#shon meckfessel

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The kaleidoscopic activity characteristic of [the Occupy movement] was only possible because of a less immediately evident characteristic that allowed these spaces of possibility: the astounding extent to which they were able to withstand and nurture what John Trimbur terms dissensus. Particularly in the pseudo-public spaces of most American cities, […] the only apparently possible shared practice is that of shuttling between sites of anonymous individual consumptions. Debate occurs third hand and is generally limited to expressing solidarity with or disavowal from various signifiers of the culture wars. In the emergence of the autonomous spaces of 2011, we learned that such debate is hardly adequate to encompass the political convictions of most members of these yet-to-be-constituted publics; the reintroduction of a material public sphere of tension was transformative for anyone who fell into it. Bound in a sort of situated love by shared rage and histories of frustration, it was this tension in discovery that drove so many of us to stay; we changed through these incessant conversations across difference and learned how thoroughly each of us is a product of our relations. The power of Occupy—what evoked that passionate commitment in action admired even by those who decried their democratic commitments as ineffectual—was precisely the persisting of bodies in space, bodies which, in better moments, came together both in shared hopes and transgression, in clashes of difference and bewilderment. Always before, a dismissive shake of the head, a shared understanding that the Other was beyond the pale, would have sufficed. Now, the persistent presence of the Other, in a way from which one could not turn away, finally—finally! —forced each of us to take responsibility for our ideas and to listen. […]

Instead of quickly managing to find those one mostly agrees with, to recreate the filter bubble, the interactions we realized we were all starving for were precisely those across such differences, even across the greatest differences. Who does not at some point rehearse to oneself, with accumulating frustration, a confrontation with a bigoted uncle or a snobbish co-worker? And yet, when we find each other at the family reunion, or the office, we politely stick to talking about marriages or pencil sharpeners. What power there is, Occupy discovered, lies in not changing the subject, in searching out the tools to have those impossible conversations, in a context where your own freedom rests on the Other’s presence (since, if our numbers were any smaller, we’d never have been able to get away with it.) For that reason alone, these spaces of transgression fostered a respect for the autonomy of the Other, for their embodied sociality which suddenly seemed so intertwined with our own present and future. Those differences became worth having out, not fleeing from in the multitudes of dismissals, avoidance, and excuse that make up every other moment of our anti-public lives. Occupy was, more than anything else, an uptake of this challenge, of the impossibility of living and deciding together how to live, in America, or in whatever country on Earth.

Shon Meckfessel, “Making Space, Not Demands: Literacies of Autonomy and Dissensus,” Literacy in Composition Studies 3.1 (2015), pp. 194–5.

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Podcast: Why White Nationalists Love Assad w/ Leila Al-Sami and Shon Meckfessel

In which I sat down with my buds Leila Al-Shami and Shon Meckfessel to talk about how and why a bunch of fascists became fans of everyone’s favorite …Podcast: Why White Nationalists Love Assad w/ Leila Al-Sami and Shon Meckfessel

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Authors Shane Burley, Joan Braune and Shon Meckfessel will discuss their research and contributions that went into the book, “¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis” on Feb. 26 at 2 p.m. at the Spokane Public Library

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Paganism, Anarchism and May Day

This week Bursts spoke with Rhyd Wildermuth.  Rhyd is a co-editor and founder or the website Gods & Radicals, which also publishes periodical journal entitled "A Beautiful Resistance".  For the hour, we speak about paganism, anti-capitalism, race and whiteness in the context of ethical approaches towards earth-based religions as white people in a Settler Colonial society, May Day and more. You can find his projects at https://godsandradicals.org

We also repeat our announcement of the upcoming anarchist bookfaire in Asheville:

If you're in the South East (or wherever), you are cordially invited to attend the 1st Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfaire, also known as ACAB2017 from May 5-May 7th in Asheville, North Carolina.  The weekend of events kicks off with an a welcome table at firestorm books at 610 Haywood Rd from 3pm until 6pm with a schedule of events and ways to plug in.  There are multiple musical events Friday and Saturday night.  Featured speakers include Shon Meckfessel, Jude Ortiz of Tilted Scales Collective, members of the crimethInc collective as well as from the Water Protectors Anti-Repression Crew and a special appearance by author and activist Ward Churchill.  Vendors over the weekend will include PM Press, AK Press, Little Black Cart, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, Combustion Books and many more.  Consider the daytime events to be all ages.  Check out http://acab2017.noblogs.org for updates and info.

More up-to-date announcements and episodes will pick up along with audio from our participation in the International Anarchist Gathering in Athens, Greece, starting up mid-May, 2017. Check out our social media feeds to see and hear elements of it, including the live broadcast on April 30th from Athens.

