Reviews and Comments

This chapter is uh... wild. It plays into some major stereotypes and structures (women lie to manipulate, men lie for power—what is manipulation if not a form of power), and it leans very heavily on some wild assumptions. For example:

It is no accident that greater cultural acceptance of lying in this society coincided with women gaining greater social equality.

Sorry, what the hell do you mean by this? Are you seriously going to tell me that lying wasn't previously a culturally accepted practice in any other time period? Because I hate to break it to you, I've sat and read historical tabloids that did nothing but lie, and it wasn't because of "women gaining greater social equality."

Like, in small ways, she's not wrong... but wow does she lean on some interesting crutches that feel very... reactionary, to put it nicely.

The second chapter is a little bizarre because:

1. The Home Alone thing is going to live rent-free in my brain, as it doesn't even take a paragraph or two to elaborate on the kind of violence and disobedience it typifies (or to even engage with the overall theme of the movie). I also find it weird to not even highlight the oppressive nature of something like Leave It To Beaver (I cannot speak to My Three Sons because I've forgotten most of what that even felt like to watch), and all of those feel weird to juxtapose against each other to make a point?

2. I'm very much here for the pro-child thing about how children have no rights but should.

3. While hooks provides examples of non-nuclear family relationships (e.g., being a god-mother), I find it peculiar to not highlight that the coercive nature of the nuclear family enforced by society is part of the very problem that she's describing here.

Am reading this largely because "bell hooks" (no works) are among the first citations on a list. It is the only bell hooks book that I physically have.

I cannot say that I'm liking it, either.

I also don't necessarily agree with placing 'love' and 'abuse' on an oppositional scale, as it's hyper-common for people to rationalise their abuse through logic like "but they love me." Personally, I think it's harmful to force people to determine whether or not an abuser loves them; I think we'd be better off to recognise that there are different forms of love and that sometimes a person's "love" can be toxic to us. It also deflates abuser rhetoric ("but I love you"): It doesn't matter if they love us if they're actively harming us. It matters that we are able to leave it and can and have the support networks available to do so.

These support networks, at least in the first chapter, are not brought up. If she wanted people to recognise that abusers don't love (but they can be caring and affectionate...?), why aren't we talking about enabling victims to remove themselves freely and without barriers to doing so?

I need to waste some time going through the references in this one, which will probably take quite a while and maybe add more books to me while I'm at it.

Short chapter, barely says anything at all, and is interesting in that it also says that (unlike racism) getting rid of patriarchy should allow for (very specific kinds of) violence but will "probably be peaceful."

This is clearly the start of his views on transformative and restorative justice (things that have a lot of critique for their application, particularly within groups that "try" to deal with the abuse of members by other members), and it's interesting how much he says KYLR (kill your local rapist) is a bad concept and dogpiles anarchafeminists engaged in discussing theory related to this slogan (not a directive)... but the examples he gives here are how women should be able to fight back and bash rapists or abusive husbands.

... In a closer timeline than when this was written, I've watched him attack and dogpile many anarchafeminists when they say that therapy doesn't help abusers to not abuse (which is true—therapy is not designed to teach abusers to stop abusing; it is a practice that often supports the status quo and teaches abusers how to abuse differently).

This doesn't mean, btw, that therapy can't be helpful to abusers who want to stop abusing others and deal with their abusive behaviours, but there is a huge difference between people who intentionally seek that out (which means they are seeking to have someone challenge their values and ideologies—and they may not be able to find that in the current landscape) and what other abusers do and the care they receive.

From the beginning of a Twitter thread of Lee Cicuta's (that I screenshot, so I don't have a link): "Therapy can help with plenty of issues but what it does not do is change someone's values and ideology. You can give an abuser insights into their trauma, work on communication skills, etc. and what you'll have is a more insightful abuser with better communication skills." (Ironicially, Lee is one of the very anarchafeminists I've watched him dogpile... and for this very thread.)

This book is possibly one of the most beautiful things I've ever read, and it was one that I didn't want to end. Rarely is that ever a feeling that I have about a novel, but this one... It felt like an unfortunate thing for it to come to a close, despite its subject matter (which was quite heavy with a focus on colonisation and the love of two women and how those dynamics interconnect).

I love this book, and it's one with a message so rare that I can't think of another one like it. I would encourage everyone to seek it out.

The third actual chapter is better, but it's let down by the fact that Peter never once wanted to define what "nonviolence" meant before we got here (and, as a result, had two sources—an FBI memo about MLK Jr and Frantz Fanon—do it for him).

This is as close as he gets (in the introduction) to defining it:

Broadly, by using the term pacifism or nonviolence, they designate a way of life or a method of social activism that avoids, transforms, or excludes violence while attempting to change society to create a more peaceful and free world.

But because "transforms" is there, that also doesn't help clarify the intended meaning and does enable a lot of further conflation that he engages in throughout the book. And when you start contextualising some of the non-Churchill sources that can be engaged with, it becomes clear that they sometimes were talking about 'nonviolent work' (which includes opening clinics, creating food programs) rather than the enforcement of a code of nonviolence.

