[nutball]

Systemic violence so drastically outweighs "individual violence" in quantity and affect that there's just no real comparison. Me smacking a dude for talking shit doesn't even come close to the totality of systemic violence: war, poverty, houselessness, rape, abuse, racism, hunger, prison, policing, immigrant concentration camps, border security, alienation, queer bashing, trans murders, environmental catastrophe on a global scale. And that's just the present situation. This violence is felt by individuals very personally, but it is systemic in cause, affect, and result.

The police, media, and state point the finger at a very specific subset of activity and call it violence in order to distract from the overwhelming violence they perpetrate. This is particularly true of those who resist the current state of affairs. Rioters are "violent" because they smash windows. The cops who beat them are merely restoring order. Police are rarely described as "violent" even though they frequently shoot people and control populations with the use of force. Prisoners are the violent ones, not the ones who lock people up in cages. The most oppressed are the violent ones, not those who maintain the system of violence.

To give a little perspective on anarchy and violence:

Anarchism tends to reject moralism. The question isn't whether it's good or bad to kill Frick. It's not about punishing a person for a bad behavior as that sounds awfully like what the state does and it's so-called "Justice." Rather, it's about what force this activity will generate. If a hated figure is assassinated, will this spark revolt? This idea was called "propaganda of the deed" and a similar idea lives on in smashing windows and similar small-scale activities among current North American anarchists: activities that can be picked up by others easily and may spread among the wider population. Other ideas tend to focus on blowing shit up and stuff, like the CCF and FAI. That's cool and all, but I don't think that spectacular acts of violence against the state will do anything to hasten its demise.