Dictionary Definition
violently adv : in a violent manner; "they
attacked violently" [ant: nonviolently]
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Pronunciation
Adverb
violently- In a violent manner.
Extensive Definition
Violence is the exertion of force so as to injure
or abuse. The word is used broadly to describe the destructive
action of natural phenomena like storms and earthquakes. More frequently
the word describes forceful human destruction of property or injury
to persons, usually intentional, and forceful verbal and emotional
abuse that harms others.
Psychology and sociology
see also AggressionThe causes of violent behavior in humans are
often topics of research in psychology and sociology. Neurobiologist Jan
Volavka emphasizes that for those purposes, “violent behavior is
defined as overt and intentional physically aggressive behavior
against another person."
Scientists disagree on whether violence is
inherent in humans. Among prehistoric humans, there is
archaeological evidence for both contentions of violence and
peacefulness as primary characteristics.
Riane
Eisler, who describes early matriarchal societies, and Walter Wink,
who coined the phrase “the myth of redemptive violence,” suggest
that human violence, especially as organized in groups, is a
phenomenon of the last five to ten thousand years.
The “violent male ape” image is often brought up
in discussions of human violence. Dale Peterson and Richard
Wrangham in “Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human
Violence” write that violence is inherent in humans. However,
William L. Ury, editor of a book called "Must We Fight? From the
Battlefield to the Schoolyard--A New Perspective on Violent
Conflict and Its Prevention” debunks the "killer ape" myth in his
book which brings together discussions from two Harvard Law School
symposiums. The conclusion is that “we also have lots of natural
mechanisms for cooperation, to keep conflict in check, to channel
aggression, and to overcome conflict. These are just as natural to
us as the aggressive tendencies."
James Gilligan writes violence is often pursued
as an antidote to shame or humiliation. The use of violence often
is a source of pride and a defence of honor, especially among males
who often believe violence defines manhood.
Stephen Pinker in a New
Republic article “The History of Violence” offers evidence that
on the average the amount and cruelty of violence to humans and
animals has decreased over the last few centuries.
Law
One of the main functions of law is to regulate violence and
violent crimes.
Sociologist Max Weber
stated that state power is the
monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force on a specific
territory. Law
enforcement is the main means of regulating nonmilitary
violence in society.
Governments regulate the use of violence through
legal
systems governing individuals and political authorities,
including the police and
military. Most
societies condone some amount of police
violence to maintain the status quo and enforce laws.
However, German political theorist Hannah
Arendt noted: "Violence can be justifiable, but it never will
be legitimate ... Its justification loses in plausibility the
farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions
the use of violence in self-defence, because the danger is not only
clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is
immediate". Many governments do abuse their monopoly on power to
engage in violence against citizens. In the twentieth
century in acts of democide governments may have
killed more than 260 million of their own people through police
brutality, execution, massacre, slave labor camps,
and through sometimes intentional famine.
Damage to
property is usually considered a less serious offense unless
the damage injures, or potentially could injure, others.
Unpremeditated or small-scale acts of random violence or
coordinated violence by unsanctioned private groups usually are
prosecuted. While most societies condone the killing of animals for
food and sport, increasingly they have
adopted mores and laws against animal
cruelty.
The
Federal Bureau of Investigation classifies violence resulting
in homicide, into
criminal homicide and
justifiable
homicide (e.g. self defense).
Below are some forms of violent crimes outlawed by governmental
legal entities:
War
War is a state of prolonged violent, large-scale conflict involving two or more groups of people, usually under the auspices of government. War is fought as a means of resolving territorial and other conflicts, as war of aggression to conquer territory or loot resources, in national self-defense, or to suppress attempts of part of the nation to secede from it.Since the Industrial
Revolution, the lethality of modern warfare has steadily grown.
World
War I casualties were over 40 million and World
War II casualties were over 70 million.
Nevertheless, some hold the actual deaths from
war have decreased compared to past centuries. Lawrence H. Keeley,
a professor at the University of Illinois, calculates that 87 per
cent of tribal
societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per
cent of them were fighting continuously. The attrition rate of
numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize endemic
warfare, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1%
of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare. Stephen Pinker
agrees, writing that “in tribal violence, the clashes are more
frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is
greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.”
