You're not ignoring the rhetoric. Almost every website for a liberal movement promotes non-violence (except the most extreme.) Unfortunately in my experience the stated words don't match the cultural climate of the liberal movements I've been exposed to
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From the beginning, a lot of Left activism has been oriented against taking lives. When it's slipped into something else, the left-of-center groups tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric (I'm thinking specifically of the Weather Underground here from the 60s/70s). The closest you'll come to a Left violent movement is probably the Baader(sp!)Meinhoff(sp!) gang from the German 70s, and even then they were far from mainstream. Certainly monkey-wrenching from the EarthFirst! original perspective was aimed not against persons but against things (and I will argue that tree-spiking is not aimed particularly at workers; anyone in the know in the industry knows that the particular hazards involved there were common before tree-spiking happened--farmer logs, camper logs, stuff back in the eras when fences and telephone wires were nailed to trees and the trees grew around them; as well as nails from dispersed campsites).
I'm reminded of a story from Nixonland (great book, by the way), which indicated that in late 1967 Nixon received a memo stating that the anti-war movement, which was arguably "left," was probably going to get more violent in the coming year, as a way of venting its frustration that nothing had changed.
A responsible president would probably have sought a way to ratchet down the violence. Whether by giving in, distracting the movement, dissembling, or some other law enforcement action, the idea would have been to reduce the possibility of violence.
Nixon's response was one word: he wrote "Good!" on the memo. And he used the left's violence to ride a wave of pro-law-enforcement sentiment to re-election.
Given all we know about how Nixon worked, the question arises was this violence originating from the Left, or was it originating from COINTELPRO sources?
I've been concerned about the potential for physical violence against persons from the Right for ages. The culture of that particular in-group trends toward a sort of bullying and physical intimidation that slides pretty easily toward serious injury of those who oppose them if not death. Certainly the Right has been wildly free with spewing death threats as opposed to the Left, and they've been doing it since 1980. I remember the reaction of my DH (then my boyfriend) when I got into a verbal sparring duel with a pro-life protester at the University of Oregon in 1980 (set the stage; unauthorized Right protesters would show up to harangue students; most were of a sort of religious bent that was 180 degrees from my orientation so I'd play the game of "Bait the Blorters." Along with other theology students I knew in the late 70s
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A responsible president would probably have sought a way to ratchet down the violence. Whether by giving in, distracting the movement, dissembling, or some other law enforcement action, the idea would have been to reduce the possibility of violence.
Nixon's response was one word: he wrote "Good!" on the memo. And he used the left's violence to ride a wave of pro-law-enforcement sentiment to re-election.
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