The world is falling leaves, and God is in the raking.
Terror breeds terror. Political violence acquires a cycle of its own, to which we are abandoned to carry out until we are all dizzy in this merry house. That it is a cycle is an established historical certainty, and there isn't any way of getting around it. We must cut through the cycle, but I'm not completely sure how this happens, however, some kind of omission or apology has to be involved. The after shocks of violence is a new found silence; the world and the self experience a sudden chasm, wherein new meaning is given to reality.
Violence is the most primitive form of shock therapy, it awakes the dead to terror, but it should not be thought of as an extraordinary event. Our Western civilization is based on violence, and has been ever since the first colonizers landed in North America, and this more or less true of all the advanced human civilizations since we first gathered in groups. But violence is accepted because violence is not always committed for violence sake; violence can serve as a basis, it can be used to create a society of unbelievable wealth. In other words, the business cycle runs on the violence cycle, but they cross out each other because business creates stationary wealth, and people are willing to accept the temporary surplus of violence, if it is matched by a temporary surplus of wealth. Many Europeans simply rationalized the mass-slaughter of the population on the North American continent, believing that it was the law of evolution and that their particular civilization was the only one ordained by God in human history.
I am not criticizing business, though, because it has ushered many positive changes. Not all business inventures are predicated on violence, new found wealth can also be developed by technological breakthroughs and that seems to be the way of our economic future. For peace to finally triumph, entrepreneurs must lead the way. All State militarism will have to be put to an end by the people of the world, and that means converting the military hardware so that it can be used for civilian ends. But so far, the growth of our civilization has been based on violence of all forms, environmental, political, and I would even argue spiritual because the long workdays kill the human spirit.
Not all violence is converted into societal wealth, in fact, most violence is produced by the powerful elite and for their own profit. I would call their violence an evolutionary violence because their actions force change in the lower levels of society. Violence speeds up the evolutionary process, and moves history toward the future. The other type of violence is revolutionary violence, which theorists and psychologists like Frantz Fanon and Rollo May have written extensively about. Decolonization was shaped by the violence it unleashed. I have not read too much of the history of violence but I am beginning to and from what I see, when history reaches a breaking point violence turns out to be cause most of the time. That is a basic statement, but all beginners must begin at the basics.
Change can occur without violence. However, it is not lasting change, unless the heightened consciousness that was required to make a peaceful change is kept up by following generations after the change occurred. For example, after MLK was assassinated by the repressive forces in America, the elite regrouped and created a drug war to re-incriminate free slaves and built a prison infrastructure to house them. Some will argue the drug war had a life of its own, and was not carried out by design but I like to defer. Nothing happens without a reason. Are money and spoils part of it? Of course. But in the grand scheme of things, the elite construct social systems to put themselves in the best position imaginable, and the drug laws, the mandatory sentencing, and other draconian measures have been instituted for a definite political purpose; to keep society vastly unequal. Also, the Drug War serves a foreign purpose, on top of domestic ones. At the same time that the Drug War came into existence, the US Dollar ditched the Gold standard, forcing the nation's financiers to find some other real commodity that could give weight to the Dollar, hence all the activity in Colombia and Afghanistan after 1971.
I mentioned that the second type of violence is revolutionary, but I should clarify that not all violence is an act of defiance, some are bursts of rage, while other occur because of an informed thirst for change. First it's strange, but then violence is normalized, to the point where nobody can see it divorced from life.
Some people mistake self-defense and natural processes for aggressive violence, and they are born horrified, but they are mistaken. Not all violence is used to shock, some is done to demobilize, some to organize, and some because people don't have the words to vocalize their deep concerns or fears. Most political violence is done by those who have told a lie. Violence stimulates the bored, and the 'sober' wise - like the pseudo-intellectuals who are mystified over why, - and give the kind of analysis that the numb and blind can get behind.
All Violence is done in the name of justice, or at least, those who commit violence also always try to justify it. If there is a Sun of Justice in this universe, it has yet to appear in our time, or at any time in history, except for a brief moment here and there. The Empire of any age feels itself to be Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, because it perceives that it is closest to the Sun of Justice. Mercury is the Roman god of merchandise, merchants, and commerce. The word mercenary also derives from it, and what's interesting is that the Greek's word for Mercury is Hermes, who is at the helm of the mystics, and is the god which leads souls to the after world.
The Empire's terrorists deeds are justifiable in this worldview, while small political organizations who also act out terror deeds are condoned and punished. In this galaxy, they are viewed as Pluto, an object far away from the Sun of Justice and so has no business of delivering it or talking about it. While Mercury is indeed closest to the sun, and the Empire is the largest force in the political galaxy, one hidden fact leaves everything out in the open, and that is this; how do we know that the Sun of Justice doesn't move around from planet to planet? Can we assume that it is like a physical sun which rises and demises every day and night and all the planets go around it in the same fashion year after year? And why does it matter who is closest to Sun of Justice, since we are all pulled by it?
Humans, and all living creatures are gravitated to all light. Without the physical sun, the crops don't grow, plants don't show, and we don't eat. Likewise, without the hidden Sun of Justice we feel down, our spirits are not as lively. The cycle of violence can speed up until our extinction, unless we evolve at break-neck pace. To be sure, our spirits do grow in strength when they are kept in the dark because it feels fear -and fear drives us into ourselves and strengthen us to face the world. I like fear. But there is such a thing as being kept in the dark for too long, and once that happens, fear begins to be used destructively and without much thought. An outpouring of fear and dissolution intensifies the nerves and cuts out all rational avenues. Blood takes over. And at that point, you become a servant of destiny instead a master of it. Such is the fate of prisoners.
These are my preliminary views on violence, I haven't given them much critical thought. I am writing in a burst of passion, making do with what little I can come up with. I'm reading Fanon, May, and others, who I will try to quote at length in the following weeks. These are stuttering and inexact thoughts, I know, but they are simply my reservations and nothing else. Maybe in the future they will begin to hold weight, but for now, they fly onto the page as madman flies into a rage and can't get a hold of himself. One of these days, however, I will get a hold of my thoughts rather than keeping them back, or throwing them forward without preparing them for critical analysis and every other force in the World of Thought.