Jared
Diamond in his award-winning books, Guns,
Germs and Steel and The
Third Chimpanzee provides sociological and anthropological
evidence for the rise of large scale warfare as a result of
advances in technology and city-states. The rise of agriculture
provided a significant increase in the number of individuals that a
region could sustain over hunter-gatherer societies, allowing for
development of specialized classes such as soldiers, or weapons
manufacturers. On the other hand, tribal conflicts in
hunter-gatherer societies tend to result in wholesale slaughter of
the opposition (other than perhaps females of child-bearing years)
instead of territorial conquest or slavery, presumably as
hunter-gatherer numbers could not sustain empire-building.
Religious and political ideology
Religious and political ideologies have been the
cause of interpersonal violence, and violent riots, political
repression, ethnic
cleansing and genocide through out history.
Ideologues often falsely accuse others of violence, such as the
ancient blood libel
against Jews, the medieval accusations of casting
witchcraft spells
against women, caricatures of black men as “violent brutes” that
helped excuse the late nineteenth
century Jim Crow
laws in the United States, and modern accusations of satanic
ritual abuse against day care center owners and others.
Both supporters and opponents of the twenty-first
century war on
terrorism regard it largely as an ideological and religious
war.
Vittorio Bufacchi describes two different modern
concepts of violence, one the “minimalist conception” of violence
as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force, the other
the “comprehensive conception” which includes violations of rights,
including a long list of human needs. These concepts are reflected
in conflicts between “left wing”
anti-capitalists
and “right
wing’” pro-capitalists.
Anti-capitalists
assert that “capitalism is violent.” They
believe private
property, trade,
interest and profit survive only because
police violence defends them and that capitalist economies need war
to expand. Many contest calling any form of property damage
“violent.” Similarly, many anti-capitalists lambast what they call
“structural
violence” which denotes a form of violence in which social
institutions kill people slowly by preventing them from meeting
their basic needs, often leading further to social conflict and
violence.
Supporters of capitalism are wary of a wide
definition of violence that requires the state and its violent
enforcement agencies to fulfill all needs denied by structural
violence. However, unlike those critics who support state
capitalism, free market
supporters argue that it is violently enforced state laws
intervening in markets which cause many of the problems
anti-capitalists attribute to structural violence.
Throughout history, some religions like Jainism, Buddhism, Quakerism and
individuals like Mahatma
Gandhi have preached that humans are capable of eliminating
individual violence and organizing societies through purely
nonviolent means.
Gandhi himself once wrote: “A society organized and run on the
basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy.” Modern
political ideologies which espouse similar views include pacifist
varieties of voluntarism,
mutualism, anarchism and libertarianism.
Health and prevention
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines
violence as "Injury inflicted by deliberate means", which includes
assault, as well as "legal intervention, and self-harm". The
World
Health Organization ( “WHO”)
in its first World Report on Violence and Health defined violence
as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or
actual, against oneself, another person or against a group or
community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of
resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or
deprivation."
WHO estimates that each year around 1.6 million
lives are lost world-wide due to violence. It is among the leading
causes of death for people ages 15-44, especially of males.
Recent estimates for murders per year in various
countries include: 55,000 murders in Brazil, 30,000
murders in Russia, 25,000
murders in Colombia,, 20,000
murders in South
Africa, 15,000 murders in Mexico, 14,000
murders in the United
States,, 11,000 murders in Venezuela, 6,000
murders in El Salvador,
1,600 murders in Jamaica, 1000
murders in France, 500 murders
in Canada,
and 200 murders in Chile. jens E er
bøsse
Structural violence
A form of violence which corresponds with the systematic ways in which a given social structure or social institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.Johan
Galtung defines violence as "avoidable insult to basic human
needs": survival, well being, identity, and freedom.
Violence in the media
The topic of violence in popular media is
controversial. This includes violence in films, television, music, comic books,
and video
games and televised sports.
Violence in the media has led to government censorship and regulation. In the United
States the
FCC regulates television and radio, as does the
CRTC in Canada. Media also
self-regulate, as through many movie
rating systems and the
Entertainment Software Rating Board for video games.
