News

Collective Punishment Backfires

David August

07 Nov 2025 — 7 min read

Michniów's Echo by author based on a photo

when school teachers tried it we acted out even more

ice is doing many things, including collectively punishing the people of Chicago, and by extension the American People. This has me writing instead of sleeping.

Gassing neighborhoods, often near children, schools and hospitals is collective punishment. Discharging their weapons recklessly at vehicles, putting people in hospitals and morgues is form of collective punishment. Apparently random abductions of working people, even while having a seizure holding a toddler, with no due process or recourse is collective punishment (and astoundingly callous and cruel). Brute force may suppress dissent in the short term (though it hasn’t much), but it unifies and unites opposition in the long term. My exhibits for this point are the elections this week.

(Collective punishment is prohibited by treaty in non-international armed conflicts [and also international ones], specifically by Common Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 4 of the Additional Protocol II.)

History shows that state violence begets mass mobilization. The more brutal the tactics, the more people feel, everyday people, compelled to resist even if they were previously neutral. History also shows that repressive regimes either collapse or become full-blown dictatorships. Limping along might be an option for a while I suppose, perhaps some sort of American version of the Italian years of lead type existence. There is no stable middle ground mid or long term. When states lose legitimacy and resort to brute force, societal collapse or revolution often follows. The U.S. is not immune to this dynamic.

The U.S. was founded on armed rebellion against perceived tyranny. This narrative is deeply embedded in our culture, making resistance to oppressive government actions more likely in some ways than in many other countries. No stable middle ground exists where the current brutality (or escalating brutality) of federal forces can persist with nothing else changing. Once a government crosses the threshold into widespread, arbitrary violence, the populace’s reaction is almost always resistance, not submission.

The only way to be sure whether or not the U.S. federal government has passed that threshold is to observe and see how the American People react. And the American People are reacting.

The American People are blowing whistles at armed and armored forces deployed on their streets, peacefully alerting their neighbors that danger is close. The American People are photographing and videoing the un-uniformed, unidentified, masked, violent, reckless (ice guy drops gun and loses magazine, without apparently noticing while aiming at civilians) for future prosecution. The State of Illinois has even already created an entity tasked with such reconciliation later. Every ice agent should welcome their day in court. It is the most gentle form of accountability available to them.

If the federal government is ends up appearing to have succeeded at doing what it has expressed as its desire to do, degrading elections, then a main peaceful path to revolution, free and fair elections, will no longer seem to exist. That would seem to leave the American People fewer non-violent options for change. And things that seem can collapse into action horrifyingly quickly. The American people tend to be collectively slow to violence. Then they are apocalyptic.

However, as Texas is doing potus’ bidding by gerrymandering itself to secure more gop seats in Congress just because they want them, California put to its voters the chance to counter such manipulation (at least in part). And the voters in California decided to counter-gerrymander their state to try to bring balance back to the House. Democracy in peculiar action. No violent changes to government made.

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If such electoral outlets like that were to stop existing, potus would actually become less secure in his position, not more. We could ask the various monarchs and dictators of history who did not allow their people the option of peacefully changing things through elections how that panned out, but they’re all basically unavailable.

In a case of ironic self-sabotage, potus and his supporters are working to nullify the peaceful mechanisms of dissent: voting, free speech/expression, court cases and more. Potus seems to forget that the American systems of non-violent conflict resolution (like the courts and elections) are among the precious few things that keep us from the law of the jungle, or what I have referred to before as John Locke’s aptly described: state of war.

Potus is 79. He has chronic venous insufficiency. He does not seem well suited to prevail under the law of the jungle in a post-Constitutional state of war.

But there is no switch that flips and shifts things from grumbly discontent to full civil war. In hindsight, historians might see some event, future or past, as the 21st Century’s version of the shelling of Fort Sumter, but I doubt it. It also seems unlikely half the country’s states will write up why they’re seceding like they basically did in the 1860s. As we face the uncertainties of this moment, it is unclear what single thing could demarcate such a change now. I doubt it can be violence between Americans that right now shifts us from one era to the next.

