An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Cultural violence

When shortage is endemic, violence becomes cultural

Omitting a few occasional upsurges like psychopaths or earthquakes, violence is a battle for life necessities like food, space and water. Hyenas, vultures or humans will fight for a carrion, not for nothing.

When forced procreation degrades society so profoundly that it becomes drenched with violent conflicts, within as well as with other societies, ideology makes violence a cultural merit, an honourable duty, and peace is equated with cowardice and treason.

If shortage is temporary, violence is momentary. If shortage is chronic, violence is momentous. If shortage is endemic, violence is cultural.

Origins

Among the few foraging cultures surviving up to recent centuries, collective violence between humans was virtually absent. In all societies where the economy is still a mix of foraging and labour, violence is more prevalent where labour is more important.

Searches of Old Stone Age sites have never yielded convincing traces of massive violence between humans. Of the many hundreds of prehistoric artworks found all over the world, those produced before forced labour do not show one single image of a human being hurt by other humans. Artworks created however during the last ten thousand years, when forced labour spread, is interspersed by fighting, killing and torturing scenes.

It is hard to imagine - it should not be - that people like us have lived without major violence for ninety-five percent of their existence. Occasional violence might have existed, but the pandemic of coercion, humiliation, submission, expulsion and slaughter, only exists on our planet since ten thousand years and has grown ever since. It was unknown for millions of years, and was never witnessed in other vertebrates. It is a strange, exceptional situation, dangerous to the living and – because of the immense brutal force of its weapons - to life itself.

Tradition of violence

In cultures accustomed to war and repression for a long time, young boys grow up as daredevils playing with danger for fun, and believe that risks with less than two percent probability belong to the category of ‘bad luck’ only happening to others. This is demonstrated daily in automobile traffic, sports, cigarette smoking and so on, but becomes a useful asset in war, where this defying death without dying is conveniently designated as courage. But even in high-risk situations, youngsters conditioned for violence hold on to the slightest chance, if necessary a chance to afterlife. As one kamikaze pilot, his intelligence not up to his courage, expressed it: ‘there was always one percent chance that we would survive - that kept us going’.

Aggression is passed from generation to generation. Youths naturally try to learn successful behaviour from the surrounding society by catching images and emotions. It is not important if those images are considered real, like a news programme or a fight in the neighbourhood, or mere fantasy, like the Iliad or The Chainsaw Massacre. It is better that youngsters see The Chainsaw Massacre in an esteemed company despising the movie, or in a despised company approving the movie, than reading the Iliad surrounded by respected mentors glorifying the depicted wars and heroes. Isolated images have no meaning. The effect of violence, in the media and elsewhere, depends in the first place on associated emotional messages. Those associated messages do not necessarily originate in the immediate environment. They can cross distances and periods of time. A child in Connecticut or Tehran can have heard patriotic stories told by a beloved grandmother, and those stories can condition perception of news years later in a distant, desolate hotel room. Many scientific studies about the effect of violence in the media have been hampered because this effect was not taken into account.

Young people are told that it is an honour to die for their country by people expecting to survive and gain prestige, power or fortune themselves, but also by adversaries – even more so if those adversaries possess powerful media. American Rambo movies for example, with their recurring plot of one invincible soldier miraculously surviving suicide missions, are dubbed, copied and viewed and understood with enthusiasm in various countries hostile to their producers.

From desert hamlets to modern cities children, by nature longing for adults to follow, are given for examples the renown psychopaths of history, and they waggle towards their destruction, like geese chicks coming out of their eggs waggle behind the first one in sight. They learn to love guns and explosions, and the rest is tricky timing: if the gun goes off too soon, they are put away as murderers; otherwise they are ready for enlistment, and their name might end on one of those pointless stonewalls with names, erected ever since primitive cities burned each other down. And the walls become ever bigger, and the letters ever smaller.

Occasionally youngsters erupt in shoot-outs, and murder teachers, students, bystanders, and themselves. The cause of this madness lies not in video-games or in modern society: there is nothing surprising in a young boy entering a school yard and killing everyone on his path if he lives in a society where fire arms are a glorified status symbol; where TV channels show the blasting of village houses and he bombardment of crowded cities as a triviality, not even without regret or pity, but with pride; where generals become heroes by leading the killing of thousands of innocents while hiding in safe quarters themselves, and political leaders are celebrated if they are prepared to wage war even for the pettiest advantage, always at the cost of the lives and misery of uncounted civilians and hundreds of their own stupid but loyal soldiers.

If violence is cultural, conditioning of children can not be countered in a few lessons or reprimands. The only forces up to indoctrination is the creation of a milieu that disapproves violence, and the continuous interaction with as many other cultures as possible.

Numerous governmental and non-governmental programs have lost millions on 'education' projects. But a structurally violent society spends at the same time more millions on arms and ideological indoctrination. The latter is hardly noticed, if not secret, but even the unseen budget for propaganda is always proportional to the military budget.

