Human violence: policy, law and State (2)

Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism

2 – Human violence: policy, law and State

Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo

For the humans, like for the other animals, violence is the natural, immediate and preferential way of constitution and resolution of social conflicts. But, in contradistinction to other animals, the human species has never found, invented or preserved inhibitory resources on the forces of intra-specific destruction that it has developed, and that threaten its very existence thanks to its exorbitant aggressiveness and armament.

The biologically institutionalized safeguards; the balances in aggressiveness; the stabilization in attack and defence, in domination and submission to the strongest; the specialized reaction of repulsion and reproduction; the basic instincts of aggression and flight; the affinities and eventual induced solidarity by extra-specific danger, geological or astronomical; the recognition of personal otherness and identity and the affective ties between Nations; the critical or geographical distances, and the material and psychological limitations of the armament (to the point of reaching a complete depersonalization due to its present technological transformation): none of this works now among humans.

“The difficulty of peace lies more in the humanity than in the animality of the human.” (R. Aron; ‘Paix et guerre entre les nations’, 1962.) The tendentially unlimited expansion and concentration of human species are far superior to its capacity of evolution, adaptation and organization. By reason of its cultural and technical progress, his inherent tensions and disputes increase instead of decreasing. Its ability to destroy is far superior to its ability to build and rebuild. Humanity is facing problems unparalleled in the animal kingdom. There is no for it a phylogenetic or ontogenetic solution, neither cultural nor political; it can, at the most, go on with what there is, resigning itself to the final catastrophe, for which it accumulates all the determinants. It holds within itself the key for its own destruction; in fact, its self-destruction is a much more reasonable perspective than its reconciliation. It does not run towards an inevitable happy development of history but towards the final catastrophe.

A non-violent human society is an ideological fabrication. An earthly world without violence does not exist and has never existed, it falls out of all experience. Located in the highest level of aggressiveness of the animal kingdom, the intra-specific violence of the human species increases quantitatively and qualitatively with the development of culture and civilization. It is highly unlikely that human animals become peaceful and non-violent, and may even destroy their own species.

Against what the good or bad intentioned ideologies want to make believe, the humans: individually or collectively considered to a sociological level, are not naturally good, righteous, noble, altruistic, sociable, peaceful and lovers of truth until – due to miserable historical contingencies and circumstances – the despotism, imperialism, mercantilism or capitalism did pervert them. Quite on the contrary, they are naturally bad, unfair, selfish, thieves, violent, aggressive, cruel, liars, ambitious, greedy, conceited, interested, envious, cheats, ungrateful and treacherous, among other qualities; most of which are the contribution of the human species to the animal development on Earth. The more or less idealistic, moralistic, optimistic, utopian, projectist or prospectivist ideologies nothing can do against it. Stoicism, Christianity, rationalism, scientism, humanism, scepticism, evolutionism, liberalism, anarchism, socialism or communism more or less “scientific” and consistent, contrary to their proclaimed and purportedly well-intentioned humanist pretensions, are or generally become cynical or hypocritical instruments of propaganda and psychological warfare at the service of the dominant and imperialistic Powers.

In policy, “it appears to me more proper to go to the real truth of the matter than to its imagination. For many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation. A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Hence, if a prince wants to maintain his rule, he must be prepared not to be virtuous, and to make use of this knowledge or not according to need.” (N. Machiavelli; ‘The Prince’.)

In the political relationships, being human nature as it is, “it is far safer to be feared than loved”. “Men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never wanes.” “Since men love according as they please, and fear according to the discretion of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself on that which he controls, and not on that which others control.” “For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, fickle, cowardly, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain.” The human “has as qualities the desire for power, pride, contempt for others, hypocrisy and moral autonomy”. “The human being is selfish and violent. And the collective beings which constitute the States are worse than the individual beings.”

Only the superior capacity of violence lends the political power, whatever it may be. “It is the only art which corresponds to the powers that be.” He that does not make “a job of it” becomes an “object of contempt”. “Because between the man who is armed and the one who is not, there is no comparison; and the reason does not want that an armed man should voluntarily obey to the one who is unarmed, nor that an unarmed man can be sure among his armed servants.”