Anyway, thoughts on this chapter ("Nonviolence is Statist"—all chapters start with "Nonviolence is..."):

• It should've been first. It structures a lot of the arguments that would've then been solidified by chapters like "Ineffective" and "Racist," and it would've positioned the forms of nonviolence that he's focused on far better than the other two (which, I think, struggle to do that).
• Lots of Ward Churchill references again (this time to a co-authored work titled Agents of Repression), which does not make this feel less like Churchill's work. It feels like an outline of Churchill's work with random other things woven in.
• There's a short paragraph where he talks about integration of schools (pacifists helping to desegregate but then relying on National Guard for Black kids to go to school), but it feels like the weirdest throwaway section. It's one of the many examples of his being incurious because he doesn't even bother to engage with anything about it. It's useful to him purely because he points out that it did happen (and that they didn't call the Deacons of Defense). Lots of Black people have written numerous critiques of integration of schools, including people who discussed what they recognised would happen before it happened. For example, people talked about how a lot of Black teachers would be (and later were) pushed out of the system, with many forced to take on other jobs at the school instead of being teachers or forced to find other work and workplaces entirely.
• That same section is also frustrating because its structure implies "white pacifists helped and did nothing," but there were obviously Black pacifists who worked to desegregate schools (like Erna Prather Harris)... Is this also critiquing people like her? Does she and people like her fit into this discussion for Peter? I can't tell because this is a throwaway comment that does no work at looking at the intricacies of what different pacifists were doing and how that supports the state.

I'm not disagreeing with a lot of the general points in this chapter; he's not inherently wrong. His problem is that his curiosity while writing this book was incredibly limited (and often clung to a handful of resources that, while I don't like them, make his points better than he does).

This book is so infuriating. I ignored it for a few months because I just didn't have the patience to deal with it, but I cannot stand how Peter repeatedly does the same few things:

1. He refers to personal emails and listserv emails, which are things that cannot be backtracked in 2026 (especially). I can only find so much information, but when I try to search for certain topics? It only leads me to variations of this fucking book. I don't mind people referring to emails in their writing, but that cannot be the core of your references. And that's not because I'm enforcing an academic standard here, but it is because I want to be able to explore the sources more deeply. I'm not allowed to, though.

2. He shifts goal posts a lot. "White pacifists" somehow starts indicating "revolutionary pacifists" (a subsection of pacifists he hadn't mention prior and are not all pacifists). This then shifts to "white radicals" (who aren't all pacifists). If this book is supposed to explore how nonviolence protects the state, it can't keep shifting the subjects when it's convenient. This happens very quickly in a three-part sentence when he brings up two pacifists who engaged in self-critique and then tosses in Mumia's critiques of white radicals. I shouldn't need to play the Sesame Street game of "one of these things isn't like the others, one of these things just isn't the same" in order for people to recognise that the rhetoric is shoddy and ill-formed.

3. While the points he makes aren't inherently wrong, none of them are specific to pacifism (the primary target of his ire). He complains about the erasure of Black activists in "state-sanctioned textbooks" and blames pacifists, but the state isn't well-known for being pacifist. It is well-known for supporting propaganda that erases militant Black activists and activism (among others) and promoting a hyper-fixation on certain nonviolent strategies, but that isn't the fault of pacifism... which is sort of what Peter keeps saying when he does this. His rhetoric in this book is quite lazy and would've benefited from an editor (or a better one).

4. A lot of machismo going on, especially in interpretation of quotes from varying activists. Mumia gets this a lot for the few references to We Want Freedom (worth a read, btw)... and the context of those quotes is rarely written in layers of machismo with an adoration of violence. (I'm not even anti-violence and recognise that it has strategic value, but I don't appreciate the ways in which he utilises the work of Black activists who aren't saying what he says they are. I read We Want Freedom, and even Mumia recognises the way that nonviolent work and violent strategy need each other; he also has a far more nuanced view of nonviolence, pointing to nonviolent actions that are highly useful and critiquing those that are not.)

Comparing the older edition with the newer one, the only changes are cosmetic and structural (not sure why he merged a few paragraphs into one; it looks worse and is harder to read).

Reading these books does one thing for me: It helps me better understand why so many of the 'educated' atheists that were drawn to the New Atheist movement failed to engage with the actual reality of the world around them... and it's because these "horsemen" failed to do so. They fail to engage with history that denies them their point, and they fail to engage with societal and political issues that add nuance to things they discuss.

And while Hitchens did better at it that his compatriots, he still does it quite a lot and to a distracting point.

I am absolutely loving this book. I think part of it is how familiar I am with the places they travel through, but it's also just such a beautifully told story.

This book is going to be fun. According to the translator's note at the back, she uses the Japanese names for the cities; having lived in Taiwain, I'm familiar with their Taiwanese Hokkien/Mandarin names.

It's also going to be fun having to remind myself that this is all fictional (as in... the "translated" novel that the original author wrote isn't really translated), regardless of the presentation.

I finished that second story. I did not like it, but I am starting to get a better handle of the structure of these three stories, but I'm still... Idk, I don't know that this is a thing I really enjoy. Let's see how I feel about the third story.