You can not honour veterans, threaten with warfare, sanctify national interest above human life, attack countries or support aggressors, and spent billions on weaponry and then think that with a few leaflets and street theatre you can divert youth from becoming violent themselves – if you would want to, because it makes no sense building weapons and at the same time raise yought to non-violence. To knock down urban riots at regular intervals then becomes just weeding the garden where new aggressive soldiers are bred. A country that goes for its own interests abroad can not convincingly tell youngsters in the barrios they must respect other's properties.

Executions, carnivals, masses

Cultural violence appears in many forms. Roman culture, the classic example, was in constant war with invaders, as well as with rebels impoverished in order to supply the army. As a consequence, violence became sanctified and celebrated in religion, festivals and circuses. In the same manner, British hooliganism is in line with the glorification of warfare in British society, and with the militarist jargon pervading common speech.

Overpopulation leads to scarcity, boredom, anxiety and frustration. Kindled by propaganda for violence in politics and warfare, this leads to riots, vandalism, gang rapes and other kinds of ‘pointless violence’. If a society can not afford to reject violence, it tries to redirect aggression to convenient social occasions like festivals, public rituals, trials and executions, sports competitions, automobile traffic and warfare.

Cultural aggression is easily represented as accidental debaucheries by social outcasts or alienated subcultures - elegant pockets in a culture’s coat, in which its shameful necessities are hidden. But the machinery of society is indiscernible if not the whole image is taken into account, including what is officially rejected and yet endured.258 Societies could not possibly function as they do without those eruptions, no matter how loathed verbally by the well-established part of the population.

Until the nineteenth century, there was no clear distinction between popular carnivals and public punishments and executions, while fairs in general were occasions for settlement and cruelty among the mobs.

Market places were always crowded with public eager to see burnings, hangings or decapitations. The difference between capital punishment and human sacrifice is very hazy: in both cases the execution follows a ritual and satisfies a raged crowd craving for thrills and looking for the reinstatement of a real or imagined balance. The public at European decapitations secretly secured pieces of the corpse for cooking, and the Aztecs sacrificed thousands of war captives by tearing out their harts alive to offer it to the sun god; then the corpses were thrown at the excited masses for consumption. Cannibalism is not a tradition in well-defined exotic tribes or in French cuisine, but, as Marvin Harris has demonstrated, it is possible in every society where animal meat is scarce, and is predictable worldwide if human population keeps growing.

In medieval Europe heretics were burned at the stake because the Holy Church does not spill blood. Convicts were carefully dressed for the show, possibly wearing only an iron penis case making the burning even more painful, and adding more excitement to the spectacle when the heat reached the metal. In Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fé, a fifteenth century painting by Berrugete, the convicts wear only an iron penis case to make the burning even more painful and a more exciting spectacle when the heat reaches the metal.259 Public arousal at hangings was of such extend, that women had to be buried alive instead of hanged because of decency. Decapitation by a wooden sword was another medieval spectacle that drew spectators from afar.

Many communities have festival days on which violent crimes are silently allowed. Public authority was suspended or altered for the time of the feast, and faces were hidden behind masks. From France to the Andes, women and children locked themselves up in their homes on those days, while the others left for rhythmic dancing and intoxication until mastered by the flush of savage revelry. Next morning the corpses were silently gathered. These could be random victims of postponed aggression, or shunned members of a close community. The latter must have felt the mood and waited for the day of feast in terror, and at the last moment tried in vain to redirect the attention of a slowly nearing mob to another victim – but by doing so only yelling for his own execution. Sometimes a sudden Roman holiday raged through the streets, attacking groups of neighbours by hazard or intrigue. While the blood was wiped from the village streets, festivals where concluded with an offering as atonement or satisfaction, in Christian cultures with confession and absolution, wiping the blood also from memory. Peter Burke has found that in sixteenth century Venice, seventeen were killed on one Shrove Sunday, which suggests thousands of victims – and many more injured – each year throughout Europe.260 At the same time Americans complained that their festivals were much more violent than those of the old world.

Women and children barricaded in their dwellings, were not always safe. On many places the intrudo – breaking into houses and molesting the habitants – was an accepted tradition during festivals.

In the village of Courmenterral, in Southern France, the Jour des Pailhasses is still celebrated once a year. The name of Pailhasses refers to the habit to wear for armour a bag with armholes, firmly stuffed with straw (paille). The straw served as a protection for the battle in the night to come. Until the sixteenth century the same tradition is traceable in the Ardennes city of Binche, which suggests that the practice was spread over the whole of rural Europe. To celebrate the Spanish conquest of Peru, Mary of Hungary, who resided in Binche, ordered a feast in 1549 CE. The local pailhasses were presented in new clothes inspired by Peruvian custom, still known as Gilles today, after the famous composer Gilles de Binche who had lived a century before. The Gilles now throw oranges at grateful tourists, instead of beetroots and stones, and few people know why they still stuff their laborious clothes with straw. The name pailhasse is still a common term of abuse, though its original meaning, ‘straw harness’, has been forgotten.

