Is Violence Ever Justified? Does Violence Ever Solve Anything?

I do not have respect for the “violence is never justified” position although I agree with you that “The hard-core pacifist, who always opposes violence, is a person of great bravery. So what? There is no law of nature that states that being courageous and being correct are coexistent in the same person. The soldiers of the Waffen SS were renowned for being exceptionally courageous, fierce, and effective fighters to give but one example.

To repeat myself I do not have respect for the “violence is never justified” position. The “violence is justified when it is the least bad alternative” position seems to me to be far more tenable.

mfi

@ markfromireland
April 28, 2015
The “violence is justified when it is the least bad alternative” position seems to me to be far more tenable.

My experience, working on factory floors, would support that position; at least 3 times in my working life.
Fortunately, the promise (by me) was enough to stop the aggression.
I think it’s enough to understand violence is part of our nature…

Not only do I disagree with “violence never solves anything,” I advocate that there is a point at which ONLY violence will change an intolerable situation. Are we there yet? Perhaps we are. “Occupy” tried nonviolence and was violently disbanded. Nonviolence has not prevented the police from continuing to murder the people they are supposed to be protecting.

People in power will hold on to that power until they are removed. When political means and reason can no longer remove them then violence or the visible and immediate threat of violence is fully justified and is, in fact, required by the basic needs of human dignity.

My distrust of violence is as much pragmatic as moral.

I have noticed that violence is a sucker’s game for the rank-and-file fighters on all sides.

“Successful” revolution merely replaces the existing oligarchy of glorified gangsters with a new oligarchy of glorified gangsters.

The elite, whether old or new, still gets the gold mine while everyone else gets the shaft, including the surviving rank-and-file fighters of the winning side.

So, if you’re a young man of fighting age (which I’m not; I turn 52 next month), why risk your life just to replace one pack of gangsters with another?

Especially if the religions are correct, and all you have to do is sit out your time in this worthless Hell called the natural universe, and then you go to a much better world? (You do have to wait, though–the Proprietor of the afterlife is said to disapprove keenly of checking oneself in early.)

I don’t know how else to say it other than the way I’ve already said it, at my blog, at other blogs, at news sites, all over the blabbosphere: when you loot and burn and riot, you’re handing the National Security State a gift on a silver platter. Congratulations.

Violence as a plan is never good. But if people are kept miserable, trapped and unendingly provoked, how are they supposed to put up with that forever? I have a feeling that a lot of us can’t even imagine what it must feel like to live in a tough neighborhood in Baltimore. I admire the patience of people who endure these problems and retain their desire to be non-violent. I think that takes some courage.

As much as I enjoy the Chicago symphony broadcasts and that she still has a job introducing them, I wonder what Lisa would nominate for the alternative to violence or at least the credible threat of it to the National Security State and if the Galactic Empire wouldn’t have fully approved of her response on this thread.

The central issue isn’t whether violence is justified – it’s whether violence has an achievable end. In this domain more than any other, the ends justify the means.

I think the only achievable end for violence is for the elites.

The members of the elite gang of criminals currently holding power achieve their goal if they maintain the status quo.

The members of the revolutionary wannabe-elite gang of criminals achieve their goal if they overthrow and replace the currently regnant gang of criminals.

Either way, we peasants who survive the chaos end up being ruled by criminals.

“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss”

Not to mention that anyone who struggles to achieve power, wealth, prestige, and other “goodies” of this life is, by definition, an idiot, because he (or she) fails to see that even if s/he achieves them, s/he must surrender them eventually, to the Reaper, if no one else.

“He who dies with the most toys wins”?

He who dies with the most toys IS STILL PURINA WORM CHOW, DUMBASS!

You might be living in a Constitutional Monarchy today, as we are in the country formerly known as Canada, if your forebears believed there was nothing to be gained by violence. I’m not saying that would be worse or better, you understand. Just ‘other’ than what is. Messrs. Franklin, Adams, Jefferson et al might not have bothered to pen that magnificent political clarion call had they believed there was nothing to be gained by violence. Or at the very least the overt, believable threat of it.

This facsimile of a culture within which we currently live and have our being preaches a lot of bromides that are not even honoured in the breech. “Life is sacred” is one – there is nothing except lip service that anyone can point to that would make me believe this cultural cliche has any meaning beyond sanctimonious platitude.