The reality of the political power is founded on violence and fear of violence. “Sovereignty is the exclusive right to frighten the others.” The dosage of fear, strategically and tactically adapted, is an important part of the political art, of war and peace. In this ground, the errors and mistakes – of principle or appreciation, of information or temperament – are expensively paid.

The fear of the infernal powers, to the vengeance of God and that of men of God, to the fire of Hell and of the bonfires of Inquisition, to the calamities and apocalyptic plagues, and to the rifles and gallows, is the motivation that determines the human behaviour in divine and human, ecclesiastical or civil law. “It is the fear, felt toward two general objects: one, the power of invisible spirits; the other, the power of men.” “Of these two powers, although the first one is greater, the fear that inspires the second one is, commonly, bigger.” The fear has always been more reliable and convincing an “argument” than the love for God and neighbour. Hell, not Heaven, determines the behaviour of men. The pain of attrition offers safer and more general guarantees of reform than that of contrition. The same happens with the moral: the fear to the reprobation from God or from men prevails over the love that humans feel or “should” feel towards God and neighbour.

“The importance of fear is extreme as a sociological phenomenon. The entire life of man takes place under the sign of fear: fear of gods, of enemies, of friends, of neighbours, of masters, of subordinates, of laws and of the absence of laws, of disease, death and of the ancestors; fear of the known and the unknown. The social organization is founded mostly on fear. The education consists in channelling it.” “The armed forces are made to be feared; and tactics is the art of provoking fear in the enemy and discipline among its own”. “Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands. In this sense, the Red Terror is undistinguishable from the armed insurrection, of which it represents its direct continuation.”

Dictatorships and occupying military forces, imperialism and fascism cannot do without terrorism. “We must shoot all those responsible. We must create a climate of terror.” (General Mola.) The quota of executions ensures from the beginning the stability and future of the régime. The totalitarian power is secured on a mountain of corpses: permanent criminal Violence (actual and virtual); jail, torture, deportation, plundering and extortion do guarantee its continuity.

“Cruel, inhuman, degrading and unnatural treatment”: as they have been designated by International Organizations, are in fact an integral part of human nature, and of the state of nature in which the States are. Far from being unjustified or useless, the effectiveness of the terror that informs them is beyond doubt: “Cold, calculated cruelty, which constitutes a method” that “paralyzes the spirits in the feeling of a fatality”, terrorism, torture, and the most ferocious, refined or reprehensible forms of criminal Violence are not unjustified procedures, nor simply or only the effect of the sadism of the henchmen who serve them; in truth, they are determined by the intensity of social struggles. They are complementary to “cold perfidy and the most hypocritical propaganda, used simultaneously or alternately”; to “the art of decomposing under terror the very soul of the adversaries, or of numbing them through a [vain] hope”; and to “the skilful handling of the most gross lie”.

Such methods are not so much the effect of the barbarism as of the civilization and the uncontrollable development of the State. They are inherent in the war against the subjugated Peoples and the despotic government upon them, from a sufficient degree of contradiction between the contenders. Given an objective level of intensity of social contradictions, terrorism is the natural and normal form of Government and misgovernment. The relative conflicts can, sometimes, do without it; yet the absolute conflicts present the ideal conditions for its production. In war and in the highly conflictive régimes of fascist imperialism and totalitarianism, fear becomes terror or turns into panic, with all its variable and relatively unpredictable consequences. Under the impulse of fear and terror, the human defends himself and sometimes attacks desperately; but panic destroys Resistance, prevents flight, and turns the vanquished into a scapegoat. Fear and terror can only be countered by still greater fear and terror. They cannot be fought with sermons and good feelings.

*

The policy is the determination of the social behaviour by means of violence. Even though not all violence does necessarily have a political entity, all policy is and necessarily implies violence: whether it be actual or virtual, licit or criminal. The monopolies of indoctrination and ideological intoxication of masses, in their mission in the service of the ideology of the illusion disseminated by the imperialistic régime, do even claim that violence and policy are incompatible. Yet violence and policy are not incompatible, they are not even properly compatible; in reality, violence is constitutive of policy. Policy consists of actual and virtual violence, which determines the behaviour and ideas of those who are subject to it.