Animals: betrayed companions, ravaged machines

In the seventeenth century CE, Descartes propagated that animals are only automatons, with no real mind or feeling. This theory has never been accepted entirely by neither scientific nor religious authorities. Yet the new imagery spread rapidly in an economy which leaned heavily on animal labour, and was increasingly subjected to harsh competition. If animals were really machines, their labour could be intensified to the very limit, denying or ignoring symptoms of agony.

Violence against animals could not have reached the incredible degree it did, if it had not been ritualised, because the aim of rituals is to consolidate social complicity. Brutal ‘scientific experiments’ on living animals, often with the only purpose to prove how much pain or injury a ‘mindless’ animal could endure, became hallucinating. Horses were repeatedly cut open, sewed together and mutilated in yet other organs, and eventually presented to an applauding audience as a proof of the efficient use of lab animals.

In the twelfth century CE Maimonides wrote:

It is prohibited to kill an animal with its young on the same day so that people should be restrained and prevented from killing the two together in such manner that the young is slain in the sight of the mother; for the pain of the animals under such circumstances is very great. There is no difference in the case between the pain of man and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for her young ones is not produced by reasoning, but by imagination, and this faculty exists not only in man but in most living beings. 261

At nineteenth century Universities, cats and dogs were forced to observe the torture of their young, even their ripped out foetuses, in order to investigate their emotions - of course the torture must be of a mind baffling severity, for the test to be ‘useful’.

Bulls, bears or wolves were tied in irons and, while hopelessly fighting for their lives, were slowly killed by one or more bloodhounds. Alternatively cheap theatres advertised the massacre of worn out cows, goats and donkeys by street dogs or rats. The rats made the cheapest show, but the spectator risked to be attacked if they managed to escape from the pit.

The public of violent spectacles did not only consist of the vulgar. Kings were often seated in the first row to enjoy cats slowly burning alive in an iron cage or bulls devoured by hound-dogs, while the upper class had also her exclusive killing parties. Keith Thomas has gathered many examples.262 Since James I it is a tradition that the British king personally cuts the throat of a captive deer, and honours his companions by smearing the blood on their faces. A handbook of the seventeenth century recommends training young dogs by cutting off a deer’s leg and releasing it again. When Queen Elisabeth needed distraction, she tended to take place in a gazebo, while an orchestra played light-hearted music. Girls dressed as nymphs offered her a crossbow while a flock of deer were driven around the gazebo, and the delighted queen massacred dozens of them. John Frederick the Magnanimous of Saxony, as many others, organised massive stag killings to entertain his guests. Cranach the Elder painted such an event twice: one team of servants drives the stags in a pond, to hamper their mobility. On the banks elegant companies of men and women, armed with crossbows, try to hit as many animals as possible. Other servants row around – not without danger - to gather the wounded or killed animals.

One of the arguments uttered against Descartes was that once animals were considered machines, it would not take long before humans would follow. Since then new weapons have indeed industrialized the killing of humans more efficiently than the best equipped slaughterhouses.

Sociobiology: a comedy of errors with a smirk

Sociobiology says that aggression has grown into our nature during prehistoric warfare, and that aggression - warfare, selfishness, sexual discrimination and intolerance - is innate.

An ever returning misrepresentation of Darwin’s evolution theory says that violence and selfishness rule the world, and that human society can only progress if we submit to this rule. Yet the evolution theory says not that living beings get better if they kill and eat everything on their way. If this would be the case, life on earth would have evolve by now to just one species with impressive fangs and bellies, crawling around in a desert sown with their bones and carcasses, searching to kill, rape anddevour.

Darwin’s great discovery was that living beings always adapt for the best coexistence with their environment. That is the real meaning of the survival of the fittest – a meaning some people find convenient to forget because they search for an excuse for our own violent existence.

E. O. Wilson dedicated most of his career to the study of insects, until he fashioned Sociobiology.263 Physics became the ideal scientific model for life, much as geometry had been taken as the ideal model for ethics in the seventeenth century CE. Wilson decreed

that the laws of the physical sciences are consistent with those of the biological and social sciences and can be linked in chains of causal explanation; that life and mind have a physical basis; that the world as we know it has evolved from earlier worlds obedient to the same laws; and that the visible universe today is everywhere subject to these materialist explanations.264

The ide a that humans are just another kind of animal was nothing new. It had been generally accepted until religious imageries like Gnosticism created an anthropology in which humans were presented as creatures fallen from an higher world and trapped in despicable bodies.

Wilson is however not satisfied with the humble admittance that we are just animals. He also pretends to knows how animals, including humans, function, and brags that science can explain a living animal from dead matter by causal laws. Essentially, he recycles the Cartesian view that animals are dumb mechanical robots following laws of physics, and degrades humans with them.

Sociobiology omits the active search for optimal existence and constant adjustment to environmental changes visible everywhere in nature for whoever wants to see it. Sociobiology neither considers the peculiar flexibility of life in general and of animal culture in particular. The living complexity of our organizations, thoughts, monuments and emotions makes us, animals, radically different from dumb machines. This complexity makes the question if laws of physics apply to us superfluous: our physical brain can simply not handle this physical complexity – the first is only a tiny atom of the latter.

