The three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual abuse.
Wanda Coleman (1946-2013) is an African American poet, often designated the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles. In 1983, she published a poem entitled ‘Rape’. The poem addresses society’s cruelty in their responses to some of the most vulnerable people in society. In Coleman’s poem, this is an unnamed Black woman who has survived multiple sexual assaults. Armed assailants break into her home and violently rape her, they then demand that she pretends that they are her lovers. They even kiss her goodbye afterwards, saying ‘when you get lonely, call’. Rather than acting sympathetically, the woman’s boyfriend is angry that his exclusive entitlement to her body has been breached. He blames her for not fighting to her death, following up this accusation by raping her. The poem ends with the heart-breaking lines:
she waiteduntil she was sure they wouldn'tcome back and killshe picked up the phoneand made the mistake of thinking the worldwould understand.
Coleman’s poem does more than simply describe the callous attitude of many people (including sexual aggressors, boyfriends, the police, and justice systems) to victims of rape; it also echoes the experiences of survivors of all forms of violence and abuse. As such, it provides a way to explore some aspects of cruelty both historically and in the contemporary world. I will be drawing on only three forms of cruelty, which are framed in three specific ways. These are: the denial of pain; the aestheticization of wartime wounding; and the rationalization of sexual abuse. These three frames of meaning (denial, aestheticization, and rationalization) provide the scaffolding for all forms of cruelty. All three appear in Coleman’s poem: the assailants deny their victim’s pain; they engage in a theatre of romance; they rationalise their violence as part of their entitlement as boyfriends and more powerful men.
While denial, aestheticization, and rationalization provide the framework for my blog, the three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual abuse. Of course, I could have built this blog around a vast number of different forms of abuse. Cruelty is endemic. However, the three sites I have chosen are not only pervasive but are also good examples of the culturally constructed and mutable nature of human harms. There is nothing universal or ‘natural’ about these three examples. All vary widely across historical time and geographical place. For example, theories about who ‘truly’ feels pain fluctuate; they are determined as much by ideological interests as by experimental knowledge about nerves and neurons. Similarly, the cruelty of lobbing grenades into adjacent trenches in the Western Front during the First World War is very different to the violence intrinsic to drone warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early twenty-first century. The suffering endured by girls and women violated by soldiers during the Second World War cannot realistically be compared to that of Italian girls and women raped by acquaintances today. Therefore, in the blog that follows, any generalizations I make must be prefaced by a reminder that cruelty is experienced personally, through the prism of unique bodies and minds. It is also important to preface these remarks by noting that cruelty is not only experienced subjectively, itis also unevenly distributed. Some people are more vulnerable than others. Other people have greater powers to inflict suffering. It matters who writes the scientific tomes that degree decrees of sentence or launches the missiles that mutilate human and animal flesh. The casual sense of sexual entitlement that characterises so much sexual violence is considerably more likely to be directed against girls and women, as well as members of minority ethnic groups, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, LGBTQ and non-binary, and those with physical or learning disabilities. With these caveats in mind, what can a brief analysis of the denial of pain, the aestheticization of wartime wounding, and the rationalization of sexual abuse contribute to a history of cruelty? My blog will conclude with some thoughts on how to create less violent worlds.
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Cruelty (both as perpetrated and experienced) is inextricably tied to broader constructions of ‘the human’. In Western science and philosophy during the modern period, one of the organizing principles of ‘humanness’ is the delineation of hierarchies of sentience – that is, the view that the ability to feel, both in terms of physical sensation as well as inner sensibilities, is ranked hierarchically. This is the first theme of this blog. To understand the importance of sentience in any analysis of cruelty in the modern period, it is necessary to turn to the great enlightenment philosophers. From the eighteenth century (and well into the twentieth century), a powerful rhetoric emerged around the concept of ‘sympathy’, as a counter to human cruelty. This emphasis on states of feeling encouraged the cultivation of a new sensibility that emphasised empathetic identification with the suffering ‘Other’. One example can be found in the writings of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. His book entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) espoused a theory of ethics that emerged not from religion but from ‘natural affection’. For Shaftesbury, imagination was the home of the ‘Divine Presence’ in each person. Right and wrong, he argued, could be understood through the application of the imaginative powers of sympathy, allowing one person to experience another’s pain.
