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- [00:03]
Matthew Remsky
Hello everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Matthew Remsky. We are on Instagram and threads conspiritualitypod and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes, of which this is one on Patreon or just our bonus episodes via Apple Subscriptions subscription. So this bonus episode is a continuation of the anti fascist Woodshed series and it's also part two of Beyond Violence and Nonviolence with Muay Thai professional and street rebellion scholar Ben Case, who joined me this past Saturday to break the spine on this whole mess of defining violence versus nonviolence both in the public sphere and and in the academic literature. So today we're going to go back into that scholarship to examine how Gandhi's idea of satyagraha became a secularized yet still spiritual demand. That we imagine resisting colonialism and fascism as a technocratic exercise devoid of emotion, devoid of political passion, and devoid of the volatility of one action leading to another, will track the career of Gene Sharp, the patron saint of strategic nonviolence, through to the rock star academic status of Erica Chenoweth, who, along with Maria Steffen, claimed to have empirically validated Sharpe's instinct that only nonviolence, though he poorly defined it, could work. They didn't actually validate it. But now there's a whole civil resistance industry out there that thinks that they did. And more than that, we'll look at the sources of institutional funding for this work and its ties to US Foreign and domestic policy interests. Benjamin Case is a retired professional Muay Thai fighter, an organizer, educator and writer. He's a researcher at the center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative. Case is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Here's part part two of our conversation, Beyond Violence and Nonviolence. Ben Case, welcome back to Conspirituality podcast.
- [02:29]
Ben Case
Thanks. Happy to be back.
- [02:31]
Matthew Remsky
Okay, so we know from last time that Gandhian non violence has been a core influence in liberal and liberal left thought for about 75 years now. In its spirituality mode. It was very influential in certain civil rights circles and anti Vietnam protest movements. But at a certain point there was a movement to make the metaphysical principle, the spiritual principle of satyagraha empirical and to kind of divorce it from its metaphysical commitments and show that it was superior strategically to any other form of resistance. And there's one main guy at the center of all of that. So I want to just start with you giving us a 101 on Gene Sharp.
- [03:13]
Ben Case
Okay? So Gene Sharp is the sort of, you might think of as the father of modern nonviolence. And he got his start as a Gandhi scholar. He wrote a biography of Gandhi and he wrote a very influential three volume work called the Politics of Nonviolent Action, which came out of his dissertation in political theory at Oxford. And the sort of main intervention that is important to know about Sharp is that he's distinguishing via studying Gandhi, which we talked about a little bit last time, right? He's sort of distinguishing between the nonviolent spirituality or principle aspect of Gandhi and the nonviolent strategy of Gandhi. And so he's saying, let's leave aside for the moment the belief that nonviolence is a more righteous way to be in the world, can make you a better person. Let's leave all that aside for the moment and let's actually just look at how Gandhi mobilized nonviolent action to, to create leverage against the British military. And so that's really his most important intervention. And so he takes from that, that, okay, well, if Gandhi could overthrow British occupation using nonviolent struggle, we should be able to formulate a theory of nonviolent action that can allow us to do that elsewhere. And so he comes up with this again, this theory that he publishes in this book and elsewhere. And the sort of main idea here is that, you know, political authority is ultimately reliant on people's willingness to go along with being ruled. Right? It relies on the consent of the governed. Right. And this is not something that is like unique to Sharpe. A lot of people have realized this, but it's important and Sharpe articulates it in a particularly kind of simple and accessible way. You've been listening to a conspirituality bonus episode sample. To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing. You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
- [05:38]
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