“Violence achieves nothing” is another. It’s an empty bromide intended to mollify and tamp down the rage of the people , even if only briefly enough for the cannons to be aimed at them accurately.

Former professional journalist says [LINK]

Former professional revolutionary says [LINK]:

The swift changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of man’s mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and passions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities of “demagogues.”

The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old régime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis – the active orientation of the masses by a method of successive approximations. The different stages of a revolutionary process, certified by a change of parties in which the more extreme always supersedes the less, express the growing pressure to the left of the masses – so long as the swing of the movement does not run into objective obstacles. When it does, there begins a reaction: disappointments of the different layers of the revolutionary class, growth of indifferentism, and therewith a strengthening of the position of the counter-revolutionary forces. Such, at least, is the general outline of the old revolutions.

Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the rôle of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.

The difficulties which stand in the way of studying the changes of mass consciousness in a revolutionary epoch are quite obvious. The oppressed classes make history in the factories, in the barracks, in the villages, on the streets of the cities. Moreover, they are least of all accustomed to write things down. Periods of high tension in social passions leave little room for contemplation and reflection. All the muses – even the plebeian muse of journalism, in spite of her sturdy hips – have hard sledding in times of revolution. Still the historian’s situation is by no means hopeless. The records are incomplete, scattered, accidental. But in the light of the events themselves these fragments often permit a guess as to the direction and rhythm of the hidden process. For better or worse, a revolutionary party bases its tactics upon a calculation of the changes of mass consciousness. The historic course of Bolshevism demonstrates that such a calculation, at least in its rough features, can be made. If it can be made by a revolutionary leader in the whirlpool of the struggle, why not by the historian afterwards?

However, the processes taking place in the consciousness of the masses are not unrelated and independent. No matter how the idealists and the eclectics rage, consciousness is nevertheless determined by conditions. In the historic conditions which formed Russia, her economy, her classes, her State, in the action upon her of other states, we ought to be able to find the premises both of the February revolution and of the October revolution which replaced it. Since the greatest enigma is the fact that a backward country was the first to place the proletariat in power, it behooves us to seek the solution of that enigma in the peculiarities of that backward country – that is, in its differences from other countries.

A Modest Proposal to address urban violence: Stop hiring men to be cops in urban areas. They’re too emotional for the job. They get their dicks involved and people wind up dead. Women would just do the job without turning into oppressive monsters. They’d be reluctant to go to “deadly force” and much more inclined to everything in their power to NOT have to shoot someone. It would change the whole us/them dynamic with the cops actually serving the community rather than merely protecting the assets of the oppressing class.

DMC, you have no idea of the amount of anger and fear women suppress. Did you see the mother of the young rioter on tv, who beat her son for risking his life by attacking police?

Violence is a tool that should only be used for gain. Using it to inspire fear in the oppressors instead of random destruction would be more effective.

I would not trust a person in a position of authority just because she is a woman.

This is hard to respond to in a comment. It would take a post.
Fundamentally, violence resolves nothing. I only postpones a resolution. There is a winner and a loser, and the loser holds resentments that will resurface. The winner is temporary. The violence will continue.
Is it ever justified? No.
That we have a history of violence, and that there are winners, does not justify violence. Violence is not power. It may be seen as power but it is not. Control, yes. Power, no.
Do I think that my succumbing to a violent encounter changes any equation? Well, it does from my point of view. The one inflicting violence will think the same.
I like my choice.

I heard a woman caller on a radio sho say that she was tired of hearing the word “riot “. She said it was an uprising. Up….is positive. Rising….is positive. and let us remember and reflect that a young man was killed. A life brutally beaten to death. On the other hand, A CVS -HELLO! – was trashed.
Not a mom and pop store. Sounds like throwing tea in the harbor. Tea!
Violence against humans are okay? Violence against precious property isn’t?

