Think Critically, Follow Orders
On service, accountability, and resistance as a person of privilege
A big part of “checking my privilege” when it comes to being in solidarity with any liberation struggle (or an ally, or an accomplice – whatever language makes the most sense to you) is knowing when to think critically, and when to shut up and follow orders.
I say this as an educated, white, cis-presenting male who also happens to be an anarchist. Checking all those boxes means that I tend to valorize critical thinking, intellectual independence, and a skeptical or hostile stance towards authority. This kind of intellectual habit and political positionality towards the world is a good thing when it leads me to take action to dismantle hierarchical systems of domination, supremacy, and celebrity culture and its related cults of personality. But the same habit can get in the way if it becomes a means of asserting my power and privilege within movement spaces.
I have written about what it means to “write a blank check” when showing up for the Palestinian resistance. I wrote about how I have both a responsibility to make the active choice to support the resistance (or not), but I also implied that showing up entails a kind of surrender. The resistance demands my unconditional support. They don’t need my critique. Even if I am uncomfortable with their tactics or the way they do things, my participation needs to be on their terms. In any movement space, I have to earn the right to have an opinion.
There are spaces where I’ve been around long enough to have skin in the game, and where it is appropriate for me to share my opinions within a context of shared power. There are spaces where I have peoples’ trust and they have mine, and where my honest input is expected and needed as long as I know when to step up and when to step back. Often, knowing when to step back means knowing who in the room is the most vulnerable, who has the most to lose, and who has the most to gain in the struggle.
We all have a stake in the liberation of Palestine, but only Palestinians who are on the ground in Palestine can lead that struggle. It is their land, their bodies at stake, and they have been resisting the ongoing Nakba for a century. They are the ones who are living under the rain of zionist bombs today. Showing up in unconditional support of their resistance means offering myself to be of service in any way I’m needed, and then listening when they give me an answer. It even means taking orders.
What does this mean concretely? I am not in Gaza or the West Bank throwing down against the IOF. But the resistance factions who are there have issued marching orders to those of us in the United States. They go something like this: “these are the principles of unity we organize around,* and to which we want you to be accountable; and these are actions we need people in your position to take in order to support us (boycotts, strikes, disruptive direct action, etc.).” So I follow and take my cues from groups in my area who adhere to these principles, goals, and demands. I am selective in my engagement with groups who do not.
If that concept of “taking orders” rubs you the wrong way, ask yourself why. You might have perfectly legitimate reasons. It might be because “following orders” sounds authoritarian, and we should all be suspicious of authoritarianism. A lot of us carry trauma from experiences of abuse at the hands of authority. But it could also be your privilege, your internalized supremacy that wants to be in the driver’s seat, that makes you want to be the authority yourself. This can show up in both overt and not-so-overt ways.
A common one I have been guilty of, which I spoke to in my previous piece, is setting up my own conscience or ideology as a universal standard that all must adhere to. For me, I used my pacifist beliefs as a pretext to set myself in a position of critique over and against Black liberation movements that embraced armed self defense and armed struggle. My privilege afforded me the luxury of picking and choosing which modes of struggle I was more comfortable with, and then assigning moral value judgments based on my own metric. I put myself in the position of judging which streams of the movement had the most legitimacy. Martin Luther King was legitimate. Nat Turner was not. Can you see the problem here?
When I dig a little deeper and get honest, my discomfort with being accountable to the resistance can be rooted in my privileged instinct to center the safety and feelings of colonizers. It makes sense: I, too, am a settler descendent, and it is easy for me to identify with colonizers anywhere and everywhere. I want to see myself as good, as innocent, and as exempt from the consequences of being a colonizer. When the revolution comes, it might come for me and my family. Decolonization means the destruction of my world. So, in order to embrace it, I have to see my own stake in it, which is nothing less than the recovery of my humanity. I have to have a moral awakening: I don’t want to secure my life at the expense of others, and as long as I cling to settler existence, my life is forfeit. It is forfeit not only because the oppressed have a principled right to kill me and expropriate my stolen wealth to free themselves, but also because the ongoing existence of settler society is destroying life on Earth. Ultimately, the way of life I cling to is killing me. It is killing all of us. The resistance not only fights for itself, it fights to save all of us.
One of the purposes of armed struggle is to force people to get off the fence and take sides. It is deliberately polarizing. It forces us into black and white binaries: either you are for us or against us. Choose. My intellectual habits militate against binary thinking, but there are times when resistance deliberately imposes binaries as a way to force the world to react on their terms. It is a way of wresting epistemological power away from the privileged by seizing the initiative. It is to set the terms of engagement. It is meant to radicalize us by pushing us to support the methods that are necessary to dismantle oppressive systems.