Shaftesbury’s ethics was radical; it posited an image of humanity as sympathetic and innately moral. Philosopher Adam Smith developed the idea further in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Humans may seem selfish and unconcerned with the suffering of other people, Smith admitted in the book’s first sentence, but there were
some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
Through acts of imagination, Smith observed, other people’s ‘agonies’ are made manifest, ‘and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels’. American statesman and philosopher Thomas Jefferson expressed it more succinctly. In 1814, he maintained that ‘Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct”. These traits ‘prompt[] us irresistibly to feel and to succour [other peoples’] distresses’. This belief in a moral instinct – called compassion, sympathy, or empathy (although each are subtly different) – enable people to see other human beings as creatures like ourselves, encouraging the view that other people share certain characteristics ‘with me’ and so deserves to be treated with consideration.
The problem was that few people believed in a common humanity. Although Adam Smith extolled the moral excellence of sympathy, in which the onlookers ‘enter as it were into his [the sufferer’s] body, and become in some measure the same person with him’, it was a state of mind embedded within hierarchies of power and powerlessness. After all, sympathy required a belief that other people really did suffer when treated cruelly. Simply put, not everyone agreed that people experienced pain in equal measure. Well into the twentieth century, scientists and philosophers adhered to the idea that there was a hierarchy of sentience. The ability to feel (physically, emotionally, and spiritually) was ranked hierarchically. Belief in a great ‘Chain of Being’, according to which everything in the universe was ranked from the highest to the lowest, is one of the most fundamental tenets of Western philosophy. However, there was a parallel Chain of Feeling, which placed male Europeans at one end and minoritized people (as well as animals) at the other. In other words, human civilization was forged in the image of the white, well-off, and educated male. The enlightenment values of Humanism installed only some humans at the centre of the universe. It disparaged ‘the woman’, ‘the subaltern’, ‘the non-European’, and a huge range of different ‘Others’. My point is that being human – or, more correctly, becoming human – has always been a political, social, and legal process. To rephrase philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s inspired conclusion about women, one is not born, but made a human. Delimiting the territories of the fully-human, partly-human, and inhuman not only involves cruelty but inspires it.
A distressing example of this Chain of Feeling can be found within the writings of advocates of enslavement and believers in the superiority of the European ‘races’. In the words of the author of an 1876 tract on vivisection, or the practice of performing operations on living beings for the purposes of scientific experimentation,
what would be torture to one creature is barely felt by the other. Even amongst the lower types of man feeling is less acute, and blows and cuts are treated with indifference by the aboriginal Australian which would lay a European in hospital.
James Peter Warbasse, surgeon to the German Hospital in Brooklyn (New York), expressed the same belief in 1910. ‘Primitive peoples’, he avowed,
have an insensibility to pain which is beyond our comprehension. Their self-mutilations are made possible not by bravery but by this low degree of pain-sense. The savage who chops off his hand and presents it to the king has displayed a stoicism which is comparable to that of the fox who gnaws off his leg to get out of a trap. Neither one is much hurt. We must not interpret these things in terms of our own pain-sense.
What was it about the non-European body that rendered it less susceptible to painful stimuli? There are a lot of answers to this question (which I explore in greater depth in my book The Story of Pain) but an important one is the influence of racist sciences, which placed great emphasis on the development and complexity of peoples’ brains. Since the ‘existence of feeling’ depended on the ‘activity of the brain’, observed a writer signing himself ‘Philanthropos’ in the early 1880s, it was logical that the ‘more perfect development of that organ’, the greater the perception of sensations such as pain. For him, the ‘rough proportion between sensibility and intellectual development’ explained why ‘Savages will undergo [with] equanimity tortures which no civilized man (except perhaps under great excitement) could endure’. Or, as the author of Pain and Sympathy (1907) concluded when attempting to explain why the ‘savage’ could ‘bear physical torture without shrinking’: the ‘higher the life, the keener is the sense of pain’. In neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell’s famous statement of 1892, during the ‘process of being civilized we have won… intensified capacity to suffer’. After all,
the savage does not feel pain as we do: nor as we examine the descending scale of life do animals seem to have the acuteness of pain-sense at which we have arrived.
