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when it's certainly not going to change at all?

- What are the false hopes that

keep us tied to the system?

What are the false

hopes that bind us to

unlivable situations and

blind us to real possibilities?

Does anybody really think that

Weyerhauser's going to stop,

deforesting because we asked nicely

that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing

because we ask nicely?

I was talking to this person in the

States several years ago and they said,

"If we can just get a Democrat in the

White House, things are going to be OK."

- We've got a couple of myths

on the left that I would

really encourage us to get over.

The first is that social change

happens by moral suasion.

It doesn't. It happens by force.

- The problem with persuasion

as a strategy is that

it only works on people who can actually

be convinced, and who can be

relied upon to act from their position

after their minds have been changed.

And the problem is that we're not dealing with

individuals who can be convinced or persuaded,

we're dealing mostly with large,

abstract, social organizations,

and corporations which are

basically sociopaths made out

of huge numbers of people.

- You can't argue with psychopaths,

you can't argue with fascists,

and you can't argue with those

who are benefiting from an economic system.

You have to stop them through

some form of force,

and that force can be violent or nonviolent.

Could you have stopped Ted

Bundy by peaceful means?

- The Left, to a large extent subconsciously,

has as its primary role

to make resistance harmless.

States have recognized that

resistance will never disappear,

that struggles will never disappear

and in the past they

tried suppressing struggles

the first time that they

showed their heads, that there was

any sign of them, and

that proved ineffective.

So nowadays that way

that states rule is by

accepting the inevitability

of conflict and resistance,

and just trying to manage it permanently.

"Keep the march going,

there's nothing happening here!

There's nothing happening,

just one more line of police,

so please keep the march going!"

- Social movements in North America are locked

into this pacifist doctrine that is imposed by

the middle class reformists

who want to control

the movement and dictate

how it conducts itself.

- Advocates of nonviolence

frequently say that nonviolence

works, and the principal

examples that they use of that

are Gandhi in India and Martin

Luther King in the U.S.

The problem with that is,

this constitutes a really great

historical whitewashing,

that in fact the resistance in

India was incredibly

diverse, and Gandhi was

a very important figure

within that resistance,

but the resistance was by no

means pacifist in its entirety.

- Gandhi gets used as a way

to shut down conversation.

- Especially in the West,

Gandhi is used as a way

to quell any ideas of

either direct action or what's

perceived as violence or,

sort of, you know, resistance that

goes beyond what is seen as a sort of a

pacifist or a peaceful means of resistance.

- For years, I really bought into the whole

Gandhian myth that is really sort of

forced down the throats of

activists in the United States,

and the people who disabused

me of that myth were

when I first actually

met some people from India.

The people I talked to

certainly didn't deify him,

and many of them despised him.

And they felt he was a

collaborator and he was somebody

whom the British could work with.

- Gandhi's very well known in the West,

but when you go to India, there's

a freedom fighter and revolutionary

leader called Bhagat Singh,

who's in India probably

almost as well known as Gandhi

as a part of

the independence movement and a

leader in the independence movement.

But in the West, most people

probably have never heard his name.

And the reason why that is, is that he used

direct action tactics.

There were generals of the

British army that were killed;

there was a bomb thrown

in a British assembly to

basically attract the

attention of the public;

there were weapons that people

were getting off of railway cars.

- With Gandhi and the

Indian National Congress,

where you had the moderates

and the extremists,

the moderates were legal;

constitutional reform

was their only method,

and they were criticized for

being a middle class clique,

for being too slow,

for being too legalistic,

and for being basically ineffective.

The extremists, on the other

hand, were accused of being

too aggressive, of being too fast

and reckless and irresponsible.

- Gandhi basically got negotiating power

from the fact that there were

other elements in the struggle

which were even more

threatening to British dominance.

So the British specifically

chose to dialogue with

Gandhi because he was,

perhaps for them, the least

threatening of the important

elements of resistance.

- Gandhi came in as

being the middleman.

His theory of nonviolent,

passive resistance

seemed to be a bridge between

the extremists and the moderates.

- The British were bled white after WWII,

and didn't have the

morale left anymore for

a big fight, and they

helped choose somebody

that they could work with.

They knew a revolution

was coming

and they wanted to

blunt it as much as they could.

- India went from being

a colony to a neocolony.

The British were still able to

maintain their interests, less directly,

with Indians being in

positions of management.

- My problem isn't with

somebody doing nonviolent

actions, it never has been.

I mean, I say all the

time that we need it all.

My problem is that

so many pacifists, especially

in the United States,

end up not supporting

more radical or militant work.

- The problem when this

debate comes up is that

you can't just assume

that people that are

resisting and are using

a means of resistance

haven't thought about what

they're doing. And that's what

I think is often the

problem. When people

decide to take certain actions

and when people decide

that, "Hey, you know,

our marches aren't enough,"

or they're doing this or doing that,

there's this assumption

by a lot of people that

want to toe the Gandhi line that,

"Oh, they're just not thinking about it."

- What most states will choose

to do in similar circumstances

is to find the elements

of the resistance

that are most easy to control

and most easy to co-opt,

to negotiate with them, and then

to hand over power to them in order

to continue the system

that had already existed.

- So again, you have the state

doing the same thing it did

with Gandhi and Martin Luther

King it does with, for example,

the environmental movement. So

it invites the responsible leaders

of the environmental

movement into inquiries,

government commissions,

debates. It recognizes them --

they're the legitimate leaders --

because again,

it doesn't want the movement to begin to

adopt more militant resistance tactics.

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