(this article was written for an essay-writing class, which may explain the overall style)

Violence as a means of solving problems has been considered and used throughout history, and is even used today in form of aggressive warfare, terrorism or criminal violence. Those measures are always being justified by some noble aims one claims to intend to achieve, propagated aims raging from daily necessities to fighting injustice to pacifying.

But justifications are somehow problematic: How to make something just which by definition isn’t? This isn’t possible, except truth is being changed and re-defined, bent to support a case which wouldn’t find support without these masks of deception. Violence always needs propaganda, violence needs lies and manipulation; violence both in physical as well as in a metaphorical way.

Contrasts between aims and means to achieve them will manifest through the act of violence itself; the voice of truth will make itself get heard. But at what costs? Violence isn’t a game, violence is contradiction to nature. The use of violence is a declaration of incompetence, a sign of one’s incapability to cope with a problem in a civilized way.

Most popularly applied for the justification of violence are ideas related to social Darwinism - ideas which easily justify genocide, open aggression and murder; but no animal in nature is as cruel as human beings. What else is society for than to contradict those principles? Society is the preserver of those who need help; and who says that the physically weak aren't strong mentally or vice versa? Social Darwinism has the ultimate flaw of relativity - the definition of strength is not that easy.

The injustices originally fought against change over time, the only thing that will stay are the new injustices, the new terror created by violence. No euphemistic propaganda can undo the crimes of so-called revolutions or liberation movements; violence is betrayal and waste of lives.

November 26th, 1998