Denying sentience to minoritized groups, as well as non-human animals, infants, girls, and women, had serious consequences: they justified treating members of these groups cruelly. For physicians, it legitimated giving certain patients minimal (if any) pain relief for illness or during surgery. For other people believing themselves to be full- or superior-humans, it enabled them to deny any culpability for treating others with disdain.
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If the first theme in this blog is the denial of pain-sensitivity to certain groups of people, the second is the aestheticization of cruelty. Here, my examples are drawn from war, where acts of wounding (often lethally) other sentient beings are turned into something not only ethically possible but encouraged. I write about this is greater length in my book Wounding the World (the U.S. version is called The Social Life of Weapons). In that book, I discuss the paradox that, although wounding and killing other people is a formidable taboo which almost always leads to self-hatred, shame, and guilt, yet, in times of war, people invent ways to aestheticize it, even to the extent of making it seem enjoyable. In the letters, diaries, and memoirs of combatants, as well as in the mass media, propaganda, and official publications, men write excitedly about combat as though it was a sport. During the First World War, a British soldier insisted that his experience of killing was ‘sickening yet exhilarating butchery’ and ‘joy unspeakable’. During the Second World War, British pilots admitted that they ‘all felt much better’ after a ‘kill’ and there would be ‘a good deal of smacking on the back and screaming of delight.’ By the time of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, militainment (the blurring of war and entertainment, often through sport and wargaming) provided a lens through which cruelty could become enjoyable. It enabled drone navigator Matt Martin to reflect that, sitting in front of his computer screens in Reno (Nevada) and launching bombs on people in Iraq and Afghanistan, he felt a
thrill… at the moment I prepared to squeeze the trigger…. The ability to kill people from such great distances, playing God, widened the gap between the reality of war and out perception of it. It was almost like watching an NFL [National Football League] game of TV with its tiny figures on the screen….. It could even be mildly entertaining.
The propensity to aestheticize deadly weapons can be seen in all military conflicts. During the war in Vietnam, cluster bombs (which cause appalling wounds) were nicknamed ‘pineapples’ and ‘guavas’ and the human dismemberment inflicted by M-79 grenade launchers was minimised by being compared to ‘brass knuckles in a barroom brawl’. Weapons and weapon-systems were given comforting names, including ones from nature: they are a Falcon, Hummingbird Warrior, Panda, and Walrus. ‘Bouncing Betties’ are explosives that propel upwards before detonating at four feet (that is, at the level of a person’s heart); ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ refers to the act of putting a M16A1 rifle on full automatic fire. White phosphorous is colloquially known as ‘Willie Peter’ – an innocent name for a chemical that burns for up to 15 days inside wounds, unable to be extinguished. These names aestheticize cruelty.
The extent of aestheticization multiplies when we turn to the science of ballistics (that is, the science of wounding and killing). Ballistic experts routinely refer to weapons as objects of beauty. Textbooks laud the ‘charm and beauty of well-made weapons’. Others take ‘delight in the esoterica of small arms and rifle ballistics’. Weapons’ experts often draw on analogies associated with water. In 1962, for example, some of the most distinguished ballistic experts asked: how can we explain the ‘interest and admiration’ aroused by photographs of ‘rifle bullets in rapid fire’? Surely it was due to their ‘resemblance to moving ships with prominent bow and stern waves and a turbulent wake’, they replied. They even evoked water when describing the ‘blasting out’ of human bodies caused by bullets: readers are told that particular bullets had a similar effect to a ‘stream of water from a fire hose’. Upon hitting human tissue, there is a ‘”splashing” effect which is analogous to the upward splash when a pebble is dropped into water’, explained one commentator in an article in the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1981. The violence of high-velocity bullets led to an impressive ‘tail splash’. Or, as one ballistic scientist noted in 1995, the ‘temporary’ cavity caused by the explosion of a bullet into flesh
can be compared to a diver entering water. If the water is entered aerodynamically and nearly perpendicular, there is little or no splash, and a minimal amount of water is displaced. This correlates to a low-velocity, nondeforming, nonfragmenting missile that does not deviate from its longitudinal axis.
