THESES ON VIOLENCE

By Friedrich Hacker

[These theses are translated from the German in: Aggression. Die

Brutalisierung der Modernen Welt, 1973, Rowohlt, Hamburg, pp.13-15.]




1

Violence is the problem that pretends to be its solution.

2

Problems that can only be solved with violence must re-framed.

3

Naked violence is the visible, unbound and free form of aggression.

All aggression is not violent but all violence is aggression.

4

Violence is infectious like cholera. Violence owes its virulence to the

appearance of justification that makes it epidemic.

5

Violence feels justified as counterforce.

6

Violence prohibited as an offense is commanded, renamed and

justified as a sanction.

7

Justification causes and escalates what it wants to deny and conceal:

its own violence.

8

Justified violence seduces to imitation of both justification and violence.

9

The legitimation of violence makes use of label fraud. One’s own violence

is presented and perceived as necessity, natural law, obligation, duty,

self-defense and service of higher goals.

10

Denial and repression of one’s own aggression projected on the enemy

increase the likelihood of the enemy’s counterforce.

11

Violence is simple. Alternatives to violence are complex.

12

The antithesis to complexity is aggressive simplification, not simplicity.

The price for simplification is violence.

13

The unrecognized veiled mask and bond of aggression for controlling violence

becomes the cause of violence and justification of violence.

14

The explosion of fierce violence is to planned action of cold violence

as symptom is to strategy.

15

Strategy can bring about and utilize symptoms. In the strategic use of

symptomatic violence, manipulation controls spontaneous expression.

16

Reason is only an alternative to violence when it is not its justifier and

accomplice.

17

The forcible education to nonviolence is accustomed to the education

method, not the education intention and perpetuates the violence that

it wants to prevent.

18

The forcibly established need for violence is represented as a natural

condition.

19

Exceptions to the prohibition of violence become rules for the use of

force.

20

Total renunciation on force or non-aggression only preached or imposed

on others hides one’s own aggression and prepares the use of force through its

justification as counterforce.

21

Only owners, not the have-nots, can prevent the escalation of violence and

brutalization through the limitation of force and abstinence on force.

22

Violence is the secret message of the mass media. In its models of conflict

Resolution, the justified, rash and preventive use of force is encouraged.

The hero is the more successful one and often the brutal one.

23

To legitimate violence, its alternatives are eliminated, e.g. renunciation on

Patterns and label fraud, promotion of tolerance for complexity and strategies

of come-of-age existence.

24

The language of violence is not a language. The only ones who understand it

Are mental robots and emotional illiterates.

25

One can learn from violence without imitating it or bowing to it.