Believe this isn't satire. Got news for you, bitch. When it comes time, America will take the penicillin for the bacteria in the system. Only thing saving these fucks now is the police, but you might not want to count on that much longer. Don't complain when your darlings get their asses waxed. NFG.
The Anti-Anti-Violence Manifesto
REVIEW: 'In Defense of Looting' by Vicky Osterweil
Andrew Stiles - SEPTEMBER 14, 2020 12:00 PM
"Social peace is just the condition under which patriarchal white supremacist violence is acting most fluidly and most thoroughly and is distributed most invisibly," writes Vicky Osterweil in her provocative tome,
In Defense of Looting. "Only when we find such ‘peace' intolerable will we be able to envision what real peace might look like, and what it might take to get there."
Osterweil, a self-described agitator who named a pet after a French tyrant (Robespierre), proceeds to lay out "what it might take"—in case chapter titles such as "All Cops Are Bastards" and "No Such Thing as Nonviolence" were too cryptic. Revolution is "the only way forward," and it won't be a nonviolent affair.
Considering the target reader is already familiar with Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States, the book is at least 200 pages too long. The casual reader, meanwhile, is likely to get bogged down in extended passages about NAFTA, El Salvador, and how "racialized hierarchies were crucial to medieval European notions of nobility and the formation of serf and slave populations." Not to mention the preponderance of descriptive adjectives, as mandated by intersectionality. Abolish capitalism? Nah. Abolish "cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist capitalism."
Osterweil isn't pro-violence, per se. She's anti-anti-violence, and prefers the term "not-nonviolent" to describe the revolution she envisions. At the same time, she doesn't want to alienate any readers. "I want to make clear that this discussion is not meant to denigrate anyone who uses non-violent tactics in their struggles," she explains.
That doesn't mean nonviolence is good or advisable. Far from it. History proves that nonviolence is "actually a collaborationist and misogynist affair." Osterweil trods literary ground that few intellectuals have dared to trod. You don't often see the word "egregious" used to describe "peacekeeping" efforts that don't involve the United Nations. The word "similarly" is utilized in courageous fashion to compare a "struggling business" threatened by riots to "a small white farmer who enslaved only one or two people."
Some of the author's attempts to diminish nonviolence as a political tactic read like a bad liberal parody of a bad conservative meme. Martin Luther King didn't really believe in nonviolence, for example, because he "traveled with a heavily armed entourage." In a footnote, Osterweil attempts to burnish her anti-anti-violence bona fides by insisting that she does not intend "to make a moral distinction between looting and property destruction or to imagine that property destruction is ‘worse' or more white supremacist than looting." Phew, thanks for clarifying.
The politics espoused in the book are, to put it mildly, slightly to the left of mainstream. The author praises Che Guevara for his "radical leadership" in promoting a system "distinct from China and the USSR, the latter of which most revolutionaries in the sixties recognized as a reactionary, capitalist state." She tries to assuage ideological purists who argue that looters "are acting as consumers and therefore furthering capitalism." (And Che Guevara got killed by Bolivian Special Forces and US Green Berets, bitch. Think about that. - JS)
What about the minority business owners who might not be so inclined to have their livelihoods destroyed in the name of abolishing [insert descriptive adjectives] capitalism? "There’s no really clean or easy way to struggle without ever hurting anyone," is the best answer Osterweil could come up with in a recent
interview with the
New Yorker. (She also elaborated on her comparison of small business owners to slaveholders, suggesting that all private property is akin to slavery.) (Bitch, then YOU start by giving up ALL your property. Got it? - JS)
Are we to take the author literally, seriously, or both? The mainstream media has been eager to dismiss
In Defense of Looting as the rantings of a lone wolf radical perverting the beliefs of millions of peaceful demonstrators. In any event, it's less dangerous than a Tom Cotton op-ed. Looting should be downplayed—to prevent Republicans from seizing—but never defended. Except the book isn't really a defense of looting so much as a rebuke of capitalism, which can't so easily be dismissed as charmingly fringe.
The Democratic Party avoided a reckoning with this reality when voters salvaged Joe Biden's zombie campaign to prevent a 78-year-old socialist from running away with the nomination. Bernie Sanders is old, but his influential allies in Congress aren't. Younger generations view socialism
more favorably than capitalism, even if they don't really know what either term means. Democratic leaders, mainstream liberals, and "woke" corporations won't be able to defer that reckoning indefinitely. Time to start boarding up the windows. (No, fuckwagon. Time to lock and load, least what a friend tells me. - JS)
Holy shit, this critter's a trannie. Hey, went to the Amazon page for this book. Reported every favorable rating as abusive. Lots of one-star ratings.
Some more:
The Vicky Osterweil delusion
In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action by Vicky Osterweil reviewed
Ben Sixsmith
A boarded up shoe store in Manhattan (Getty)
Ben Sixsmith
August 30, 2020
12:25 PM
In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil ActionVicky Osterweil
Bold Type Books, pp.288, $28.00
Vicky Osterweil, a trans woman who describes herself as a ‘writer, editor, and agitator’ and whose Twitter handle is ‘
Vicky_ACAB’ (all cops are bastards), must have been overcome with joy when rioting and looting broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s death. This is partly because she is a radical leftist and partly because she had just finished writing a book called
In Defense of Looting. What a stroke of luck! It’s as if I had written a book called
Beware of Pandemics in late 2019. I have to salute her timing.
