DUCKPOND

The apparent paradox is that peace is sought, most obviously at the macro-level, using the means of physical force and violence. In truth this is more a contradiction than a paradox, since the purpose of violence is to establish institutions of structural violence. The definition of structural violence given here is close to the usual meaning:

Often when we use the term “violence,” we think of direct or physical violence. But Galtung has seen how violence can have many faces, and that evil can exist in many subtle and evil ways. Structural violence is violence that does not hurt or kill through fists or guns or nuclear bombs, but through social structures that produce poverty, death and enormous suffering. Structural violence may be political, repressive, economic and exploitative, it occurs when the social order directly or indirectly causes human suffering and death.

Racism in the South prior to the Civil Rights Movement is an example of structural violence, and the success of the nonviolent movement led by Dr King was in part the  delegitimization of racism. In the case of structural violence the case can always be made it is the victims fault. Responsibility can be displaced. In practice we have should be suspicious of those who recourse to violence rather than exercise nonviolence. The obvious example has been the invasion of Iraq in which an apparent threat was used to justify violence involving the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Max Weber said that the State cannot be defined in terms of ends but only in terms of means, specifically the “legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. It can be noticed that Australia is using violence against what is described as “the Taliban” in Afghanistan. As to whether this is legitimate use of military force is another question, although the end is claimed to be justified, and the process is to continue despite the change of government.

The Australian Government has taken to employing violence as an instrument of policy on the pretext of protecting the community. One way of conceptualizing the intervention in the Northern Territory, purportedly to address the problem of child abuse, and to override the prerogatives of the Northern Territory Government and the principles of federalism is to see as a form of state violence. A similar case can be made for the extended detention of refugees in privatized prisons. As in Iraq, ends and means become dissociated, or more plainly the actions are inherently dishonest.

On an individual level, the institutions of the State aim to constrain behavior that overtly harms others or is reckless. Normal Mailer said that most males suppressed their inclination to violence, and that suppression of their instincts made them sick. He thought that people, particularly males, had to find an outlet through boxing, or some other form of activity. Mailer was in the habit of making assertions, more than he was in examining the available evidence.

It might make more sense, have greater utility, to consider violence and nonviolence as competing models of how the world might be made to work better. We need to consider whether what appears to work in the short term is still effective when considered in terms of its long term effects. Violence is often used in the belief that nonviolence will not, cannot, work.

But can violence work against nonviolence? Probably not. It depends on the person. There are many historical examples, and while Thomas More was canonized as a saint, he was nevertheless a human being, an exceptional one for sure. The Catholic Church got it right; he was a deeply spiritual person. In 1960, Robert Bolt wrote the play A Man For All Seasons , later turned into a film by Robert Zimmerman, which used some of the text from his letter to his daughter Margaret of his second interrogation before members of the King’s Council, 2 May 1535:

Whereto I answered, that I give no man occasion to hold anyone point or the other, nor never gave any man advise or counsel therein one way or other. And for conclusion I could no further go, whatsoever pain should come thereof. I am, said I, the King’s true faithful subject and daily beadsman and pray for his Highness and all his and all the realm. I do no­body harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith, I long not to live and I am dying already, and have since I came here been divers times in the case that I thought to die within one hour, and I thank our Lord I was never sorry for it, but rather sorry when I saw the pang past. And therefore my poor body is at the King’s pleasure; would God my death might do him good.

More somehow confused ends with means in his life.