WEEK 13 – WAR,VIOLENCE AND MODERNITY (2): CIVIL VIOLENCE
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Presentation on theme: "WEEK 13 – WAR,VIOLENCE AND MODERNITY (2): CIVIL VIOLENCE"— Presentation transcript:
Slide1
WEEK 13 – WAR,VIOLENCE AND MODERNITY (2): CIVIL VIOLENCE
Preliminary comments on Terrorism
Slide2
Terrorism
Weapon of desperation used by the weak
Opposed by many mainstream revolutionaries e.g. Lenin and Bolsheviks – tended to strengthen state, not weaken it
Rarely achieves its goals except:
To encourage repression – IRA 1970s; ‘Al Qaeda’
Assassination (not ‘terror’ as such)
Exerts an influence way beyond its reality – political effects
Threatened states infringe their own civil liberties
Tends to strengthen the threatened state (
cf
Tsarist Russia)
Terrorist’s chief weapon is often the enemy’s media as in
CharlieHebdo
Slide3
Terrorism Deaths Worldwide 1992-2005
Slide4
Worldwide deaths from Terrorism in 2013
Since 2005 figs have risen sharply to over 18,000 in 2013 mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan where they shade into guerrilla and civil war
Iraq
— where 2,492 incidents in 2013 left 6,362 dead.
Afghanistan
— where 1,148 incidents left 3,111 dead.
Pakistan
— where 1,933 incidents left 2,345 dead.
Nigeria
— where 303 incidents left 1,826 dead.
Syria
— where 217 incidents left 1,078 dead.
Turkey
had 34 attacks and 57 deaths
United States
had nine attacks and six deaths.
The United Kingdom
had a high number of attacks (131), but most of these were small-scale attacks in Northern Ireland and left only three dead.
Israel
had 28 attacks in 2013 that left two people dead
[Figs from Institute for Economics and Peace quoted by Washington Post]
Slide5
Muslim victims of al-Qaeda
Between 2004 and 2008 al-Qaida claimed responsibility for 313 attacks, resulting in the deaths of 3,010 people. And even though these attacks include terrorist incidents in the West -- in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 -- only 12 percent of those killed (371 deaths) were Westerners.
between 2006 and 2008, non-Westerners were 38 times more likely to be killed by an al-Qaida attack than Westerners.
[
Der
Spiegel
based on figs from the Combating Terrorism
Center
(CTC) at the United States' Military Academy at West Point in New York]
Slide6
u
Slide7Slide8
Gun deaths US vs deaths of US citizens worldwide from terror 2004-2013
Note that exposure to these conditions is socially conditioned as is -
Slide18
Malaria Deaths 2013
Some 200 million cases
Some 660,000 deaths
[World Health Organisation]
Slide19
4. ‘Economic’
violence
famine
death by interest rate / ‘laws’ of competition / economic structures
death by product (tobacco; baby milk; untested drugs)
‘accidents’
Disease
Also part of ‘objective’/structural violence
Slide20
Revolutionary Violence
French Revolution
Fall of Bastille (parading De
Launay’s
head: parading head and heart of other victims)
September Massacres (1789) - 2000 prisoners of all categories killed by insurgents
Jacobin Terror (16,600 executions nationwide including c. 2,500 in Paris) (cf. c. 4m. dead in Napoleonic Wars)
Slide21Slide22Slide23
Russian Revolution
Civil War (10 million deaths)
- mostly from cholera, typhus, influenza and starvation
- extensive atrocities (looting in Petrograd December 1917; armed grain requisition; peasant retribution)
- social dislocation e.g. urban depopulation (Petrograd 2.5 m. to 750,000);
- White
Guard anti-
semitism
-
at least 50,000, perhaps 200,000 deaths
Slide24
Interpreting Violence
1. Traditional Hostile
View
Burke (1790s)- ‘cruel ruffians and assassins reeking with....blood’
Hippolyte
Taine (mid 19th.c) ‘vagabonds, beggars, fugitives from justice
’
‘
the mob’ ‘riff-raff’ ‘bandits’ ‘brigands
’
Thomas Carlyle - admires fight for freedom but fears anarchic mass
.
[Note French rev in British tradition usually seen in negative light as terror and tyranny- Scarlet Pimpernel, Dickens ‘Tale of Two Cities
’,
Hornblower
- very few sympathetic reflections]
Slide25Slide26Slide27
2. Making Sense of Violence
Albert
Soboul
(1964)
-
strategic significance
of the revolutionary ‘
journées
’ (days)
Bastille - saves Paris
September massacres fuelled
by fear of invasion
Terror - strengthens war effort
-weakens counterrevolution
Slide28
Edward Thomson (1963)-
‘rescue [lower classes] from the enormous
condescension of posterity….Their aspirations were valid
in terms of their own experience
’
Moral economy
of the masses.
[
cf
Clifford
Geertz
(1970)-
‘thick
description’
in anthropology
&
Subaltern Studies – revolution in understanding peasants (Vietnam war)]
George
Rudé
(1959)-
the crowd
Eric
Hobsbawn
Bandits
(1969)(‘social’ banditry or criminality?
Slide29
3. Revolutionary Violence as Response to State Violence
[Foucault (1960s - 70s)- state ‘invents’ forms of criminality -esp. over property - and forms of madness in order to lock up and repress the poor and rebellious in prisons and asylums]
Peter
Linebaugh
The London Hanged (1991)
- capital punishment as instrument of class war
Rise
of capitalism achieved by mass violence of state -
Highland
clearances: enclosures; repression of
resistance
(Anti-Combination Acts; transportation
)
in
‘
The Many-Headed
Hydra’ (2001)
Linebaugh
and
Rediker
include slavery and slave trade - mythologizes joint resistance of victims - slaves; seamen; maroons etc
.
Slide30
Arno Meyer
The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
(2000)
-
‘The Furies of revolution are fuelled primarily by the inevitable and unexceptional resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it’
‘the hecatombs of the foreign wars of the French and Russian revolutions exceed those of their civil wars, and yet the former are glorified and mythologized, the latter execrated.’