Violent content has been a central part of
video
game controversy. Critics like Dave
Grossman and Jack
Thompson argue that violence in games (some of which they both
call "murder simulators") hardens children to unethical acts.
Historical examples of violence
splitsection
Historical examples of violence Acts of violence are commonly
found in historical record. The following is an incomplete list of
some of the more large-scale examples of violence in history.
Caesar's campaigns
As many as 1 million people (probably 1 in 4 of the Gauls) died, another million were enslaved, 300 tribes were subjugated and 800 cities were destroyed during the Gallic Wars (present-day France). The entire population of city of Avaricum (Bourges) (40,000 in all) was slaughtered. During Julius Caesar's campaign against the Helvetii (modern-day Switzerland) approximately 60% of the tribe was destroyed, and another 20% was taken into slavery.Boudica's uprising
Boudica (d. 60/61AD) was a queen of the Celtic Iceni people of Norfolk in Roman-occupied Britain who led a major uprising of the tribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire. They destroyed Camulodunum (Colchester, a settlement forhghg discharged Roman soldiers), Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans). In the three cities destroyed, between 70,000 and 80,000 people are said to have been killed. Tacitus says the Britons had no interest in taking or selling prisoners, only in slaughter by gibbet, fire or cross. Cassius Dio's account gives more prurient detail: that the noblest women were impaled on spikes and had their breasts cut off and sewn to their mouths, "to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and wanton behaviour" in sacred places, particularly the groves of Andraste.Albigensian Crusade
The Albigensian Crusade or "Cathar Crusade" (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by the Pope Innocent III of the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate the heresy of the Cathars of Languedoc. Béziers was a Languedoc stronghold of Catharism and the first city to be sacked, on July 22, 1209. In the bloody massacre which followed, no one was spared, not even those who took refuge in the churches. The commander of the Crusade was the Papal Legate Arnaud-Amaury (or Arnald Amalaricus, Abbot of Citeaux). When asked by a Crusader how to distinguish between the Catholics and Cathars once they'd taken the city, the abbot famously replied, "Kill them all, God will know His own" - "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet". According to "Caesarius of Heisterbach: Medieval Heresies," after the city was taken, at a cost in life of thousands of defenders, about 450 heretics were "examined" by the inquisitors and many of them claimed to be good Catholicss rather than being heretics. Fearing the possibility that these were lying, must have caused the infamous phrase to first be uttered. In the end, the Albigensian Crusade killed an estimated 1,000,000 people, not only Cathars but much of the population of southern France.Mongol Empire
Quoting Eric Margolis, Adam Jones observes, in his book Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, that in the 13th century the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan were genocidal killers (génocidaires) who were known to kill whole nations leaving nothing but empty ruins and bones. Many ancient sources described Genghis Khan's conquests as wholesale destruction on an unprecedented scale in their certain geographical regions, and therefore probably causing great changes in the demographics of Asia. For example, over much of Central Asia speakers of Iranian languages were replaced by speakers of Turkic languages. The eastern part of the Islamic world experienced the terrifying holocaust of the Mongol invasions, which turned northern and eastern Iran into a desert. Between 1220 and 1260, the total population of Persia may have had dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine.Before the Mongol invasion, Chinese dynasties
reportedly had approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the
conquest was completed in 1279, the 1300 census reported roughly 60
million people. About half of the Russian population
died during the Mongol
invasion of Rus. Historians estimate that up to half of
Hungary's
two million population at that time were victims of the
Mongol invasion of Europe.
The Pope Innocent IV’s
envoy to the Mongol Khan, who passed through Kiev in February 1246,
wrote:
''"They [the Mongols] attacked Russia, where they
made great havoc, destroying cities and fortresses and slaughtering
men; and they laid siege to Kiev, the capital of Russia; after they
had besieged the city for a long time, they took it and put the
inhabitants to death. When we were journeying through that land we
came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on
the ground. Kiev had been a very large and thickly populated town,
but now it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the
present time scarce two hundred houses there and the inhabitants
are kept in complete slavery."''
