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Last October, The Forgiveness Project - a UK-based charity which explores forgiveness and conflict resolution through the stories of real people - held a controversial event at The House of Commons in collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues. On the day after the 25th anniversary of the Brighton bombing, Patrick Magee, the man responsible for planting the bomb, spoke alongside Jo Berry, the daughter of MP Sir Anthony Berry, who was killed in the blast. It was an impassioned debate which stirred emotions and opened minds. The following day, the only part to make headlines, however, was Magee's refusal to repent for his past actions. Despite the fact that the former IRA activist is always at pains to stress that, in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, violence can no longer be justified, few ever seem to take any notice.

As a result of this complex discussion I asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu to deliver The Forgiveness Project's inaugural annual lecture on the subject 'Is Violence Ever Justified?' Clearly he appreciated the challenge, and on May 12th this year, at St John's Smith Square in London, he will be speaking alongside Patrick Magee and Jo Berry. Also on the panel will be Mary Kayitesi Blewitt who lost more than 50 members of her family in the Rwandan genocide.

No doubt the ethics of violent resistance will be fiercely debated, not least because Magee's position is still deeply political. At the Commons meeting, when asked if he would publically apologize, he made it clear that this could not happen until the British Government also accepted responsibility and apologized for their part in Northern Ireland's Troubles.

A day after the House of Commons event I flew to Israel to collect stories from a remarkable organization called Combatants for Peace. I traveled between Jerusalem and the West Bank meeting former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian combatants who no longer believe that conflict can be resolved through violence. Almost all the Palestinians I talked to did not denounce their violent past. Like Magee they believed they had been fighting a just war, defending their communities at a time - during one or both intifadas - when there was no other choice. In the end it was only a weariness born out of witnessing the futility of the cycle of violence that made them lay down their weapons. Just like Patrick Magee, they were not going to say sorry for past actions which they saw as both provoked and inevitable.

The message of Letlapa Mphahlele is perhaps an easier one for the public to swallow. During the apartheid era Mphahlele, then Director of Operations of Apla, the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, was responsible for many attacks on whites. However, in post-apartheid South Africa, Mphahlele no longer believes violence should be met by violence. He explains,

I believed then that terror had to be answered with terror and I authorized high profile massacres on white civilians in the same way that the whites did on us. At the time it seemed the only valid response - but where would it have ended? If my enemy had been cannibals, would I have eaten white flesh? If my enemy had raped black women, would I have raped white women?

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Desmond Tutu to Consider: Is Violence Ever Justified?

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Last October, The Forgiveness Project - a UK-based charity which explores forgiveness and conflict resolution through the stories of real people - held a controversial event at The House of Commons in collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues.

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NOTE:
You've come to an old part of SW Online. We're still moving this and other older stories into our new format. In the meanwhile, click here to go to the current home page.

Is violence ever justified?

December 7, 2007 | Page 8

BRIAN JONES answers a question that socialists are often asked about the struggle for a different society.

WE LIVE in an extremely violent world. In 2002, a World Health Organization report concluded:But violence never simply "breaks out." And if we're so naturally violent, why does the military have to go to such great lengths to "break down" soldiers in order to train them to kill?IN ALMOST every country of the world, the state power--the government--is the greatest source of organized violence. States have armies, whose main purpose is to use violence against other state armies. States also have police forces, whose purpose is to use violence to control the domestic population.MANY WHO recoil at the violence of our world turn to the ideas of pacifism and declare their opposition to all forms of violence.

Violence is among the leading causes of death for people aged 15-44 years of age, accounting for 14 percent of deaths among males and 7 percent of deaths among females. On an average day, 1,424 people are killed in acts of homicide, almost one person every minute. Roughly one person commits suicide every 40 seconds. About 35 people are killed every hour as a direct result of armed conflict. In the 20th century, an estimated 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly as a result of conflict, and well over half of them were civilians.

One way to look at all of this violence is to blame human nature. People are naturally violent, goes the argument, and that's why we live in such a violent world.

Following this reasoning, we should say "thank goodness" for the police, the army and prisons, since they work to stop all of the violence.

The mainstream media share this framework. You can tell by the way they talk about "cycles of violence" or print headlines that scream about how violence "broke out" here, or violence "broke out" there. And since we're naturally such violent folk, violence requires little more explanation than that.