Policy and non-violence are incompatible: without violence, there is no policy. Non-violent policy is a contradiction in terms, a vacuous attempt against any formal or general logic, and a hypocritical denial of the most apparent reality, whose consequences are always suffered by the weak and the helpless. There cannot be place for opposing a violent policy and another non-violent one: a policy can or cannot be opposed to another one; but it cannot, without formal contradiction, be opposed to violence.

“The decisive means in policy is violence.” Policy is defined by the means that constitute it: violence. An auxiliary, illusionist, hypocritical and contradictory version of policy aims to make people believe that “one cannot use violence to achieve political ends”. But, quite on the contrary, violence is not a circumstantial and more or less advisable, acceptable or reprehensible means to obtain political ends; is not a form – whether valid or not – of political action; is not “compatible nor incompatible” with policy. Strictly speaking, violence is the constitutive means of policy: “Violence is the specific means of policy”, not a simple accessory. Ends and means are political insofar as they are constituted by violence; and they cease being so if they leave out the element that constitutes them as such. The hypocritical condemnation of all violence, as declared by the dominant propaganda, is in material contradiction with the political reality, established as such by violence.

It is impossible to differentiate a policy from another one by the presence or absence of violence, since much different their purposes though they may be, they all use the same means. The distinctions that might be established between the democracy policy and the despotic one, between the defensive and the aggressive actions, or between the “good” and the “bad” violence, are completely irrelevant in this respect: violence is violence, and therefore all behaviours involving violence are – ontologically – seamlessly indistinguishable as regards the nature of such a means of action.

Certainly, between the democratic and the despotic policy there is both a qualitative distinction, because of the legitimate and licit ends of the former as opposed to the illicit and criminal ends of despotism; as well as a quantitative one, due to the respective differential doses of violence – controlled in the first case, and uncontrolled in the second – that both policies apply. Yet democracy does not consist in non-violence but – like any political régime – consists in violence; although in its case it is the legitimate violence exercised in defence of fundamental human rights, as opposed to the aims of the illegitimate violence of the despotic régimes.

“A negro is a negro, only in certain conditions it becomes a slave.” A cannon is a cannon, only in certain conditions it is a white cannon or a red cannon; but it’s enough to turn it round to turn it into the contrary. An armed group is an armed group, but only as a part of an armed ensemble of strategic level becomes a command. A bomb is a bomb, and a pistol is a pistol; only in certain strategic conditions become factors of armed struggle, of political terrorism, and of war in one or another direction.

“It is perfectly ridiculous on the part of the revolutionaries to condemn in the name of the moral the ‘policy of force’ carried by the agents of the Ancien régime; being so that, in the end, they use exactly the same means.” Violence is violence; war is war; repression is repression; terrorism is terrorism: be that white or red, fascist or democratic, or whether they are in the service of “good” or serve to “evil”. As it will be more widely exposed in Chapter 8 – Ideological camouflage of criminal Violence and State Terrorism, there can be established different species of violence according to the technical, political, legal or moral criteria that one wants to choose; but none of this alters their identity as violence.

*

“The law is not a non-coercive order, as a utopian anarchism would desire.” Law is the determination of the condition and behaviour of the subjects by means of the monopoly of violence. Thus law: a species of policy, consists of a social order of violence. The law is a political order; which is not the same as the traditional normativist “juridical order”.

All law and all policy are constituted by violence. Opposing policy, law or human rights to violence is formally absurd. Without violence there are no policy, nor law, nor fundamental human rights. Violence is constitutive of all policy and of all law.

Actual/effective violence is the foundation of virtual/potential violence, which is in its turn a necessary and prior part and complement of all law. That is to say, actual and virtual violence, and the sanction and punishment, do not follow crime but do precede and constitute it. Let’s see: contrary to what the auxiliary, idealistic, illusionist, hypocritical, contradictory and official version disseminated by the dominant ideology on policy and law aims to make us believe, violence does not “intervene” belatedly so as “to support, defend or restore the threatened political order or violated law”; it is not an occasional, circumstantial and more or less recommended or acceptable means of obtaining political ends. Quite on the contrary, political order and disorder (whether they be licit or criminal), law and its norms (which determine the lawful and criminal behaviour), as well as the State, war and peace, are founded on a prior violence – actual/effective and virtual/potential – that does precede and constitute them. “Whether we like it or not, that’s just the way things are”, and not the way idealists, utopians, moralists, and hypocritical impostors and mentally retarded think or say that they should be.

