Philosophical Justifications for Violence

[Rick Ross 187]

Particularly concerning in revolutionary situations. Here are some good quotes i found:

Frantz Fanon on violence from the colonised to the coloniser:

Quote:Even if it is argued that it is wrong for certain violations to occur… such an argument is irrelevant, ultimately, if there is no will to change the fact that they continue to occur. The colonized people’s struggle for liberation should not, then, be treated as the same as the colonizers’ violence (which is a maintenance of colonialism). For in the accomplishment of the former’s struggle is the possibility, fragile though it may be, of a world that is not by dint of its very structure, violent. (Fanon: A Critical Reader, p. 306)

Robespeirre, leader of the French Revolution, justifying the use of violence against by the revolutionary state against the so called enemies of the revolution and those who were the rulers before the revolution (in particular conern for the French revolution, but quote should be universally applicable):

Quote:If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most pressing needs.

Quote:To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to pardon them is barbarity. The rigor of tyrants has only rigor for a principle; the rigor of the republican government comes from charity.

Quote:Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution? What is this spirit of persecution that has come to revise, so to speak, the one that broke our chains?.

Quote:"A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains."

(my personal favourite, particularly the bolded part)

Video of Zizek dissucssing Robersppieres Terror in the Revolution and violence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orv1kmkiEpk

Mark Twain on the justice of the violence in the French Revolution:

Quote:"There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the “horrors of the… momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves." Mark Twain, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"

So yeah, post quotes of or your own justifications for revolutionary violence, or critique what has been said in its justification

[Themusicintheair]

"Communism does not invent violent, but finds it already institutionalized" - Merleau-Ponty.

"Sitting at your ease on the corpse of Ireland...be good enough to tell us: did your revolution of interest not cause more blood than our revolution of ideas?" - Michelet.

I agree with the first one, it is not necessary us who chooses the bullet, but those oppressing others with it, they choose for us to react that way.

[El Mono]

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children. "