Radicalization through polarizing action is a time-honored tactic embraced by every slave uprising and anti-colonial movement in history. Examples include Nat Turner’s rebellion, John Brown’s campaign in Kansas or, a century later, the Algerian resistance to French colonialism, which shaped Frantz Fanon’s theorization of anti-colonial violence that, in turn, is shaping this essay you’re reading right now. It sometimes means embracing methods we find deeply disturbing. Decolonial violence is apocalyptic violence: it reveals, it mirrors back to us the violence that is baked into the colonial system that is invisible to those of us who benefit from it. Decolonial violence is exorcistic violence: it is a means of shaking off spiritual and physical possession by oppressive powers that seek to contain and control and colonize bodies and minds and spirits. Decolonial violence triggers oppressive powers into self-defeating, repressive responses that shift violence from the implicit to the explicit. As their system unravels, things may look worse before the final liberatory collapse.
Of course, nonviolent methods can trigger the same spiraling response, and famously did so in places like India and the American south, but it is a mistake to elevate this to a universal truth. Armed resistance co-existed alongside and in support of these nonviolent movements. Setting up universal, categorical imperatives is a supremacist habit. Whether a movement embraces nonviolent or violent methods is a choice that must be left to the most directly affected. It is the job of the privileged to show up in support, and to do that, one must first take sides.
Does that mean the resistance is always right? No, it doesn’t. No group is a monolith, and neither is any movement. But it means that debates over methods are internal conversations that I am often not invited to, and I need to check my entitlement to those conversations at the door. It means that I must acknowledge that the resistance has the right and responsibility to decide for itself what methods they will employ based on their own circumstances and conditions – conditions that I do not share in as a person of privilege. Movements make mistakes and evolve and experience conflicts and splits, and that can be tricky to navigate as an ally or accomplice, but they are their mistakes to make, and their conflicts to resolve (or not).
I still have agency. I still have responsibility for the ways I engage with any movement. And many movements embrace a diversity of tactics with multiple ways for people to engage. There is usually space for each person to decide for themselves what their personal boundaries are when it comes to the activities they engage in. I might not be willing or able to engage in certain tactics or take certain risks, but there are a lot of other ways I can support resistance. What I will not do is critique or condemn other peoples’ tactical choices. That is the kind of cop-like behavior that splits and undermines movements, ultimately serving only the oppressor. I am accountable to the resistance, not the other way around.
Being in solidarity, being an ally, being an accomplice, means allowing myself to be led by others. It means recognizing that every movement, even a “leaderless” one, has leaders and followers, whether we acknowledge it or not. It is important to be intentional about who should be in charge and when. That is especially important if you are a person of privilege showing up in a cross-cultural space, where the leadership springs from different political traditions and histories than your own.
Respecting the leadership of a movement does not mean allowing myself to be used or abused. I have been in that position. I have seen people with marginalized identities attain positions of power in organizations or movement spaces and then tear the group apart with divisive, cop-like behavior. If you see someone demanding blind obedience or loyalty, or leveraging their identity to rationalize predatory behavior, creating factions and turning people against each other and generally fostering an atmosphere of paranoia, it may be time to take a step back if nobody is holding that person to account, especially if (rightly or wrongly) you are not in a position to effectively hold that person accountable.
Personally, I need to balance my anti-authoritarianism with humility and collectivism. Anti-authoritarianism among white guys like me can look an awful lot like arrogant rugged individualism. I could be a self-styled maverick or contrarian and end up becoming a fascist. Nature abhors a vacuum, and because humans are inherently collectivist beings, I could deceive myself into thinking I am accountable to no one and end up bowing down to the next demagogue or personality who strokes my ego. Fascism, after all, is a twisted kind of collectivism that preys on our fundamental need for belonging to something larger than ourselves. The kind of collectivism I am looking for is about mutuality. For me, that means staying humble, using my power responsibly, and seeking to be of service. That means showing up for the movement as someone who is accountable and willing to be led.
*A summary of the core principles/demands of the Palestinian resistance, known as the Thawabet in Arabic: 1) the liberation of all of historic Palestine from the River to the Sea, with Jerusalem as its capital, 2) the right of return of all Palestinians, including those in the diaspora, to their ancestral land, 3) the right to armed resistance, 4) the abolition and dismantlement of zionism and the zionist entity (“Israel”).