Timur’s conquests
Timur Lenk was a 14th century conqueror of much of Middle East and Central Asia, and founder of the Timurid dynasty. He thought of himself as a ghazi, but his biggest wars were against Muslim states. In 1383 Timur started the military conquest of Persia. He captured Herat, Khorasan and all eastern Persia to 1385 and massacred almost all inhabitants of Neishapur and other Iranian cities. When revolts broke out in Persia, he ruthlessly suppressed them, massacring the populations of whole cities. When Timur entered Delhi (India), the city was sacked, destroyed, and left in ruins. When Timur conquered Persia, Iraq and Syria, the civilian population was decimated. In the city of Isfahan he ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000 human skulls, from those that his army had beheaded, and a pyramid of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside the Aleppo. Timur herded thousands of citizens of Damascus into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame, and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit, and another 90,000 more in Baghdad. After the capture of Bagdad, Timur ordered that every soldier should return with at least two severed human heads to show him (many warriors were so scared they killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign just to ensure they had heads to present to Timur). Nestorian Christians east of Iraq were almost entirely eliminated by Timur. As many as 17 million people may have died from his conquests.Aztec human sacrifice
The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of victims (often slaves or prisoners of war) annually to the sun god Huitzilopochtli; an offering to Huitzilopochtli would be made to restore the blood he lost, as the sun was engaged in a daily battle. Human sacrifices would prevent the end of the world that could happen on each cycle of 52 years. For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they sacrificed about 80,400 people over the course of four days. According to Ross Hassing, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.Vlad the Impaler
Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, the 15th century ruler of Wallachia in present-day Romania, has been characterized as exceedingly cruel. Impalement was his preferred method of torture and execution. As expected, death by impalement was slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days. Impalement was Vlad's favourite method of torture but was by no means his only one. The list of tortures he is alleged to have employed is extensive: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to animals, and boiling alive. No one was immune to Vlad the Impaler's attentions. His victims included women and children, peasants and great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants. In 1459, he had 30,000 of the Saxon merchants and officials of the Transylvanian city of Kronstadt who were transgressing his authority impaled. In 1462 Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, during his campaign against Wallachia, was “greeted” by the sight of veritable forest of stakes on which Vlad the Impaler had impaled 20,000 Turkish prisoners. Dracula was probably killed in battle against the Ottoman Empire near Bucharest in December of 1476.Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War was fought between 1618 and 1648, primarily on the territory of Holy Roman Empire. Virtually all of the major European powers were involved. The Thirty Years' War was the most destructive conflict in Europe prior to World War I. Atrocities and massacres, such as Sack of Magdeburg, became standard methods of warfare. During the war, Germany's population was reduced by 30% on average; in the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas an estimated two thirds of the population died. Germany’s male population was reduced by almost half. The population of the Czech lands declined by a third. The Swedish armies alone destroyed 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.Reconquest of Ireland
It is estimated that as much as a third of the entire population of Ireland perished during the civil wars and subsequent Cromwellian conquest in the mid-17th century. Since the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Ireland had been mainly under the control of the Irish Confederate Catholics. The Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland was extremely brutal, and it has been alleged that many of the army's actions during the reconquest would today be called war crimes or even genocide. William Petty who conducted the first scientific land and demographic survey of Ireland in the 1650s (the Down Survey), concluded that at least 400,000 people and maybe as many as 620,000 had died in Ireland between 1641 and 1653, many as a result of famine and plague. At the time, Ireland had around 1.5 million inhabitants.The Deluge
During the 1640s and 1650s the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its populations (over 3 million people). First, the Chmielnicki Uprising when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine). It is recorded that Khmelnytsky told the people that the Poles had sold them as slaves "into the hands of the accursed Jews". It is estimated that 100,000 Jews were massacred and 300 of their communities destroyed. The decrease of the Jewish population during that period (referred to in Polish history as The Deluge) is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases and jasyr (captivity in the Ottoman Empire).Revolt in the Vendée
Vendée is remembered as the place where the peasants revolted against the French Revolutionary government in 1793. They resented the changes imposed on the Roman Catholic Church by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) and broke into open revolt in defiance of the Revolutionary government's military conscription. This guerrilla war became known as the Revolt in the Vendée, led at the outset by an underground faction called the Chouans.Initially the Vendée rebels gained the upper
hand, so on August 1 1793
the
Committee of Public Safety ordered General Jean-Baptiste
Carrier to carry out a pacification of the region. The
Republican army was reinforced and the Vendéan army was eventually
defeated. The Reign of
Terror, seen elsewhere in France, was extraordinarily brutal in
the Vendée. There was a massacre of 6,000 Vendée prisoners, many of
them women, after the battle of Savenay. Subsequently, there was
the drowning of 3,000 Vendée women at Pont-au-Baux. This was
followed by 5,000 Vendée priests, old men, women, and children
killed by drowning at the Loire River
at Nantes in
what was called the "national bath" - tied in groups in barges and
then sunk into the Loire. Under orders from Committee of Public
Safety in February 1794 the Republican forces launched their final
"pacification" (the Vendée-Vengé or "'Vendée Avenged") - twelve
columns, the colonnes infernales ("infernal columns") under
Louis-Marie Turreau, were marched through the Vendée,
indiscriminately targeting not only the remaining rebels and the
people who had given them support, but the innocent as well.