Since for professor Wilson animals are automatons, and humans are the equals of animals, he concludes, with a few soothing sentimentalities intermingled, that humans are automatons. Cleverly made automatons, of course, but that should be no reason for optimism. Wilson exclaims with surprising enthusiasm that human aggression is innate, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Yet, this position is not a well-founded scientific hypothesis or a meticulous research program: it is a unsubstantiated dogma, stated boldly while many simple observations plead for a more cautious approach. As all dogmas, this one also short-circuits reason: since we act as we act, it is our compulsive nature, and a compulsive nature is genetic, with no research required. Saying that we are violent genetically, is really saying that we are definitely violent because we are noticeably violent. And the only conclusion yielded, that we are powerless against it, is nothing but another masquerade of the ideology of submission, once spread by coercive religions, and now conveyed by pseudo-science.

Humans and other animals are no mechanical creatures, assembled from reactive sphincters and forever doomed to repetition. Apart from the dull mantra ‘it’s all genes’, nobody, now or in the foreseeable future, knows laws to calculate the path of an ant for the next five seconds, and certainly not if the ant would know of the experiment and dislikes sociobiologists. Yet this is what physical laws do with a pendulum or a falling stone. If the laws of the physical sciences Wilson refers to do not even work for an ant, they must definitively be worthless with regard to birds, fish and mammals.

In contrast to dumb mechanic robots like common people, clerks like Wilson have a mind powerful enough to decipher the causes of social behaviour. The high priests of the social sciences must be allowed to apply to the lower people ‘biological principles which now appear to be working reasonably well for animals in general.’

Professor Wilson claims that ‘human beings are innately aggressive’, and illustrates his assertion with the fact that ‘during the past three centuries a majority of the countries of Europe has been engaged in war during approximately half of the years.’265 At first sight this statement suggests that European countries must have very violent genes, but if closely examined the proposition is deceitful: if not all European countries were at war half of the time, the best part must have been at peace all the time.266 But professor Wilson avoids the only reasonable conclusion, that we have a choice between war and peace, and that this choice, innate or not, prevailed even during the most violent centuries. He prefers the conclusion that violence is innate to humans (why not to Europeans, since his data only cover Europe?), even if this conclusion is contradicted by his own observation.

A similar logic is given by professor Steven Pinker, who lectures psychology at the MIT. Professor Pinker cites more recent data, very close to those of Wilson, and arrives at the same wrong conclusion with the same weird enthusiasm. Pinker cites that some sixty to seventy countries were involved in conflicts each year between 1993 and 2002 CE but, by leaving out that twice as many countries were at peace during the same period, conveniently stresses the feeling of omnipresent violence.267 When adding up all countries, the results line up with Wilson’s, and again the statistics - now on a global scale - hardly support the professor’s viewpoint, that the world population is compulsory violent.

Killing genes

Take a family with no liveable homeland nor income, endlessly pushed around state borders by racist officers. Then one infuriated member of this family, a young man, kills an embassy official. Nobody would conclude from this story that the young man had violent genes, just because other people in similar situations might react less violent. Yet similar conclusions are drawn constantly in the real world.268

The dogmatists of innate violence are in no way disturbed by the observation that violence follows frustration. Why would the frustrated or deprived have more ‘violence genes’? No doubt we have inherited genes that allow us to kill. But we have also inherited genes that allow us to climb in trees and to dig holes. A genetic ability is not a compulsive ‘instinct’. In fact, humans can live a very happy and satisfying life without ever digging a hole or killing someone, and climbing trees might even lead to sorrow by itself.

The pulse of our heart and the number of toes we have is defined genetically. But genes concerned with behaviour are, per definition, genes of choice. There is no necessity, not even a possibility, to perform all behaviour our genes allow. This misconception is frequent among people who have studied lower organisms for a too long period of time, but also among those who live well on best sellers thriving on fear.

Until today there are no specific ‘behavioural genes’ known. Popular speech tends to use the term ‘genetic’ to denote ‘unchangeable’. Such claims of ‘genetic inevitability’ are never based on anything near scientific genetics, but on too subjective interpretations of real life behaviour. The correlation between ‘genetic’ and ‘unchangeable’ is wrong. Snow rabbits have white or black ears, depending on the season, and both are caused by the encounter of rabbit genes with their environment. This example, chosen for its simplicity, points out the nature of other complex and unpredictable life processes. We are different each year, even lazy one day and energetic another, all with the same genes. By our genes alone we can not even speak or walk: we speak and walk after our genes have deliberated at length with all aspects of our environment, from oxygen availability to parental worries.

The only question remaining is: what motivates someone to go for the seemingly random theory that ‘violence is genetic’? Of course there is the desire for a best seller. In this respect Wilson repeats authors like Robert Ardry who hit the same jack-pot more than a decade earlier. Sociobiology would never have drawn this attention, and would never had sold that many books, if it had not excused violence the same way Ardry did.269

But there is another motivation. Sociobiology is a thesis pleading for the old hierarchical society, implying that people should keep calm and forget their longings, because those longings are dangerous ‘instincts’. Only clerkdom understands the secret code of human existence, in contrast with the mechanical instincts of common people who have to accept whatever the clerks have decided to be better for them to think. Sociobiologists seem to have other genes and can ‘deeper and more courageous examine human nature’, because ‘the principal task of human biology is to identify and to measure the constraints that influence the decisions of ethical philosophers’. In fact Wilson says that we can all better be controlled ‘scientifically’ by clerks like himself. In this regard, sociobiology equals fundamentalist groups who want to raise their followers isolated from damaging pretensions.