In “The Lost Science of Money” by Stephen Zarlenga , he writes about the monetary cause of the American Revolution. The Lords of Trade passed “Currency Acts” in 1751 and one with more bite in 1764. They were enacted to suppress the paper currency of colonies especially Pennsylvania. The colonies had come up with their own money system rather than borrow from the English banks and so go into debt. (Like what goes on with the IMF and WTO etc today.) Ben Franklin went to London to lobby against the act of 1764. In London he saw the slums and squalor which he told Londoners he did not see in the American colonies. He told Parliament that one reason for the impatience and disrespect which the colonies were manifesting towards Parliamentary authority was “the prohibition of making money.” The historian Charles Bullock writes, “In colony after colony, party lines came to be drawn upon this sole issue.
“There can be no doubt that the bitterness engendered by this conflict was one great cause of the Revolution, ” writes another commodity historian, William Sumner.
Everybody needed “money” to run their businesses whether it was small farms or shoe making, so everybody debated this. Draconian money measures from far away in England led to debt and poverty. Hence the comparison to uprisings now and uprisings then.

Again with the “blacks have an overall average IQ of 85” routine? Whats the average IQ of police? of George Bush? Your family tree?
Better yet, just be quiet.

Certain ironies here [LINK]:

[36:34]

BEGIN QUOTE…Historians estimate that roughly fifteen to twenty percent of white males were Loyalist by the war’s end, and in this sense, when I’m using the word “Loyalist” here, I’m actually meaning people who did something overt to support the Crown during the Revolution, like signing addresses, bearing arms against the continental troops, doing business with the British army, seeking military protection from the British army or going into exile. So just people who were doing those activities: fifteen to twenty percent of white males.

When you add to that percentage those who just wanted to avoid involving themselves in the struggle you end up with roughly half of the white male colonists not falling into the category of “Patriot” or, if you use a term that the Loyalists would have used, “rebel.” So all in all, only about half of the white male population actively supported colonial resistance, and at different times of the war, depending on the immediate circumstances, obviously people changed their views.

Now there were any number of reasons to stay loyal to the Crown, and I’m guessing — certainly if I hadn’t studied this time period I would assume that there is this stereotypical image of the Tory who one would assume is this sort of aristocratic person, this really rich person in a very fancy wig with very fancy clothes, taking snuff and doing a variety of other aristocratic eighteenth-century gentry kind of things and sort of sneering at the rebels. I think there’s sort of some stereotype we have in our brain about who Tories are, but as a matter of fact they were — some Tories fit into that category but certainly not all.

Wealth and poverty, high status and low, every kind of ethnicity could be found on both sides of the crisis, and from colony to colony different kinds of people chose different sides depending on regional circumstances. So for example: In New York a lot of the landed gentry tended to be Loyalist. In Virginia, the landed gentry tended to not be Loyalist. In Massachusetts, small farmers tended to be Patriots. In New York and North Carolina the — or at least the up-country of North Carolina — small farmers did not necessarily tend to be Patriots. So it obviously varied region by region, depending on local circumstances.

In general terms — In very general terms, you could say that Loyalism was stronger in the middle states than in New England and stronger in the lower South than in the upper South, and very strong particularly in New York, which the British ended up holding throughout most of the war, and weakest in Massachusetts, Virginia and Connecticut. Connecticut stood up. But there’s a reason for that because those are among the oldest colonies with a very long tradition of self-government, aggressive self-government.

Scholars who have studied Loyalists have noted that there seemed to be several types of people who ended up being more likely to become Loyalists. One likely Loyalist — and this won’t be surprising — would have been people who were connected with the British government by some kind of an official appointment, or were related to somebody who had an official royal appointment. For these people remaining loyal was not necessarily due to self-interested reasons, although certainly self-interest could have played a part, but as important loyal officeholders or people related to them had closer contact with the British government than most others, and thus they were better able to see the logic of politics in England, so they had more reason to be skeptical of claims about a conspiracy afoot in England to destroy colonial rights.

…A second kind of person who tended to become a Loyalist was — again logically enough — people who were in a religious or cultural minority, and who thus already felt a little defensive and not necessarily trusting in the whim of the majority — or the whim of the angry, resistant majority. And I’m going to go into this in more detail in a future lecture, but for logical reasons a good many African-American slaves ended up becoming Loyalists for good reason having to do with the chance of earning their freedom. So that’s a second kind.

