I think the two main lessons that leftists in the imperial core need about violence are to unlearn violence-as-punishment and to learn violence-as-intervention. In the imperial core, where complacency and civility are hard coded in from birth, we have a lot of cop brain to unlearn. We too often act like taking action against systemic violence would make us bad, and we let our feelings of injustice focus around punishment, especially when there's a big spectacle involved in the punishment.
To act, especially to act violently, to end the genocide in Palestine, is unthinkable to many in the imperial core because it is unpalatable. It is trivial to get most people to agree that it would be morally just if say the UN raised an army (as Gustavo Petro, President of Colombia has proposed) to go into Gaza and defeat Israel. The problem with an idea like this for people is not that it would be unjust but that it would be unseemly, that it would mean "escalating".
Meanwhile I've seen an increasing number of people talk about Netanyahu being tried and even executed. My concern with this is that if we take insufficient action while the genocide is ongoing, and then it has succeeded and we punish Netanyahu as an emblem of its evil, then we are saying that his life is worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The people who would be satisfied by Bibi being killed would be letting the systems that have created the genocide get away only one fascist lighter.
I saw someone on substack who was saying "my hot take is that bad people deserve to die". And she went on to list ICE agents and other fascists, rapists, pedophiles, IDF soldiers, and some others as groups she thinks should be killed. The trouble for me is that immense punishment is not a hot take, it is an ice cold take and it also is used in a post-facto search for justice rather than a preventative measure. It isn't just that punitive logic is never and will never be applied equally, fairly or without authoritarian creep, it's that these are all cases where there are systems of material connections and ideology that drive people to act in these ways and if we want to stop people acting in these ways we have to challenge the systems.
Israel has mandatory national service. A lot of the IDF are teenagers or in their early 20s. I would like to believe that if the right interventions were made those people would be able to lead non-fascist lives for the remaining 6 or so decades they have on the planet. Before anyone says, no of course that won't undo any of the atrocities those people have committed, but the thing is: neither will killing them. On the other hand if killing them would save Palestinian children from being shot in the head while they search rubble for their parents, yes I'd rather the fascist gets the bullet.
I am using the example of Palestinians as a white British woman here so let me change to situations from my actual life.
I have been harmed in relationships before, in particular my first relationship with another trans woman was abusive - she hit me on multiple occasions, among other things. I don't want bad things to happen to the person who did bad things to me. I did for a while, and talked and acted like it, but none of that brought me any healing. I kept trying to express to people around me that I felt conflicted about her, and was treated with suspicion for wanting to see my abuser as a whole person instead of a cartoon monster. I would actively not like people to exclude her, treat her poorly, say unkind things to her, because I know what she did came from things in her life she couldn't properly heal from, and what I would like most of all is for the people in her life now to help her heal.
I am trans, and I sure fucking hate the UK government. If I were to point to one politician that my instinct to punish is brought out by more than any other it would be Wes Streeting. There are child suicides in our community that could have been prevented by a lifting of the puberty blocker ban that he chose to extend knowing it would likely cause more deaths. If he got hit by a bus, I would not consider that justice to the families and loved ones of those children, or to our community broadly. If he were tried for his role in these deaths and somehow in my imaginary UK court that cares about trans children found guilty and punished, I don't feel any justice in that. On the other hand I think that if a trans woman is about to be arrested at a protest, given that trans women are sent to men's prisons, I think using physical force to de-arrest her would be a moral act.
We need to stop seeking punishment, an ultimately disempowering instinct that makes us wait patiently for some form of legal Daddy to make everything fair and just, and start seeking immediate actions that stop systemic violence. Yes, they may escalate into a conflict, but conflicts only become conflicts when somebody stands up to violence. We need to sit with the fact there is hard, uncomfortable work to be done in helping "the bad people" to be able to live in the world we want to build, because we aren't going to change systems of human behaviour by fantasizing about a day where we can see all our enemies hanged
Not to be unbearably cringingly earnest or anything, but
Punish the bad people isn't a hot take. Help the people who have learned or been forced into horrible action to be free of the systems that contort them into hideous shapes, that's a pretty hot take
