We must delineate what we are, and are not, willing to name “violence.” I don’t believe a smashed bank window or a burning trash can on the Berkeley campus outside a Milo speech to be victims of violence or to produce victims. But that is not an absolute distinction related to animate versus inanimate objects—for a smashed mosque window or a swastika on a Jewish grave would, by my lights, produce legitimate victims of violence. The latter, but not the former, are in service of an ideology—white supremacy—in which violence inheres. There is a crucial distinction between destruction as collateral damage of a political end (say, in the goal of disrupting a neo-Nazi gathering), versus as its central tenet (genocide).

Anti-fascist violence is thus a counterviolence, not an instigation of violence onto a terrain of preexisting peace. A situation in which fascists can gather to preach hate and chant “blood and soil”—this is a background state of violence. The problem we face, then, is not so much that of necessary violence as it is one of impossible nonviolence.