Violence

Violence
Interest of	• Antifa • Evren Balta • Neville Bolt • Oliver McTernan

Violence is the use of force.

Justifying myths

“There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used. ... Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was.”
Gil Bailie

Definition

As with "non-violence", a definition is more problematic than one might think.

Exhortations

In June 2019, Fred Chan Ho-fai wrote opinion in the New York Times that "The protesters [in Hong Kong] should thoughtfully escalate nonviolence, maybe even resort to mild force, to push the government to the edge. "

 

Examples

Page name	Description
Assault	causing physical harm to another person.
Battle
Cultural genocide	the destruction of a culture.
Genocide	the destruction of a people.
Iconoclasm	The destruction of art, images and monuments. A part of Cultural genocide.
Militarisation	The mentality, methods and tools of the military are increasingly being applied across society
Murder
Rape	sexual violence
SWAT	The use of extreme violence by police, which has effectively normalised the use of military equipment and methods
Structural violence
Torture	Torture is the deliberate infliction of pain, used both as a means of obtaining information (though for this purpose it is notoriously unreliable) and (such as at Guantánamo Bay) to terrorise entire populations.

 

Violence victims on Wikispooks

Title	Description
Jamal Khashoggi	assassinated journalist
Jim Koethe	Violently murdered in September 1964 in his Dallas apartment, before he could finish his book on the JFK Assassination.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Bureaucracy	“are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity — of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence. This is why even if a bureaucracy is created for entirely benevolent reasons, it will still produce absurdities.”	David Graeber
George Carlin	“The latest disaster for the rest of the universe is that the United States is going to go to Mars. Okay, aw yeah. We’re going to go to Mars. And then of course, we’re going to colonize deep space with our microwave hot dogs and plastic vomit fake dog shit and cinnamon dental floss and lemon-scented toilet paper and sneakers with lights in the heels and all these other impressive things we’ve done down here. Let me ask you this, let me ask you this. What are we going to tell the intergalactic council of ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers throws her newborn baby into a dumpster huh? How we going to explain that to the space people? How we going to let them know that our Ambassador was only late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half an hour punching his wife around in the kitchen. What are they going to think when they find out – it’s just a local custom – that over 80 million women in the third world have had their clitorises forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasure so they won’t cheat on their husbands. Can’t you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up? Can’t you see them out there?”	George Carlin
Piers Corbyn	“Piers Corbyn is a danger to our families, teams + to the people who believe the garbage he bangs on about. People may not agree with all their MP does but threatening to hammer us to death and burn down our offices is vile. Anonymous online trolls aren’t the major problem here.”	Piers Corbyn Sarah Owen	18 December 2021
Harry Ferguson	“Sadly, my advice today to any aspiring recruit who values the defence of human rights would be to stay away and do something better with their lives. The intelligence services are not what they were. Above all, they have forgotten the lessons that we learned during the struggle against Irish terrorism: that brutality and injustice are not the answer, they simply fuel the next generation of terrorists.”	Harry Ferguson
Johan Galtung	“Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action. ... Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another.”	Johan Galtung	1969
Johan Galtung	“We shall refer to the type of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence as personal or direct, and to violence where there is no such actor as structural or indirect. In both cases individuals may be killed or mutilated, hit or hurt in both senses of these words [i.e., physical and psychological], and manipulated by means of stick or carrot strategies. But whereas in the first case these consequences can be traced back to concrete persons as actors, in the second case this is no longer meaningful. There by not be any person who directly harms another in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.”	Johan Galtung	1969
Mahatma Gandhi	“I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill. I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”	Mahatma Gandhi
Government	“No matter its guiding “ism,” every government has granted itself the power to initiate violence against its citizens. Just because the ruling agglomerate asserts this privilege doesn’t render it philosophically valid. What it does is legitimate the initiation of violence for any and all causes — domestic and foreign — the government deems proper. Having violated the first principle of nonaggression, nothing can stop that philosophical default from trickling down to the subject population.”	Robert Gore	11 February 2017
Samuel Huntington	“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”	Samuel Huntington
MLK	“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government.”	MLK	9 November 1967
Bill McCollum	“Teen-agers account for the largest portion of all violent crime in America... They're the predators out there. They're the most violent criminals on the face of the earth.”	Bill McCollum	1996
Money/Creation	“Generally speaking the zero sum game promotes conflict. Conflicting parties need money to stand competition (in the extreme case: fight a war) in order to maintain their positive balance position. The only regulatory principle to limit the promotion of violence in all shapes and colors is the monetary monopoly's need to manage risk. Fatally, the risk taken by banks is distorted by the doctrine that the monetary monopoly as a whole may not fail. This so called Moral Hazard caused by public bailouts encourages investments in exploitation and war. What really trickles down is violence, not wealth.”	'Smithy'
Cass Sunstein	“Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law.”	Cass Sunstein Adrian Vermeule	15 January 2008
Totalitarianism	“Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.”	George Orwell

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:The new alliance between anti-vaxxers and the far right is a deadly threat	Article	1 August 2021	Paul Mason	"Though they claim to be “peaceful”......by setting themselves up as the victims of genocide, the anti-vaxxers give themselves permission to threaten violence.....Those behind the “crime” are said to include governments and the World Economic Forum (WEF)" because the real fascists are the ones that oppose oppressive government mandates and forced injections.
Document:Weekend Clashes Emblematic of Political Violence Around the Country	Article	16 October 2018	Anti-Defamation League	This ADL blog post from 2018 outlines instances of "terrorism", blamed mainly on the Proud Boys during first two years of the Presidency of Donald Trump. Since then, they were revealed to have links to FBI informants.

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