Category Archives: defining “violence”

Donovan Schaeffer: The shared fantasy of redemptive violence between ISIS and ther Islamophobic right. read

Michael Lerner on violence: “Othering.” “Yet violence continues to produce more violence. So the violence we delivered in the Middle East engendered ISIS/ISIL, and so it goes throughout history, and today in our own country. But for us in the religious world, the ongoing violence normally ignored by the media and genuinely not known or understood by most Americans is a spiritual, religious, and ethical emergency that deserves the attention of all people in every country of the world.” read

Lawrence Wittner, The Appalling Violence of the World’s Three Superpowers. US, Russia, China “Not surprisingly, these are also violent societies at home.” New study: “when it came to peacefulness, the United States ranked #103, China #120, and Russia #151.

Is this really the best that these large, economically productive, educationally advanced, and technologically sophisticated nations can do? If so, the world is in big trouble.” read

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo: US history of terrorists and massacres. read

Carlos Wilton on the myth of redemptive violence. read

Bill Black int. by Paul Jay on how white-collar crimes kills and maims more than crimes of the poor. read

Steven Pinker (2011) on a history of violence (1 hr 26). watch

David Cole:After Dallas. “It is the “war” on crime itself that is most to blame. More than any other nation in the world, we turn to the state-sanctioned compulsion of the criminal justice system to “solve” social problems, including mental illness, drug addiction, poverty, homelessness, and lack of opportunity.. …This state violence breeds private violence. …Americans own about 300 million guns, or 88 for every 100 people, more guns per capita than any other nation…..And as Jill Leovy powerfully demonstrated in Ghettoside, once the law loses legitimacy in a region, gangs also step in. …There are important differences, to be sure, between military invasions, drone strikes, police shootings, gang executions, violent popular uprisings, terrorist acts, and sniper attacks. But what all of these incidents share is the precipitous, unjustified, and ultimately corrosive resort to violence.” read

John Ackerman: Nobody is noticing how Mexico is massacring its citizens. read

John Whitehead: Violence begets violemce. Blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities, is a reality….Then start by telling the government to stop creating blowback at home by stirring up wars abroad, stop killing innocent civilians as part of its drone wars, and stop policing the world through foreign occupations….Investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson argues convincingly that “the FBI is much better at creating terrorists than it is at catching terrorists.”…As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we’re witnessing is the case being made for the government to shift even more aggressively into the business of pre-crime: monitoring all Americans, identifying which individuals could become potentially “anti-government,” and eliminating the danger before it can pose a threat to the powers-that-be.” read

PRRI polls show a double standard in judging Christian and Muslim violence. read

Chris Floyd: “The atrocities in Brussels — and they are horrific, criminal atrocities — are not occurring in a vacuum. They are not springing from some unfathomable abyss of motiveless malevolence. They are a response, in kind, to the atrocious violence being committed by Western powers on a regular basis in many countries around the world.” read

Anjuli Pandavar on the Quran and killing nonbelievers, and not calling it “suicide.” read