What they mean when they talk about peace

“I will ensure that the forces of peace and justice prevail,” Missouri Governor Jay Nixon said Saturday, August 16, after a week of strife sparked by the police killing of teenager Michael Brown. “If we want to achieve justice, we must first secure peace.” Is this how it works – first you impose peace, then you achieve justice? And what does “forces of peace and justice” mean? What peace and justice are we talking about here? As everyone knows, we would never have heard of Michael Brown's murder had it not been for the riots in Ferguson. White police officers kill over a hundred black people every year without most of us even noticing. This silence – the absence of protest and disruption – is the peace that, Governor Nixon would have us believe, will produce justice. This is the same story we always hear from those in authority. First we must submit to their control; then they will deal with our concerns. They insist that all the problems we face are caused by our refusal to cooperate. This argument sounds most convincing when wrapped in the rhetoric of democracy: these are "our" laws, we should shut up and obey - "our" cops who shoot us and pepper spray us - "our" politicians and leaders who beg us to go back to normal.But returning to normal means walking gracefully over the corpses of countless Michael Browns, leaving them to the graveyard and oblivion. Governor Nixon's peace is what happens after people are forcibly pacified. His justice is whatever it takes to entice us to accept peace under these conditions - petitions that go straight to the trash can, trials that never produce more than a small slap for the murderers in uniform, campaigns that may advance the career of an activist or a politician but will never put an end to the killing of unarmed black people.

Maintaining Peace in Ferguson

Allow us to suggest another idea for dealing with conflict – we would call it the anarchist approach. The basic idea is simple. Real peace cannot be imposed; it can only arise as a consequence of resolving a conflict. Accordingly, the classic slogan: no justice, no peace. Left to its own devices, an unbalanced state tends to return to equilibrium. To maintain imbalances, violence must be used. The greater the inequality, the more violence is necessary to maintain it. This applies in physics as well as in society. This means that there cannot be poor and rich people without a police force that ensures unequal access to resources. There can be no whiteness that stabilizes this class divide without a massive infrastructure of racist courts and prisons. You can't keep two and a half million people - nearly a million of them black people - behind bars without the constant use of potentially lethal force. You can't enforce the law that protects the well-being of good liberals like Governor Nixon without cops like Darren Wilson killing hundreds of black people. The militarization of the police is not an aberration - it is the necessary condition of a society based on hierarchy and dominance. It's not just the police that have been militarized, but our entire way of life. Anyone who doesn't see this doesn't live in the sights of the gun barrels. These are the forces of peace and justice, the mechanisms that “sustain the peace” in a dramatically unbalanced social order.Sometimes they appear as surveillance cameras, as security guards, as police who stop us, search us or shoot us. Other times, when this has become too contentious, the forces of peace and justice appear as the good cops who seem like they genuinely care about us, as sincere politicians who want to make things better - whatever it takes to bring public opinion back to the side of those who fired the tear gas. Still other times, the forces of peace and justice are community leaders who beg us to leave the streets, accuse us of being “outside instigators,” or promise us more effective ways to vent our anger if we only cooperate—all to prevent, discredit, or postpone direct, concrete combat against inequality. In any case, it's the same bullshit: peace now, justice later. But real peace is impossible until we end the violent imposition of inequalities. All the conflicts that are currently being suppressed by law enforcement - between urban developers and residents, between rich and poor, between those privileged because of their skin color and everyone else - must be allowed to come to the surface. Make it impossible for anyone to force anyone else to accept a relationship that is not in their own interest: then and only then will there be an incentive for everyone to address conflict and reach agreement. This is the only way forward, but it is a daunting prospect.It's not surprising that people are more likely to blame those who stand up than to confront how deeply divided our society is. This explains why so many apparently well-intentioned critics have pretended not to understand why so many people took part in looting as a form of protest against the murder of Michael Brown. The same constant imposition of violence that took Michael Brown's life is separating millions like him from the resources they need to live their daily lives. From this perspective, looting makes perfect sense - solving the immediate problems of poverty, resisting the violence of authority, and demonstrating that change must be more than just police reform. Let us not begrudge those who spiraled out of control, to remind ourselves of the unresolved conflicts of our society. On the contrary, we should be grateful. They do not destroy peace; they simply make it clear that there was no peace, that there never was justice at all. At enormous risk to themselves, they give us a gift: the opportunity to notice the suffering around us and to rediscover our ability to identify and sympathize with those who have experienced it. We can only experience tragedies like the death of Michael Brown as such if we see other people reacting to them as tragedies. Otherwise, unless the event directly affects us, we remain insensitive. If you want people to notice an injustice, you have to respond directly to it, like people did in Ferguson.You don't have to wait for a better moment, you don't have to beg the authorities, you don't have to formulate a striking saying for listeners who in your imagination represent public opinion. You must take immediate action to show that the situation is very serious. Ferguson is not unique - there are countless of these cities across the US where the same dynamics play out between people and police. The rebellion in Ferguson will certainly not be the last of its kind. Those of us who do not buy Governor Nixon's program of peace now, justice later must prepare for the battles that will unfold very soon. May we one day meet in a world without tear gas, where skin color is not a weapon.

Translated and set to music byFrequency A – an anarchist podcast.