Re: War, nonviolence, the police

On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Christopher Mcmahon wrote:

> I think Tom has a point in attempting to distinguish between epistemic
> violence and war. but I have always felt that he wanted to make the
> distinction qualitative, and I have misgivings, because war is sometimes
> just (as a police action can sometimes be just).

Well in using the police example, I'm obviously suggesting that it can be
"just". At the same time, I'm making a definite point about how
"nonviolence" tends to become, continually, a hidden meaning of "just" and
"ethics" (please, don't hurt any small animals. Children were playing with
the baby rabbits next door, who let out a terrific wail ((the rabbits)) 
and I found this very upsetting. That is more than enough for me!) But the
possibility of the "just war" is, can be, or should be countered by a more
serious and radical nonviolence that is at odds, one way or another, with
war itself, and presents and offers alternatives to war, even the most
"just" war, saying that the damages and violence of even just war is not,
or might not be, trutly so justified. But, of course, if things are just
"how they are and that's how it is", of course everything plays out like
clockwork.


> Here Derrida's passage, cited by jon, seems especially poignant. What i
> see is this: a line of cops in northern ireland keeping the orangemen
> from violating a catholic ghetto, as they have been doing, previously
> with police support, saying: its our tradition that we rub your noses in
> your defeat, anually. And I see the cops protecting that creep, Pauline
> Hanson, from the left-wing socialist protesters. 

But in any event, can't we look more radically at such conditions? A more
radical look at the situation in northern Ireland may give us to start
endorsing a *radical* anti-polemos and nonviolence that questions the
ongoing violence at more fundamental levels, and not restrict our vision
to this or that immediate, stellar, local event. When we take that view,
then we see the ongoing "just war" as, many ways, the cause of the
tragedies, and the cause of so many others. There are many requirements
for such a radical position, of course. 
> 
> It's like the 60s have been turned upside down - the cops defending the
> nonviolent march of the neonazis from the hysteria of those whose hearts
> are in the right places.
> 
> Cormac McCarthy has his avatar of violence say this:
> 
> "Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the
> powerful in favor of the weak. historical law subverts it at every turn. A
> moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man
> falling dead in a duel is not proven in error as to his views. His very
> involvement in such a trail gives evidence of a new and broader view. The
> willingness of the principals to forgo futher argument as the triviality
> which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the
> historical absolute clearly indicates how little moment are the opinions
> and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is
> indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. ...."
> 
> In other words, war is what happens when talking stops. 

No. It's more than that. War can happen in talking too. The crucial
element, forgotten over and over again, is violence. Perhaps where is what
happens when violence "talks". I don't know. Partly, it is true, violence
happens when talking stops, that violence can be war, or in a certain way
always is war/polemos. But polemos inhereis in polemics. The "antipolemic"
is something else. Didn't Deleuze say that Nietzsche wrote an
"antipolemos"? Look at Foucault on polemics (in an interveiw in the
_Ethics_ volume of that new set). Here I am far, actually, from seeing a
qualitative difference between "violence" and "war" as such, btw.


> But Hobbes saw it
> the other way around. And Locke had yet another inversion. 

Could Gandhi every be listed within a group such as this? Seriously. Could
he be considered a philosopher?

> The relation
> between epistemic violence (differance) and war puzzles me. 

Me too. 1. What are you talking about? and 2. Why is "differance"
equivalent to "epistemic violence"?

On one hand,
> they seem to be quanta or simply deployments of different bodies against
> each other (i.e fight with words not arms) and words can be worse than
> arms...... On the other hand, Tom seems right, and I would rather talk
> than kill (more slave morality?).

I think it is naive what you are saying here. Talking can lead to killing
or can play an ongoing role in killing. I read in the paper that the
"troubles" in Ireland have killed 3,600 people. Is that true? That number
seems small, but quite possible. In any event, it made me almost laugh: We
have like 20,000 or more handgun deaths (it might actualkly be much more
than that) a year here in the US, and it has *everhthing* to do with
talking. I'm certainly not talking about "how conversations end up in
gunfights", but on the other hand, that is precisely what I am saying;
i.e., how conversations on gun control (notoriously polemical, btw) and on
laws, crime, criminals, etc., lead to these, precisely. There is an "event
containment" operating here, which I am definitely exceeding, in saying
that "talking associates with these 20,000 a year" or the 1.9 poeple in
prison in the US. This is difficult.


> 
> I think I am what is called an "ethical minimalist". I don't think there
> is a way of justifying ethics. Ethics is the black glass wall of thought.
> It's the limit. The good has no standard, other than itself, and that is
> no standard at all!
> 
> If there was a system that was not flawed - and don't we
> all feel the falws here, in these systems we propose, for the ethics of
> life, or the ethics of violence - would we not have thought of it by now?
> (better minds than mine have pondered this) 
> 

System, no, not quite possible. But remember, antisystematicity was
something that Nietzsche was about. But, *so was Gandhi*, in words that
almost paralleled Nietzsches. Yet no one will recognize Gandhi along side
Nietzsche. Why?


> but i do not mean we should
> give up. Again, Derrida seems to mark it out.

I'm not sure.


 Its an endless and tiresome
> engagement/negotiation/struggle - and endless battle in a fog where
> one's enemies like one's comrades, and even the color of one's flag, can
> only be glimpsed from time to time. 

An endless *antibattle*; one has to grasp this clearly.


> 
> And sometimes we do not like what we
> see.

Yuppers.


TMB