Sociobiology is a jubilant plea for the foundation of a college of clerks with the authority to scientifically propagate submission among the general public. This antagonism between superior clerkdom and obtuse lay-people is typical for all centralist civilizations of the past, and firmly establishes the divide between ideology and science.

In discouraging people on false grounds from dealing with the problems of cultural violence and warfare, sociobiology is traditionalist, antidemocratic determinism.

Sex genes

Another dogma of sociobiology is the primacy of procreation in sexual encounters.

Susan Browning defended in a study that rape is rather an act of violence and humiliation, and that sexual lust only plays a secondary part. And indeed, sexual urge can hardly be called the initial drive of prearranged gang rapes.270

Sociobiologist John Alcock has refuted the theory of Susan Browning. In his opinion Browning’s theory predicts that older and powerful women are raped more often, which, he continues, is not the case. To Alcock, rape is linked to reproductive tactics, since most victims are fertile women.271

In the oversimplifying vision of Alcock people react mechanically on plain facts, unhindered by a complex world-image built from emotion, experience and association. His assertion that most victims are fertile women is nowhere substantiated. At least one out of three victims of rape are infertile women: one out of five is below twelve, and one out of seven is above sixty. Almost one out of ten victims of rape, including anti-gay violence, are men. Furthermore one out of four rapes is incestuous, and anal rape is well known in cultures where vaginal virginity is imperative.272

Alcock refutes the theory of Browning by stating that acts of violence and humiliation must predictably aim at powerful victims. This proposition also lacks ground. The Ku-Klux-Klan does not molests powerful and wealthy afro-Americans, and the Nazi’s killed not only powerful and wealthy Jews. If they intended to oppose the threat of the growing power of their victims, the killing of poor Negroes or poor Jews would be a waste of energy, incomprehensible to sociobiologists. If, as Alcock defends, acts of violence and frustration are predictably aimed at the more powerful, exasperated workers would usually hit their boss, and never work off their feelings on their wives or children.

Life in the real world is more complicated than sociobiology seems to believe. As a general rule, aggression is directed towards the ‘weaker parts’ of enemies, victims and their surrogates. The ancient Sun Zu called this the science of weak points and strong:

in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.273

Because of this rule armies bomb civilians, vultures molest a carcass through the anus, and kidnappers take helpless children of powerful parents for hostage.

In many cases this weakness is the only reason to pick on a surrogate. Frustration is often let off by violence in sports or exercise, or against arbitrary persons or even animals. Employees bully their spouses when thwarted at work, tamers chose meek tigers, terrorists blast supermarkets, and soldiers rape women – all real world events unpredictable in sociobiology.

The geneticist Richard Lewontin and many others have attacked the claims of sociobiology. This has however not stopped sociobiology to put back the outworn Indogermanic myth and become the next justification myth of Atlantic civilization: ‘sociobiology is the latest and most mystified attempt to convince people that human life is pretty much what it has to be and perhaps even ought to be.’274

Lewontin wrote further:

No one has ever measured in any human population the actual reproductive advantage or disadvantage of any human behaviour All of the sociobiological explanations of the evolution of human behaviour are like Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories of how the camel got his hump and how the elephant got his trunk. They are just stories. 275

Cultural violence in the Atlantic civilization

In only a few centuries, Europeans killed forty million American Indians for their land. Then, to work this land, they brought in ten million African slaves, an enterprise during which twenty million perished in raids and transport.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, new population pressure in Europe caused the transition from slave trade to imperialism and colonialism. As forced labour was now carried out in the homelands of the labourers, it is much more difficult to give well-founded estimates, but there is no reason to believe that those in power suddenly became kind-hearted: one commission entirely composed of missionaries, insisted that the beating up of natives, already generally practised by civil authorities, should be legalized also for free entrepreneurs – of course no settler had ever been waiting for this verdict. Colonial administrators sent alarming petitions to their motherland, complaining that the fast decrease of the native population made it impossible to meet the imposed production quota. Of the estimated thirty million inhabitants of Congo Free State, only ten million remained at the beginning of the twentieth century CE. Although the international press was less focused on the pillage of other colonies, it is reasonable to expect that Europeans did not differ much in behaviour, and to estimate that during African colonialism two third of the indigenous population died of violence or misery.

In the period following colonialism, the enriched countries installed a disastrous one-sided economy, and vigorously drove back refugees fleeing the spiral of hunger, conflict and disease they mainly had brought about themselves. At the end of the twentieth century, this caused one million African casualties per year.

Extrapolation suggests that more than one hundred million people were sacrificed to Atlantic military deployment, ruthless colonial pillage and swindled economics. While adding up the victims, one must keep in mind that Europe is only one well documented instance of the way civilizations have functioned throughout history.

