“Non-violence is non-functional in a society that’s based on organized violence”

Lessons from the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army

Kathleen Cleaver former Communications Secretary for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense said it best. “Non-violence is a very non-functional approach in a society that’s based entirely on organized force and violence. A country was created in violence. Land was taken in violence. Society that’s perpetuating itself through violence in the ghettos, in Vietnam, in Africa wherever you look there is organized force and violence at work to maintain the society. There’s a world of difference between 20 million unarmed people and 20 million people organized and armed to the gills. That’s power.”

Every day there’s a new massacre in Palestine, Yemen, Sudan, and the Congo. In conjunction ice raids target an entire apartment building in Chicago dragging naked children out in the middle of the night. There have only been two days so far in 2025 when police did not kill someone in the colonial entity known as The United States. The police have inflicted colonial life ending violence on 997 people in the year 2025 alone. The non-violent flotilla members attempting to break the violent Israeli siege on Gaza are captured at gunpoint, tortured, humiliated, and deprived of food, water, and medicine. This is of course a fraction of the colonial violence imposed on Palestinian hostages daily. Palestinian political prisoners are abducted for years with no media attention, no support from outside governments, and very few people working to humanize their stories.

What do most western influencers tell you to do? Call your representatives!!! Hit the streets for marches that are sometimes coordinated and approved by police. This is liberal bourgeois nonsense. It reminds me of when I was shot by the LAPD/LASD with rubber bullets in 2020 and I did in fact call my Congressman Ted Lieu to press him about it. He didn’t even have the courage to talk to me directly. He had one of his underlings suggest I report it to the police. YOU MEAN THE GUYS WHO SHOT AT ME?!?! They are aware, I saw them high-five.

The political class is acutely aware of the violence and is hoping you will be satiated by non-violence. The calls that never reach them and the emails that get archived and deleted by an intern. They are banking on your fatigue with engaging in these futile efforts.

Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) critiqued the strategy of non-violence in 1967, “Dr King’s policy was that non-violence would achieve the gains for Black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are non-violent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good you only made one fallacious assumption, in order for non-violence to work your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” This is true for the zionist entity as well.

This sentiment was no doubt influenced by Franz Fanon on page 48 of The Wretched of the Earth, “colonialism is not a thinking machine nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. At the decisive moment the colonist bourgeoisie which up till then has remained inactive comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as them and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed.”

Field Marshall for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, George Jackson, further underscored this line of thinking in his communications with his mother in 1967 in a collection of writings known as Soledad Brother, Prison Letters of George Jackson. “In a nonviolent movement there must be a latent threat of eruption, a dormant possibility of sudden and violent action if concessions are to be won, respect gained, and the established order altered. That nonviolent theory is practicable in civilized lands among civilized people, the Asians and Africans, but a look at European history shows that anything of great value that ever changed hands was taken by force of arms.”

I think a large part of the problem is that people in the west have been conditioned to see protests as an aesthetic that doesn’t really challenge the power structure. We bring our cell phones to take photos and livestream the marches which in turn make us an extension of the surveillance state. It’s become more about being seen than enacting a change. I am guilty of this as well. It’s long past-time for people to put our phones away and connect with likeminded individuals offline. Find mutual aid and direct action networks near you and get to work, time is running out.