A third kind of Loyalist consisted of people who lived out in the hinterlands in the backcountry away from the eastern seaboard. And this is for a couple of reasons, but one of the main ones is, if you think about it the main vehicle or one of the main vehicles for radical ideas would have been newspapers. And newspapers largely circulated in large port cities. And I’ve quoted already a number of times from the Boston Gazette, which would have been hard to get out in the hinterland somewhere. Tories called the Boston Gazette — That’s where Samuel Adams wrote a lot of his things — Tories called the Boston Gazette the “Weekly Dung Barge.” [laughs] I think everybody just wins here in the propaganda game. It’s equally impressive on all sides in the propaganda game.

People out in the frontier in Virginia or the Carolinas who didn’t have a lot of access to newspapers might have been harder to convince of a great plot against their liberties. As one historian wrote, “Not having been exposed to the ‘disease,’ how could they catch it?” None of these people had a particular reason to be swept up in the resistance movement, and they had reasons to resist it.

By 1774, all of these people — royal officeholders, cultural or religious minorities, people living out on the frontier — were conscious minorities, people who felt either weak or threatened, particularly considering raging events in cities along the seaboard. So in a way, you could say that many Loyalists were simply more afraid of the rebelling colonies than they were of the Crown. Almost all of them had interests that they felt needed protection from a raging American majority.

…Many of these Loyalists did not part with the colonial majority until well into the imperial crisis, and for many, as we’ll see, it’s not until independence becomes probable, and when real, actual separation from the mother country is at hand, that they felt compelled to declare their loyalty to the Crown and actually break away.

This was actually part of the agony of the Revolution, the fact that many people just weren’t sure of what they should do. They weren’t sure how they felt about the crisis. They weren’t sure what side to take. They weren’t sure that they wanted to take a side. They weren’t sure what would happen if they did. And on all sides people still cared about the colonies.
END QUOTE

JustPlainDave
May 1, 2015

In high-school (once) and on factory floors (three times) my promise of violence, if the bullying/harassment didn’t stop, netted me freedom from the bullying and, ultimately, acceptance.
Philosophise till the cows come home; I live in the reality of what works in given situations.
This whole violence thing just leaves me shaking my head (walks away shaking head).
I live in the real world; not some made up lala land…

BlizzardofOz,

I see you’re as charming as ever. Of course the minor riots aren’t “really” about what actually happened. It’s all in service to “their” (Obama, elites, media, Illuminati, etc.) agenda. Since we all know that due to their low IQs, innercity blacks can’t possibly have any aintelligent agency of their own, they are just easily manipulated violent sheep being used to push “Da Man’s” agenda.

You’re a hoot. It’s no wonder they’re laughing at you over at Salon as well.

At least in Baltimore there are charges. Might the tactics of the mindless black masses, otherwise known as thugs, of that city have some positive effect? Not saying there is necessarily a singular cause and effect here but it is at least reasonable to suggest that this provides a possible answer to the questions posed by Ian.

Blizzard, there is quite an interesting body of theory and evidence supporting the notion that when there are pervasive, long-enduring differences in IQ between groups, they are due to high levels of structural inequality and reduced opportunity for the lower IQ group. In short, if the difference exists, it is manufactured rather than innate.

I would take from your derisive use of liberal that you would self-identify as some form of conservative. You aren’t.

JustPlainDave,

Great! Keep up the good work. So at least you know that tsk tsking them is not helpful.

Overall, this situation is as predictable as it is grimly insane. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, blacks have such negative interactions with cops and do all the “right” things in response and barely protest at all. Even when the straw occasionally breaks the camels back, they mostly engage in peaceful protests but occasionally those protests turn violent in spots and gasp! a CVS drug store might get burned and looted horror! Then on one side you have the handwringing tsk tisk brigade and on the other is just a question of how quickly they get dismissed as thugs. Wash, rinse, repeat.

At times the use of violence is necessary. Especially when it comes to defending yourself or another from great bodily harm. The world would be a great place if we all loved one another but unfortunately this is not the case. Love is the better way.

An ex of mine who claimed to be a pacifist (mainly because he was a wimp) was somewhat wrongfooted when I put it to him: “What if I was being attacked by a mugger? Or your mother was being attacked? What then – would you still be a pacifist?” Violence is certainly justified when innocent people are in danger. Would apartheid have been overthrown in South Africa without violence? You have to stand up against the bully.