Category Archives: Violence

Violence breeds violence. When will we finally learn that?

“Our thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. Just as they are with the millions of victims that western terrorism is responsible for, by unlawful use of force and wars of aggression.

Since the terrorist deeds hitting us are, beyond reasonable doubt, induced and provoked by our violence, there is a self-evident way to counteract them: stop our own crimes.

We should instead try the Chinese – peaceful – way to conquer the world: by aid, trade and investments.”

I posted those words on the NYTimes Readers Comments to an article about the Manchester attack, with to date not one “Recommend” from readers. On the other end of the list, with almost 700 Recommends, one finds the following sentences:

“When my son heard about this horror, he looked at me and said â€˜Why, Mommy? Why would somebody do such a thing?”

“in the end I just said, ‘I don’t actually know. I don’t know why.'”

“we all so desperately want this to stop and we don’t know how to make it end.”

One can’t blame this woman since she is misinformed by our media like most of us. But on the other hand it should’t take much imagination to picture oneself in the same situation as a fellow human being in the Middle East, in countries torn apart by the merciless war machine hitting them from “the free world”. And if thinking alone doesn’t work, the Internet is abundant with testimony from the suffering people.

Take the interview with the Yemeni boy in his lower teens who had lived in the U.S. and moved back to his village, where he managed to convince his countrymen that America was a fair country. Then came a drone-strike killing innocent people, and all his efforts were in vain. They then naturally hated the U.S. and lived in constant fear of the drones, praising cloudy days because drones can’t fly then.

Or take the bombed wedding parties (at least eight such U.S. bombings since 2001, according to The Nation), together killing more people than all terrorist attacks in Europe in the same time-span. The human beings we threaten with immediate death are more eligible to “don’t know how to make it end” than we are. The only response some of them can think of is terrorism (they are in other words just as vindictive as many U.S. citizens after 9/11). These are just minor examples, the number of killed in Iraq alone exceeds one million by now.

It seems impossible that their terrorism will achieve any productive goal whatsoever. It will just induce even more atrocities from “the free world”, provoking further terrorism, in a never-ending loop. Contrary to what the woman above thinks, there is a simple way to break this loop: stop our violence!

Europeans and their offshoots in America have for 500 years dominated the world with military power. We have killed millions and millions of poor, innocent people through the centuries (besides shortening the lives of hundreds of millions through economic suppression.) Violence has worked as far as the western well-being is concerned. For those at the wrong end of the club it has been detrimental in all aspects. The new terrorism by the oppressed is a clear sign that our violence doesn’t work the way it used to.

China has demonstrated a way forward, we just have to achieve the same cultural and rational level as them. It should be easy: see and learn! A new era is dawning, as long as we can prevent the lunatics from incinerating the globe into nuclear ashes, or clean the planet from human beings through a climate catastrophe.

And yes! We can!

Perpetual violence – to be cured by more violence?

Baton Rouge againâ€¦

This time itâ€™s said to be retaliation for the last time. In that case it’s how violence works, which is a truism familiar to everyone. Also well-known is that violence easily triggers chain reactions, multiplying the killings.

One reasonable explanation for why the US police use their weapons so readily is that they must expect anyone they confront to have a gun. This excuse was put forward in an American online paper, followed by critique of the generous gun laws. But apart from the abundance of deadly weapons in a society, crazy in itself, there are normally specific reasons to kill before anyone takes that often suicidal step. And the reasons are plenty and obvious.

On the international scene Europeans, and their descendants in America and elsewhere, have subdued large parts of the world with brutal, immeasurable violence for 500 years. If people on the wrong end of the club should do what we do, retaliate on the same scale, we havenâ€™t seen nothing yetâ€¦Â And we have not ended our butchery! By setting the whole Middle East on fire we have implanted the violence, making people in the region kill each other brutally.

Domestically the neoliberal assault by the ruling class against ordinary people has created multiple causes for conflicts. Had we lived in the short period of fairly civilized western life, the one we experienced 1945-75, a strong labor movement would have fought back with peaceful means against the self-indulgent, arrogant and greedy little clique that has been allowed to grab most of our countriesâ€™ wealth and power.

But the labor movements have lost much of their territory in the ideological warfare launched by the â€œelitesâ€. It turned out that the little clique controlled most of the media, which in turn made us believe that they were the truthful and objective media in the world (unlike our enemiesâ€™ propaganda outlets).

Our propaganda of all kinds – some of it called advertisment – has been pushed down people’s throats. No surprise that we have been made obedient, and passively led to fulfil our purpose in a society whose main goal is to enrich a miniscule group of unbelievably rich, at the same time probably destroying all prospects for human life in a sinister future, which comes even closer by the day.

Hopefully that future is not inevitable. To turn events in a hopefulÂ direction â€œjustâ€ requires global popular struggle, solidarity, a completely different economic system and rational oversight, among many other things. The key issue is to separate economic power from political might, tough enough.

The concept â€œpropertyâ€ has to be given a new implication. And a really lasting society in which the human species will survive has certainly to be something radically different than the braindead and consumer-slave herd driven for the main benefit of the super-rich.

Something we could really call Democracy.