Violence is always a means to some end, not an end unto itself. To really explain the violent nature of the world, we need a different framework altogether. We must understand the conditions that produce violence, and the ends toward which much of the violence in the world is consciously organized.

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At the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. described the U.S. government as the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." He was talking about a war where American military forces killed over 3 million Vietnamese people.

Forty years later, tragically, the statement is still true. The U.S. war on Iraq is only one case in point. After killing 3,000 Iraqi children a month for over 10 years starting in the 1990s through a regime of crippling sanctions, the U.S. has now also caused over 1 million "excess deaths" in Iraq since it invaded and occupied the country in 2003.

And what of the role of the U.S. government at home? Here, the military was founded as a force for the genocidal extermination of the Native Americans, and the police were first organized as slave-catchers. Today, the U.S. government holds, by force of arms, 2.2 million of its own citizens (most of them convicted of non-violent offenses) behind bars.

Rather than see the state as a neutral force, standing above society (and ostensibly "protecting" everyone), Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels were the first to describe all states--from ancient Rome to today--as instruments for one class to rule over another. As Engels wrote:

The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument for exploiting wage labor by capital.

All of the violence described above flowed not from some flaw in our nature. The occupation of Iraq didn't just "break out" or flow naturally from some "cycle" of violence. The occupation of Iraq was organized by a specific group of people--the American ruling class. They organized all of these violent means toward a very specific end--their ability to control the largest supply of oil in the world, and thereby to maintain a dominant position in the world's marketplace.

Likewise, to report that violence "broke out" in Palestine only serves to hide the real objectives to which that violence is directed. The media are thus obscuring Israel's interest in using violence to destroy any possibility of Palestinian statehood, and the Palestinians' interest in using violence to win liberation from their occupiers.

What of the violence that is not organized by the state? What about domestic abuse? What about armed robbery? Surely the state is not to blame for those?

Actually, states have long been endorsers and promoters of violence against women. Ancient Roman law held women and children to be a man's property, holding the power of life and death over their heads. In the Middle Ages, men were encouraged to beat their wives to control them.

Early American colonists passed laws prohibiting the beating of wives after 8 p.m.--to avoid disturbing the peace. It wasn't until 1911 that most U.S. states (except Mississippi) outlawed wife beating. Thus, the state for several thousand years, has officially sanctioned, condoned and endorsed domestic violence.

And yet here in the U.S., where it is "officially" condemned, millions of women are violently abused by men every year. Like robberies and other kinds of violent crime, domestic abuse continues anyway because of social conditions that promote it.

Just as armed robbery is a product of poverty, domestic violence is often a result of the frustration produced by poverty, for example. If we know that veterans of war are more likely to abuse their wives, does that tell us something about human nature, or something about the nature of our society?

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But can we truly condemn all violence? What of the basic right of self-defense?

There are two problems with a moralistic approach to these questions: one, it fails to appreciate the difference between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor; and two, it serves to justify the existing ruling-class monopoly on the means of violence.

The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky brilliantly illustrated the first point in his famous pamphlet, Their Morals and Ours. Citing the American Civil War, he poses the question: "Is the violence of the slave the same as the violence of the slave-master?":

The question lies not even in which of the warring camps caused or itself suffered the greatest number of victims. History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains--let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!

Likewise, should we wag our fingers at the Jews, trapped by the Nazis, awaiting the gas chamber, who smuggled guns into the Warsaw Ghetto? If they tried to shoot their way out of the ghetto, should we cheer them or scold them?

The ruling class would have us believe that the violence of the state--of the police, of the military--is "heroic," but that the violence of the poor or the oppressed is "terrorism." Malcolm X eloquently challenged this hypocrisy when he asked an audience in Detroit:

How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi, as violent as you were in Korea? How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed, and your little girls are being murdered, and at the same time, you're going to be violent with Hitler, and Tojo, and somebody else that you don't even know?
If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it's wrong to be violent defending Black women and Black children and Black babies and Black men, then it's wrong for America to draft us and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.

Anyone who wants to revolutionize society--to rid the world of so much violence--must eventually face the question of how to deal with the overwhelming violence of the state. In 1917, the workers of Russia would never have been able to take power if Russian soldiers had not refused their orders to repress that revolution. The soldiers, in fact, joined the revolution.

Actually, the First World War ended because of the revolutionary wave that swept Europe--soldiers from all sides who were sick of war rose up against their real enemies at home. Fifty years later, the disintegration of the American armed forces during the Vietnam War showed a similar process, albeit on a smaller scale.

