NYT interviewer struggles with author of "How to Blow up a Pipeline", cw: liberalism
NYT interviewer struggles with author of "How to Blow up a Pipeline", cw: liberalism
This interview between the NYT and the author of 'how to blow up a pipeline' includes discussion of the social acceptability of political violence. Unsurprisingly, the NYT person flips out at the idea of property destruction and seems to bounce between 'political violence is never acceptable' and calling David Malm a hypocrite for not blowing up a pipeline during the interview. Evidently this is the kind of political violence the NYT doesn't support, in contrast to the kind of political violence they love (i.e. political violence used by the american state against property and humanity both foreign and domestic).
This is my favourite part of the interview in the spoilers.
spoiler
NYT: We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.
Malm: Of course we can. Why not?
NYT: That is moral hypocrisy.
Malm: I disagree.
NYT: Why?
Malm: The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence — that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using.
NYT: But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?
Malm: Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.
NYT: Could you give me a reason to live?
Malm: What do you mean?
NYT: Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human project.
Malm: I’m not an optimist about the human project.
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This whole thing was bizarre. It felt like the interviewer was trying to trick him into admitting that everything was going to be OK and that he's just angry because of some aberrant mental deficiency.
just angry because of some aberrant mental deficiency
It's accusations of ressentiment every time. They want you to shrivel up and die.
It's funny, when I started going to a therapist, they said something like "well, maybe you have depression, or maybe being upset at everything going on and wanting to do anything but work for the same capitalist forces that perpetuate this massive injustice is actually the rational position, and there isn't anything wrong with your brain?" They were a comrade therapist <3
I basically explain that as simply as I could and without trying to be "too commie" with multiple therapists. Along the lines of "I don't think people were meant to live like this, but I'm forced to." Keeping it vague for them. It sucks though because literally everything is set up that if you can't tolerate 40 hours a week for your entire life because your brain is exploding at the bootlicking you see from coworkers or the depravity on display from owners... then you're the problem and you need to get help. Or you go on rants day after day until you get forced out of jobs... cough
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