Check out this episode!

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Anarchist News @ https://t.co/QLF6cdRpt8: TFSRadio: "Nonviolence Ain't What It Used To Be" with Shon Meckfessel / #anarchism

— Anarchism - news (@anarchismhub) April 3, 2017

(http://twitter.com/anarchismhub/status/849042582273482753)

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The refusal to acknowledge policing as a persistent concern in its own right is especially noticeable in the public amnesia around Martin Luther King Jr.’s address to the March on Washington. While the final, ‘I have a dream’ portion of the speech may well be the most frequently cited act of public oratory of the twentieth century, the speech in its entirety is seldom cited, particularly the middle portion, where King extols ‘[t]he marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community.’ Rather than mentioning policing in passing as a local impediment to his campaigns, King presents it as core to the movement’s goals, as a sort of summary of actually existing racism in the United States. ‘There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.’ Addressing those who have traveled to the nation’s capital from the struggles in the South, King again presents the violence of policing as the epitome of racist hatred faced by movement participants: ‘Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.’ Bizarre metaphors aside, police brutality is of such pervasive importance to King that he evokes it repeatedly, throughout multiple sections of the speech, unlike the incessantly quoted dream of the day when ‘little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,’ which appears only in the closing passage, when ‘all of God’s children … will be able to join hands.’ While the horrors of police brutality warranted more space in King’s speech (already heavily edited by state censors) than the dream of children of different races joining hands, the latter image came to stand in for the entire message of his speech, and indeed his entire life; his critique of endemic, racist police violence, however, has been utterly erased from public memory.

Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), pp. 35–36.

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If tantruming is male—which fails even as a metaphor; female children are just as likely to throw tantrums!—the potentially counterhegemonic, transgressive meanings of a feminist/queer riot are foreclosed. […] While the same actions carried out by straight white males might be equally illegal, the need to translate the queer/feminist riot into a bunch of boys reveals the extent to which feminist/queer violence is profoundly more disruptive—not only of state power but of the heteronormative-patriarchal complex on which it rests. The destructive power of subjects presumed to be passive, who take violent agency in the face of the very figures possessing Weber’s ‘legitimate use of physical force in a given territory,’ is too powerful a semiotic disruption to gain space in representation. Indeed, its power can be measured by the extent to which dominant discourses try to hide and deny it. When it succeeds, such reversal makes manifest the patriarchal mechanism that covertly legitimizes only men to employ force.

Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), pp. 163–4.

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When Gandhi disavowed any inclination to bring harm upon the British in India, he may have spoken of an egalitarianism of universal humanity, but his actions were in fact tactical moves within a larger rhetorical strategy of reversal. Anyone, whether the war-weary British or the international audience, watching the news clips of British troops beating in the skulls of satyagrahis publicly demonstrating their spiritual strength had no ambiguities about who were the truly civilized and who were the obviously brutish. Gandhi’s great discursive victory was not, then, one of asserting equality where colonial discourse had devaluated the captive population as much as it was one of reversing it. This was precisely the strategy that [Martin Luther] King took up from Gandhi: his words of universal love for humanity worked all the more powerfully to contrast with the monstrosity of Birmingham dogs and fire hoses; they sought and performed no shared humanity with Bull Connor and his social order, but an undeniable superiority before the courts of northern liberal television and newspapers that King knew was his real audience. Indeed, despite his professed faith in converting one’s enemy through an assertion of triumphant humanity, King certainly never claimed that Connor himself might be the target of his egalitarian appeals. According to historian Adam Fairclough, King’s approach in fact failed in the 1963 Albany, Georgia, campaign, when Chief of Police Laurie Pritchett himself professed a belief in ‘nonviolence’ and instructed his officers to use a ‘nonviolent approach’ by beating demonstrators only after they had been removed to jail and setting high cash bonds for protester arrests to delay their release until after demonstrations [Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000, 269–71]. These prescient practices, so akin to today’s ‘strategic incapacitation’ policing, defeated King’s tactics and left the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] on the verge of ‘imminent collapse.’ ‘Albany,’ according to Fairclough, ‘disabused the Civil Rights Movement of its more romantic notions about nonviolence.’

Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), pp. 85–86.

