Why I'm NOT a Pacifist

I blame Derrick Jensen. In his book - Endgame II: Resistance - he lays down a thorough analysis of the abusive dynamics and how pacifism relates to this, over three chapters. I've picked out a few particularly salient quotes from each chapter, but I REALLY encourage you all to read the full chapters themselves:

PART I
http://www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/25%20-%20Pacifism%20I.html

"The people in power will not disappear voluntarily; giving flowers to the cops just isn’t going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window."

~William S. Burroughs

[...]

"It has always seemed clear to me that violent and nonviolent approaches to social change are complementary. No one I know who advocates the possibil-ity of armed resistance to the dominant culture’s degradation and exploitation rejects nonviolent resistance. Many of us routinely participate in nonviolent resistance and support those for whom this is their only mode of opposition."

[...]

"Those in power have effec-tively convinced us they own land, which is to say they’ve convinced us to give up our inalienable right to access our own landbases. They’ve effectively convinced us they own conflict resolution methods (which they call laws), which is to say they’ve convinced us to give up our inalienable right to resolve our own conflicts (which they call taking the law into your own hands). They’ve con-vinced us they own water. They’ve convinced us they own the wild (the government could not offer “timber sales” unless we all agreed it owned the trees in the first place). They’re in the process of convincing us they own the air. The state has for millennia been trying to convince us it owns a monopoly on violence, and abusers have been trying to convince us for far longer than that. Pacifists are more than willing to grant them that, and to shout down anyone who disagrees. "

[...]

PART II
http://www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/25%20-%20Pacifism%20I%20pt2.html

I’ve never heard of an abuser saying, “I hit you because I wanted to terrorize you into submission.” Instead he might say,“I wouldn’t have hit you if you wouldn’t have kept yelling and yelling and yelling at me about coming in so late.”

[...]

I keep thinking about that line by Gandhi, “We want freedom for our country, but not at the expense or exploitation of others.” I’ve also had this line crammed down my throat more times than I want to consider—often phrased as “You keep saying that in this struggle for the planet that you want to win, but if someone wins, doesn’t that mean someone has to lose, and isn’t that just perpetuating the same old dominator mindset?”—and I’ve always found it both intellectually dishonest and poorly thought-out.

A man tries to rape a woman. She runs away. Her freedom from being raped just came at his expense: he wasn’t able to rape her. Does this mean she exploited him? Of course not. Now let’s do this again. He tries to rape her. She can’t get away. She tries to stop him nonviolently. It doesn’t work. She pulls a gun and shoots him in the head. Obviously her freedom from being raped came at the expense of his life. Did she exploit him? Of course not. It all comes back to what I wrote earlier in this book: defensive rights always trump offensive rights. My right to freedom always trumps your right to exploit me, and if you do try to exploit me, I have the right to stop you, even at some expense to you.

[...]

PART III
http://www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/25%20-%20Pacifism%20I%20pt3.html

"It’s pretty clear to me that our horror of violence is actually a deep terror of responsibility. We don’t have issues with someone being killed. We have issues about unmediated killing, about doing it ourselves. And of course we have issues with violence flowing the wrong way up the hierarchy. "

[...]

Now it’s true that Gandhi perceived cowardice as worse even than violence (and please note that while I’m accusing Gandhi of fuzzy thinking, naïveté, and, as you’ll see in a while, misogyny, never would I accuse him of cowardice: the man was stone cold brave), saying, for example, “Where the choice is between only violence and cowardice, I would advise violence,” and “To take the name of non-violence when there is a sword in your heart is not only hypocritical and dishonest but cowardly.” Even more to the point—and if all of Gandhi’s words were this great he’d certainly be my hero—he said, “Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission. The latter befits neither man nor woman. Under violence, there are many stages and varieties of bravery. Every man must judge this for himself. No other person can or has the right.” And here’s one I like even more: “I have been repeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honour by nonviolently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live forever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully.”

[...]

"Many killers—and nearly all exploiters—would vastly prefer intended victims not resist."

[...]

Let’s go back to the same basic example we’ve been using. A man breaks into a woman’s home. He pulls out a knife. He is going to rape and kill her. She has a gun. Perhaps if she just shows him by shining example the beauty of nonviolence, perhaps if she dies with courage and compassion on her lips—or if she offers herself to the butcher’s knife or throws herself into the sea from a cliff—she will convert his heart and he will realize the error of his ways and repent, to go and rape no more. Perhaps not. If she guesses wrong, she dies. And so do the rapist’s next victims.

Gandhi’s statement reveals an almost total lack of understanding of both abu-sive and psychopathological dynamics. His comment is one of the worst things you can say to anyone in an abusive situation, and one of the things abusers most want to hear. As I mentioned earlier, among the most powerful allies of abusers are those who say to victims, “You should show him some compassion even if he has done bad things. Don’t forget that he is a human, too.” As Lundy Bancroft commented, “To suggest to her that his need for compassion should come before her right to live free from abuse is consistent with the abuser’s outlook. I have repeatedly seen the tendency among friends and acquaintances of an abused woman to feel that it is their responsibility to make sure that she realizes what a good person he really is inside—in other words, to stay focused on his needs rather than her own, which is a mistake.” I want to underscore that Gandhi’s perspective is, following Bancroft, “consistent with the abuser’s outlook.”
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I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend that you also read his chapters on Abusers:

http://www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/23%20-%20Abusers.html

http://www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/24%20-%20Abusers%20pt2.html