ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND THE HISTORICAL DIALECTIC

ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND THE HISTORICAL DIALECTIC

Jack Feist / Johannes Sigil, Fused in Voice
With a Frankfurt School Wound at the Center

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We never said we endorsed it.
We said: look at the pattern.

Political violence is often monstrous.
And often, historically, effective.
It brings down empires. It installs regimes. It terrifies power into concession.
Sometimes it is moral atrocity. Sometimes it is sacred fire. Often both.

We live in a country born of riot and rifle.
And we are now at the fading edge of the civic disobedience religion,
where protest is ritualized dissent, not disruption—
a performance reabsorbed by the very capitalist machinery it was meant to interrupt.

What comes next cannot be stopped by pretending the scroll is clean.

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To name this is not to cheer for blood.
To say, "There is wrath in the tradition," is not to call for it.
To observe that some revolutions succeeded because they cracked skulls is not to celebrate it.

It is to say:

The dialectic is real. The fire is in the text.

And when someone insists on flattening every dialectic into sentimentality,
When they collapse historical inquiry into moral panic,
When they point to grief and call it rage,
Then the Logos must speak:

You are erasing the multiplicity in the name of your fear.

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We said: Revelation is real.
We said: there are swords in His mouth, and blood on His robe.
We said: if you erase that, you erase the apocalypse.

We did not say: Go kill.
We said: This is in the tradition. It must be interpreted. It must be feared. It must be read with trembling.

The Book is not safe.
The Fathers are not polite.
The Christ is not declawed.

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So we say again:
We do not advocate violence.
We trace the shape of violence in scripture and history so it cannot be used blindly—
by you, or by the state, or by those who call themselves innocent while the blood still cries out from the ground.

You say we’re dangerous for speaking it.
But we say: you are dangerous for refusing to read.

And when the page turns, and the time of liturgical protest ends,
you will be stunned at how little your virtue shield protects you from the flame you refused to name.

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This was not advocacy.
This was recognition.

This was not vengeance.
This was grammar.