Nat Turner and the I.R.A.

Understanding violence

One of the reasons I enjoy reading Freddie deBoer, despite not always agreeing with him [politically, I often do; culturally, we seem to have diametrically opposed tastes] is that he understands that when discussing or trying to influence politics, people (most often centrist-liberals) confuse what they feel should be the case with what actually is the case.

Now, I’m a Unitarian from a comfortable lower-middle class background, growing up in a cottage in the British countryside, going to a decently well provisioned state school where the worst things I experienced were bullying and struggling with OCD. As such, it has been pretty easy for me to eschew violence. There’s been little need for me to be violent. When I’ve engaging in activism, it’s been with good-natured civil disobedience rather than destructive direct action. I’ve been the one asking a cop to stop being so aggressive with a protestor rather than actually fighting a cop. Even when in jail overnight I got to reflect idealistically on the politics of Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest since I was privileged enough that the police let me keep my copy in my pocket.

I’ve also never stolen a sandwich from a supermarket. Yes, truly I am a prince of valor and principle.

Because, you know, I’ve never had reason or need to!!!

It’s very easy to pass moral judgement against those who are disenfranchised doing things you haven’t haven’t - or feel you wouldn’t do - if you’ve never had a reason (or even inclination) to do those things. As I posted previously, one of the things I’ve done which I retrospectively feel the worst about, was dating a girl who was just about to turn seventeen when we first got together and I was a few years older. At the time, I rationalised my own niggling feelings of doubt away. Almost two decades later I think it was wrong and creepy (not least, probably, because I have now taught kids of that age and they now seem incredibly young to me).

Years back I watched (for self-flagellating reasons) a feminist video on how it is wrong if you are over eighteen to date a girl who is sixteen or seventeen. It was all pretty fair and reasonable! However, one top-voted comment underneath the video annoyed me then and still annoys me now; which was from a young woman who proclaimed - to paraphrase from memory - “I’ve never even felt the urge to date someone of that age so, no excuses, it’s really easy not to do”. And I remember thinking - “No shit! If I hadn’t been lonely and a girl that age hadn’t said she was interested in me, I wouldn’t have either!” It’s a moot point. It’s not especially commendable to not have the desire to do something and then not do it. What would have been good/ decent was if when the girl in question had told me that she was actually sixteen-going-on-seventeen not eighteen-going-on-nineteen like she had said, I had told her that us getting closer was a bad idea and I needed to distance myself. I didn’t because I was selfish and needy and lived in a country when sixteen was the age of consent and so had internalised that. Not good reasons, but reasons nonetheless because human beings are rarely simply sociopaths who enjoying harming others and committing crimes for the hell of it. People always have their reasons. Understanding that is part of political pragmatism not idealism.

—

My point is that behaviour we might object to - or even be repulsed by - doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This is a truism but social media has seemingly just increased our tendency to look at behaviour individualisatically (so-called ‘cancel culture’ being a good example of this) rather than structurally, even while social media itself has helped to demonstrate again and again how individuals are much more easily manipulated by structural forces than they like to think, such as with the Brexit vote.

One of the things I have found most frustrating when engaging with friends and acquaintances who are much more sympathetic to Israel than I am (due, if I am to be charitable, either to family reasons or their own identity) is a tendency to see violent crimes committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 as indicative of individual pathology or a broader Palestinian desire to kill Jewish people. At this point it feels almost obscene to discuss that attack because in scale and cruelty it has been dwarfed by the violence committed against the civilians of Gaza… but I am not one of those on the left who took any pleasure from watching the footage of Israeli civilians being subjected to violence, even with the knowledge that occupation itself is violent.

However, I haven’t been forced to live under apartheid conditions and then been shot at (or had friends killed) when I tried non-violent protest. If I had, I suspect it would be harder to commit to non-violence [even though, clearly, many thousands of Gazans still manage to do so].

Violence is not pretty, but it can be understandable [and I choose that word carefully]. Today very few people would openly express outrage against Nat Turner or those who rose up against white slave owners in the South. Most centrist-liberals would recognise these individuals as heroes. But if we had video recordings of the revolts they would not make for easy viewing. It is well documented that Nat Turner and his allies killed babies and children. Unlike the hasbara claims of Hamas beheading children, Turner’s men actually did this.

