WEEK 13 – WAR,VIOLENCE AND
MODERNITY (2): CIVIL VIOLENCE
Preliminary comments on Terrorism
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
Terrorism Deaths Worldwide
1992-2005
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]
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]
u
Gun deaths US vs deaths of US citizens
worldwide from terror 2004-2013
Road Deaths USA – selected years
since 1945
Year
Total deaths
1946
31,874
1956
37,965
1976
45,523
1979
51,093 (peak)
1989
45,523
1999
41,717
2009
33,808
Currently 1 death per 10,000 population per year
Road deaths UK since 1925
2010 = 1 death per 25,000 of population
Air accident fatalities since WW2
Global Death Toll- Variety of sources
(Oxfam March 2013)
Future Terrorism
Hollywood nightmares
nuclear weapon (e.g. Disguised as freight container or ‘suitcase bomb’)
chemical agents – anthrax; botulism; sarin gas
contaminating water
cyberterrorism
Most of them either need state-level involvement (leads to fear of ‘rogue
state’) or threaten own aims and objectives
States are the most effective terrorists e.g. Drones in the Obama years:
390 strikes – 2,5000 deaths – at least 250 civilians
WEEK 13 – WAR,VIOLENCE AND
MODERNITY (2): CIVIL VIOLENCE
Lecture One Civil and Revolutionary
Violence 1789-1921
[i.e. not state vs state violence –war
Violence within a state]
1. State violence (often‘Legitimate’)
•capital punishment
•corporal punishment
•imprisonment, exile, transportation
•police/judges/law
•[Terror]
Zizek – ‘objective’ violence;
‘structural’ violence – the necessary,
everyday violence to maintain the
status quo
2. Anti-state or intra-state violence
•civil war
•revolutionary violence
‘illegitimate’
•terrorism
•racial/ethnic violence
•criminal (personal) violence (gangs, bandits,
muggers, hooligans, etc.)
[struggles of this type often more heated than
regular war]
Not pursued in these lectures
3. Violence of nature (‘acts of God’)
•wild animals (bears, lions, tigers, sharks,
snakes, wolves, insects) note also violence
against these creatures
•climatic hazards (drought, flood, storm)
•geological hazards (volcanoes, earthquakes,
mud slides, tsunami)
Note that exposure to these conditions is
socially conditioned as is -
Malaria Deaths 2013
• Some 200 million cases
• Some 660,000 deaths
[World Health Organisation]
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
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)
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
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]
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
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?
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.
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.’
Note also: Return of tendency to stress
revolutionary violence
Bicentennial of French Rev.
Francois Furet & Mona Ozouf
Simon Schama - ‘Citizens’ (1989)
Russian Rev
Orlando Figes - ‘A People’s Tragedy’ (1996)
(influenced by Maxim Gorky)