“The form of expression according to which they are not humans who do govern but norms and laws” is a misleading way to solve the problems. “A norm is never set by itself (this is a fantastic way of talking) [...] as if it was fallen from the sky.” It is not the laws that do rule but those who make and impose them: the humans make the law. They are not the law and the positive law that do govern the policy: it is the humans-made policy that, by means of violence and war, establishes the legal norm and positive law. These: legal norm and positive law, are mere reflections of a certain political order, that is, of a social order of violence.

The so-called “sources of law” in the traditional normativist and formalist Theory on Law, are consequence, form, vehicle and dissimulation of its real creation. Contrary to the mystifications disseminated by the idealist and formalist ideology on law, the reality is that the positive political and juridical norms do all have as their true “source” the anticipation and the threat of violence, that is: of a virtual violence based on actual violence, which do constitute these norms. The fear of violence: primary, instinctive, emotional, affective and passionate sequence of the prudence, is a necessary and essential component of peace and war, of the juridical norm and of all method of Government.

All policy and all law: including fundamental human rights, are violence, discrimination and imposition  (first and foremost against those who intend or would like to violate them); but not all violence is law, not even policy, nor does it reach strategic entity and determination. Policy is not the individual or marginal “violence” and “terrorism” of the weak and the incapable but the exorbitant, unilateral and unlimited Violence and Terrorism of the great strategic concentrations of power. Only socially structured and permanent violence can be considered political.

There is no any policy, any law, or any juridical norms than those ones constituted by violence. The violence constitutes the international relations, law and political organizations, which do not exist without it. “The law is conservative”, although not static or unchanging; its capacity of reaction on the policy and the general rapport of forces is very small. The law: species and part of policy, is also an important and privileged ideological vector; it is the law of the policy and of the dominant interests that make it.

As already said, the juridical norm is based on virtual violence, necessary complement of the actual violence; whatever may be the fiduciary margin that its effectiveness deserves or tolerates. The virtual violence, founded on the actual violence, is constitutive of the juridical norm.

The juridical norm, like currency, is a fiduciary category. Now then, currency is not the object of the scientific theory on political economy, since this one has as its object the social relations of production and distribution. In the same way, the juridical norm is not the object of the scientific theory of law: this one has as its object the social order of violence in which the law consists; much though this fact may be aimed to be veiled by the idealistic ideology placed at the service of the constituted power, above all if this one is despotic, imperialistic and criminal. Indeed, legitimate power does not need such covers, dissimulations and falsifications of the legitimate violence which it is founded upon.

Once this mystification has been eliminated, “the rule of law” appears clearly as it is: the law of the rule. The same is true of what is distortedly called “the State of law”, since every State is a “State governed by the rule of law”: it is founded and legitimized by its own law, which can naturally be either democratic and licit, or despotic and criminal.

The imaginative and fiduciary consideration that the subjects make about the virtual violence: constituent of the political and juridical norm, is an efficient and sufficient cause for the determination of their behaviour, since the socio-psychological emotional factors transform the said consideration into the various reactions of fear, terror and panic. The fiduciary anticipation of the “necessary” relationship that exists between the conditioned behaviour and the subsequent conditioning violence (a “foresight” that determines either the behaviour that excludes the legally criminal act, or the “criminal behaviour” that includes it), constitutes the mechanism for the operation of the juridical norm. Therefore the juridical norm decants the subject either towards a fiduciary rejection of the act, or to its criminal and penal realization. In any case, the norm does not establish the violence; quite on the contrary, it is prior violence – whether it be licit or criminal – that establishes the norm. It is the constituted political power, by virtue of the monopoly of violence that it holds, that creates and lays down the juridical norm.