I also doubt we’ll have a shot heard round the world either (as the telling of the American Revolution so often includes). And I do not doubt it because there is no potential for real, deep change. There is. We are facing the chance to make real changes.

No, I doubt it because we have had dozens of little civil wars and revolutions in the last almost 250 years. We typically call them elections. Now before you stop reading and discard this as utopic fantasy, or that I’ve ignored the rougher realities of American politics, hear me out. I am writing this at 4am so please bear with me.

The demarcation of violence as the start of a civil war or revolution in the United States today might be useless. There have been about 423 mass shootings in the US this year, so far, and we’ve had only 311 days.

So which fraction of which day would we choose as a decider between before and after the NEXT BIG VIOLENT CONFLICT? Even if a culturally resonant or exceedingly violent one happens, how would we know that it the one that’s pivoting history? (I hope such a shooting doesn’t occur, though hope seems less effective than sensible gun laws with this type of thing: when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was in place we had fewer shootings, and both Republic and Second Amendment did not wither and die as a result).

Don’t worry, if we can’t make up our minds on whether or not the most recent mass casualty event is the historically vital one, we'll just wait an average of less than 18 hours and we’ll have another one to consider.

This is not a screed about gun violence. If anything, this is a blurb about the hopelessness and counter-productivity of all violence. Violence is never a good answer.

Violence is not a good answer, but it is an answer. Clearly violence is an answer people choose too often. Every life lost to violence reveals why it is too often. Everyone mangled, physically and emotionally, by violence is a monument to how violence happens too much.

Is it idealistic to want there to be no violence? Yes. Isn’t violence natural and part of nature like lions hunting prey? Yes, but neither the lion nor the prey can read or write this sentence, and along with opposing thumbs, a voice box capable of human speech and a prefrontal cortex unequaled in the known natural world, I’d like to think we are different enough from the lions and the prey that we can do better than they could in our shoes. (Insert joke about a lion running in heels.)

And we do. We do do better. If you squint in a poorly lit room, you might even view all of human civilization as a sophisticated attempt to avoid raw, wall-to-wall violence. We have courts, we have dispute resolution policies at work, we have words we can use to talk, discuss and insult instead of punch, kick and eye gouge. We have built cities and houses and playgrounds without every project devolving into a five-year-old's-slap-fighting style mess. Angry email chains are better than Thunderdome style “two people enter one person leaves” death matches.

We learned to cultivate the land to grow food. And we raised armies to take land that wasn’t ours. We landed on the moon. And we proved we had the technology to land bombs in our adversary’s cities. We split the atom which now powers and warms cities full of millions of people, and also threatens to turn those same cities, and people, into glass.

There is a tension in technology, and life, and governance. When we reduce violence we probably reduce harm.

The people of this country, in order to make us a more perfect group, articulated a country working to make things just, tranquil and protected, to make things generally better, and codify some freedoms and rights for us and our kids. I just paraphrased the opening of our constituting document, and we, the people, can find ways to make potus and ice bend to it without us needing to be the violent ones in this struggle. We are not animals (even if doing what an animal would do sounds very appealing). We are Americans. And like the elections this week have done, we can remind potus and ice of just what it means to be an American and strive for ideals. We can remind them, again and again, until it’s not needed anymore. Thanks for reading and do something fun this weekend; despots hate when you do something fun 😝.

David August is an award-winning actor, acting coach, writer, director, and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent’s Day, and after its theatrical run, it’s now out on Amazon (affiliate link). He has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, on the TV show Ghost Town, and many others. His artwork has been used and featured by multiple writers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, and others to express visually. Off-screen, he has worked at ad agencies, start-ups, production companies, and major studios, helping them tell stories their customers and clients adore. He has guest lectured at USC’s Marshall School of Business about the Internet.