Beyond these massacres there were formal orders
for forced evacuation and 'scorched
earth' - farms were destroyed, crops and forests burned, and
villages razed. There were many reported atrocities and a campaign
of mass killing universally targeted at residents of the Vendée
regardless of combatant status, political affiliation, age or
gender. Some consider these acts to be the first modern genocide. The campaign was
ordered as such by the Comité de Salut public:
"The committee has prepared measures that tend to
exterminate this rebellious race of Vendéeans, to make their abodes
disappear, to torch their forests, to cut their crops."
The orders to Turreau were:
"Exterminate the brigands to the last man instead
of burning the farms, punish the fleeing ones and the cowards, and
crush that horrible Vendée. Combine the most assured means to
exterminate all of this race of brigands."
When the campaign dragged to an end in March 1796
the estimated dead numbered between 117,000 and 500,000, of a
population of around 800,000.
Wahhabist conquests
The Saudi Wahabbist sheiks were convinced that it was their religious mission to wage holy war (jihad) against all other forms of Islam. In 1801 and 1802, the Saudi Wahhabists under Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad ibn Saud attacked and captured the holy Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq, massacred the Shiites and destroyed the tombs of the Shiite Imam Husayn and Ali bin Abu Talib. In 1802 they occupied Taif where they massacred the population. In 1803 and 1804 the Wahhabis captured Mecca and Medina. In Mecca and Medina they destroyed monuments and various holy Muslim sites and shrines, such as the shrine built over the tomb of Fatima Zahra, the daughter of Muhammad, and even intended to destroy the grave of the Prophet Muhammad.Taiping Rebellion
During the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) that followed the secession of the Tàipíng Tiānguó (太平天國, Heavenly Kingdom of Perfect Peace) from the Qing empire both sides tried to deprive each other of the resources to continue the war and it became standard practice to destroy agricultural areas, butcher the population of cities and in general exact a brutal price from captured enemy lands in order to drastically weaken the opposition's war effort. This war truly was total in that civilians on both sides participated to a significant extent in the war effort and in that armies on both sides waged war on the civilian population as well as military forces. In total between 20 and 30 million died in the conflict making it bloodier than the World War I or Russian Civil War.War of the Triple Alliance
War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) was the bloodiest conflict in the history of South America, fought between Paraguay and the allied countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Paraguay’s prewar population of between one and one-half million was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men. Paraguay's dictator, Francisco Solano López, is widely regarded as being responsible for the war, which led to his death. "Conquer or die" became the order of the day. Lopez ordered thousands of executions in the military. In 1868, when the allies were pressing him hard, he convinced himself that his Paraguayan supporters had actually formed a conspiracy against his life. Thereupon several hundred prominent Paraguayan citizens were seized and executed by his order, including his brothers and brothers-in-law, cabinet ministers, judges, prefects, military officers, bishops and priests, and nine-tenths of the civil officers, together with 500 foreigners, among them several members of the diplomatic legations (the San Fernando massacres). The bodies were dumped into mass graves.Indian Wars
In his book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, amateur historian William M. Osborn sought to tally every recorded atrocity in the area that would eventually become the continental United States, from first contact (1511) to the closing of the frontier (1890), and determined that 9,156 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans, and 7,193 people died from those perpetrated by settlers. Osborn defines an atrocity as the murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners. It was estimated that nearly 100,000 Native Americans were murdered in the expansion of the United States.Second Boer War
The English term "concentration camp" was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899–1902).These had originally been set up as "refugee
camps" by the Army for families whose farms had been destroyed by
the British under their "Scorched
Earth" policy (sweeping the country bare of everything that
could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women
and children, and including destroying crops, burning down
homesteads and farms, poisoning wells, and salting fields) and
thousands of Boers had already been brought into them.
