Subject/Object

Yesterday I went to hear Jaggi Singh speak at Hart House. Frankly, I wasn’t impressed. I have seen him around, read articles about him, but I haven’t read anything he has written. I’ve been to protests where I have seen him very active, and arrested quite dramatically. However, I have never heard his ideas about anything, except the general anarchist-anti-capitalist stance.

To be honest, I find he talked a lot and didn’t say much. The topic of his speech was that we, as Canadians, shouldn’t think we are without blood on our hands, and then he went on to list about 40 minutes worth of contemporary examples of oppression, both internally and externally, domestic and abroad, that “Canada” (I didn’t understand if he was talking about Canada the society or Canada the government, or both) is actively involved in. And, that was basically the end, with no theory, no philosophy, no plan of action, except the standard Michael Moore type complaining, without any form of positive plans.

Which is not to say I didn’t agree with him. I don’t know if such simplistic labels as “Socialist” or “Anarchist”–or even “theist” or “atheist”–should be used by intelligent people, who are always free for forge their own path. Yet, however much this man is famous in activist circles, I thought he didn’t tell me anything I (or most of the group that was assembled) already knew. Governments are bad?? What a shock. The history lesson I could have got from reading Indymedia, Noam Chomsky and Wikipedia.

However, what I did find shocking was his so-called opposition to violence, which was only an opposition to the violence of the oppressor, not the oppressed. At an even whose fliers demanded an end uniquivicol to violence at the university (not just one type of violence), I found that calling US and Canadian oppressors “murderers” and those who retaliate with violence, such as the leaders of the Haitian revolution, “unequivocal”.(Jaggi called Toussaint L’Ouverture a hero).

I got up and tried to point out the slight hypocrisy in that statement. I made the point that some theorists would argue that violence, in all its forms, is the problem, and not who wields it. Despite what the Wikipedia article says about him, he is not a pacifist, and he admitted that he supported the use of violence when it is necessary in conflict against oppression.

I hope that one day we can reach a point where only thinkers and humanitarians can be thought of as heroes. It takes more bravery to be Gandhi or Dr. King that a violent military commander, regardless of what side he shed blood for–blood is blood. Later I discussed a wonderful Derrida essay with a member of the audience, “The Force of Law”, which, in short, says that all critique, all revolution, begins with a kind of Divine violence that does away with law, but that same movement of violence eventually sets up and enforces new law, defeating its original purpose.

The end of violence, Derrida writes, exists in this messianic time (not a specific messianism) that is always in the future, but it never arrives. The ideal is always betrayed.

I guess I didn’t agree with his ideas of the role of violence.

Not all the government/corporate forces are working against the rights and freedom of internet users. Unfortunately, it is usually just some lone judge, like this guy.

In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official.

Of course, when entering the public sphere, the people are legally entitled to critique. The judge of the superior court wrote that the internet is a “unique democratizing medium unlike anything that has come before,” and argued that setting the bar too low would stop people from their given right to communicate and critique anonymously. And, he also says what I have been thinking for a long time, that blogs and chatrooms serve the same function as early democratic pamphleteering.

The nature of such a zone of freedom as the internet (Siva calls it anarchistic) is that we shouldn’t resort to legal means to combat ideas which we don’t like. In an academic’s dream, what we have to do is make a better blog with better arguments than those we dislike. Ideally, in such decentralized networks, it is all about survival of the fittest, which, in this instance, is a movement of freedom. And this judge agreed:

Steele noted in his opinion that plaintiffs in such cases can use the Internet to respond to character attacks and “generally set the record straight,” and that, as in Cahill’s case, blogs and chatrooms tend to be vehicles for people to express opinions, not facts.

It is going to happen, in the not too distant future, when it won’t be the cultural norm to fight what we don’t like with legal means, if it is in the realm of ideas. Sure, we are still going to call the cops for murder and arson, but if someone we don’t like is making arguments, which are the hight of non-violence, we won’t respond with an agent of violence, i.e. the State, but with an attack of non-violence, our words.

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