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[T]he mass publics that classic nonviolence relied on have been reconstituted by shifts in the nature of mass media. Once again, hegemonic forces have done quite well in foreclosing the opportunities successfully exploited by previous generations. Modern images analogous to those of My Lai are scant when journalists must choose between ‘embedded’ reporting and being shot. The only exceptions are occasional internal leaks carried out with great courage in the certainty of terrible reprisal: Chelsea Manning, rather than receiving the Gandhi Peace Prize, as Daniel Ellsberg did for his leak of the Pentagon Papers, instead gets solitary confinement, pain-compliance holds, and a thirty-year prison sentence; Edward Snowden, as of this writing, waits in uneasy exile, likely facing worse than Manning if he is extradited. These are precisely the acts which, a generation ago, won accolades for Ellsberg and for the courageous exercise of free press powers by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Coverage of domestic dissent has followed suit; nearly all media outlets are owned by the same few parent companies that set their editorial policy, with disastrous consequences for breadth of permissible dialogue on domestic issues. Mass media in the neoliberal era works to hide rather than publicize the present-day Little Rocks and other forms of state and racist violence. The highest rate of incarceration in world history, with a total of seven million citizens under correctional supervision; daily killings of African Americans by police (one African American death at the hands of police and vigilantes every 28 hours); daily deaths by enforced exposure along the United States–Mexico border—all have been rendered invisible to the public eye by near-absolute exclusion from mass media coverage, at least until the limited successes of Black Lives Matter and more local movements.

Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), p. 42.

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In the Seattle protests of 1999 [against the World Trade Organization summit] and within wider waves of alter-globalization contention […] protesters not only refused to notify police beforehand of their plans but also actively (and successfully) strategized to outmaneuver police on the ground. Illegal activity was suddenly no longer limited to predetermined, agreed-upon acts of nonviolent civil disobedience; it included politically embarrassing employments of disruptive tactics—most importantly, in Seattle, with the successful blockading of delegates from entering the WTO ministerial and massive disruption of downtown business flow during Christmas shopping season, in addition to Black Bloc property destruction. Employing new electronic communications media, protest organization became utterly decentralized and autonomous, removing the traditional core of coordinators with whom to negotiate or, alternatively, target for elimination. Consequently, police had to come up with a new plan. They arrived at a new approach that Patrick Gillham and John Noakes call ‘strategic incapacitation.’ By employing fierce but focused violence, scrambling communications, conducting preemptive arrests and detention until protests are over, targeting support networks such as medical and legal assistance, seizing food, interrupting protesters’ sleep, and disrupting coordination of actions, police tactics aim primarily to impose limits on the ability of protesters to carry out their plans by miring them in the muck of logistical dilemmas. Publicly, police try to limit sites of political action to ‘free speech zones’ far from the target of the protests, while demeaning protesters through intensified media coordination that limits their larger webs of support. In extreme but increasingly common cases, police encourage right-wing vigilantes to preoccupy demonstrators and organizers with the logistics of their own safety and survival. Attempts to control demonstrators end up mimicking the tactics of the demonstrators themselves, as police, too, become more diffuse and multimodal. In turn, protests tend to be increasingly focused on countering the actions of the police. Responses to strategic incapacitation thus become an unavoidable core ‘message’ in the politics of contemporary protest.

Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), p. 33.

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The focus on the incapacitation of movements, rather than the justice of their cause, can be understood as the most significant shift in social control from the welfare state to the neoliberal era. Consider the foundational 1962 Port Huron Statement that established Students for a Democratic Society. The statement, which in many ways framed New Left concerns, reveals how movement rhetorical strategies of the time were primarily concerned with attacking the justice of the status quo: ‘Many of us began maturing in complacency.… As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss.… Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era.’

Reading these words now, their pained sincerity is no less striking than their absolute distance from our own times. Whatever one’s social position or political affiliation, the idea that complacent comfort, virtue, or some sort of Golden Age is in danger of being undermined by a threat of hypocrisy and decline is an idea from some other world. Political radicalization must now happen by other means, since no one—Left or Right—would entertain such naivety in the first place. […] If movements are to do their job and disrupt the daily reproduction of the status quo, they cannot merely point out how unfair things are, which is obvious enough. Instead, they have to figure out, work through, and overcome those social ‘advances’ that have convinced people that they are powerless to do anything about it.

Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), pp. 13–14.

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Even within communities of color, the recognition of policing as a central social movement concern has often been starkly generational. Research concerning perceived causes of the massive 2005 riots in the Paris banlieues is borne out by analysis […] looking at 366 statements culled from Le Monde. Older neighborhood residents, spokespeople for the government and opposition parties, and Sarkozy himself favored explanations blaming either personal discriminatory attitudes, structural exclusion from access, Sarkozy and the parties in power, or, predictably, excessive immigration and youth delinquency. Of the seventeen statements by neighborhood youth, not one of them mentioned any of these as a related issue; fully 100 percent of their statements attributed the riots either to police (40 percent) or to other causes (60 percent) not understood as ‘political.’ Not one of the 145 statements by older inhabitants or political figures mentioned police. Expert and volunteer associations, presumably comprising and having contact with both of these constituencies, offered even more mixed statements. Older inhabitants’ responses more closely resembled those of political parties than their own youth; this would indicate more of a generational divide rather than solely an ethnic, class, or geographical one.

Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), p. 39.

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State legislatures have retained effective control over finances, schooling, and housing, but more diverse representation at the city level ‘meant that civil violence or other claims on city government increasingly would be directed toward African American public bureaucrats, and African American police.’ [Michael Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn?] This results in a perverse hesitancy for communities of color to manifest antagonism in the places they live, lest they lose the ambiguous gains won through long struggle; political elites, whatever good or bad intentions they may have, are thus able to demobilize dissent, as urban populations identify more closely with the faces, if not the actual forces, of rule. The contradictions in the practice of such management strategies can be seen in the example of Occupy Oakland, when Chinese American (and former neighborhood organizer and self-described communist) Mayor Jean Quan at first attempted to express sympathy with the movement by visiting the camp, only to order the deployment of near-lethal force by hundreds of riot police less than two weeks later. Quan justified her move by claiming that ‘white anarchists’ were marauding through ‘our Oakland,’ which, though misrepresenting the diverse composition of Occupy, seemed true if ‘our’ referred to the racial makeup of the city’s political elites. The appeal of this claim must have been noticed by other politicians: on November 24, 2014, when Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Seattle and shut down the country’s largest interstate for a full hour, white mayor Ed Murray did not blush to claim that the freeway had been shut down by ‘a bunch of white anarchists,’ even though, according to several eyewitnesses I spoke with, every one of those who actually made it on the freeway were Black youth (with the ironic exception of local white hip hop celebrity Macklemore). In both instances, a bizarre rhetorical situation was revealed: minoritized communities were apparently shut off from the sort of public disruption that had historically been a central means of influence, so that their ‘representatives’ could actually claim public disruption to be evidence of privilege.

Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), pp. 22–23.

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The subjects usually do not realize that they are the source of the ruler’s power and that by joint action they could dissolve that power. Failure to realize the role they play may have its roots either in innocent ignorance or in deliberate deception by the ruler. If the subjects look at their ruler’s power at a given moment, they are likely to see it as a hard, solid force which at any point may fall upon them in their helplessness; this short-range view leads them to the monolith theory of power. If they were to look at their ruler’s power both backward and forward in time, however, and note its origins and growth, its variations and fragility, they would begin to see their role in the genesis, continuance and development of that power. This realization would reveal that they possess the capacity to destroy that power.

Gene Sharp, Power and Struggle: The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part 1 (Porter Sargent, 1973), p. 44, quoted in Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (AK, 2016), pp. 73–74.

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Thursday, July 19 at 7 PM - 8:30 PM PDT

Veradale United Church of Christ 611 N Progress Rd, Veradale, Washington 99037

Hosted by Families Against Bigotry

The next event in an ongoing summer event series on FASCISM, HATE, AND BUILDING ALTERNATIVES. FREE AND OPEN THE PUBLIC.

 UCC Church on 611 N. Progress Rd. JUST MINUTES FROM DOWNTOWN SPOKANE, PLENTY OF FREE PARKING. When “Free Speech” is Actually Its Opposite: How to Not Get Played By the Alt-Right, with Dr. Shon Meckfessel The alt-right and the resurgent white nationalist movement have found success in blurring the line between hate speech and free speech. This talk will help cut through this confusion and give us ways to respond to the charge that protesting fascists somehow violates the Constitution.

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Shon Meckfessel interview, p2

This is a continuation of our episode talking about violence, non-violence, nonviolence, property destruction, Liberalism's public secret, antifa violence, insult and way more. 

In this podcast bonus is content we couldn't fit in the hour of our show for this week.  Hopefully most of it will end up in an episode in the near future. 

Shon recently authored the book, "Nonviolence Ain't What It Used To Be," which is also the focus of this related podcast episode.  We hope you enjoy this.  Let us know by dropping us an email at thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net, check out our archives at https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org or write us at:

The Final Straw Radio c/o AshevilleFM 864 Haywood Rd Asheville, NC 28806

At one point we talk about anarchist approaches to the Syrian Revolution & Rojava and I reference an interview with a co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, Robin Yassin-Kassab which can be found <a href="https://sub.media/video/lessons-from-the-syrian-revolution/">here</a>

Check out this episode!