editors note: We’ve got no beef with the Eugene Weekly

By: Lola

i suspect that responding to a lte in a different newspaper than it was printed in is some kind of faux pas, but i suspect more strongly that the eugene weekly would not print my vehement FUCK THAT response to their Feb. 5th letter from Hope Bohanec. Don’t get me wrong, EW is pretty decent for a liberal news outlet, and I know part of their ethos is printing all number of lukewarm takes, as long as it fits the format.
but i digress.

Hope, in a long legacy of willfully obtuse privileged liberals, charges protesters in Eugene to remain nonviolent, keeping their actions to “filling the streets with chants”. As she and countless other counter-insurgents who’ve come before her affirm: “Violence provides justification for repression, for invoking measures like the Insurrection Act, and for expanding state control in the name of “public safety.”

How many times, and in how many ways, do oppressed people need to explain that insistence on nonviolence is actually insisting that the state and fascists should hold a monopoly on violence?

I will not, in 500 words or less, attempt to argue whether or not violence is ever justified, or to make the distinction between violence against property versus a person’s physical body. What I want to convey to those wrestling with this question of violence is simply that violence is here whether we like it or not. The police use it daily with impunity, and ICE has been converted into a private militia to enact violence on whomever the federal government sees fit. If we are to remain civil, using only chants against their army, the only reason they will have ceased to repress us will be because they have succeeded in imposing complete imperialist control over everyone and everything, disappearing our immigrant and/or uncooperative neighbors in the meantime.

If you are able to insulate yourself from the effects of state and fascist violence, it simply means that what you hold dear has not been sufficiently threatened.