on state violence

I haven't watched the video.

I was in bed last night, recovering from the flu, and from the next room over I could hear BBC News as my wife watched. Women shouting, men yelling, and then shots ring out and there is just screaming. I can't bring myself to watch it for real.

Yesterday in Minneapolis, agents of the United States shot an unarmed woman in the face and watched her die, as her wife sat beside her in her car.

That is the plain-language truth of the matter. There is no need for adjectival ornamentation ('vicious' ICE agents, 'helpless' wife) to see that what we are talking about is obscene - although obviously most of the adjectives applied are true, and illustrative. But the facts are stark, and speak for themselves.

This was a murder, a deadly assault against a defenceless person by a State official. It was an execution.

As I tried to come to terms with this, this morning, I saw some posts on social media from British people horrified at the situation in America and warning that 'it might happen here.' And all I could think was - how can you not see?

There is a sort of British exceptionalism which denies or disavows or remains fully ignorant of what the British State committed against civilians in Northern Ireland. I am not talking about armed participants in terrorism, or organised armed resistance, whichever way you see them. I am talking about unarmed civilians like those killed on Bloody Sunday, or at Ballymurphy, or lawyer Pat Finucane. I am talking about collusion, and corruption, and outright violence, among British law enforcement and armed forces in the North. I am talking about shoot-to-kill.

Because whatever you think of the IRA and their supporters, at no point did merely agreeing with them, being of the same community, or the same religion, carry a lawful death penalty in the territory controlled by the British State.

What we saw in Minneapolis last night happened over and over on the streets of the six counties of Northern Ireland in the period known as the Troubles. This doesn't make what happened in either Northern Ireland or Minneapolis more or less bad, but it does make them part of a pattern of State violence carried out by those who think they can act with impunity against people who resist the State order.

The State is a violent entity by virtue of its mere existence. It is impossible to create and maintain a State without - at least - the threat of violence; a colonial state, even more so. The United Kingdom is a colonial endeavour. It still maintains territories overseas from its metropole, Britain. One of these is Northern Ireland. The United States is a colonial State too, having taken over the unceded lands of Native American peoples. The way the State maintains control is through maintenance of public order and control of its borders. Both of these are done through the threat of violence: who may pass into or out of which areas, which behaviours are considered legitimate, who is awarded citizenship and, most pertinently, who is denied it.

You cannot have a State without violence. It is intrinsic to the state-making project. The UK is not an exception to this.

In my experience, the reasons that some British people think the UK is exceptional are twofold: they are blindly patriotic, or they are ignorant of the historical and recent crimes of their country. It is hard to reason with the first set. The second set are different. The second set have been let down by an educational system which does not illustrate and contextualise the full history of the United Kingdom and what it has done overseas; and by a media apparatus which upholds the fiction that the UK is exceptional, is a world leader, is well-respected Global Britain, etc.

No State is an exception. Every State has the ability to be violent, and only a tenuous social contract holds it back from being so at any given time. What we are seeing in the United States is the complete breakdown of that social contract from the side of State authorities. It's not the first time, however - Black people and Latine people in the US have been warning their white counterparts about this for years because they have already been living in a profoundly necropolitical landscape.

Necropolitics, the term coined by Black scholar Achille Mbembe, denotes the power of the State over decisions regarding who lives and who dies. Mbembe wrote that Black and otherwise racialised non-white lives are most often devalued by the State and 'sentenced' to shortened lifespans through means of biopolitical control such as living conditions, incarceration, etc. It includes all the violences which operate undercover in State power, in ways other, and up to, the firing of a gun.

Necropolitical control is also a vital part of the running of a State, beyond armed officers. In ICE we see where the two sets of violences collide, as minority communities are stalked by men with guns, and their defenders risk their lives to bear witness. Yesterday, last night, the world bore witness too.

Let it be a lesson that none of us are free and none of us are innocent as long as we uphold State hegemonic practices and do not resist the political conditions which benefit solely ourselves.

One final word:

The woman murdered in Minneapolis was called Renée Nicole Good. She had a wife and a six-year-old. She was, according to some internet reports, a Legal Observer to ICE stops and abductions, which is why she had pulled over to video what the agents were doing at the time of her killing. She exhibited extreme bravery in doing so. ICE have not demonstrated shyness or restraint regarding violence. They were armed. Good was not. One agent told her to move her car. She did so, and as she was doing so, another agent approached the car from a different angle and shot her.

She died needlessly and cruelly, and her family are now mourning her loss. So should we all.