me they just seem to be imitating college basketball fans, but I could well be wrong.

P.S.  FAIR's first report on May Day reporting.

Who Cleans Up After the One Percent?

I meant to put up that corner banner before, but had trouble getting it to work. I tried again today, and it worked, so there it is. It would be easy to think that Occupy has passed its moment, with the police clearing out the occupations (though not everywhere, not yet), and the media are sure to tell us it's all over. That might account for the drop in donations to OWS recently. But it's not over. Occupy protests are happening in places you might consider unlikely. Did you notice that Occupy Oakland shut down Oakland Port again on Monday, with similar actions up and down the West Coast?

That's not what I mainly meant to write about, though. We had an interesting event in Bloomington last weekend that sheds light on a lot of the criticism one sees of the Occupy movement: IU won a basketball game against a number-one, and the fans went wild. "Slow-motion drinks flying through the air," says the report; how do you do that? But anyway, the key thing is that the police response, and public response, were very different than response to the local Occupy group, or to the movement nationally. Inside one of the popular bars:

"I don’t think I got to leave till 3 or 3:30 a.m.," [one worker] said. "I usually get off at 1 a.m. It was unreal. I’ve never seen Nick’s so dirty with beer on the floor. We were cooking food until the last minute when we had to shut down. Officially, we were closed, but on a night like last night, you couldn’t get all the people out."

Outside, the streets filled with people as the police watched. A car parked across the street from the bar was "trampled — its roof caved in, hood scuffed with shoe marks, windshield cracked. About an hour into the celebration, the crowd wanted to see it flipped." Which they tried to do, despite a couple of people who told them to stop. The car turned out to belong to a waitress in the bar, who was not pleased. However,

Bloomington Police Lt. Faron Lake was one of the officers who responded to Kirkwood following the win. It took the police some time to clear the area, Lake said, but there were no major problems while he was there. ...

Bloomington Police Sgt. Shane Rasche said there were no mass arrests as a result of the celebration.

"No major problems"? "No mass arrests", eh? Not even any arrests at all, it seems. Just as there were no arrests after Penn State students rioted in support of disgraced Coach Joe Paterno. The owner of the smashed car wrote a scathing letter to the local paper, which was published yesterday. One other letter appeared the same day, drawing unflattering contrasts between the treatment our student rioters received and the reactions of decent citizens to the Occupy camp.

For that matter, the police managed to arrest five IU students from a group who were protesting against the appearance of representatives of J.P. Morgan Chase at the School of Business.

At one point during the commotion, several protesters were allegedly pushed by a man in a gray suit. The man was later identified as IUPD Detective Greg McClure.

The assault was caught on video, of course, but to date McClure has not been arrested. The university has promised an investigation, of course.

(One of the things I, and I hope many other people, have learned from the late wave of protests is that the police cannot be believed about anything. Every time accusations of police violence have been leveled against them, they have come up with explanations that bear no relation to reality at all, which is proved by videos recorded by their targets. I don't suppose that this is anything new, either. It suggests that all police reports should be regarded as false until proven otherwise.)

By all accounts, last Saturday's riot was mild. I was living on the courthouse square in downtown Bloomington in 1976 when IU won the NCAA championship, and the rioters spread through most of downtown. They howled "Number One!", smashed windows, broke beer bottles on the pavement, and drove around honking their horns and ignoring stop signs for about three hours. I've been through two such victories since, which is not why I have no interest in sports -- that predates the 1976 riots by twenty years -- but it is why I always hope that IU or any team in the area will lose all its games.

This kind of behavior (which isn't limited to Bloomington, of course) doesn't lead to any general hostility to organized sport in America. But peaceful political protests are greeted by hostility, police violence, and dishonesty, as regular and automatic as breathing. That's a pretty stark disparity.

(By the way, I know that few of last Saturday's rioters come from the top 1% of the American distribution of wealth; even fewer of them have that much money of their own, as opposed to their parents. But as a matter of sympathy and solidarity, I suspect that many of them identify with the 1 percent. And we all know who cleans up after the messes the 1% make, be they literal or metaphorical; it's the rest of us.)

