Structurally Frustrating in a Myriad of Ways
1 star
For someone who thinks you can't define violence, he sure seems to think he can define nonviolence (by not defining it at all). I find this annoying because it still plays into the dichotomy he complains about without even trying to dismantle it. If you think we can't define one, then we really can't define the other because it's only being shown as 'not that'. If it's 'not that' but we don't know what 'that' is... then we're not going to be able to have a sufficient argument to discuss.
That said, Peter should've stuck to his primary source of inspiration and followed what Ward Churchill did in Pacificism as Pathology. At least there, Churchill was clear in what he was talking about because he rarely discussed nonviolence but focused entirely on pacificism. Peter pretends to do this here, but he routinely starts flipping between terminology without …
For someone who thinks you can't define violence, he sure seems to think he can define nonviolence (by not defining it at all). I find this annoying because it still plays into the dichotomy he complains about without even trying to dismantle it. If you think we can't define one, then we really can't define the other because it's only being shown as 'not that'. If it's 'not that' but we don't know what 'that' is... then we're not going to be able to have a sufficient argument to discuss.
That said, Peter should've stuck to his primary source of inspiration and followed what Ward Churchill did in Pacificism as Pathology. At least there, Churchill was clear in what he was talking about because he rarely discussed nonviolence but focused entirely on pacificism. Peter pretends to do this here, but he routinely starts flipping between terminology without recognising how it creates a lack of cohesion in his own critiques.
Another of my main complaints is that Peter is far too verbose for saying so little. You could easily take three chapters (Nonviolence is Ineffective, ... is Tactically and Strategically Inferior, ... is Deluded/Delusional) and combine them into one. The topics were, overwhelmingly, not that different. It also would've made it so he stopped grabbing random darts and throwing them at the board, which is how reading the latter two felt.
This was very clear when, in "Nonviolence is Deluded/Delusional" (depends on the version you're reading), he starts devolving into irrelevant topics around the critique of violence alienating people. But "violent video games and violent movies are the most popular!" Okay, and? Stories with conflict, which often or occasionally includes violent conflict, are interesting to many people; they are also fictional, which people are more comfortable with exploring. Is there a difference between "I like playing Hitman" and "I'm a sniper?" Probably, right? No one's going to ask you for the context in which you're playing Hitman, but they are going to wonder what kind of sniper you are and whether that might be a cause for alarm to them. This chapter is very clearly him grasping at whatever arguments he can possibly make to support his cause, and most of them are just... He should've deleted this chapter, honestly.
For chapters where they weren't being duplicated, they have other issues. Comparing the "Nonviolence is Racist" chapter with the "Nonviolence is Patriarchal," it is interesting to see that he has far more support for violent strategies for the former than he does for the latter. No other chapter includes him saying, as he does in the patriarchy chapter, that "[m]ost of the work needed to overcome patriarchy will probably be peaceful, focused on healing and building alternatives." It's interesting that this is nestled in that chapter. (Granted, it's also interesting that one of his core references for the chapter on patriarchy is bell hooks... who was notoriously anti-violence in her work. Weird that he goes hard on other people who supported "nonviolent strategies" in the chapter on racism, but he thought she was fine to use here. His primary work cited here is The Will to Change, which has a lot of issues of supporting patriarchy rather than dismantling it.)
He does kind of concede that we can't forbid the use of any other tactics in the patriarchy chapter, but you can see that he bristles with the idea of abusive men receiving physical consequences for their own behaviour in most instances.
My other major issue is that this book is presented at the beginning as an intracommunity critique for anarchists. It is not. He spends so much time critiquing organisations, like the School of the Americas Watch (SOAW). Just because you, an anarchist, exist within an organisation... does not make it an anarchist organisation. This happens over and over, where the primary critiques keep forgetting to engage with anarchism or focus on anarchists in most capacities. He also doesn't really engage anarchist work on this sector. When he does, it's mostly anarchist work that highlights his critique (unless it's Wolfi Landstreicher, also known by the older name Feral Faun—this anti-feminist "anarchist" is someone Peter repeatedly cites positively).
His "alternatives" are just... commonsense for anarchists. Oh, community building, you say? Wow. Who knew. Insightful. (This is particularly funny because he spent a few lines misrepresenting David Graeber's point in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, almost implying that Graeber said we should pretend the government doesn't exist and it'll disappear! Except that work's whole point was trying to highlight variations on different existing cultures that might support various options of what practiced anarchism can look like.)