The Violence Shall Rise Again

Members of this country of ours refer to certain events as the War of Northern Aggression. Worth mentioning, and indeed sometimes mentioned, is the fact that during this war of “Northern Agression”, the South, like Han Solo, shot first. Some of this has been in the news lately.

You have to wonder how much of the Southern idea of honor comes out of the way they have to think about these events. The war of Northern Aggression, in which the South resorted to violence first. Let us imagine for a moment that this is not a contradiction; let us imagine that we live in a universe in which the aggressor is not the one who first resorted to violence but the one who drove the other to violence. You have to have something that trumps violence, something that justifies violence as an opening gambit.

You have to have a concept of honor, or of fighting words. Violence in other forms: who I am — my person — is my honor and the honor of my family, which your words can diminish. This justifies raising my fist against you: because you have threatened my person in the form of my honor. Always you are looking for the thing that trumps violence. The thing that you can say is just as bad as violence. Consider here the concept of economic violence, popular on the Left but not unknown as a defense of the South. Consider the threat of extinction of a way of life.

This is where the idea of structural violence breaks down: every thing is a threat against some other sacred and holy thing. Now that we know it is a threat, we know that we can respond with violence if necessary. The same mustachioed madman lies at the foot of every slippery slope, with his tan jacket and red armband: thus, any step in any direction can — nay, must — be met with violence.

We know some things that are probably not true. In the Old West of popular imagination, there is this odd conceit that you could kill a man in self-defense if you could get him to draw first. Drawing the gun is a form of violence that justifies our violence in response. In this way, you could shoot first without being the aggressor. But — again, in the Old West of popular imagination — what this meant is that the fastest (most accurate) draw could kill with impunity in many cases. In the stories, the Fastest Gun in the West can only be one of two things: he can be a bully who rides into town and threatens civilization, or he can be a monk who is somehow not corrupted by the awesome power of life and death that he wields. We know that the latter is a fiction intended for the comfort and inspiration of children.

gauche
12 Apr 10