However,
If the same diver deviates from his perpendicular longitudinal axis, even slightly, he will create a bigger splash. The amount of water displaced is proportional to the degree of deviation from the perpendicular.
The authors of a 2005 article in the journal Injury used a similar metaphor. They blandly noted that some divers enter the water in a ‘clean’ fashion, creating little ‘turbulence and splash’; in contrast, others did a ‘bellywhopper’, in which ‘the splash is maximum’. In case readers had not grasped the full implications, these commentators extolled the bigger ‘splashes’. These metaphors aestheticize cruelty. After all, water is an incongruous stand-in for crushed, torn, and splintered tissue and bone. Clearly, such ways of talking about wounding people perform an important function: they exchange the messy, sticky, bloodiness of actual wounding (not to mention the screaming victim) for a clean, even gentle, image of water that simply ‘moves to the side’ when hit. Given the fact that these commentators were engaged in researching or producing weapons designed to tear living people apart, being able to talk about it using such analogies must have been profoundly soothing.
Euphemism and ballistic abstraction are other languages used to talk about inflicting acts of extreme violence. Statistics and detailed analyses of the ballistic properties of weapons provide a numbing techno-speak, leading people to forget that the chief function of weapons is to maim and kill fellow human-beings. Euphemism is even more effective. While talking about ways to bomb populated cities, ballistic experts used phrases such as ‘delivery may… be achieved’, as though they were referring to flowers. Thermonuclear fusion bombs are called ‘clean bombs’ even though they are 700 times more powerful than the fission (or atomic) bomb that was released over Hiroshima. The MX missile, which carries ten warheads, each of which contains 250 to 400 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb, is called a ‘damage-limitation weapon’. President Ronald Regan called it ‘The Peacekeeper’. Understatement encourages a kind of cognitive forgetfulness. An enemy combatant can be described as having ‘received’ a bullet. The enemy is not ‘killed’, but ‘had’, ‘disposed’, or ‘exterminated’ like a bug. Ballistic experts talk about the ‘production of the wound’ or ‘producing the casualty’ as though mortal combat is some kind of industrialized assembly line. Making ‘a kill’ is a ‘good shot placement’. A particular kind of wound was described as ‘cookie-cutter’ damage. In the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. planes ‘seeded’ anti-personnel mines (they were called ‘bomblets’, but we should not be fooled by the use of the diminutive) over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodian. Once ‘seeded’, these mines were forever primed to kill. The main victims are children, attracted by the shape or colour of these ‘playthings’. Cluster bombs that detonate in such a way that fragments wound or kill people within an area of 300 by 900 metres (to give a perspective, the average U.K. Premiership football pitch is 104 x 68 metres long) are called ‘area denial’ weapons. The Predator drone is ‘a big bee… with one hell of a sting’. The scheme to send huge, pilot-less planes to bomb Germany during the Second World War was christened ‘Project Aphrodite’, after the goddess of love. Other names attempted to bestow a sense of honour on the device: Britain’s first ballistic rocket was called the ‘Black Knight’, for instance.