Kitchener succeeded
Roberts as commander-in-chief in South Africa in November 29,
1900 and in an attempt to break the guerilla campaign, initiated
plans to "flush out guerrillas in a series of sytematic drives,
organized like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly
'bag' of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country
bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas,
including women and children. . . . It was the clearance of
civilians -- uprooting a whole nation -- that would come to
dominate the last phase of the war." Following Kitchener's new
policy, more camps were built and converted to prisons and many
tens of thousands more women and children were forcibly moved to
prevent the Boers from resupplying at their homes.
By August 1901, 93,940 Boers were
reported to be in "camps of refuge". A report after the war
concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 24,074 [50% of the Boer child
population] were children under 16) had died of starvation, disease
and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four
(25%) of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died.
Don Cossacks
Following the defeat of the White Army in Russian Civil War, a policy of decossackization (Raskazachivaniye) took place on the surviving Cossacks and their homelands since they were viewed as potential threat to the new Soviet regime. That was the first example when Soviet leaders decided to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory". The Cossack homelands were often very fertile, and during the collectivisation campaign many Cossacks shared the fate of kulaks. The man-made Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 hit the Don and Kuban territory the hardest. According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".Spanish Civil War
The number of casualties is disputed; estimates generally suggest that between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in the Spanish Civil War. Over the years, historians kept lowering the death figures and modern research concludes that 500,000 deaths is the correct figure. Atrocities during the war were committed on both sides. At least 50,000 were executed during the civil war. Franco's victory was followed by tens of thousands of summary executions.In his recent, updated history of the Spanish
Civil War, Antony
Beevor "reckons Franco's ensuing 'white terror' claimed 200,000
lives. The 'red
terror' had already killed 38,000." Julius Ruiz concludes that
"although the figures remain disputed, a minimum of 37,843
executions were carried out in the Republican zone with a maximum
of 150,000 executions (including 50,000 after the war) in Nationalist
Spain." In Checas de Madrid, César Vidal comes to a nationwide
total of 110,965 victims of Republican repression; 11,705 people
being killed in Madrid alone.
During World War II
Germany
During World War II, the holocaust initiated by the German National Socialist party killed millions of people: Slavs, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Communists, Serbs, and especially Jews. After the end of World War II, this genocide came to be known as the Holocaust. Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and homosexuals and anybody considered a threat to the Nazi party were rounded up and sent to labour camps, death camps, or just killed in their homes.The Nazi occupation of Poland resulted in
the death of one-fifth of the population, some 6 million people,
half of them Jewish. The Soviet Union
lost an estimated 27 million people during the war, about half of
all World
War II casualties. Of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs captured by the
Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end
of the war.
Japan
Japanese soldiers rounded up and killed millions of civilians and prisoners of wars from surrounding nations, especially from Korea, China, Philippines and US during World War II. At least 20 million Chinese died during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).Unit 731 was
amongst one of the most notorious examples of wartime atrocities
committed on a civilian population during World War
II, where cruel and inhumane experiments were done to thousands
of Chinese
civilians and Allied prisoners of
war. The
Rape of Nanking is another example of atrocity committed by
Japanese soldiers on a civilian population. Hundreds of thousands
of men were slaughtered, while women of all ages were
systematically raped and / or killed by Japanese soldiers.
