Final Straw: “Non-Violence Ain’t What It Used to Be” with Shon Meckfessel

This week, we air our conversation with Shon Meckfessel. Shon is a longtime anarchist and activist from Sacramento, CA. He has penned numerous articles and the book Stuffed How It Gush: A North American Anarchist in the Balkans. In this interview we talk about his most recent book, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used To Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance. We spend the hour chatting about concepts of Nonviolence in the U.S. and how they’ve developed, the threat and use of violence in and by anti-capitalist and anti-racist social movements. The chat moves through Lockean Liberalism, Insurrectionalism, Ghandian-Kingian non-violence, Anarchism, Nihilism and more.

It was a fun chat and we talked in some real depth that we couldn’t fit into this one hour. So, we made a podcast episode that’s just over an hour PLUS another hour-long podcast of the secondary materials. The second part will soon end up as an episode as well.

At one point we talk about Rojava (the Kurdish-led, Bookchin influenced anti-capitalist revolution being run in parts of Turkey and Syria) & the Syrian Revolution and anti-authoritarian participation in it. I mention an interview that subMedia did with Robin Yassin-Kassab, a co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.