|
Viewpoint Transfer support to those trying to eliminate violence, hot or cold
By COLMAN McCARTHY
In the field of conflict resolution, two types of violence have
been identified: hot and cold. Hot violence is the death and chaos of Sept. 11
in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Hot violence is the Columbine High
School massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing. The unspeakable horror is up close
and visible, witnesses emotions are felt, outrage is immediate, the media
are quick to the scene.
Cold violence has little of those elements. It is beyond view, so
routine as to stir few emotions, and so ordinary as to attract the media only
rarely. Cold violence is the daily death toll of an estimated 40,000 people who
died yesterday, who are dying today, and will die tomorrow, from preventable
hunger-related diseases. For years, Oxfam International has documented this
reality. But it is a distant and unseen reality, not an American reality, not
the destroyed World Trade Center reality. Cold violence is the dying of Iraqis
caused by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions. UNICEF has reported that as many as
250 Iraqis have succumbed every day.
We learn to compartmentalize. Two days after the Colorado school
killings in April 1999, President Bill Clinton displayed the art form. He went
to a public high school in Alexandria, Va., to speak to a student peer
mediation club: We must do more than reach out to our children and teach
them to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words, not
weapons.
After the talk, heartfelt and eloquent, he returned to the White
House to order up the most intense bombing of Belgrade, in the former
Yugoslavia, since U.S. and NATO pilots were turned loose a month before. In
speeches, Clinton would keep calling for alternatives to school violence --
the hot kind -- while continuing to justify the cold kind: military
violence on Yugoslav civilians in their homes, offices and neighborhoods. His
weapons that killed thousands were good; the weapons of schoolhouse gunmen were
evil.
The presidents thinking was revealed in All Too Human
by George Stephanapoulos. When told in October 1993 that American soldiers had
been killed by street fighters in Somalia, Clinton said: Were not
inflicting pain on these f------. When people kill us, they should
be killed in greater numbers. I believe in killing people who try to hurt you,
and I cant believe were being pushed around by these two-bit
p-----.
All of this fits the pattern of double-standard ethics. Hot
violence tends to be illegal and unofficial. Cold violence is legal and
official. In Violence: Perspectives of Murder and Aggression,
sociologists Diane Archer and Rosemary Gartner write: Wars and other
forms of official violence are unique in that they wear the mantle of
governmental legitimacy. When aircraft bomb a village, when the CIA hires
assassins to kill foreign leaders, when a policeman shoots a looter, when a
prison firing squad executes a convicted murderer, the killings that occur are
the direct result of governmental orders. These orders originate in a
hierarchical organization. They are issued by appointed or elected officials
and carried out collectively by uniformed deputies who perform the actual
killing. Officials killing, therefore, differ from illegal violence in that
they result from governmental orders, are usually performed by several agencies
acting collectively and are justified as instruments of some higher
purpose.
Similar trenchancy is found in The Respectable Murderers,
the classic text on nonviolence by Msgr. Paul Hanely Furfey, the Catholic
University sociologist: The sporadic crimes that soil the front pages,
the daily robberies, assaults, rapes, murders are the work of individuals and
small gangs. But the great evils, the persecutions, the unjust wars of
conquest, the mass slaughters of the innocent, the exploitation of whole social
classes -- these crimes are committed by the organized community under the
leadership of respectable citizens.
The solution? Withdraw support -- political, financial and
emotional -- from all double-standard practitioners of violence, hot or
cold, illegal or legal, and transfer the support to those working to eliminate
violence no matter where it is found or who is madly justifying it.
Colman McCarthy, former Washington Post columnist,
directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington.
National Catholic Reporter, October 5,
2001
|
|