The Three
Alls Policy (Sankō Sakusen) was a Japanese scorched
earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three
alls being: "Kill All, Burn All and Loot All". Initiated in 1940 by
Ryūkichi
Tanaka, the Sankō Sakusen was implemented in full scale in 1942
in north
China by Yasuji
Okamura who divided the territory into pacified, semi-pacified
and unpacified areas. The approval of the policy was given by
Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 575 on 3 December
1941.
Because of the sheer scale of suffering caused by
the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s, it is often
compared to the military of Nazi Germany
during 1933–45. Much of the controversy regarding Japan's
role in World War II revolves around the death rates of prisoners
of war and civilians under Japanese occupation. The historian
Chalmers
Johnson has written that:
It may be pointless to try to establish which
World War Two Axis
aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it
victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million
Russians [i.e. Soviet
citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million
Filipinos,
Malays,
Vietnamese,
Cambodians,
Indonesians and
Burmese, at
least 23 million of them ethnic
Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a
monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer
period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and
exploited them as forced
labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as
[forced] prostitutes
for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from
Britain,
America,
Australia,
New
Zealand or Canada (but not
Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by
comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was
nearly 30 %.''
Soviet Union
According to the historian Norman
Naimark, the propaganda of Soviet troop newspapers and the
orders of Soviet high command were jointly responsible for excesses
by members of the Red Army. The general tenor in the writings was
that the Red
Army had come to Germany as an avenger and judge to punish the
Germans. On January 12, 1945 army General Cherniakhovsky
turned to his troops with the words: There shall be no mercy - for
nobody, as there had also been no mercy for us... The land of the
fascists must become a desert …
On the German side, any organized evacuation of
civilians was forbidden by the Nazi government to boost morale of
the troops, now for the first time defending the "Fatherland", even
when the Red Army entered German territory in the last months of
1944. It is estimated that Soviet soldiers raped at least 2,000,000
German women and girls, an estimated 200,000 of whom later died
from injuries sustained, committed suicide, or were murdered
outright.
Mao Zedong
Mao’s first political campaigns after founding the People’s Republic were land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, which centered on mass executions, often before organized crowds. These campaigns of mass repression targeted former KMT officials, businessmen, former employees of Western companies, intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect, and significant numbers of rural gentry. The U.S. State department in 1976 estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform, 800,000 killed in the counterrevolutionary campaign. Mao himself claimed a total of 700,000 killed during these early years (1949–53). However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution", 1 million deaths seems to be an absolute minimum, and many authors agree on a figure of between 2 million and 5 million dead. In addition, at least 1.5 million people were sent to "reform through labour" camps (laogai). Mao’s personal role in ordering mass executions is undeniable. He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.It is estimated that hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions, perished in the violence of the Cultural
Revolution. When Mao was informed of such losses, particularly
that people had been driven to suicide, he blithely commented:
"People who try to commit suicide - don't attempt to save them! . .
. China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do
without a few people."
Equatorial Guinea
In September 1968, Francisco Macías Nguema was elected first president of Equatorial Guinea, and independence was granted in October. In July 1970, Nguema created a single-party state. In 1972 Nguema took complete control of the government and assumed the title of President for Life. Nguema’s regime was characterized by abandonment of all government functions except internal security, which was accomplished by terror; he acted as chief judge who sentenced thousands to death. This led to the death or exile of up to 1/3 of the country's population. Out of a population of 300,000, an estimated 80,000 had been killed. Uneasy around educated people, he had killed everyone who wore spectacles. All schools were ordered closed in 1975. The economy collapsed, and skilled citizens and foreigners left.Idi Amin Dada
Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, is notorious for being one of the bloodiest dictators of the 20th century. The exact number of people killed is unknown. The International Commission of Jurists estimated the death toll at no fewer than 80,000 and more likely around 300,000. An estimate compiled by exile organizations with the help of Amnesty International puts the number killed at 500,000. The victims soon came to include members of other ethnic groups, religious leaders, journalists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, students and intellectuals, criminal suspects, and foreign nationals. In some cases entire villages were wiped out. Bodies were dumped into the River Nile, on at least one occasion in quantities sufficient to clog the Owen Falls Hydro-Electric Dam in Jinja.Ethiopia
During Mengistu’s 17-year reign it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel sympathisers hanging from lampposts each morning. Mengistu himself is alleged to have murdered opponents by garroting or shooting them, saying that he was leading by example. Some experts have estimated that 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed during Mengistu's rule. Amnesty International estimates that up to 500,000 people were killed during the Red Terror of 1977 and 1978. On 12 December 2006 Mengistu Haile Mariam was found guilty of genocide and other offences. He was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007.Western New Guinea
Amnesty International has estimated that more than 100,000 Papuans, one-sixth of the population, have died as a result of government-sponsored violence against West Papuans, while others had previously specified much higher death tolls. In 2004 the Yale University Law School published "Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control", a 75 page report detailing the applicability of Indonesian control to each of the genocide conventions.Algerian Civil War
During the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, a variety of massacres occurred. The massacres peaked in 1997 (with a smaller peak in 1994), and were particularly concentrated in the areas between Algiers and Oran, with very few occurring in the east or in the Sahara. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people lost their lives during the conflict.Starting around April 1997 (the Thalit
massacre), Algeria was wracked by massacres of intense
brutality and unprecedented size; previous massacres had occurred
in the conflict, but always on a substantially smaller scale.