It is not enough to be disgusted by the violence of our society. All those who genuinely want to end it should start by supporting the right of people to defend themselves from violent repression and to resist occupation by any means necessary.

But since the armed forces are overwhelmingly working class in composition, a revolutionary movement must also aim to win over the military, and thus take away from the ruling class its principal means of violent repression. A revolution that eliminates classes and class oppression will eliminate the need for violent repression--and eliminate the desperate, frustrating social conditions that lead to individual acts of violence as well.

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NOTE: You've come to an old part of SW Online. We're still moving this and other older stories into our new format. In the meanwhile, click here to go to the current home page. Is violence ever justified? December 7, 2007 | Page 8 BRIAN JONES answers a question that socialists are often asked about the struggle for a different society.

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I notice a fair number of sweet, well-meaning people saying "violence is never justified."

This is a position I have a lot of respect for, though it's not my position. The hard-core pacifist, who always opposes violence, is a person of great bravery.

But to say NEVER is a strong statement. In the US, if you are saying "violence is never justified" with respect to the Baltimore riots, for example, you must also oppose all the wars and killing the US is involved in.

In practical terms, that must mean that you believe that every politician who voted for war is more unethical than any rioter. You must believe that George W. Bush and Barack Obama are far fouler individuals than any rioter.

Ethical outrage must be proportionate to the violence and the violence in Baltimore is nothing compared to the scale of the Iraq War, or Afghanistan, or drone murders. Nor is it anything compared to the scale of police violence against Americans, especially African-Americans.

NEVER is a big word.

What most people really mean is that they condemn non-state sanctioned violence, except sometimes, like, say, in the American Revolution, or the Maidan protests.

In fact, they approve of some violence and not of other violence. Most such people, were you to dig down hard enough, are hypocrites, but some aren't, even if one disagrees with them. If you were to allow the USSR the right to crush revolutions along with the US, and condemn the American revolution, you wouldn't be a hypocrite, just not a very nice person.

Trying to argue about popular will and/or democracy is a slippery road, mind. For example, the numbers on the American revolution with which I'm familiar don't show the majority of the population being for leaving British rule. Maidan overthrew a democratically elected government in the Ukraine and the French revolution was made by the Paris mob, while most people living in rural areas of France (the vast majority of the population) would have preferred to keep the Ancien Regime.

Relatedly, violence often does solve problems. The Native Americans cleansed from North America were "problems" to the settlers, and violence dealt with that problem just fine. Fascist Germany was a problem to most non-German countries, Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Gays, and many others and violence solved that problem. Carthage was a problem to Republican Rome and violence solved that problem.

And riots, rather better organized than the Baltimore ones, granted, solved the Parisian problem with the old Regime, while the Terror, terrible as it was, did make sure that there was to be no going back-even if France was to alternate between Republics and Empires for some time.

Violence often solves problems and it often does so rather permanently.

Here is what history actually teaches us about violence: People who are better at violence than those they fight get the spoils and often keep them for a long time. You do know that the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain, yes? Then the Normans? Those people did very well out of killing the locals and wiped them almost entirely from the most fertile parts of what is today England.

Europeans conquered most of the world and Europeans today (and their descendants) are powerful and relatively rich compared to almost everyone they conquered. Many economic historians believe that imperialism and colonialism were required for the industrial revolution to really take off; and definitely for capitalism to find sufficient markets. Violence worked very nicely for Europe and especially for England and the United States.

Of course, history marches on, and eventually everyone will get their turn at the curb, their face stomped on. But history can take a long time, and multiple generations can enjoy the fruits of violence-theirs or their ancestors. Violence only doesn't solve anything in the sense that nothing solves anything-extend history enough in any direction and all peoples eventually have a really bad day (or really bad hundreds of years or millennia). Heck, eventually, all species will go extinct.

I don't know if violence is ever justified. But I do know that violence often does "solve" problems and I do know that peoples who insist on being entirely non-violent or bad at violence eventually discover that everything they have they hold at the sufferance of those who are good at violence.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Is Violence Ever Justified? Does Violence Ever Solve Anything?

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I notice a fair number of sweet, well-meaning people saying "violence is never justified." This is a position I have a lot of respect for, though it's not my position. The hard-core pacifist, who always opposes violence, is a person of great bravery. But to say NEVER is a strong statement.