The mutual implication between actual violence and virtual violence induces the fact that the greater is the superiority of violence of the group that holds it, relatively the greater is the role of virtual violence, and relatively the lower is the corresponding one to actual violence. The capacity to use actual violence, the collective responsibility, the reprisals against the Resisters, their families and their social base, allow to achieve the intimidation that is the foundation of virtual violence, and – starting from there – the relative decrease in the need to use actual violence. Instead, the weaker a group is, the smaller or null is its credibility and – as a consequence – the relative function of its virtual violence, and the greater is the relative function of its actual violence.

An insurgent policy will have to use actual violence in a sufficient extent and frequency, before its virtual violence attains the credibility that makes it possible to relatively do without the former. But the purely “deterrent” virtual violence, in the absence of actual violence and of intention of using it, is a formally contradictory and ideologically limited ideological resource. There is no war without blood, nor peace without violence, nor virtual or actual offence without the penalty that – founded upon violence – does precede and constitute it.

“The punishment itself is a coercive act, i.e. a use of violence.” “As for coercive act, it is to be understood as an evil – such as the withdrawal of life, health or freedom; of economic goods and others – that must be inflicted to the recipient against his will, and if necessary using physical force.” “It must be carried out even against the will of the individual that must be reached; and, in case of resistance, by means of the use of physical force.” “The sanctions of law consist in inflicting an evil by means of force or – considered in negative terms – in removing a good by force.” The penalty “consists in the removal of certain goods: life, health, freedom, honour, economic values”.

A juridical norm cannot be founded in covenants or treaties but insofar as it acquires a political level. The aphorism “pacta sunt servanda” involves – in policy and law – a petitio principii. No despotic, imperialistic and totalitarian policy respects human rights, conventions, norms, covenants, agreements or the given word by themselves, unless these ones are political and juridical, that is: unless a capacity of real violence constitutes them as such and obliges to respect them. The ideologists of totalitarian States have made it clear: “While sovereign, the State has the undeniable right to declare war when it wants to, and, at the same time, to tear the treaties.” “No State has ever contracted a treaty for another reason different than self-interest. A statesman who has any other reason deserves to be hung.” No State does voluntarily comply with a law or a treaty that doesn’t suit to it, unless it has before it a force that compels it to fulfil it.

Given the existing imperialistic reality in the world, they are only such ones and are only met the laws and treaties that violence constitutes and obliges to comply with. What States say does only count to the extent that it serves what they do. Only violence turns interest and will into law; other factors – extra-political, ideological, demographic or economic – of the rapport of forces have sometimes the same effect. “In human affairs, the submission to the rules of law occurs when the mutual need obliges to it; yet for the mighty the power is the sole rule, as well as for the weak is the submission.” Governments and Peoples are accessible to humanitarian feelings as long as they serve their domination or their interests, or at least do not undermine it or harm them.

Whether a State is legitimate or criminal-imperialistic, the law is not the basis of the State but its complementary and belated component. Certainly, the State produces its own legal framework constituted by its juridical violence, and therefore all States are “States of law”; but a previous violence: whether licit or criminal, did precede and constitute the State itself, and therefore the nature of that violence does condition and determine the nature of that “rule of law”. Peace does only exist as peace of law; yet, law – like all policy – is violence, and thus the law of peace, as well as peace itself, are violence.

In an imperialistic and totalitarian State, such as they are France and Spain, the armed forces are not guardians of law; are not administrative accessories or organs of the political power: they are the political power, eventually equipped with more or less developed or hypertrophied organic differentiation-specialization. When they collapse, that State collapse with them. Those armed forces do not act pursuant to “the articles of the Constitution”, nor does that Army receive its power from the formal “Constitution”, as stated by the hallucinated and traitors “Basque moderates and radicals” of the liquidationist bureaucracy Pnv-Eta. It is, quite on the contrary, the power of the Spanish and French Army that thoroughly founds its formal and secondary Constitution. The power of this Army does, above all, found the real and primary constitution of France and Spain: a direct result of the wars that their Armies won and the others lost. Without the power of that Army, there is not any Constitution or political régime left to be reformed, developed, democratized or abolished.

The State, the law and the norms of positive law do not prohibit violence; they only strengthen and develop it. In peace the same as in war, all policy and all law are actual and virtual violence; apart from this, there is no policy. And in a criminal imperialistic régime, its Violence involves murder, kidnapping, deportation, imposition, taxation, extortion, discrimination, repression, threat and intimidation.