Hunger refugees

Societies rationalize violence away, while in practice they keep it alive as a necessary component of their social structure. As a result people recognize violence in other times and cultures at a glance, while the own society can perform a mass slaughter and never become aware.

Each year, more than one thousand African hunger refugees drown in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach the Spanish coast. For other European borders we don’t even have estimates, while Sicily alone could come near to Spain.276 Only when bodies of tens or hundreds of emigrants – often women with babies in their arms – wash ashore, they reach the media:

Coastguards operating from the island of Lampedusa, a tiny, barren outcrop of the European Union closer to Libya than Sicily, have grown accustomed to grim discoveries aboard the rickety boats which transport the migrants from Libya and Tunisia. The coastguard crew which boarded the 40ft vessel on Sunday evening found a boat laden with almost as many corpses as living people. Two bodies were stuffed into a space under the engine, with a further 12 heaped in a pile. [..] It was only after the boat had docked that rescuers realised one of the “corpses” was still alive.277

In the last five years of the previous century two thousand perished along the American-Mexican border. In this period of time the US government spent twelve billion dollars to keep this border sealed with an iron curtain, while prosperous Americans procure Jeeps, camouflage and military gadgets for their sporty and sociable hobby: to hunt down and report hunger refugees risking their lives trying to cross the fence and the desert. Following newspaper article is about just one of those many:

Mario Alberto Diaz, a biologist nearing completion of his master’s degree, crawled under a barbed-wire fence marking the border with the United States one evening this summer. He had 48 hours to go in his illegal trek across the desert. Desperate for a way to support his family, Diaz had a lead on a job in his speciality, cultivating mushrooms, at a plant in Florida. But not far into Arizona, his dream turned into a nightmare. He stumbled and sprained a knee. Limping two nights and days, at times in 95-degree heat, left him dehydrated. On the second day, a cactus punctured his plastic bottle, spilling the last of his water. He fainted twice. Travelling companions revived him, draped his arms over their shoulders and pulled him along. Each time they crossed a road, they urged him to stay behind, flag down the next vehicle and turn himself in. Each time Diaz refused, even after the ghastly sight of a man, woman and child huddled in lifeless embrace in the desert made clear the risk of continuing. [He kept] repeating: “I promised my daughter I would get there.” He didn’t. At the end of the second day, Diaz collapsed in exhaustion in a dry Arizona gulch and never got up. His body lay there for 20 days, left behind in the biggest yearly influx of illegal migration across the U.S.-Mexico border since 2000.278

An unknown number of hunger refugees freeze, suffocate or are crushed to death hidden in airplane cavities, cargo containers or train carriages. If one of those calamities by accident reaches the press – and thus consciousness – society incriminates the hunger refugees themselves (they are for short called ‘illegals’, while they act less illegal than any native wrongdoer), but never blames the prosperous who is denying hospitality until death.

Of course there is a satisfying justification: those people must die a terrible dead because the richer economies would collapse under the pressure of their numbers. This brings us to an interesting thought experiment. We are almost unanimously shocked by the slaughter of millions of European citizens during the Nazi period. Suppose a great magician stood up, who had the power to undo those killings. Would we let him? The drawback would of course be that the European population would rise by numbers similar to the number of hunger refugees. Of course there is no magician: we will get no second chance a few years from now. The millions we let die today, are dead forever.

This mass killing of hunger refugees out of greed will become a shameful page in European history, comparable with the suffering on Atlantic slave ships: the number of fatal victims is of the same magnitude, their death of the same horror, and both cases have in their own time been designated as inescapable economical necessities. Once they died because we needed them, and we didn’t care; now they die because we don’t want them, and we couldn’t care less.

The fate of black slaves on the Atlantic has slipped behind the hundred-years horizon, and it has become profitable to romanticize their misfortune in books and movies. The very same public that is moved to tears by accounts of ancient events, manage to remain blind for identical present-day suffering. It is remarkable how societies heading for violence always see their cultural expressions evolve to blatant sentimentalism. Ventilating feelings in a virtual world facilitates the worst malice in reality.

Human rights

To value each individual is the essence of modernity. Therefore the Universal Declaration of human rights, as it was adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 CE, is the most important expression of modernity today. The goal of the Declaration, approved by a vast majority of states, is the protection of each individual human. It guarantees minimal rights to individual persons, nothing less and nothing more. Such a worldwide consensus was infeasible, even unthinkable at any moment in history fifty or more years earlier. Never before, exchange had caused the worldwide cultural understanding capable to inspire such an agreement.279

Despite the imperfections of both the United Nations and of the Declaration, every human being should be aware of the long struggle of all peoples on earth to arrive at this monument. Nobody can rightfully reject it with the argument that it is alien and hostile to a particular culture. The whole of humanity, including all cultures, has suffered too much in order to arrive thus far: those who turn down this glance of modernity spit on the graves of people in all nations who have struggled in the past to better their children’s destiny.