It's the Only Thing

The child-rape scandal at Penn State continues to unfold, and I confess to some relief that for once, words that are often thrown around too freely, like "pedophile" or "rape" itself, are actually the right tools for the job. "Pedophile" has been been inflated to the point where it is used any time there's a notable age-difference between partners, even if the younger partner is thirty; but this time the victims are in fact prepubescent children, and they were forced, so "rape" is the correct word once again. Not that it matters, since a ten-year-old of either sex is not allowed to give consent to sexual penetration by a sixty-year-old male in any state of the Union; the overturning of sodomy laws in 2003 has no effect on that. It would be interesting to know how Jerry Sandusky worked around little details like this in what passed for his mind. He can hardly have been unaware of the law, or the moral issues; or even, "This is a lot of fun, but what if someone walked in and caught me?" Someone did, after all, but all that happened to Sandusky was that he lost his keys to the shower room and had to take the boys home to diddle them.

The Penn State coverup echoes the Roman Catholic Church's coverup of sexual abuse by clergy. Despite the high moral values claimed by religion and elite sports, neither institution could work up much concern over the sexual use of children and youth by adults who had official charge over them. Given the official hysteria about pedophilia in anti-gay campaigns, it's fascinating that, confronted with cases of actual pedophilia, coaching and religious hierarchies don't in practice consider it a big deal. (This might be a useful point to bring up when antigay bigots start frothing about pedophilia: why are they so worked up about a possibility that isn't even theoretically on the table -- If we pass a gay-rights law, day-care centers will have to hire known child molesters! -- but not very excited about institutions in their midst that have employed and protected known child molesters? Indeed, they continue to revere them, and defend them vehemently. More attention should be focused on this, and less on indignant screaming about whether homosexuality is a choice.)

It's a reminder that the word "rape" has only recently been dragged, kicking and screaming, to a new and specific meaning of the imposition of sexual acts (a messy category itself) by force on an unwilling partner. In practice and in theory, "rape" has included consensual acts where the "victim" was not allowed by law or custom to give consent: a white woman to a black or lower class male, a physically mature individual to an even slightly older one -- and in practice and social attitudes, the victim has often been blamed even more than the perpetrator: once penetrated, a woman is polluted, so she must have or get a husband, which justifies and covers the pollution, or she'll be branded a whore. ("Sodomy" is another tricky term: it often carries connotation of force, because no male of any age is permitted to consent to being abased in this way, so any "sodomy" is forced by definition.) "Rape," like many other sexual offenses, really means that a nominally clean person has been polluted, and her or his consent is irrelevant, which is probably why there's so much confusion about the issue.

Another confused area, of course, is mob violence, which is what got me started on this post. Penn State students rioted the other night in support of Coach Joe Paterno, who for the better part of a decade covered up the sexual abuse of children in his facilities even after it was reported to him. (A smaller group of students also gathered around Paterno's house to support him, crying "We love you, Joe!") This even jolted Jon Stewart; but maybe football is just inherently less important than basketball. FoxSports reported:

At around 12:20am local time Thursday, the university issued an official police dispersal order via Facebook, warning students to vacate downtown State College immediately. It came after several violent scenes in which protesters flipped over a media van and destroyed other property.

Well, there you go! I now see how valuable social media like Facebook really are.

About 2,000 people gathered at Old Main and moved to an area called Beaver Canyon, a street ringed by student apartments that were used in past riots to pelt police, myFOXphilly.com reported.

But while several arrests were made, the disorder was controlled amid a strong presence from state police as the crowds returned to Old Main.

(Bold type is mine.)

To add to the entertainment, the Phelps clan, aka Westboro Baptist Church, is planning to picket Penn State, to the indignation of some groups there. "[T]he radical group has caused the Penn State Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Ally Student Alliance to team up with the Penn State Atheist/Agnostic Association in a counter-protest."

Alyssia Motah, co-president of the LGBTQA Student Alliance, says that WBC's presence will be a chance to be heard.

"The fact that they're going to be here is an opportunity for us to react and we intend to do that," Motah said.

Maybe they should chip in for WBC's travel expenses, for giving them an "opportunity to react."

