While i obviously can't speak for Cassandra, i can say with some measure of confidence that she is "committed to the principles of non-violent civil disobedience." She just doesn't happen to consider property destruction to be violent, which is a pretty popular notion. I would differ with her on this point. Obviously, i consider property destruction, just like almost anything we can do that has repurcussions of any sort—positive, negative or neutral—to be somewhere on the continuum of violence, and perfectly justifiable, in certain circumstances. The fact that the break-away march was planned to avoid confusion with or direct physical impact (due to possible police reaction) on the larger march indicates to me some thoughtfulness in this regard on the part of the organizers.

To say that non-violence worked for Gandhi and King skews history, as far as i see it. Gandhi's non-violence movement would more than likely have failed entirely were it not for the existence of more violent forms of struggle against colonialism at the same time, both in India and elsewhere in the British empire. Of perhaps even greater significance in the fall of the British colonial empire was the beating the country received from Hitler, who, as we all know utilized a less-than-non-violent tact (he also had very little concern for the interests of the Indian people—they were, after all, living proof of the fallacy of the myth of "Aryan purity"). We will never get anywhere if we continue to propagate such blatant mistruths as "non-violent resistance brought down the British rule of India." Bullshit. What non-violence DID get Gandhi and his movement was some moral authority after British rule was overthrown. The ends to which that moral authority was used subsequently are hardly worth our praise. Violent or not, power corrupts.

The case with King is not so clear. He accomplished quite a lot, no doubt. But, again, his civil rights movement existed in the context of a great deal of work being carried out by the Black Panthers and other more militant groups, not to mention generalized insurrection. The civil rights movement accomoplished a lot in Washington and in those communities where it translated into multiracial direct action on such a scale that it could not be ignored and presented a real force of accountability, moral and physical. But, for the most part, institutional racism has remained and non-violent civil disobedience does not seem to have been any more effective at eliminating this than militant struggle. Civil rights leaders in this day and age have little street credibility because their proponents are all too often power-hungry clergymen (or putrid politicos, like Scott Kennedy). The shiny polish on "non-violent civil disobedience" has worn off to reveal that it is just as prone to (ab)use by both petty and great oppressors as violent struggle is. Again, violent or not, power corrupts.

Oh, and then there's that great liberal cause celebré: gun control. How could any thoughtful, compassionate person be AGAINST gun control, right? Well, i am an anarchist, after all, and i don't think there should be bureaucratized gun control by the government. I'm not as whacko about this issue as many of my comrades, and certainly not as much as the gun nuts on the right—after all, as Christian Parenti once mentioned, revolutions have never been fought and won through the use of LEGAL firearms. Unfortunately, in the event of any violent upheaval, which is fairly likely, it does encourage a sort of elite vanguardism on the part of those who've managed to procure weapons illegally. I am not generally prone to parrot the right, but i do tend to agree: guns don't kill people, people kill people. Actually, bullets kill people. In fact, bullets don't kill people, either. The hole produced by a speeding bullet kills people. The point is that there is a whole chain of events which results in deaths at the hands of gun users. I can think of a whole number of places in that chain of events where it would be more effective and more efficient to intervene against gun violence than by legislating gun laws (for instance, encouraging social, economic and racial equity or anger-management skills or whatever). So why are gun control laws so popular amongst legislators? Because they also carry the ancillary benefit of ensuring that their positions of power will never be questioned—nor will they be held accountable—by an armed citizenry. There was a reason for the second ammendment, and it wasn't just because the guys felt a need to reify their phallic force in constitutional law (although i won't deny that there was probably some of that, too).

To a certain extent, yes, this sort of thinking is what brought down the WTC, but that does not mean that it will be taken to the same ends. There are very few, if any, "Propoaganda by the Deed" sort of anarchists around these days such as committed political assassinations around the turn of the century. Even these turn-of-the-century anarchists (such as Alexander Berkman) would never have committed such an act of mass murder. To consider such an act to be the logical extension of an anarchist political reading of violence and power is to totally misunderstand the logic of that critique in the first place, not to mention the ethics which motivate it.

In any case, if we're going to develop a truly effective movement at this point (and we cannot afford to be anything but effective), we need to start looking at violence, power, authority and ethics separately and in combination, but not as if they were all the same thing and coextensive with one another. The more we bicker back and forth about the nature of violence, the less we will be addressing the more pertinent questions of power, authority and ethics. I submit that the latter are what we need to focus on.