In policy, the use of violence is not a matter of moral or ethical principles, it’s a “simple” matter of strategy; everything else is heavenly music. The fundamental question to be clarified, in order to qualify the type of policy it is about, is who exercises violence and who suffers it; what is imposed, to whom and by whom; who discriminates against whom, in what and for what.

For moralists, utopists and prospectivists, or for the best-intentioned from among its sponsors, a new instinctive and cultural structure is the only hope for mankind. In fact it’s nothing else. It is not, in any case, a political issue.

“Ever since, the most diverse political groups have all had physical violence as the normal means of power.” “The political units, the constitutional régimes do all owe their origin to violence.” “Without war there would be no State.” “All the States we know have been born out of war.” “The State is a pure product of force.” “There is no State that has been created or is maintained without the use of force.” “All State power rests on the force of arms.” Without “those same cannons, which [according to Lassalle] constitute the most important integral part of the constitution”, the domination of the State is nothing. “Nowadays, the relationship between the State and violence is especialy intimate.” “The true sovereignty is defined by the effective right to resort to weapons.” “It is only authentically sovereign, it only is authentically State the powerful State”, qualified by “the number, the territory and the resources”.

The State “does not let being sociologically defined but by the specific means that – as to any other political group – are its own, namely: physical violence. ‘Every State is founded on force’, said once Trotsky in Brest-Litovsk. That’s so, in fact. If only there were but social structures where all violence was absent, the concept of State would have then disappeared, and would only remain what is called, in the proper sense of the term, ‘anarchy’”. “The State is original and necessary; it will continue to exist as long as there is history, and is as essential as language”. “The State is the People, legally united as an independent power.” All States are constituted by violence and war; and many of them by wars of aggression, armed reprisals, terrorism, and by collective or individual legitimate self-defence against it. All Peoples, with or without State, do act the same way and claim the same rights. “The national State is our monster released. Where will be found the harpoon that will keep in line that Leviathan?”

The State “is an organization designed to ensure the systematic exercise of domination of one social class by another; an organ of oppression of one part of the population by another one”. The States have as foundation the more or less dimensioned and monopolized armed gangs that establish and maintain them; which implies “the systematic destruction of all concurrent armed forces”. “No one will be able to oppose the decisions of the State, for the State shall always be in a position to oppose by force to its unarmed subjects.” “Rulers have always been, are and will always be the strongest.” The State “is the force of the strongest, dominating the weakness of the weakest”.

This force “is strengthened as class contradictions become more pronounced within State, and as the bordering States grow greater and more populous”. This force “exists in every State; it is made up not only of armed men but also of material annexes, prisons and penitentiary institutions of all kinds”. “The ‘power’ of the State can only but manifest itself in the specific means of power that are at the disposal of the Government: fortifications and prisons, cannons and gallows, men in uniforms of police or military.” These means of power are violent and deadly instruments, thus attacking “the life, physical integrity and freedom of persons as supposed untouchable, supreme or absolute values”. This, however, is being concealed, while while the alleged inviolability of these values and other hypocritical nonsense – which are the favourite falsehoods of the imperialistic and fascist propaganda – continue to be cynically asserted.

In the reality of imperialistic and totalitarian Law and State, where the pure and simple extermination of the subjugated People is not the immediate goal of its criminal Violence (and once the war has been won and the rules of the monopoly of this Violence and Terror have been established on the People), the Violence “does not need to intervene except when a resistance opposes the implementation of these rules, which normally does not occur. The organs of the modern State have at their disposal the necessary means of force to such an extent that all resistance is usually in vain.”

“For even though it is true that an organisation based on force can only survive as long as it is able to overcome the resistance of individuals or groups by force, it is equally true that it could not survive if it were compelled to use force every time it is challenged. If this becomes necessary, then the situation will be revolutionary; the organs of authority will be in contradiction with the economic bases of society, and this contradiction will be projected into the minds of people. People will then cease to regard the existing order as given in nature, and they will oppose the organized force with force.” (G. Lukács; ‘History and Class Consciousness’.)

