Violence

A Modern Obsession

Richard Bessel

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781471147920
• eBook ISBN: 9781471126000
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

After a century that has been described as the most violent in the history of humanity, Professor Richard Bessel has written an intelligent and fascinating book on the history of our violent world and how we have become obsessed about violence. He critiques the great themes of modern history from revolutionary upheavals around the globe, to the two world wars and the murder of the European Jews, to the great purges and, more recently, terrorism. Violence, it seems, is on everyone's mind. It constantly is in the news; it has given rise to an enormous historical, sociological, and philosophical literature; it occupies a prominent place in popular entertainment; and it is regarded as one of the fundamental problems affecting social, political and interpersonal relations. Bessel sheds light on this phenomenon and how our sensitivity towards violence has grown and has affected the ways in which we understand the world around us - in terms of religious faith, politics, military confrontation, the role of the state, as well as of interpersonal and intimate relations. He critiques our modern day relationship with violence and how despite its continuing and inevitable nature, we have become more committed to limiting and suppressing it. Both historically questioning and intensely evocative of the most vicious and brutal violence enacted by mankind, this book shows how the place of violence in the modern world presents a number of paradoxes and how it is an inescapable theme in human history.

Notes

Introduction

1 Michael Geyer, ‘Some Hesitant Observations Concerning “Political Violence”’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 4, no. 3 (New Series), p. 695.

2 Etienne G. Krug, Linda L. Dahlberg, James A. Mercy, Anthony B. Zwi and Rafael Lozano (eds.), World Report on Violence and Health (Geneva, 2002), p. ix. Accessed: http://whq­lib­doc­.who­.int/­pub­lic­at­ion­s/2002/­9241545615_eng.pdf.

3 Christian Gerlach, ‘Extremely Violent Societies: An Alternative to the Concept of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, December 2006, pp. 455–71; Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge, 2010).

4 Charles Tilly, ‘Violence, Terror, and Politics as Usual’, Boston Review, Summer 2002. Accessed: http://­new­.bos­ton­re­view­.net/­BR27.3/tilly.html.

5 See Henry R. Luce, ‘The American Century’, Life, 17 February 1941, pp. 61–5. In that article, Luce wrote: ‘So far, this century of ours has been a profound and tragic disappointment. No other century has been so big with progress for human progress and happiness. And in no one century have so many men and women and children suffered such pain and anguish and bitter death.’ (p. 64.)

6 David G. Winter, ‘Power, Sex, and Violence: A Psychological Reconstruction of the 20th Century and an Intellectual Agenda for Political Psychology’, Political Psychology, vol. 21, no. 2, p. 384.

7 Till Bastian, Das Jahrhundert des Todes: Zur Psychologie von Gewaltbereitschaft und Massenmord im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2000), p. 7.

8 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London, 2006), pp. xxxiv–xxxv. Ferguson goes on to discuss the issue of comparative levels of war-related violence at some length in a thoughtful appendix (pp. 647–54). In it he notes, I think correctly, that:

the interesting question is not really, ‘Why was the twentieth century more violent than the eighteenth or nineteenth?’, but, ‘Why did extreme violence happen in Poland, Serbia and Cambodia more than England, Ghana and Costa Rica?’; and ‘Why did so much more extreme violence happen between 1936 and 1945 than between 1976 and 1985?’ (p. 649.)

9 Ibid., pp. 646, 654.

10 For a penetrating critique of Ferguson’s book, see Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Anekdoten statt Analysen’, Die Zeit, 12 December 2006.

11 See Ferguson, The War of the World, pp. 653–4, where he asserts that the twentieth century:

was undeniably unique in two respects. The first was that it witnessed a transformation in the kind of war waged by developed western societies against one another. [. . .] The second feature that makes the twentieth century beyond question unique – and which remains the paradox at its heart – is the way that leaders of apparently civilized societies were able to unleash the most primitive murderous instincts of their fellow citizens. The Germans were not Amazonian Indians.

12 For example, reflecting on the leader of a political movement and ideology that both glorified violence and applied it on a horrific scale, in his biography of Hitler Ian Kershaw refers to the ‘Nazi assault on the roots of civilization’ and ‘the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times’. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (Harmondsworth, 1998), p. xxx; Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 841.

