We Have The Right To Defend Ourselves

When peaceful means aren't enough

On Sunday night, Ecuador’s right-wing candidate won the Presidential elections. Daniel Noboa, running for a second term, was announced three hours after voting booths closed, an amazing feat given votes have to be flown in from indigenous communities deep in the Amazon. He had also called a State of Emergency on Saturday, despite the country already being in a State of Emergency, calling on residents of his opponent's strongholds to stay indoors. Noboa is the son of Ecuador’s richest man and his government is known for its corruption. Unsurprisingly, he has strong ties to Trump, and flew to Florida to meet Trump and Musk a few weeks ago.

Much like eyebrows have been raised over Trump winning all seven swing states with less than half of the popular vote, it is mind-boggling that enough votes were counted in three hours to announce Noboa’s success. Like Trump, Noboa seeks to undermine democracy itself, and part of his campaign promised Ecuador a new constitution. He has outlined that said constitution will eliminate indigenous rights to their territories, land and cultures. These people, who have safeguarded their lands for thousands of years, will now be stripped of them. Bodies of forests and waters and creatures will be handed over to the grip of industry who will squeeze every last drop of value from them, leaving behind shadows and death.

I wrote last week that defending ourselves from a global politics which consumes bodies to feed its own desires for power and wealth must go beyond words and strategies of non-violence. It caused a stir in the comments. Some people were agitated by my dismissal of non-violence as a blanket effective strategy, others equated my call with self-defence with a call for violence. One person, a man, wrote that I was missing “the greater truth” at the core of non-violence, commenting: “Gandhi believed that in the presence of a person fully dedicated to non-violence, a violent person's heart could be changed. I have, in fact, done this myself.”

Ah, why didn’t I know this sooner? Obviously, the friend who tried to lock me in his dorm room to assault me when I was 19 did so because my heart was not pure enough to cure the violence in his.

Obviously, children who are raped by dangerous adults also are not dedicated enough to non-violence otherwise they would melt their abusers’ cold hearts.

Obviously, the living creatures born in slaughterhouses and raised to die are also not embodiments of non-violence otherwise their captors, too, would lay down their tools and set them free.

Obviously, the children of Gaza and Sudan and West Papua are too violent themselves to change the minds of those intent on genociding them.

Sweeping statements about the efficacy of love and light—which is surely what we place all our hopes on when we refuse to use force to defend ourselves—in the face of bodily danger always anger me. These words are vague whispers on the wind of privilege which negate the physical reality of so many beings who live on the brink of destruction, whose bodies are mutilated and tortured and penetrated and dismembered without their consent. These words echo the Christian ethos of hierarchy and purity and innocence, and promise that those who indeed embody those values will be rewarded with a Heaven on Earth, a Heaven where there is nothing to fear and good triumphs over evil. This is a seductive lie to make sense of the suffering on Earth where there is no battle between good and evil, no game of higher morality playing out through our physical forms, but only ever the pain and sorrow and joy and wonder that bubbles up from deep within our bodies as we come into contact with our magnificent, terrible world.

When my friend started shoving me towards his bed, I turned first to words. They didn’t work.

I noticed that every woman who commented on Words Won’t Cut It was in support of my brutal statement that what we’re living through, and what’s coming, is physical. We will need to act in self-defence, and that defence, too, must be physical. The physical reality of living in a female body in every country in the world is living with the threat of violence, and most experience violence in their lifetimes. Women know, intimately, that words won’t cut it because words don’t cut it today. No matter the political movement which takes up the rallying cry of gender equality and women’s safety, no matter the books published and essays written and courses taught and discussions had between friends, our bodies are always endangered, most often by those closest to us. And in those moments, when a body much bigger than your own stands between you and the door and then moves you further from the door and then knocks you off your feet—in those moments, the movement does not exist, only your body, his body, the door.

Our political movements are deeply important, they attempt to grab onto the wheel of history and slowly turn it towards a better future. That many over the last century have been couched in non-violence is moving. That people marched and chanted and sang and danced and stood side by side in front of their oppressors with their arms wide and said from deep in their bellies they were going nowhere is a wondrous reality that speaks to the moral clarity of the collective when they come together and position themselves between the past and the future like a bookmark, claiming we stop here, together, until something better is written.

Political movements can afford to be non-violent because they are an ideological super structure, a confluence of people and voices and bodies who, together, create something bigger than themselves, compelling the violent forces against which they resist to be drawn into an ideological battle, one which targets the message and words rather than the body which quietly marches upon the seat of power.

