In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs and other heads of states.
The kind of violence one should fear is always quiet and comes all wrapped up in words like Love until you live with it daily and you value only that which is valuable to the violator.
When one uses the simple monosyllabic 'France' one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When. . . we say 'France sent her troops to conquer Tunis'—we impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and- blood men and women who are the true actors.. . if we had no such word as 'France' . . . then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: 'A few of...thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.' This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the 'few'? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey? Empire-building is done not by 'nations,' but by men. The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each nation, who are directly interested in imperialism and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities pay the expenses and fight the wars.
Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.
It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence. The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek πá½¹λις [city-state] down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.
Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d’être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man’s innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
Democratic law does not say, "Thou shalt not kill". Instead, it designates certain people who have the right to kill -- soldiers and State police. Democratic law does not order, "Thou shalt not steal". It says that only certain people have the right to steal -- tax and customs agents. What does "power to the people" mean when the people enjoy fewer rights than their supposed servants?
Politics does not exist to eliminate violence but to legalise it. The only people who suggest making violence illegal are libertarians, and that is why libertarian principles are the most advanced in the evolution of humanity.
Whatever the problem, a gun is not the answer. A gun is only the seed of more guns and the harvest will come.
"Looking at why people treat each other so violently. We've always known that this violence comes from the urge humans fell to control and dominate one another, but only recently have we studied this phenomenon from the inside, from the point of view of the individual's consciousness. We have asked what happens inside a human being that makes him want to control someone else. We have found that when and individual walks up to another person and engages in a conversation, which happens billions of times each day in the world, one of two things can happen. That individual can come away felling string or feeling weak depending on what occurs in the interaction."
"We humans always seem to take a manipulative posture. No matter what the particulars of the situation, or the subject matter, we prepare ourselves to say whatever we want in order to prevail in the conversation. Each of us seeks to find some way to control and thus to remain on top in the encounter. If we are successful, or our viewpoint prevails, then rather than feel weak, we receive a psychological boost."
"In other words we humans seek to outwit and control each other not just because of some tangible goal in the outside world that we're trying to achieve, but because of a lift we get psychologically. This is the reason we see so many irrational conflicts in the world both at the individual level and the level of nations."
"The consensus in this matter is now emerging into public consciousness. We humans are realizing how much we manipulate each other and consequently we're reevaluating our motivations. We're looking for another way to interact. I think this reevaluation will be part of the new world view."
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
There is usually an inverse relationship between the size of a weapon and the moral responsibility practiced by the user.
The contradiction of hiring an agency of institutionalized violence to protect us from violence is even more foolhardy than buying a cat to protect one's parakeet.
If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.
The Iranian Girl
There's a hole in the ground
A moving of earth, now made
A sad depression
Where once she played in
Puddle-rain
Splashing with the joy that comes
From child-like feet
The sound is still here
In the air, the breeze yet carrying
The secret laughter
That haunts the waking hours of those
Who've lost the way
How vain to think that
Memory can be erased
All will remember
No one escapes
I wonder if she saw it
The moment before
Her hair still flying free
The metal catching that last
Pure glint of sun
Did she hear the explosion
That made no sense
Did she feel
Her body come apart
And fall like dust, too soon
Does anyone ask
Whatever she felt, whatever she dreamed
Her dreaming time is gone
And no lofty word of God or
Glory will ever make it right
Dare to listen and you will
Hear her
Dare to open your eyes and see
The Iranian girl
No different
Like you, like me.
War, hatred, and violence all spring from one infernal idea: that one person, race, creed, or culture is better than another.
"If you try to fix violence with violence, you do nothing but create violence."
When individuals and groups do not experience being loved -- when whole communities lose hope that anyone cares -- fear and violence are often seized upon as seeming protectors in the form of gangs, mobs, and communal hostility.
It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving. 'That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.' So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws.
It is this law of love and its recognition as a rule of conduct in all our relations with friends, enemies and offenders which must inevitably bring about the complete transformation of the existing order of things,
not only among Christian nations, but among all the peoples of the globe
Weapons are the tools of violence;
all decent men detest them.
Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn't wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?
He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.
Violence is a choice masquerading as a necessity.
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
The recently ended twentieth century was characterized by a level of human rights violations unparalleled in all of human history. In his book Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel estimates some 170 million government-caused deaths in the twentieth century. The historical evidence appears to indicate that, rather than protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of their citizens, governments must be considered the greatest threat to human security.
We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.
Poverty is the worst form of violence.
I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