13 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psycho-genetische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1976). For a critical view, see Ian Burkitt, ‘Civilization and Ambivalence’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 47, no. 1 (1996), pp. 135–50.

14 Dan Diner, ‘Perspektivenwahl und Geschichtserfahrung. Bedarf es einer besonderen Historik des Nationalsozialismus?’, in Walter H. Pehle (ed.), Der historische Ort des Nationalsozialismus. Annäherungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 94–113.

15 See especially Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1989). For an interesting critique of Bauman’s discussion of modernity and genocide, see Michael Freeman, ‘Genocide, Civilization and Modernity’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, no. 2 (1995), pp. 207–23.

16 Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau, Jahresbericht 2009 (Warsaw, 2010), p. 22.

17 See Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009), pp. 779–851; Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Jane Rendall (eds.), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820 (Basingstoke, 2008).

18 Mark Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, The American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 4, p. 1158.

19 This is true not only for the First World War, but also for the Second. See Richard Bessel, ‘Death and Survival in the Second World War’, in Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze (eds.), Cambridge History of the Second World War, Total War – Economy, Society and Culture at War (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).

20 Steven Pinker, ‘A History of Violence’, New Republic, 19 March 2007. Accessed: http://­pink­er­.wjh­.har­va­rd.edu/­art­icl­es/me­dia­/­2007_03_19_New­%20Repub­lic­.pdf.

21 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (London and New York, 2011), p. xxi.

22 Pinker, ‘A History of Violence’, op. cit.

23 Habbo Knoch, ‘Einleitung: Vier Paradigmen des Gewaltdiskurses’, in Uffa Jensen, Habbo Knoch, Daniel Morat and Miriam Rürup (eds.), Gewalt und Gesellschaft: Klassiker modernen Denkens neu gelesen (Göttingen, 2011), p. 14.

24 http://www­.color­ad­o.ed­u/c­spv­/.

25 Patrick H. Tolan, ‘Understanding Violence’, in Daniel J. Flannery, Alexander T. Vazsonyi and Irwin D. Waldman (eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression (New York, 2007), p. 9.

26 According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, edited by Angus Stevenson (3rd edition, 2010) ‘violence’ is defined as follows:

noun [mass noun]

1. behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something: violence erupted in protest marches | domestic violence against women | the fear of physical violence. screen violence. (Law) the unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.

2. strength of emotion or of a destructive natural force: the violence of her own feelings

27 Felicity Kaganas, ‘Domestic Violence’, in Peter Cane and Joanne Conaghan (eds.), The New Oxford Companion to Law. Accessed: http://www­.ox­ford­ref­ere­nce­.com/­views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t287.e679.

28 Krug et al., World Report on Violence and Health, p. 5.

29 Ibid.

30 Quoted in Christine Chinkin, ‘Violence against Women: The International Legal Response’, Gender and Development, vol. 3, no. 2, June 1995, p. 26.

31 Sally Engle Merry, ‘Rights, Religion, and Community: Approaches to Violence against Women in the Context of Globalization’, Law & Society Review, vol. 35, no. 1 (2001), p. 39.

32 Thomas Sheridan, A complete dictionary of the English language, both with regard to sound and meaning. One main object of which is, to establish a plain and permanent standard of pronunciation. To which is prefixed a prosodial grammar (London, 1789), p. 598.

33 N. Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (Edinburgh, 1800), p. 879.

34 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, p. 1611. Accessed: http://­mac­hau­t.u­chic­ago­.edu­/­?re­sour­ce=Webs­ter%27s&word=violence&use1913=on&use1828=on.

35 Rafael Moses, ‘Empathy and Dis-Empathy in Political Conflict’, Political Psychology, vol. 6, no. 1 (1985), p. 136.

36 Omer Bartov, ‘Genocide and the Holocaust: What Are We Arguing About?’, in Uffa Jensen et al. (eds.), Gewalt und Gesellschaft, p. 393.

37 Most notably in the widely acclaimed work of Saul Friedländer, who is both a prominent historian and a Shoah survivor: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939 (London, 1997), and Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (London, 2007). See also Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (eds.), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London and New York, 2010).

38 For example, Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Also by Richard Bessel
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Spectacle
• II. Religion
• III. Revolution
• IV. Politics
• V. War
• VI. Women and Children
• VII. Control
• VIII. Memories
• IX. Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index