Well, they can afford to as long as their oppressors agree to the rules of engagement. More often than not, throughout history, the violent forces do not forget, and they open fire. 223 Palestinians were killed on the Great March of Return, in which citizens of Gaza regularly gathered to walk up to the border fence and peacefully protest between March 2018 and December 2019. We all remember Tiananmen square massacre in 1989 in which over 2,500 were killed. In the USA, the National Guard shot dead four students protesting the Vietnam war on May 4, 1970. Ten days later, two more students were killed by police while protesting on campus at Jackson State. Three students has also been killed by police during a peaceful protest in Orangeburg in 1968.

And this isn’t just relegated to history. Americans are being killed during protests today. Hundreds were killed in Mozambique last year protesting their government. Iran sentences peaceful protesters to death. In Myanmar, Kenya, Chad, Iraq, Nicaragua, Somaliland and many more. Anti-government protests and violence have become so widespread in recent years that Carnegie is now tracking every eruption around the world.

One of the most phenomenal political moves over the last half century has been to disembody politics, to have our political leaders and economic experts speak about the overarching themes and decisions which affect our lives as if they are words and ideologies and not active forces which peel us apart from one another and attack our wellbeing, health, agency. Politics is spoken of as if it has no impact on our bodies, as if backs don’t bend and feet don’t bleed and stomachs don’t grumble and heads don’t spin with every decision made at the seat of power. Hunger and pain is spoken of in the parlance of recessions, stagnant economies, and even tariffs.

If the political forces have no interest in your humanity, in the fact of your life, in your words, or even if they just think they can get away with it, then they will not hesitate in violating the body, for that is all they see: the thing they have power over to do with as they please. Noboa’s new constitution will strip indigenous people of their rights because, to his government and allies, they are merely bodies standing in the way of even greater riches.

Our bodily defence cannot rely on non-violence alone because non-violence asks for the world to change while our bodies exist in the world as it is. A movement cannot shelter us from a bullet or a stare or a body bigger than ours if we have already been reduced to the fact of our body, stripped of the complexity we hold within us and boiled down to what that person sees of us: Black, mine, bitch, rat, scum, savage, whore, fuck off back to where you came from.

The non-violence of movements depends, intrinsically, on the willingness of the other side to see, hear and acknowledge the humanity driving that collective clarity. It also depends on history. Would Gandhi’s march had worked if there was not already a long campaign for independence movements for over a century? Or if the global economy wasn’t being reshuffled due to the war and a new form of economic prosperity which demanded less manpower emerging: neo-colonialism? Would MLK’s lengthy campaign have succeeded without Malcolm X? Or without Ghana gaining independence and the continent of Africa rising up to meet its colonisers?

And what about the end of the European slave trade, which began as a non-violent campaign led by the Quakers—would Europeans colonising the Americas have given up their greatest energy resource without the discovery of coal, a cheaper and much more energy-rich resource than the stolen African bodies they had relied on?

Nothing happens in a vacuum. History creates the conditions for what we then remember as leaps forward in civil rights when, in fact, it is rarely morality which triumphs, but technological, political and economic innovations which create new ways for bodies and Earth’s body to be exploited at the hands of the powerful.

We are living in a time, now, of acute regression into autocracy, segregation and exploitation. If the powers that be think they can get away with reducing our lives to the matter of our bodies in order to extract as much as they can from us, then it will be impossible to negotiate with them, for that which is only a body or a financial value has no voice, no right. This is where non-violence as a strategy committed to not using force becomes an echo of the past. We are going to have to learn to defend our bodies because they are under attack. They always have been, of course, but there were ideological super structures we could shelter under to mitigate those attacks: fair wages and labour laws and unions. It is critical we hold onto those structures, of course, but they cannot be the endgame, not when the enemy is bearing down as if there is only, and will only ever be, your body, their body and the door.

Women are dying in the USA, children are being separated from their parents at the border, entire bloodlines are being eviscerated in Gaza, our elders are dying from the heat and the cold in Europe, men are starving on the streets, forests are being razed, oceans choked, animals hunted and caged, and Earth herself split open and drilled into. Indigenous defenders and guardians are being killed and disappeared. Children are dying of preventable diseases and pollution. Journalists are being stolen and tortured.

How many bodies must suffer before we defend ourselves?