The Declaration of human rights of 1948 CE starts with the statement that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, and should cooperate in a spirit of brotherhood. It is no plea for relativism or pluralism, nor for any metaphysical notion of justice. It does not endorse one state or rebuffs another. It is not relative to the society a person lives in, nor to the person’s intellectual, moral or other capacities: communities will freely carry on their business, they just will not infringe on the rights of individuals under their rule or power.280

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been criticized on all continents. It is nowhere practised in its entirety, but it can not rightfully be claimed, nor rightfully discarded, by any ideology or civilization.

Article thirteen of the Declaration says that everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Unfortunately the ‘each’ word in this quote is not taken literally until now. The article guarantees the right to leave any country, but the symmetrical right ‘to enter any country’ is omitted. And the tremendous important right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution has been declared solemnly, but the plain and simple right to flee poverty is lacking. Yet this right existed everywhere in practice, but is today violated with the rise of technology allowing wealthy states to tightly seal their borders in the ever more grim contest for living space.

The death penalty has already been abolished in over half of all countries, but executions still go on in the West as well as in the East.

At the General Assembly of 1948 CE, the Soviet block abstained from voting because in their vision happiness can only be provided by the socialist state.

Canada, despite its discrimination of Canadian Japanese, American Indians, communists and Jehovah's witnesses, eventually subscribed the Declaration. In the house of commons a speaker for the Conservative Party pretended that

human rights and fundamental freedoms exist in Christian civilization. They do not exist elsewhere. They have never existed elsewhere.281

Muslim countries, except Saudi-Arabia, subscribed the Declaration also, but the Cairo Declaration on human rights in Islam, issued in 1990 CE by a conference of Muslim governments, maintains that human rights mean the right ‘to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shariah’.282 This is a contradiction, since under Shariah it is a capital crime to quit Islam, while the free choice of religion is a non-derogable human right to the Declaration. Clearly many Muslim leaders are torn between cosmopolitan modernity and the mood of traditionalist populations in their hinterlands, and during the last half century of confrontation between Arabs and the West, the latter has gained ground.

The Bangkok Governmental Declaration, composed by a conference of Asiatic governments the same year as the Cairo Declaration on human rights in Islam, claims that human rights are relative to historic, cultural and religious backgrounds.283 Various despots bluntly defended that, under ‘traditional Asian values’, an individual is less important than his community. The Chinese scholar Xiaorong Li has effectively demonstrated that values common to the whole Asiatic continent are clearly made up for the occasion. Asiatic governments never were too principled against Western culture to benefit from its market economy where possible - scruples only surfaced when those benefits risked to be distributed among their populations.284

The USA subscribed despite the continuing practice of capital punishment and the racist laws discriminating, at the time, Afro-Americans and American Indians. Some citizens feel, completely unfounded, that the Declaration is in fact the submission of the world to their own constitution.

In Western society racists propagate that human happiness would benefit from discriminating individuals,285 and inherently contest that people with unequal capacities can be equal in dignity and in rights.

It is a blunt assumption that human rights present no problem whatsoever to Atlantic society, certainly when Western powers claim that the notion of human rights is one of those Western niceties that retarded peoples all over the world must learn from ‘the free world’, if necessary with the help of ‘justified’ violence.

Human rights in the twenty first century

After the criminal attacks on the World Trade Centre of New York, the Atlantic civilization felt for the first time to be caught in a life threatening situation comparable with what most humans experience most days, and it became clear in the following weeks and months that the moral standards of the West are not much different from anywhere else.

The shock wave that swamped Atlantic civilization can not be explained by the number of victims, who was less than the number of hunger refugees hounded into death each year by Atlantic society. The number of victims was also less than the number of USA citizens that dies each year because of cigarette smoking, or because of automobile traffic, or because of medical errors. Usually, a few thousand people sacrificed for economical gain or political power is hardly news, but in the heart of New York the sudden loss of lives took the shape of a cosmic ordeal. Abstraction made of cheap symbolism, this shock can only be explained as a civilization quake: just like the Romans when their capital was raided for the first time by the Goths, the American citizens were shocked, more than by anything else, by the displacement of otherwise usual terror right into the trusted streets of their metropolis.

Two months after the attacks, the President of the USA signed an order allowing a military tribunal to secretly execute foreigners, and installed a concentration camp on its military base of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where prisoners were detained for an unlimited time without charges, and without access to legal representation or to the outside world whatsoever. Rumours about torture keep reappearing while the government does not demonstrate their falsehood, and plans have been aired to install a death chamber for executions. As always, clerks were called in to back the soldiers:

A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law [..] The memo, prepared for defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture [..] Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo [..] as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.286

Harvard professor Ignatieff referred to torture when he bluntly stated that ‘a principle does not become totally void if occasionally concessions are made’ and suggested that it might be acceptable for the USA to put some human rights aside to fight ‘apocalyptic and nihilist Evil’.287 He explained:

While conscientious people may disagree as to whether torture might be admissible in cases of necessity, all will agree that torture can never be justified as a general practice. The problem lies in identifying the justifying exceptions and defining what forms of duress stop short of absolute degradation of an interrogation subject.288

Ignatieff is a follower of Isaiah Berlin who, more than twenty years earlier, called it a difficult dilemma whether children should be tortured to obtain intelligence.289 Now a special UN Commission on human rights has the task to carefully study and evaluate, from an international point of view, precarious situations in which the temporary abolition of certain human rights might be necessary, but the ban on torture is one of those rights that are declared simply non-derogable. If people living in the luxury and safety of the USA find an excuse to use torture, then how could ever other people suffering injustice and poverty every day of their lives be convinced to keep from torture if they consider it a way to a better their destiny?

