INTO THE VIOLENCE CYCLE:

INTO THE VIOLENCE CYCLE: So here’s how it goes. Leader X (call him George Bush, call him Ariel Sharon, call him whatever you want) perceives that his nation/group/whatever is experiencing a security problem. He proposes a large-scale application of violence as a way to end this problem. He applies the violence. The problem doesn’t stop. In fact, it gets worse. (Duh! This is what srategic-affairs experts call “the security dilemma”.)
So our intrepid and wise (!) leader needs to explain the fact that his group’s security problem continues, and has gotten worse. That is, that the “solution” he earlier proposed to the problem has notably failed to deliver what it promised. How does he do that? Why, easy! He argues that the fact of the continuation of the security problem–despite the wise measures he took to end it– just proves that “the opponent” is even more heinous and threatening than anyone had realized.
Therefore, even more violence is needed to deal with him!
And so it goes… Escalation piled upon escalation. Casualties, grief, and human needs shamelessly exploited for what becomes (if it wasn’t already) a highly ideological agenda. On both sides.
How to get out of this spiral of violence? That’s one of the things I am looking at in my current project on “escaping from violence” in Africa. In Mozambique, the escape from the violence of the civil war (which came after 500 years of ruthless colonial violence) took the relentless grinding-down of both the “sides” to the civil war to the point that mass starvation and pauperization was already a present reality. And then, it took some smart and compassionate diplomacy from church bodies and the UN to get the two sides to a peace agreement.
In South Africa, according to Fanie du Toit of Cape Town’s Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, it took a deep pragmatism from elites in both core communities (“black” and “Afrikaner”) as well as the extremely smart and disciplined leadership of the black rebel movements. (Some black South Africans with whom I spoke argued that their side’s ability to maintain a small military/violent component in their movement was also important in bringing the Afrikaners to the negotiating table.)
So what will prevent George Bush and his advisors from exploiting the fact of the latest anti-Western and anti-Saui bombings in order to justify launching even more belligerent and violent policies against targets in the Muslim world?
How do we pull him back from plunging the whole world into the abyss of a longterm inter-group confrontation that almost inevitably, if it continues, will take on an increasingly “religious”, Christian-vs.-Muslim aspect?
Violence begets violence. There are many, many better ways to build a world safe for all than trying to build the “security” of one small group of people on the insecurity of others. Maybe someone should introduce Pres. Bush to some of those pragmatic Afrikaners.
South Africa really is, in many ways– in the struggles it continues to face against poverty and inequality as well as in the steps it has already taken towards political democratization and multiculturalism– a microcosm of the situation of the whole world. And the Afrikaners have great lessons to share with the “powers that be” in the global west about what has worked better to preserve their people’s sense of security: violence, or respectful negotiation and problem-solving.
For more than 40 years, from 1948 through 1990, the Afrikaners tried to apply imposed solutions to their non-white fellow-citizens, backed up by the massive application of physical and administrative violence. It didn’t “work”. Oh yes, apartheid’s policies worked in that they inflicted untold misery, deaths, maimings and massive disruptions on the lives of millions of black and other South Africans, as well as on millions in neighboring countries (Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, etc) who were the target of the apartheid regime’s deliberate and largescale destabilization campaigns. But they didn’t “work” in the sense of bringing to Afrikaners themselves an abiding sense of security and wellbeing…
Violence, as I said, has this strong tendency to stoke the flames of further violence.