This is Terrorism: the Nonviolence of Extinction Rebellion.

boris johnson the prime minister in the
uk everyone's going to be looking at him so he's going to be going around you know shaking hands of kids at school planting a few trees making these announcements all this that's when you want to go and expose his gross obscene hypocrisy right because he's weak in 2022 he's not going to care about the climate christ he's moved on right so that's the moment to strike okay and like on that diagram i showed then there's the 9 11. then there's the 9 11. then there's the 9 11. then there's these massive crises you have to act fast you know if hundreds of people have died in germany because of the floods you need that small group to go right we're going to have this big demonstration now in 24 hours you're going to make that fast decision that's why you need a small group is to react to these spontaneous moments when the opposition is weak or to design something when you are going to maximize the probability in other words strategic intelligence we're not going next year we're going now right we're going when they're weak on our we're we're determining the moment of resistance number three is high level disruptive action okay so again this is like totally foundational you're not going to be in the ballpark of catching that ball going down the road down the hill unless you engage in high level disruptive action that's an absolute no-brainer at this point in history we've got three years to turn around the crisis in the six-month plan we have to go in there with something massively transgressive massively disruptive massively outrageous if you're not doing that you're not in the ballpark because you've got to capture mass attention to change history to change how the society is going to work this is the complete opposite of performative protest right it's about material disruption it's about material disruption if we're going to challenge the absolute obscenity of the plan to destroy the next generation we have to go in with something that's outrageously disruptive to say to the general public to say to the government this is outrageous and we're not standing for it and we're doing whatever it non-violently takes to push that into your face that's how history changes so it means blocking motorways or blocking ports right blocking the center of cities it means unlimited hunger strikes it's classical non-violence right people get hurt sometimes people get killed people get hurt sometimes people get killed an ideology can never be discredited you can disillusion particular believers but the belief remains like a disembodied ghost the belief in marxist economics it still circles the globe it doesn't matter how many millions of people have been killed it doesn't matter how many true believers later lost their faith and wrote autobiographies reflecting on it it doesn't matter in how many classrooms in front of how many chalkboards people can prove theoretically that marxist economics can't be made to work and it doesn't matter how many people just sincerely and sadly say that they tried their best to take these ideas and implement them but the outcomes were horrible and disastrous believers lose their beliefs believers grow old and die and yet their beliefs never disappear they continue to haunt humanity and find new souls who are so foolish or so mean spirited as to believe in them non-violence is yet another ideology and i know how hard it is to get you to question it i mean communism has the same fundamental advantage going for it it has a catchy name it sounds so positive it sounds so appealing don't we all want to believe in community or don't we all want to live in a commune you know we could call it the togetherness ideology oh it sounds so positive it sounds so uplifting non-violence what could be wrong with that roger hallam the leader of extinction rebellion he's a very instructive example of exactly what's wrong with non-violence right now in the 21st century i don't have to go back a long way here i don't have to reach back to the examples of the vietnam war or whatever the year 2020 was it such a long time ago can't you remember the protests that destroyed one city after another from coast to coast in the united states of america demanding justice demanding legal reforms demanding something fundamental change in the system of policing and the courts something fundamental has to be changed in the constitution of the united states of america were those protests non-violent were they and were they successful if we can't look back at the non-violent protests of 2020 and both admit to ourselves that they were a failure and honestly examine why then we can never move out from under the shadow of this ideology that strangely still hovers above us all this belief in non-violent protest now roger hallam is partly the leader of a real political movement but he's partly a youtuber just like myself he's someone who sits down in front of a camera and it's one of his most powerful one of his most effective ways of communicating with people organizing emoting people is doing exactly the same thing i'm doing with you now in one important respect it really reminds me of the youtubers i've seen who are trying to make money and trying to build up a big fan following by teaching you the secrets to learning a new language learning french is hard learning german is hard oh but it doesn't have to be trust me believe in me sign up now i've got the secret i've got the methodology i've got the technique i've got this one trick that can make it so much easier for you to learn a language have you ever tried to learn chinese japanese even for a day or two have you ever felt desperate to have a charismatic self-confident person speak to you through the screen standing there as a sage on a stage telling you that they know the secret they know what you're doing wrong and then to engage in one discussion of methodology after another the real point of which is just to establish their own unimpeachable authority as a leader as someone deserving your donations your respect ultimately your obedience [Laughter] i mean language learning it's what goes on between a grandmother and a grandchild it's something caring and informal and repetitious you know it's something you kind of can't buy at any price when it's done right if you could adopt a new grandmother you could learn any language in the world and if you had the patience to live with her and wash dishes with her and she had the patience to keep correcting you while speaking with you in chinese or while speaking with you in french while you wash the dishes together right but what you're going to see on youtube fundamentally because people are trying to earn your devotion and earn your donations is instead an approach that presents you with one more sophisticated methodology