Compare this to the unprovoked police attacks on nonviolent protesters in New York, Boston, Oakland and elsewhere. If the Penn State rioters had been upset about something not related to college sports, I think we'd have seen pepper spray, tear gas, tazers, clubs, shields, and water cannons, and there'd have been a lot more than "several" arrests. None of these police sex toys have been mentioned in any report of the Penn State riots I've seen, and according to the FoxSports story, Penn State students have a history of 'pelting' police in past riots.

Amartya Sen wrote in The Argumentative Indian (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005), page 237, emphasis mine:

This inequality [of physical violence] has been traced by some commentators to the physical asymmetry of women and men, with men having greater immediate power in the gross bodily sense. Undoubtedly, this asymmetry does have a substantial role in the prevalence and survival of this terrible state of affairs, made worse by periods of particular vulnerability for women, such as pregnancy and early post-natal phases. But in addition to the physical aspects of this inequality, attitudinal factors cannot but be major influences. The possibility of physical violence can actually be used (to settle a dispute or gain an advantage) only when the permissibility of such behaviour is accepted, explicitly or by implication.

I think this goes a long way toward explaining the differing police responses to the Occupy movement and to the Penn State rioters. It's considered natural, if slightly tacky, for sports fans to riot after a loss, or a victory, or the dismissal of a popular coach; so the police treat them gently, even in the face of much greater and more overt provocation. Even political disruptions are okay, as long as they come from the Right. Remember the "unruly" Tea Party mobs, organized from above by right-wing organizations and media, at town hall meetings with Congresspeople in 2009? (The linked story mentions no arrests, let alone broken heads, resulting from the police intervention.) The Right's response to criticism was that the Left had done the same in our day -- which was true enough, but the Left got much harsher treatment for it, and continues to do so. As Sen suggests, that's not accidental. It won't be easy to change, either, but we should all be aware of the attitudes involved.

Violence Begets Violence, or the Other Way Around

Here's another one of those things that reveals a strange attitude in our media -- strange when you think about it, anyway, or when I think about it.

The Huffington Post posted a story on the Occupy Wall Street protests, headlining the corporate media's favorite Catholic fascist and former Nixon toady, Pat Buchanan. For a supposed extremist, Buchanan has enjoyed a very comfortable ongoing relationship with the mainstream, even more comfortable than Rush Limbaugh's. But anyway, today was Buchanan's day for some concern trolling about OWS:

“It’s going to end very, very badly with these folks in the winter and they’re not going to be getting publicity and they’re going to be acting up and acting badly like the worst of the demonstrators in the 60s," Buchanan said. "They’re going to start fighting with the cops.”

This was on The McLaughlin Group, a weekly program with a notable right-wing slant; so of course it originated on the commie Public Broadcasting System, though in 2007 it began airing on some CBS stations.

The HuffPost story then offered anecdotes which I suppose were intended to support or illustrate Buchanan's prediction.

Occupy Wall Street took a violent turn this week as Oakland police unleashed tear gas on protesters and injured an Iraq war veteran.

On Saturday, scores were arrested in Denver after protesters clashed with local law enforcement. When cops began to spray Mace on the crowd, several protestors reportedly retaliated by kicking and pushing police.

So, it was OWS that "took a violent turn" in Oakland -- not the police, who initiated the attack. And in Denver, when the police just began innocently and nonviolently "to spray Mace on the crowd," some protesters fought back. True, OWS has declared a nonviolent stance, which usually means non-retaliation even to police violence. But still, wouldn't it have been more accurate to write something like

The Oakland Police turned violent Thursday against Occupy Oakland, unleashing teargas against nonviolent demonstrators and critically injuring an Iraq war veteran.

or

On Saturday, scores of OWS protesters were arrested in Denver after some fought back mildly against an unprovoked police attack.

Even that is granting the Denver police too much, since they doubtless intended to arrest scores of protesters whether they fought back or not. I suppose this sort of reportage and commentary is a preview of propaganda and state violence to come.

The Guy in Blue

I considered writing about this yesterday, but I'm glad I waited until today.

Yesterday Salon.com ran this photo that was making the rounds.