Totalitarian States laugh at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and at other similar “international instruments”, even though mainstream propaganda try to make people believe otherwise. War of aggression, repression and treachery, as well as lies, dissimulation, falsification, duplicity, perfidy and hypocrisy: which serve and conceal the totalitarian reality, are suitable and normal instruments of the policy and diplomacy of these States. Individuals and above all Nations seek their own interest, without worrying if it has to be at the expense of others. Besides being thieves and murderers, they are usually forgers, liars, cheats and unscrupulous.

The various factors of imperialistic domination: demographic, economic, political and ideological, do reinforce or counteract, implicate, follow and complement each other, and present themselves in different ways in each case; but they always do, like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, ride together. The strategic selection of ends and means – whether of imperialistic domination or democratic opposition – depends on the rapport of forces, the situation, the moment and the tribal or international context, and on the absolute or relative ends of imperialism.

The dominant – moral and juridical – ideology is the one that the dominant social group creates and enforces for its convenience. As for moral norms, these ones are made by the political power, and its propaganda services legitimate without limitations those that best suit it in order to increase, consolidate and justify its power, weakening – intellectually and morally – all actual or virtual Resistance. It seeks thereby to remedy the inevitable effective limitations of its own violence. In matters of morality, as in matters of legality, everybody produces those that suit him. The “supreme, transcendent and immutable values” are those that the dominant social group does invent, impose, subordinate, replace or destroy through social, economic, and political pressure, psychological and ideological conditioning, intimidation and brute force.

An apolitical society, that is, non-violent or “anarchist” in the first sense of the word, is outside all reality and all experience. In the national and international political reality, peace and war, and the issues on human rights, on imperialism and fascism, and on freedom and democracy, are constituted, dealt with and resolved – in one sense or another – by means of violence, not of non-violence, good feelings or the normativist imagery. There is no war or peace without violence. “‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’, says the Scripture; but alas!, who does not take the sword dies on the cross.” The peacemakers will be blessed in the other world, but in this one they end up in the slaughterhouse.

Strictly speaking, “peace is the absence of physical force, of violence”. “But the peace of law is a merely relative peace; indeed, law does not exclude in an absolute way the use of force, that is the use of physical coercion by some humans against others.” On the contrary, “it determines the conditions in which – and the individuals by whom – force can be exercised”.

“A question arises: can Social-Democrats be, in a general way, against violence? Certainly not.” In fact, the “revolutionaries”, having passed the phase of illusions characteristic of the infancy of revolutions, have not lagged behind to respond to the violence and terror with which the “Ancien régime” sought to perpetuate itself. The others, have ended up by being put – their bodies and hopes – before a firing squad and other shortcuts to the dustbin of history.

“History, so far, has found no other means of making mankind advance than by always rising the revolutionary violence of the progressive classes, against the conservative violence of the doomed classes”; bearing in mind that imperialism and its domination on the subjugated Peoples is class struggle at an international level between the reactionary/imperialistic classes, and the progressive classes that are the dominated Peoples. “The degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a whole series of internal and international circumstances. The fierce and more dangerous is the resistance of the class enemies who have been overthrown, the more inevitably will the system of repression take the form of a system of terror.”

“The revolution does not ‘logically’ imply terrorism; nor does it ‘logically’ imply armed insurrection. What a profound banality! But the revolution does demand of the revolutionary class that it attain its ends by all means at its disposal: if necessary, by an armed insurrection; if necessary, through terrorism. [...] Wherever it [the revolution] is confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or rising, it will hurl at the heads of its enemies an unsparing penalty. [...] The question of the forms of repression, or of its degree, of course, is not one ‘of principle’. It is a question of expediency. In a revolutionary period, the party that has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling class and that proves this by its desperate struggle against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.” “Otherwise there would be no point in taking power.”

To wage war or not to wage it, to take power or not to take it; that is the question. Makes not war he who wants to but who can make it. For not to be able to get to that point, it is better to change of policy, occupation or job.

All war and all peace, all policy and all law are founded on violence. This does not imply the permanent or case-by-case “action” of all available weapons; otherwise, there would be no room for political normativity. Violence founds the juridical norm, which is present in peace and even in war. The normative peace of the law is not the absence of violence, just as war is not the absence of norms, which integrate the strategic behaviour beyond the law of the war.