after another there's always something new to say about method method method and the reality is there is no method in the world good enough that it can make learning chinese easy and there is no method so bad so ineffective that you can't learn the language despite it just with enough hard work effort practice repetition that grandmother who moves in with you and washes dishes with you every day even if she is a stuttering alcoholic you can win language trust me there's a very strange parallel between the vegan activist group direct action everywhere and extinction rebellion both of them came onto the world stage promising that they had a method that would work as never before that it was something fundamentally new and different from what any other protest movement had attempted before because their method was based on social science research other political leaders would supposedly just appeal to your emotions your sentiments your biases but here was someone claiming that they knew how to change the world they knew how to achieve political progress on the basis of certain scientific facts donate now as with so many language learning gurus as with so many exercise gurus weight loss gurus bodybuilding gurus the strange thing is that as soon as you open up the box containing this special methodology it seems like there's really nothing inside it seems that extinction rebellion didn't have any special technique that hadn't already been used for example by people for the ethical treatment of animals oh oh oh people lying down on the sidewalk with chains around their wrists having chained themselves to a fence then forcing the police to take the time to cut through the chains or cut through the fence and extract them and carry them off in an ambulance oh uh uh this this is familiar and what what did you say about social sciences and how were you so sure this was gonna work oh um women who've taken their clothes off and are standing across a bridge blocking traffic nude topless women with slogans written on their skin this is this is the new and different methodology that's going to change the world as as never before this didn't even seem new in the 1980s so what is this ideology of non-violence that on the one hand they claim is completely new and different and can change the world as never before and on the other hand simultaneously they claim hasn't changed since mohandas gandhi in india and that has been proven to work as a consistent pattern again and again throughout history and then let me ask you less facetiously in the audience at what point can we frankly say that this has been discredited and is proven in the same way as marx's economics at what point can we move on to try something really new really innovative really challenging i spoke to roger hallem just once from the audience at a public event and when i stood up in the q a session i pointed out to him that in a really interesting way his lecture was reproducing the defects of the approach already taken by direct action everywhere direct action everywhere said just look at the great success of non-violent protests in the arab spring and then here we were so many years later and i was able to say the arab spring protests were not non-violent they were not successful and on the contrary when you look at them now in retrospect at every stage of the development they were a disaster that's ended up with a huge body count and no appreciable progress towards democracy now here we are roger and he was indeed repackaging this same so-called social science research pointing to this as a success as a victory that proves the efficacy of non-violence instead of looking at this same historical example as proof that what these people call non-violence is in fact incredibly violent and doesn't actually achieve any of its intended outcomes and now here you are roger so many years later and you've added to this litany of supposed success stories the pro-democracy protests in hong kong and i asked them look really really where do you think those protests are going to go from here do you think just a few months from now or a few years from now we're going to be talking about an independent democratic hong kong or do you think there's a chance that the example of hong kong like so many others is going to end in failure it's been a day of glaring absences people traffic police even demonstrators they've melted away leaving a landscape of destruction [Music] we found him staring in disbelief at the trash metro station where someone had gone the extra mile to prevent access people wandering around me are just as bemused as i am remember this is one of the main streets to the center of hong kong right next to the university on a friday afternoon in russia and it's basically a battlefield [Music] his reply was very down to earth and affable and he said like yeah well when you look at it it's like you know 51 49 or 60 40. really the odds aren't that good for any particular non-violent protest movement but you know we kind of you know look at these anecdotes from history and we kind of go with what works um i appreciate his candor what i don't appreciate is that he is now quite literally recruiting people to engage in terrorism and to organize themselves in terror cells and to carry out quote-unquote non-violent disruptions that are only non-violent but the same definition that he applies ludicrously but consistently to tremendously violent episodes in our history like the pro-democracy protest in hong kong like the 2020 george floyd riots and like the arab spring [Music] some are still busy building walls across the middle of a four-lane highway while others are not at all sure what to do next the umbrellas are harmless enough less so the rocks and molotov and in case the protesters suffered existential angst philosophy is at hand in french translation i rebel therefore i am [Music] more than 20 000 desperate angry people watched that video from roger hallam not all of them read aristotle not all of them read thucydides there are some really stupid really malevolent people in that audience and they are going to interpret the vague incitement to disruptive action that he's offering each in their own peculiar way we can't really pretend that roger hallam will be blameless or will have no blood in his hands when one of his followers one of his minions takes his words to mean what they so clearly do mean we live in a world where paradoxically non-violence is nothing more than an ideology preaching violence and promising you outcomes as a certainty whereas the lessons of history show that it has failed again and again but the ultimate lesson of history is no matter how badly or how profoundly or how repeatedly an ideology is debunked it will never disappear particular believers become disillusioned but sadly the belief remains [Music] maybe we can we can practice