Changing Justifications for Violence

The hundred years from 1800 saw an unprecedented expansion in violence as an arm of European colonialism. The building of competing European empires justified this violence to sometimes dubious home populations on the grounds of uplifting, improving, saving and civilising humans deemed to be living in ‘inferior' or ‘misguided' cultures.

An exemplar of this confluence was the so-called Congo Free State (1885­1908), operating as a corporate state run solely by King Leopold of Belgium. Leopold's state was ‘free' of tax on international trade while local people endured various forms of slavery, forced labour and land grabs, and were tithed in the form of rubber. As with many other European colonies, the Congo Free State was ostensibly a Christian charitable venture, but ulti­mately became infamous for the violence Leopold's agents inflicted on the people.^{[6] [7]} The so-called ‘Congo Horrors' came to light from the late 1890s. In 1904, Roger Casement (1864-1916) issued an eponymous Report detailing in forty pages the atrocities for the UK parliament. Congolese who failed to deliver their rubber quotas faced execution or mutilation. The chopping off of hands was a common punishment and Leopold's soldiers took severed hands as proof of their enforcement.

Ideals of the liberty and equality of all people had been building from the European Enlightenment and the anti-slavery movement of the late 1700s and were consolidated in the 1800s. The major beneficiaries of this forced labour system acquiesced in the abolitionist cause over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. The United States joined this global trend in 1865 after its own bitter Civil War (1861-5) in which around 700,000 people died in the violence spurred by the questions of slavery and race equality. In dismantling slavery, some of the foundations justifying European colonialism were weakened as well. The supremacy of the white races over all others was challenged - the right to exert power required more subtle justifications. Saving souls, making ‘productive' use of wasted land and opening the world to free trade became common justifications for inflicting violence on less powerful groups. The prestige newly accruing to science and technology gave rise to Social Darwinism, such that, even with the abolition of slavery, the belief in a race hierarchy (with whites at the top) continued through the first half of the twentieth century. This ‘scientific' position led to abominations such as the removal of mixed-race children from their parents in Australia between 1910 and 1970 - now known as ‘The Stolen Generations'.^[8] Under the control of the state, these children became effectively slaves in households and farms around Australia - their wages held in accounts that they struggled to access - experiencing beatings, abuse and rapes common to African slaves a century earlier in the South of the USA.

From the mid 1900s, patience with European dominance was wearing thin even in localities where colonialism had not been quite as egregiously brutal as in the Congo Free State. The twentieth-century independence movements led to the formation of new nation states in which the violence of European colonisation was echoed in the independence struggles that pushed the Europeans out. Nationalist independence leaders sought legitimacy for their violence through narratives of ‘overthrowing oppressors', ‘equality', ‘freedom' and ‘self-determination'. Older rivalries between tribal or language groups were submerged, sometimes temporarily, in the fight to expel the Europeans. In South Asia, Britain negotiated the independence of India and East and West Pakistan along a major religious divide between Hindus and Muslims. The violent partition of Pakistan from India in 1947 resulted in the deaths of around a million people and the rape of around 75,000 women. At other times, the ‘political anxiety' of the weak state resulted in a leap to a violent rather than a negotiated solution. Post-independence Nigeria almost immediately faced a civil war (1967-70) as the region of Biafra dominated by the Igbo people sought to secede from the new multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation. But, in Ukoha Ukiwo's words, it was state violence rather than cultural divisions that triggered the secession attempt, and it is state violence that has brewed ethnic nationalism ever since.^[10] In the conflict and accom­panying siege, around 100,000 military deaths and an estimated 2 million civilian deaths through starvation occurred.

Eventually, as these newly independent nations consolidated their social and political systems, national ‘traditions' were invented to give meaning and unity to the oftentimes disparate groups that attained citizenship. The nation-state adorned itself in flags, anthems, pledges and constitutions communicated through national education and broad­casting systems. The defence of each of these symbols of national unity and sovereign power became the spur for violence directed externally and internally.