I joked when my friend first shoved me. I asked him what he was doing. Then I asked him to leave me alone. I couldn’t even imagine that he could do what he was doing and that’s why I thought words would be enough. But they weren’t, because he was already doing it, and by talking I was existing in a fantasy, in a world where he couldn’t possibly, all while he very much was because words slide off whereas hands hold on.

The suffragettes were ignored while they spoke because they were understood as female and female meant lesser. It wasn’t until they started blowing up postboxes that the men started to listen. Blowing up postboxes was an act of defiance, an act that showed that their bodies were not just fit for what their position in society dictated, but that they could break the rules of social engagement because their bodies granted them agency. Only once they refused to abide by the absurdity of their own oppression did they force a crack through which a new reality could enter. But they had to use their bodies. The physical world is the only reality which refuses to bend to the wills of men; no matter what they say every year at COP, Earth makes a mockery of the slavish belief that everything is under control.

I do not believe that jamming a spanner in the cogs of the machines with which our imperialist, extractive and unjust system is built is in any way violent. Whether it’s breaking bank windows or blowing up pipelines or dismantling mining machinery, these are acts of self defence. The great beauty of these acts of sabotage, of self-defence, is they are hyper local. Our side doesn’t have drones and planes. We cannot send men off to war to spill their blood for an unworthy cause. When we act, it is through our own bodies, in our own environments. We are defending our right to beauty and life where we are, not attacking beauty and life elsewhere.

Violence is an obliterating force. Self-defence is a conscious force, one which brings you out of the world of fantasy and into your body. It bends your knees and clenches your fists and has you face the cold hard truth that nothing and nobody is coming to save you.

There is a reason we have legal defences for those who fight back against the person that violates them: we have the right to defend ourselves. Nobody expects victims to suffer acts of violence for the sake of defending the moral high ground. Nobody expects witnesses, either, to do nothing. That same defence can be applied to witnesses who jump in and get their hands dirty to defend anyone from a loved one to a stranger. Our bodies are connected. Defend them first, for without our bodies there is no wider movement.

This is why Israel’s claim of acting in self-defence has always been a bare-faced lie. Israel is infinitely more powerful than Palestine. It does not oppress Palestinian bodies to protect Israeli bodies, but does so to warn the rest of the Middle East of its unstoppable power, its capacity to break international law over decades and still be supported by its Western allies. Israel has now killed an estimated 60,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023, most of them women and children, none of whom threatened the most militarised regime in the world. Israel’s claim of self defence is hollow. It’s why men who kill women almost never get to claim reasonable use of force in their legal defence in court. The bigger, the stronger, the more powerful is rarely the one fighting for their life.

The third time my friend shoved me backwards he knocked me off my feet. It brought me back to my senses and suddenly I accepted the reality of what was happening. I caught myself on his bed post and coiled my body. Snapping around, I burst up at his torso and knocked him off balance. He stumbled, and I threw myself between the space that opened up between his body and the wall, scrambling for the door.

There is no doubt in my mind of what my friend would have done had I not caught myself, had I waited longer, had I kept hoping what was happening wasn’t happening, had I kept hoping my words would penetrate him before he could penetrate me. I challenge anyone to tell me that using my body against his, in that moment, was an act of violence.

And if we had struggled and if, by some fluke, I had killed him, would I be condemned as violent? Would I be criticised for not having taken the time during being raped to attempt to reform my rapist?

Violence cannot be reformed, only redirected. It’s why the living conditions of the working classes in Europe improved once their masters found other populations to exploit. It’s why wealthy countries protect their parks and forests while mining and logging foreign lands. It’s even perhaps why women’s suffrage was granted in the USA in 1920 after a decade of mass immigration, ensuring a steady supply of bodies for the workforce and liberating female bodies from the role of sole producer of that workforce. In the reverse, a century later, rabid anti-immigration policies are executed in tandem with the policy of forced pregnancy.

Our global machine consumes bodies to feed itself, and the attack on our wider environment—on our oceans and forests and biological brethren—is also an attack on our bodies. Without a thriving and complex natural world, we, as natural beings, suffer. We are running out of places to run and hide. That means we will have to learn to fight, to use our bodies with force as well as using them peacefully in the context of our movements.

Groups of people coming together to deliberate and figure out how to defend themselves—whether it is the Papuans taking up arms against their genociders or masked climate vigilantes slashing tires of gas-guzzling cars in cities—this is bending our collective knees and clenching our collective fists and facing the cold hard truth that only we, together, can defend ourselves.

This is the moral clarity of the collective: refusing to abide by the absurdist rules which demand we rise above the destruction of our bodies and become whispers on the wind.

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