Photo by Pedro | CC BY 2.0
Violence is the great obfuscator. When its name is invoked by the powerful, rest assured that it is masking much more than it reveals. While it is presented as an objective description of a state of affairs requiring immediate condemnation, it simultaneously serves to discredit movements and ideas, deny the political agency of certain actors, and cloak brutal forms of domination. Its purportedly objective presentation is, in fact, a legerdemain that stirs up moral sentiments in order to muddy political analysis. Under the guise of indubitable moral rectitude, the world is turned upside: those who stand up for justice are often made to appear as senseless savages, and the greatest perpetrators of violence are exonerated, or even presented as victims.
Of late, violence has made headlines in the U.S. corporate media by serving to discredit the work of anti-fascist activists and distract from the actual threats of fascism and white supremacy. One would think that the very expression “anti-fascism” would immediately convoke pledges of allegiance in a country whose nationalist narratives include the story of its own rise to power as the global hegemon through the militant defeat of fascism in WWII. Regardless of whether or not we sanction its veracity, the story of the violent fight against fascism—not with kicks and punches, but with bombers, tanks, heavy artillery and nuclear bombs—is, indeed, one of the founding narratives of contemporary…