The final cognitive distortion involves giving agency to inanimate weapons: weapons are spoken about as if they possess lives independent of their human-creators and users. They are autonomous agents. People routinely speak as though the missile, rather than the person wielding the weapon, is responsible for the destruction. Indeed, ballistic science is defined as a kind of ‘bullet-body interaction’ in which there is a ‘transfer of energy from the projectile to the medium’. In such ways, the victim’s flesh is portrayed as an active partner in the interactive wounding process: her body participates in ‘exchanging’ energy with the missile. In this process of transferring agency from the soldier to the technology, weapons are made to possess emotions. The missile called ‘Special K’ (which blasts out razor-sharp shrapnel to ‘slice and dice anyone within a twenty-foot radius’) does not allow anyone, even at fifty feet, to ‘escape its wrath’ entirely. It is important to point out, however, that while weapons are portrayed as deeply enmeshed in social relations (they interact with the bodies of victims and have emotional reactions to those victims), they are curiously abstracted from wider, political relations. They exist independently of the military and political apparatus behind them. By converting violence against others into something attractive, abstract, or absent makes it easier to inflict cruel and unusual suffering on other people.
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So far in this blog, I have discussed the way cruelty is enabled by denial (that is, claiming that people do not suffer or feel pain equally) and aestheticization (wounding humans in war is made to sound exciting and alluring). The final enabling device is rationalization. I discuss these issues at greater length in my most recent book, entitled Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence.
Rape is a serious problem in Italy, as it is throughout the world. Today, it is estimated that more than one-fourth of Italian women aged between 16 and 70 years have experienced sexual violence. The law has struggled to deal adequately with the scale of the crisis. In the past, as in the present, the punishments meted out to convicted rapists are minimal. For example, in 1988, a man who had raped his daughters over a period of ten years was only fined £8,000. That same year, a woman who had been brutally raped by fifteen young men was forced to flee her home after being labelled a ‘slut who asked for what she got’. Because she was ‘pretty’ and wore a miniskirt, it was assumed that she was partly responsible for being gang raped. Her mother complained that ‘One thing is certain. No one will marry my daughter now’. And we are all aware of the ‘Jeans: An Alibi for Rape’ case of 1999 in which the Corte di Cassazione overturned a conviction for rape on the grounds that it was ‘illogical to suggest that a girl would submit passively to a rape, which is a grave assault on the person’. According to the judges rationalizations, rape was so damaging to female honour that any girl or woman would have vigorously fought off any assailant, even at the risk of severe injuries or death. Bizarrely, the Justices added that ‘it is a fact of common experience’ that ‘it is impossible to take off jeans… without the active cooperation of the person who is wearing them’. In effect, having sexual intercourse with a girl or woman wearing jeans must have been consensual because removing that item of clothing required the wearer’s assistance. The case was a stark reminder that women are not equal to men in law. It also draws attention to the persistence of discredited myths about rape, such as the belief that victims are prone to lie, that they will immediately report being assaulted, and that they are prepared to fight to the death to protect their ‘honour’.
In Italy, as elsewhere, the most pervasive form of sexual violence occurs in the home. Until recently, there was widespread public agreement that rape within marriage was an impossibility: indeed, husbands coercing their wives into sex is the most tolerated form of violence. Philosopher of language John L. Austin has argued that the words ‘I do’, spoken at a wedding ceremony, is one of the paradigmatic examples of a performative speech act: the words themselves act on the world or consummate an action. By saying ‘I do’, a woman not only marries a man but also surrenders future rights to say ‘no’ to him. In the guise of offering conjugal fulfilment and sanctuary to wives, matrimony extends to them a lifetime of sexual servitude. This form of cruelty was based on the ‘unities’ doctrine, whereby the legal existence of a wife is inextricably merged into that of the husband. Her legal existence, including her sexed body, are identical to his. It is also dependent on the rationalization that heteronormative, patriarchal marriage (with the husband as the ‘head of the household’) are at the heart of personal morality and national stability. Giving women autonomy over their own bodies would threaten civilization itself.