It was accompanied by an article by Justin Elliott on "Occupy Wall Street's struggle for nonviolence." Apparently the right-wing media had jumped on the photo as proof of OWS's violent tendencies. Numerous commenters on Elliott's article pointed out how unclear the picture was, especially since it had been taken on the fly and the photographer didn't see it until afterward, when he looked over the images he had. But what is going on here? Was the guy in the blue shirt actually attacking the policeman, or had he been shoved from behind or simply lost his balance -- not hard to do in a big, agitated crowd -- and was simply falling forward, trying to brace himself against the person he'd been thrown onto? No one seemed to know anything, not even what had happened in the immediate sequel. Had the demonstrator been arrested?

The reason I'm glad I didn't write about it yesterday is that we know a little more today. Turns out the man in blue didn't just fall, he was throwing himself at the policemen. But someone who was present has spoken up.

The “tackling” photo appears to have been taken just moments after protester Felix Rivera-Pitre was punched in the face by NYPD Deputy Inspector Johnny Cardona. A couple of videos of the punching have gone viral on YouTube (see below for one).

Rivera-Pitre tells me that the unidentified man in the blue shirt in the “tackling” photo merely entered the melee to come to Rivera-Pitre’s aid.

“He was just trying to help. The cops were pretty violent. They were the ones actually elbowing people,” Rivera-Pitre says. “The reason I didn’t get arrested was this guy [from the photo] was one of the guys around me. I think he was the one who started screaming, ‘Save him! Save him!’”

Naturally, the police deny it. (Which, according to Duncan's Law of Official Denials, means that it's true.) They say Rivera-Pitre tried to elbow Cardona, and got punched in return. It's hard to tell from the video Salon links to, but we have to remember who we're dealing with: a lawless police force that has been caught initiating violence against peaceful protesters many times already. And whatever the guy in the blue shirt did, he didn't use pepper spray, or a truncheon, or a horse against Cardona. The police violence at OWS and elsewhere is indubitable, amply documented, and far outstrips anything the protesters have plausibly been accused of.

I'm glad the Occupation is committed to nonviolence, simply on practical grounds. As Noam Chomsky wrote during the antiwar movement of the 1960s:

It is quite easy to design tactics that will help to consolidate the latent forces of a potential American fascism. To mention just one obvious example, verbal and physical abuse of the police, however great the provocation, can have only this effect. Such tactics may seem "radical" and, in a narrow sense, justified by the magnitude of the infamy and evil that they seek to overcome. They are not.

(in American Politics and the New Mandarins [Pantheon, 1969], 398)

Besides, the police outgun the protesters and are trained in the use of violence. If the Occupiers renounce nonviolence they will lose the high ground they now occupy, and will lose anyway in any real fight.

I'm not saying that peaceful protesters should be abandoned to police violence. Lots of pressure can, and I hope will, be put on the government to rein in and punish police; this won't be easy, of course, since the police are acting on government orders -- they are not "out of control." Notice that the officers in the photo are wearing white shirts, which means they are supervisors, like most of the police who've been documented assaulting protesters. They're not rogues, they're leading the attack on freedom of assembly. This is all the more reason to raise an outcry against police thuggery, instead of wringing one's hands because the protesters may have hit back once or twice.

Once again I have to ask why the story is being framed solely in terms of the Occupiers' "commitment to nonviolence"? Why not the state? That may seem a somewhat ingenuous question, since everyone knows that states claim the monopoly on violence. What I'm asking is why so many people, especially toward the left end of the political spectrum, don't see state violence as discrediting the state, and can still regard violent states as moral agents in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, and become so indignant when citizens fight back against the violence of the state, no matter how ineffectually and mildly.

(As I've noticed before, not all violent protests are created equal. If they speak for the government's interests, like anti-Japanese protests in South Korea a few years ago, they're acceptable and even laudable. If they are right-wing thugs attacking peaceful demonstrators, probably incited by the government, that's okay too.)

If the police want the OWS protests to be nonviolent, all they have to do is renounce violence themselves, because the violence that does occur is almost all theirs. The rest of us must remember that.