Osterweil is the classic sort of leftist who attempts to wrap enough pretty language around violence and destruction as to ennoble it. The riots, arsons and looting of 2020 needed such a character. It is sort of bracing to have a full-throated endorsement of such activities after grappling with slipperiness of the softer-left.
Compared to legends of the field, like Jean-Paul Sartre, she comes up short. Indeed, her writing often verges on self-parody. ‘Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,’ she informs us. Femme? (As fuck?)
‘As a mode of struggle, riots are marked by many characteristics traditionally defined as feminine: not driven by rational argumentation or “proper” political dialogue, they are instead driven by desire, affect, rage, and pain.’
I don’t know what kind of stone-cold misogynist thinks the irrational is necessarily feminine. That’s a level of sexism that even the outer reaches of the ‘red-pilled’ internet only aspire to achieve. You get the sense that Osterweil was just
desperate to squeeze modish gender politics in somewhere.
There are two ways of approaching Osterweil’s argument, one of which focuses on her
tactics and one of which focuses on the values that underpin them. Focusing on the former concedes too much. Osterweil’s problem is not that she has good intentions and unsound strategies. It is that her entire worldview is unhinged. According to Osterweil, ‘In the four hundred years of barbaric, white supremacist, colonial, and genocidal history known as the United States, the civil rights movement stands out as a bright, beautiful, all-too-brief moment of hope and struggle.
’ This is typically hysterical oikophobia. God knows, I will not say a kind word for slavery, Operation PBSuccess and the Iraq War. But I will also not say a kind word for Mao and the oppression of the Uighurs — yet I still appreciate the riches of Chinese culture and history.
Osterweil is flagrantly dishonest, or fantastically ignorant, in her attempts to portray the US as such a quasi-fascistic oppressor of African Americans that violent disorder is justifiable. Darren Wilson, she writes, ‘gunned down Mike Brown for the crime of being black’. Multiple investigations have
concluded that Brown attempted to seize Wilson’s gun, and if Osterweil has reason to think that this is false she should have argued as much. (It was also discovered that Brown robbed a convenience store immediately prior to this altercation. Osterweil says he was ‘slandered’ as a thief but offers no evidence to support this characterization.)
Such hot bias pervades Osterweil’s treatment of history as well. On page 3, as Pranesh Prakash
pointed out, a quote that the word ‘loot’ was used as a ‘bond of union’ in India is attributed to an English colonial officer but actually
comes from Amir Khan, Nawab of Potok. Another small example — but a telling one in how it illustrates the firmness and narrowness of Osterweil’s blinkers — comes when she bangs on about McCarthyism for pages but does not spend as much as a sentence admitting that there
was extensive Soviet infiltration of the US. If you are going to reference the execution of Julius Rosenberg in the context of a long rant about ‘paranoid fear-mongering’ I think you are obliged to admit that he was guilty.
Osterweil spends a lot of time arguing that violence and destruction are not bad
per se. I agree! Armed self-defense? Good! Resisting illegitimate authority? Often good! But when it comes to arguing that violence and destruction in modern-day America is justifiable, Osterweil is not merely unpersuasive but actually makes me think she might be an undercover conservative trying to make the left look bad. Consider this emoting:
‘We can no longer let the police, that despicable occupying army, seem “natural,” nor let anyone paint resistance to the settler state as an enemy of peace. Their peace is the peace of the grave.’ (That's the peace this swine should expect if the police ever depart. A friend says it'll be open season on her and her ilk. - JS)
Eh? I’m not sure if that pseudo-poetic flourish merits a response but it might be worth pointing out that
less than one-fifth of the black Americans that Osterweil does a lot of speaking for in
In Defence of Looting want fewer police on their streets. In the
book, Osterweil condemns people who think ‘poor Black or working-class folks don’t know what they’re doing’. I guess in this instance she doesn’t think black people know what they’re doing. And what
is it with this kind of writer and the word ‘folks’?
‘We need to stand fast beside looters, rioters, and street fighters,’ Osterweil insists. Well, let us look at what looters and rioters have been getting up to. Destroying and damaging
small restaurants,
bars,
churches,
car dealerships,
grocery stores, pharmacies — many of them owned by
African Americans (which I don’t think makes it more condemnable than when they are owned by anybody else, but which makes Osterweil’s arguments even more preposterous). In an interview with NPR, Osterweil actually
justified this violence in these terms:
‘When it comes to small business, family owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections. They are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses.’
Well, I don’t see what gives to Osterweil the darn right to determine whose businesses deserve to survive but perhaps they provide good products, friendly service and a local alternative to the mega-corps which are swallowing up Western economies in the aftermath of a vicious COVID-19-lockdown combo.
As for the ‘street fighters’ she endorses, it’s worth asking how she distinguishes then from the man who killed David Dorn as he
protected his friend’s pawn shop, or the men who
beat a woman protecting a jewelry store, or the people who
hurled rocks and bottles at firefighters.
Ultimately, when an ideology is premised on misplaced hostility and paranoia, and when violent tactics are so broadly and hysterically justified, this kind of pointless, pathetic destruction is inevitable. Osterweil only provides encouragement. This book proves, if nothing else, that you can get anything published if you wrap it in a veneer of progressive idealism.