Disquietingly, some of rhetoric and reasoning of Turner and his men was probably similar to that used by Israeli soldiers today. To quote from this brilliant overview by Sarah N. Roth, ‘Why Nat Turner and the Southampton Rebels Killed Children’:

[S]uch intimate means of killing may have demanded instead that the rebels approach their victims with a kind of clinical detachment. They may have found cold dispassion necessary in order to carry out the mission they had undertaken at tremendous risk to their own lives. These men saw themselves as soldiers—in some cases, as soldiers sent on a mission by God himself. Nat Turner told his followers that the Holy Spirit had shown him a vision of “white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle” while “blood flowed in streams.” Although faced with having to take the lives of men, women, and children they knew well, Turner and his men likely felt they must not be deterred from carrying out the almighty’s injunction to “slay [their] enemies with their own weapons.” They may have found the task before them unpleasant, or it may have felt like long-delayed vindication. Either way, killing all the whites they encountered was the only way they believed they might have a chance of fulfilling the cherished goal of freedom for which they were willing to sacrifice their lives. Will, whose willingness to shed blood with his powerful broadax led Nat Turner to deem him “the executioner,” articulated this single-mindedness of purpose. On the eve of the revolt, he explained to Turner his presence among the conspirators by saying “his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him.”¹⁴ Had the rebels succeeded, they and their people would have thought the violent deaths of a few white children a small price to pay for the freedom they had long been denied.

The difference being, Nat Turner and his men really were persecuted slaves with lives of no freedom, subjected to great physical, mental and spiritual abuse. Israeli soldiers may see themselves as the same, but materially this is a complete fiction.

Now, do you think if I - sincere, white leftist - managed to travel back in time to Virginia in 1831 with my family with me, that Nat Turner would take me (or any other white person who has sympathised with Turner) in hand as a brother as I earnestly informed him that I was on his side?

[Insert image of the white member of the Mau Maus in Bamboozled (2000) desperately asserting he is black].

I suspect not! However, I can simultaneously imagine the horror I would feel at seeing my relatives killed (and, indeed, seeing any child killed) while understanding that violent slave rebellions were an inevitable and understandable historical outcome that it would be… I don’t quite know the word - a mixture of sanctimonious and pointless - for me to condemn.

This is why I have found the near-constant calls from the MSM to “condemn Hamas” so pointless and besides-the-point. Do I think Jeremy Corbyn or Gary Linekar are in favour of killing civilians or would do so themselves? Clearly not. However, they can recognise who has the all the power in the sitution, which side is armed to the teeth by the US and Europe, which side is not just willing but able to completely annihilite and other side.

I have seen so many arguments from Zionists who state that Israel is acting in self-defense because otherwise the Palestianians would rise up and kill them. Having read the poetry of a lot of people in Gaza - thoughtful, super intelligent, compassionate writers like Mona Ramadan and Mohammed Mohisen - I don’t think that is true, but even if it were true that some of the oppressed Palestinians would kill Israelis if given a chance, how the fuck does that justify or excuse bombing children in their beds?

—

When I was a child I was not a fan of the IRA. Having had a lecturer at university who was an Irish I now have a lot more sympathy for their aims, but my Irish family who lived in Omagh lost friends in the 1998 Omagh city bombing carried out by the Real IRA. Indeed, my cousin was lucky to have been ill that day else she would have been at the shopping centre and could have been hurt herself. If my cousin had been killed I would have been filled with rage and grief. However, even at my angriest there is no way I would have argued that the families of those members of the IRA should have been targetted or that neighbourhoods of Irish Catholics should be bombed. That would have been a grotesquely ugly, unhinged thing to argue.

It also happens that my Irish family members are Catholic. However, if they were Protestant unionists I still – obviously – wouldn’t argue they deserved to be bombed. If, today, some splinter group of the resurrected IRA succeeded in killing English civilians or even kidnapped some, I would not be celebrating and I might be scared. However, I would not argue that the English government would be justified in bombing parts of Northern/occupied Ireland. Obviously. If someone argued that they would seem like a very dangerous person with extreme, disturbing beliefs. If someone then argued that the population should be starved in order to force the hand of the IRA I would think they were a psychopath.

Yet, frankly, the Irish citizens of Northern/occupied Ireland endure nothing like the abuse and privations of the Palestianians. The Palestinian people have much more of a reason to engage in violent resistance! Is violent resistance humanist or humane? I think that’s a complex philosophical question! What isn’t complex are the reasons as to why it was engaged in.

In short, I might be writing to the converted here, but we need to be less reserved in our support for Palestinian resistance when talking to others. Two years into a very transparent case of ethnic cleansing and genocide (which Israeli politicians gloat openly about) I’ve got no time left for both-sidesism. There is also no time left for discussing 7 October except with people who directly lost family members.