on demonising retaliation
on demonising retaliation
wrist slaps for provocateurs, thrown keys for retaliators
aight, i think its time to reserve a place on Bedroom Cinema Club for shorter thinkpieces. i’ll call them: nap-chats. they’ll be thoughts about the world, politics, culture, basically any interesting stuff i might have stumbled across or am thinking about. sound good?
we are taught from early (through implicit signals – rarely direct sentiments) that retaliation is just as more immoral than instigation and that retaliatory escalation is an improper response to incitement.
we learn it best in school; when a victim is encouraged to “tell" on their bullies to a teacher who lacks the tools to mediate/resolve conflict or discipline the bully.
the bully pushes more incessantly. the victim crumbles or snaps. lashes out, and in righteous anger, strikes the bully. the bully cries to the same teacher and becomes the new victim. a tale as old as time.
something more insidious is happening. the victim's violent reaction is seen as a behavioural corruption by the teacher. the OG victim is expelled from the moral grace of victimhood, newly tainted and transformed into a worse aggressor, deserving of a worse punishment than the bully who tried to kill them by a thousand cuts.
every time i see an example of it, i know where it comes from.
the cultural suppression of retaliation is a gross, hypocritical mutation of patriarchal paranoia, the ancestral dread of a white supremacist world domination that has built it’s rickety house of matchsticks on a bed of wet, morally reprehensible sand. so scared of its comeuppance that it whisper-traffics the ideal that retaliation, especially to the abuse of one’s power, is worse than the abuse of power itself.
retaliation is often a privilege of the oppressor, their escalation supposedly understandable, their trauma taken seriously and made legible. events like 9/11 and July 7th justify the invasion of the Middle East. events like october 7th justify an escalation of the genocide on the Palestinian people. disproportionate response is justifiable by the one with the power to control the narrative.
we see it commonly in the way that revenge fantasies have become a cultural staple in media. smash-hit shows like The Boys (2019) don’t exist without the women that were fridged to motivate the white male protagonists.
sometimes, films subvert the narrative and allow a wronged (typically white) woman to enact her revenge on her male aggravators (Kill Bill (2003), Girl with a Dragon Tattoo (2009), I Spit On Your Grave (2010) to name a few). there are special reservations for the retaliatory effort of white women (at least in a cinematic sense). the patriarchal construction of their dainty femininity makes their violence tantalising and unexpected. men who’ve caused irreparable harm get a glorious comeuppance. we feel good watching them because our karmic intuition can palpate the universe balancing out. some films pretend to be this radical and end up reinforcing the status quo:
for everyone else, retaliation is a sin. it is why reporters always ask the living kin of Black police brutality victims whether they’d forgive the killers. it is a pathological attempt to temper righteous rage, to warp the scales of moral integrity by defanging the natural order of one’s right to pursue retribution. we know. we know that we deserve to have power over the people who have used their own power to abuse us. we feel it in our bones. the powerful want to do everything to expunge that truth, anything to avoid an answer to the question that is burnt genetically into them:
“what if they do to us, what we’ve done to them?”
i was reintroduced to the case of Chrystul Kizer by the homie
(and i encourage you to read further, it’s been going on for a while). the news of this case’s ruling is in direct conversation with a guardian article about a pregnant woman who’s assaulter, despite eyewitness evidence, was found “not guilty” in British trial.
legal rulings set legal precedents. but to a larger point, they are an exhibition of their nation’s moral values. in the case of Chystul Kizer, the ruling exhibits that America won’t/can’t/doesn’t want to protect Black women from the violence of sex trafficking, nor does it intend to offer them grace should they choose to retaliate and liberate themselves from such insidious fates. in the case of Alexandra Heminsley, the ruling exhibiting that Britain won’t protect a pregnant white woman from harassment and that it prioritises the functional wellbeing of a male aggressor over pursuing justice for the vulnerable woman he assaults.
to sign off, i wanted to think about this paragraph from Heminsley’s article.
as long as the power dynamics of this world remain intact, we will have to suffer the demonisation of retaliation. it will make those without power live in states of daily dread that encourages them to outsources their protection, specifically their violent protection, to governing bodies outside of themselves. i resent that, in order for retaliation to violence to be societally and legally valid, it must meet a goal-post-moving set of impalpable conditions, because i like to think we all have a somewhat innate understanding of when something is wrong and when something goes too far. ‘israel has a right to defend itself’ might be true if you wanna conveniently overlook its organising principle of instigating a colonial project, but does that ‘right to defend itself’ include the indiscriminate bombing of entire neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, universities, homes?
when we outsource protection, we absolve ourselves of the communal responsibility to help one another when we’re in need. in Heminsley’s situation, the only people who successfully helped her were other passengers. the police failed to be a deterrent. the staff were absent. the courts failed to deliver her justice. it was other passengers that cared for her. so i think should rely more on the good nature of fellow passengers actually. less minding our own business and more community action – especially in moments of distress – because the systemic aid might never come, in fact it will likely turn on you, because it has less of an obligation to morality more of an obligation to upholding structures of power. communal retaliation might be the only way to truly protect ourselves.
(check out other nap chats: here)