In Italy, the possibility of convicting a husband of marital rape was only made possible in 1976. Italy is far from unusual in this regard. In the same year as Italy made it possible to prosecute husbands for raping their wives, the first American state (Nebraska) did likewise, slowly followed by other states. Criminalization of marital rape happened even later elsewhere: France in 1984, Spain in 1989, England and Wales in 1992, and Germany in 1997. In Greece, it only became an offence as late as 2006. It is still not a crime for a husband to rape his wife in 48 countries today. In half of those, a husband’s exemption from rape if the victim is his wife is explicitly endorsed in law.
Where there is abuse of power, however, there is also resistance. The rise of ‘second wave’ feminism from the 1970s onwards drew attention to the numerous ways that sexual cruelty was meted out to girls and women. As during the ‘blue jeans’ fiasco, Italian feminists and their supporters could be loudly heard denouncing rationalisations of sexual abuse against girls and women. In 1979, for example, 300,000 Italians petitioned the legislature, calling for the major reform of Italy’s rape laws. In particular, they called for the reclassification of sexual offences, removing them from the section of the penal code entitled Delitti contro la morale pubblica e il buon costume (or ‘crimes against public morality and decency’) and placing them in the section on Delitti contro la persona (or ‘crimes against the person’), which also dealt with murder, assault, threats, and slavery. This would require a recognition that sexual abuses harmed individual victims, not societal morality: victims were subjects, not objects. The reforms were only passed in 1996, after 17 years of activism.
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Finally, this blog has included many grim stories, surveys, and statistics. So: now for the good news. It doesn’t have to be this way. Feminists, peace campaigners, and other progressive activists have always fought against the denial, aestheticization, and rationalization of cruelty, as discussed in this blog in the contexts of hierarchies of sentience, military wounding/killing, and sexual violence.
It is important to be reminded that change is possible. We are a peaceful people. Few of us actually enjoy hurting others; even enthusiastic sadists ensure their partners have a safe-word in case delight turns into distress. Most people recognise the look of pain on other people’s faces, even if they are strangers. Many of us actively seek to reduce or eradicate other people’s suffering. Through the creation and cultivation of effective coalitions and strategies of resistance, it is possible to forge futures that treat the numerous forms of cruelty as aberrations, outside the human.
Of course, eradicating violence is not going to be easy. The most debilitating myth for people seeking to forge better worlds is the assertion that cruelty is inherent to what it means to be human. So many times when writing my books on pain, war, and rape, I have been told that violence has ‘been part of the human condition since the struggle between Cain and Abel, and regrettably they are likely to remain so’. Many commentators claim that violence is ‘deeply wired’ in evolutionary terms, or that it is culturally omnipresent. It may be utopian to believe in worlds where people act in kind, equitable, and non-violent ways. But it is my contention that we should aim for such a world. After all, to be human is to seek companionship, collaboration, friendship, and love. Cruel acts are social activities. As such, they can be unmade as well as made.
So, what is to be done? Cruelty and violence are unlikely to be stopped through legal and criminal justice systems. The law regulates war, rather than eradicating it. For example, the laws of war provide a language to authorise violence against civilians. By delineating categories of ‘illegitimate violence’, the rules and regulations of war implicitly and explicitly construct what is legitimate. This was what the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868 did: by creating the category of ‘unnecessary suffering’, it allowed for ‘necessary suffering’ in the name of ‘military necessity’. In other words, legal regulation and wartime violence are symbiotic: the codification of the laws of war has created the category of ‘humanitarian war’, or legal war, which legitimates and facilitates violence.
In the context of sexual violence, expanding criminal justice systems is also not a solution. Criminal law is extremely parsimonious about what is designated as violent sexual behaviour, fearing the criminalisation of ‘ordinary’ male misbehaviour. This is not to deny that legal and other legislative initiatives can play a part in forging more peaceable worlds. They are crucial in drawing public attention to the extent and seriousness of sexual violence, for example. Certain legal approaches (such as restorative justice) are consistent with feminist ambitions. The law may also be effective in establishing officially agreed norms of behaviour, such as the wrongness of a husband coercing his wife into sex or an employer sexually harassing his employee. However, it fails to dent persistent assumptions of male entitlement and its accompanying casual misogyny.