The difference between peace, war and law, between political order and disorder is relative. Only formal or conventional criteria allow to delimit them. “The international law does not establish the level of violence that the armed operations should attain so that the rules on international conflicts may be applicable.” “There are wars that do not have a perfect decision or solution.” The expression “neither war nor peace” defines a situation that “has nothing of unnatural”, and that reflects the ambiguity of the concepts of “state of war, state of peace, act of war and declaration of war”. (Cf. the notions – rather floating – of “cold war”, “no peace-no war”, and “latent or virtual war”.)

The idea according to which violence is a matter of war, whereas peace is founded on non-violence, is equally false. War and peace are not differentiated by the absence or presence of violence; quite on the contrary, they both are founded on it. Peace without violence does not exist nor has ever existed. The peace does only exist as peace of law, both are correlative. And law, as well as war, is violence.

The political history and reality do only present one alternative: peace or war, order or disorder. But both peace as well as conflict, political order as well as disorder, are based on violence, which takes different forms according to the epoch, the rapport of political and ideological forces, the succession or combination of war and peace, the cultural context, the type of civilization and other factors. For imperialism and fascism, war, subjugation of Peoples and populations (which its demagogues call now “citizenry”), permanent military occupation, mass terrorism, expulsion of indigenous populations from their lands and homes, apartheid, repression, kidnappings, deportations, pillage, extortion, executions and torture (public and “private”, legal and “illegal”, official and unofficial), are reinforced and stimulated with hard or “soft” demonstrations of violence, parades, manoeuvres, exhibitions, intimidations, remunerations, promotions, tributes, celebrations, commemorations and awards.

“Ignoring the element of brutality because of the disgust it inspires, is a waste of force, not to say an error.” “He who might reject the recourse to certain brutalities should fear that the adversary may take advantage of it, by putting aside any qualms.” “There is no greater misfortune for an army than a General who intends to save blood.” “In a matter as dangerous as war, the errors due to the goodness of soul are precisely the worst of things. Being so that the use of physical force in its entirety does not exclude at all the cooperation of intelligence, he who uses of this force without mercy and does not retreat before the bloodshed will take advantage over his adversary, if this one does not do the same. He dictates thereby his law to the adversary, in such a way that each one pushes the other up to extremes that have no other limits than the counterweight residing on the adverse side.” “The devastations, the cruelties are always inevitable in the war.”

If it is accepted that violence, war, terror and torture are means of solving problems, there is only one way to win or not to lose: to outdo the adversary in violence, war, terrorism and torture. Whoever does not do so, loses. And to lose, it’s better not to start.

“Experience shows that the difference in physical losses suffered by the victor and the vanquished in the course of the clash is seldom very great; it is often null, and even sometimes inverse.” “The difference between the number of killed, wounded, prisoners and artillery lost on the field of battle by the victor and the vanquished, is negligible.” “Losses in armed forces are not the only ones suffered by both sides in the course of the confrontation; moral forces are also shaken, broken and destroyed.” In the war, “every clash is a bloody and destructive competition of forces, both physical and moral. The winner is the one who, in the end, has still the greatest sum of the ones and the others.” “The outcome of a great confrontation exerts more considerable moral effects on the vanquished than on the victor; these effects cause greater physical losses, which in turn react upon the moral factor, leaning and reinforcing mutually.”

In “times of disorder”, the function and organs of material and cultural production are sorted and subordinated to the function and organs of destruction and terror. In the constitutive sacrifice of political conflicts, the function and social organs that produce and reproduce human life remain ordered and subordinated to those of the ruin of human lives. Natural selection maintains and preserves a reservoir of thieves and murderers who sometimes are locked up and hanged in time of peace, but who in time of war become political agents: necessary, heroic and meritorious instruments and pillars of repression, revolution, counter-revolution and war.

All of this leads us to consider the issue of morality at the service of the established imperialistic and fascist power, as another more integral element of its ideology; which will be discussed in the following chapters.

(From: ‘Violence and Terrorism. - Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism’.)