Berlin and Ignatieff turn the application of torture from an appalling barbarism into an interesting issue for academical debate. They resemble the Dominican monks painted by Pedro Berruguete, having philosophical discourses about the vaporous nature of the soul while strolling around the burning stake.290

Berlin has coined his philosophy pluralism. Pluralism is a theory that can be summarized in three propositions: one, that the world will always remain undecided; two, that the strive for a perfect society always leads to human disaster; and three, that we should be satisfied if we just manage to ease a little bit of the worst suffering occasionally. At first sight this theory seems reasonable, humane and even common place. In reality, it is a dangerous nihilism and a license to barbarism. Transposed it says: some ideas are so dangerous that any means - including torture and killings - are allowed to counter them.

The first proposition of pluralism is not new, but is used here to ridicule every convention against international aggression. Treaties are unreliable because of the undecided nature of life. It makes it ‘philosophically’ acceptable to infringe on international treaties and resolutions – including those patronized by the United Nations. It will not be difficult for anyone to hear a ring of Israeli foreign politics in the background.

The second proposition is plain wrong: there is no causal relation between imageries of a better world and terror. Utopianism was never a cause of violence by itself, and has certainly caused less violence than the common ideologies of civilizations. The mass violence witnessed in the last centuries were not magically caused by some sardonic fantasy disguised in the sheepskin of utopianism; the root cause of wars is the ever more forbidding struggle for shrinking resources. It is unforgivable to incriminate the longing for a better existence, because without this longing every hope is wasted.

To depict the Reign of Terror as a sudden outburst of violence in an otherwise peaceful France, only inspired by the utopian writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is to reject that the working population of France was exhausted by warfare and unlimited war taxes, and died by uncounted thousands from hunger and misery under the Ancien Régime. Even more, to denounce Rousseau’s defence of popular sovereignty, is the same as to condemn modern democracy.291

Neither was there a relation between Stalin and utopianism. Already under Lenin the heirs of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and other utopianists had been eliminated.

The third proposition became popular as the ‘doctrine of the lesser evil’, but is really the law of the jungle put another way: cruelty, now a way of peacekeeping, is acceptable if it only claims to avoid more cruelty. It gives you the right to kill ten people, if you are convinced that one of them will kill eleven. Or extrapolated, it could mean that each of us better kills as many as possible, just to make sure. This proposition is the most dangerous, because it can be used by anyone sufficiently armed, to defend every brutality at any moment, as long as efficient propaganda accuses the counter party of worse – which propaganda always does.

The intellectual exploit of Berlin’s Pluralism arrives, through many twists and turns, at a very predictable conclusion, unfortunately drawn before by regimes with feebler academic backing: human rights only count when they are in your own interest. With its denial of international cooperation, its incriminating of all longing for an enjoyable life and its licence for cruelty, it comes down to the free market of bloodshed. It will, if ever generally accepted, submerge humanity in a darker age than ever witnessed before. If ‘apocalyptic and nihilist Evil’ ever existed, it must resemble Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism.

Another scholar appreciated by Ignatieff is his fellow teacher at Harvard, professor Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz simply defends that torture should be legalized in the USA. A judge should issue a ‘torture warrant’ to the police when needed, for example in a ‘ticking bomb scenario’, or in other words, when a captive is supposed to know details of an imminent attack. When asked what to do if it is not certain what the prisoner knows, Dershowitz answers:

Well, we don’t know, and that’s why [we need] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about non-lethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords.292

Now Alan Dershowitz is also an extreme defender of Zionism, and has been accused by professor Norman Finkelstein and journalist Alexander Cockburn of plagiarizing whole chapters from Joan Peters’ hoax From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, to augment his own work called The Case for Israel (2003).

Dershowitz himself revealed recently that he was a member of the Israeli ‘assassination committee’, an organization which examines in secret which foreigners are to be targeted and murdered by Israeli forces, sneaky or otherwise. Here an interesting problem arises. If Dershowitz is intellectually honest, he must admit that his viewpoint on torture also applies to Gaza, where almost all the killings ordered by the assassination committee take place. Now imagine that Dershowitz would be captured by a Palestinian commando after a session of his assassination committee. This would be a genuine ticking bomb scenario, since Dershowithz would know where another rocket will hit a crowded street to terrorize and kill innocent villagers together with the ‘convicted’. Following professor Dershowitz a Palestinian magistrate should then produce a torture license, and make the professor himself endure the effects of his own academic work. in the course of this treatment he might suddenly become a fierce defender of individual rights and international treaties.