Activists are better placed spending their energies addressing systemic injustices, fuelled by sexism, racism, colonialism, economic injustice, heteronormativity, transphobia, militarism, climate denial, and neoliberal capitalisms. In other words, campaigns against violence cannot exist, thrive, or transform the world without alliances with other progressive causes. In the next few minutes, let me address four central tenets for transnational campaigns against sexual violence. These are: locality, diversity, pleasure, and the body.
First: local. Anti-violence strategies must attend to local needs and engage the political labour of local activists. It cannot be outsourced to (or directed by) outsiders. Often, these activities will be small and individual. For example, Cecil H. Cox was serving in Northern Italy during the First World War. He described the moment when he looked into the eyes of his enemy and refused to shoot. In his words:
I saw a young German coming towards me and at that moment I just could not murder him and lowered my gun, he saw me do so and he followed suit, shouting ‘What the h— do you want to kill me for, I dont [sic] want to kill you.’ he [sic] walked back with me and asked if I had anything to eat? At once the relief inside me was unspeakable, and I gave him my iron rations & my army biscuit.
State legitimatised killing was understood as ‘murder’ in a moment of epiphany that was ‘unspeakable’ at the time. Of course, Cox was immersed in a global, military slaughter in which his individual refusal to kill was a drop in an ocean of blood. But if it had been one of my loved ones whose life was saved, his courage would have been momentous.
Second, if justice is locally relevant, it is also culturally variable. By necessity, anti-violence initiatives will be diverse. This is meant in many ways but let me just mention two. They need to be inclusive in terms of personnel and strategy. All potential allies need to be welcomed. In the past, many anti-rape feminists have been reluctant to involve boys and men; today, many seem to fear trans-involvement. Thankfully, this is on the decline. Strategic diversity is also central. There is no singular template. Each of us have specific talents and spheres of influence. Wherever we are situated – as academics, homemakers, labourers, shopkeepers, secretaries, publishers, journalists, civil servants, teachers, students, entertainers, novelists, artists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, the unemployed, and so on – we can make a difference in our local contexts.
If the first two tenets are locality and diversity, the third is the embrace of pleasure. Activism is often tiring, dispiriting, and depressing. Positive and creative approaches are necessary. Anti-violence activists are emboldened by art, literature, poetry, film, performance theatre, and music. Poets, artists, satirists, filmmakers, and musicians have always played significant roles in resisting the ‘warification’ of our society. They have always been central to equality movements. This was why I started this blog with the poetry of Wanda Coleman, who eloquently evokes the suffering of the unnamed Black victim of multiple assaults. The poet Adrienne Rich has also reflected on the importance of all forms of artistic expression, not as ‘a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering’ but as a form of ‘resistance, which totalising systems want to quell’. She insisted that art and literature are capable of ‘reaching into us for what is still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched’. The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously coined the phrase ‘There is no alternative’ to her neoliberal policies, which earned her the nickname ‘TINA’. However, Rich argued, the ‘imagination’s roads open before us, giving the lie to that brutal dictum, “There is no alternative”.’ Rich maintained that when ‘poetry lays its hand on our shoulders we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved’.
Finally, there is the body. To make a permanent difference, individual resisters need to join with other resisters. Anti-militarist protest movements and anti-rape movements date back to classical times but are particularly powerful today. In Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis (2013), legal philosopher Costas Douzinas insists that ‘Ours is the age of resistance. The possibility of radical change has been firmly placed on the historical agenda’. If this is to become true, one central task is to reaffirm our right to engage in the public sphere. If we are to create worlds free of the cruelty inflicted by racist ideologies, militarism, and sexism, we will need to harness the political, economic, and cultural labour of allprogressive groups. Every community has a wealth of knowledge that can be used to address their particular needs and desires for a rape-free world. The rich tapestries of public and private resistance that are open to us are inspiring. They are hope-inducing.
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