The Nonviolence Fetish

So it’s all fine and good to have this protest action, but I have a question.

Why is it that protest actions these days almost always advertise themselves as nonviolent?

Let’s be clear, I am most certainly not advocating for violence, which would almost certainly be stupid and counterproductive. I am however curious as to the process by which we fetishize nonviolence to the point that we have to define any political action as nonviolent upfront. Even leaving behind the fact that Martin Luther King was a gun owner and that guns were central to self-defense in the civil rights movement, it’s still kind of weird despite the bad history behind it. I am trying to wrap my brain around this.

It’s almost as if protestors today want to advertise that they will do nothing to threaten the system. It’s not as if, unless you live in Portland or Seattle, there are organized groups of anarchists who want to break shit that you have to worry much about in these protests. It just seems to me, again, to be announcement that we aren’t threatening in any way, shape, or form, that we will hold our little action and go home (probably using public transportation) and we can be ignored.

So I’m curious–why do we do this today?