Tag Archives: violence

On words

Posted on by
Reply

A few days ago, my hairdresser posted a comment about Huckleberry Finn and that it has been banned at numerous points in time and in different places. The ensuing commentary flared up with the usual snarky comments about using the N-word, or hearing it on an audio book.

The last comment, after a stream of thoughtfully inane comments was:

I think it’s ridiculous how much power we give that word. Yes the history and hatred behind the word is disgusting but the word is just a word. We decide how much power it has.

I thought long and hard before not posting:

So says the middle-class blonde-haired white woman.

I didn’t think it appropriate to start an argument on my hairdresser’s page about race and class. But i was riled.

I think i spend too much time thinking about the importance and worth of words. School yard retorts, like “sticks and stones…” really do nothing but excuse poor behaviour, ignore the problem. But greater than that, i’ve found that often when i explain to people what i’m interested in and why i do it, that i hear “Well, people are just inherently selfish/greedy.”

I refuse to believe that. Maybe i watched The Diary of Anne Frank too many times as a child, but i refuse to believe that people, at their root, are singularly greedy and selfish. But i do believe that as long as we keep telling each other that, then it, like the school yard retort, simply excuses and ignores bad behaviour.

What prompted this post today was re-reading the introduction to Derek Gregory‘s, The Colonial Present. In it he states:

Words have an extraordinary power to wound and even to kill.

The importance of words has been slamming into me these past few days. I re-read Trinh Minh-Ha‘s “Gradma’s Stories” this morning as part of my postcolonial section. Both of them (Gregory and Trinh) are confronting the same thing, to a certain extent: the construction of the narrative of H(h)istory. Who tells it, how is it told, what purpose does it serve, whom does it serve? They are confronting the imaginative geographies of the colonial encounter – thrusting open the given discourses of what it means to be — .

So it is today that i put the question out there: what if we changed our language? What if we changed the language of dissent and dispute? What if we changed our language of reflection? What if we recognized that all of our depictions of other people and places and things are really simply reflections of our own making? They are not real? What if, today, we all chose to believe that people, at their root, are kind and compassionate – that we all are desperately interested in what is best for all of us? What if we fostered a discourse of kindness?

This week has been especially difficult in coming to terms with the power of words. The shooting of 14 people in Arizona has raised a number of questions about the power of vitriolic verbiage in the American public.That Palin had used cross-hairs to point to one of the victims, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) raises questions about responsibility in public discourse.

So, with that, i’ll leave off with a quote from Tariq Ramadan in response to the now-infamous cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting Mohammed:

“Nobody is saying that we don’t have the right to offend. The question is: is it wise, and is it the way forward for us in our societies? It is wise when we are in a pluralistic society to say ‘I have the right to do it, but I have the civic sense of responsibility not to do it.’ It’s not censorship that we want. You know, the difference between censorship and respect is that censorship is the removal of a right, while respect is asking you to use that right in a reasonable way.”

On Violence

Posted on by
2

The use of “violence” has come up a number of times in the past few years, but again, particularly in the past few weeks. By “violence”, i mean, by extension, the use of violent terms to describe actions. But more on this in a moment.

I come to this today after reading Stuart Elden’s blog post, Thoughts on the Fees Issue. At the end of his post, he asks:

Am I the only one to find politicians’ use of the term ‘violence’ to condemn protests inappropriate given the systematic violence being done to higher education and social mobility? Or the violence of the wars initiated or supported by those doing the condemning?

No, you are not alone. Unfortunately, the ones trying to point out the very irony of it all are precisely the ones being crushed. That violence may only be meted out by the government – as intervention, suppression, humanitarian aid – is one side of that coin – a kind of ownership over violence and death that Max Weber so elegantly called Gewaltmonopol des Staates (it just doesn’t sound as sexy in English: state monopoly on violence). And while this is as much about the legitimization of violence within the purview of the state, as in the right to defend one’s own property, it somehow fails to extend to our rights to protect our…well…for lack of a better word: rights.


But that’s getting ahead of myself. I really wanted to start with violence, precisely- not what has brought Britain to this point of disruption. 


The same thing happened at the WTO protests in 1999. I watched my friends get dragged off rather brutally by police, another was shot at point blank range with a rubber bullet – all as we sat peacefully in the road attempting to enact our right to protest against the other kinds of economic and political violences against all of us that were being decided behind closed doors that week-end. We stand in the middle because it is terms of violence that are used against those who would stand up not just for our own rights but for the rights of others – of our future, of our fellow human beings, terms like: riots, clashes, attacks.

This isn’t just happening in Britain (well, the underlying cause of protest is fairly enclosed). I wrote about this earlier in the week in regard to Haiti – protesters referred to as violent, rioters. We saw the same thing here in Seattle – peaceful protesters being goaded, ringed in, shot at, driven into, beaten. That the protests continue is testament to the strength of people’s convictions, i think. 


What this brings to mind, then (and i’m no political theorist, so please forgive my crude take on all of this) is Habermas’ assertion that the state must ensure both legitimate law making and enforcement. Legitimate law making. At what point do we view the violence of the state against its own people, exercising their rights within the frame of the law as deligitimization of the state? That the state works so furiously to delegitimize any protest through the use of terms of violence speaks, i think, to their fears of being delegitimized themselves. Is that what it’s come down to, then?

I want to leave off today with the words of Thich Nhat Hanh which i keep over my desk – a reminder of all that resistance is:

Resistance at root must mean more than resistance against war. And there are so many things like that in modern life that make you lose yourself. So perhaps resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted and destroyed, by the system. The purpose of resistance, here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly…. I think that communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.