Typically targeting entire villages or neighborhoods and
disregarding the age and sex of victims, the Armed
Islamic Group (GIA) guerrillas killed tens, and sometimes
hundreds, of civilians at a time. These massacres continued through
the end of 1998, changing the nature of the political situation
considerably. The areas south and east of Algiers were hit
particularly hard; the Rais and
Bentalha
massacres in particular shocked worldwide observers. Pregnant
women were sliced open, children were hacked to pieces or dashed
against walls, men's limbs were hacked off one by one, and, as the
attackers retreated, they would kidnap young women to keep as sex
slaves. This quotation by Nesroullah Yous, a survivor of Bentalha,
expresses the apparent mood of the attackers:
We have the whole night to rape your women and
children, drink your blood. Even if you escape today, we'll come
back tomorrow to finish you off! We're here to send you to your
God!"
The GIA's
responsibility for these massacres is undisputed; it claimed credit
for both Rais and Bentalha (calling the killings an "offering to
God" and the victims "impious" supporters of tyrants in a press
release), and its policy of massacring civilians was cited by the
Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat as one of the main
reasons it split off from the GIA. At this stage, it had apparently
adopted a takfirist
ideology, believing that practically all Algerians not actively
fighting the government were corrupt to the point of being kafirs, and could be killed
righteously with impunity; an unconfirmed communiqué by Zouabri had
stated that "except for those who are with us, all others are
apostates and deserving of death."
Second Congo War
The Second Congo War, also known as Africa's World War, began in 1998. The largest war in modern African history, one of the deadliest conflicts since World War II, it directly involved eight African nations, as well as about 25 armed groups. Nearly 5 million people have died. A U.N. human rights expert reported in July 2007 that sexual atrocities against Congolese women go 'far beyond rape' and include sexual slavery, forced incest, and cannibalism.See also
References
Sources
- Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence
- Arno Gruen psychoanalyst who has written extensively on the origins of violence
- Flannery, D.J., Vazsonyi, A.T.& Waldman, I.D. (Eds.) (2007). The Cambridge handbook of violent behavior and aggression. Cambridge University Press, NY.
- Nazaretyan, A.P. (2007). Violence and Non-Violence at Different Stages of World History: A view from the hypothesis of techno-humanitarian balance. In: History & Mathematics. Moscow: KomKniga/URSS. P.127-148. ISBN 9785484010011.
External links
- Information on James W. Prescott's work
- 1986 Seville Statement on Violence
- Introduction and Updated Information on the Seville Statement on Violence
- The Meanings of Violence and the Violence of Meanings Intercultural discussions on violence
- Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma
- Violence Prevention Institute
- Text of Dom Helder Camara's classic 1971 "Spiral of Violence"
- Boys Equally At Risk For Partner Violence
- Violent Youth
violently in Arabic: عنف
violently in Bulgarian: Насилие
violently in Catalan: Violència
violently in Czech: Násilí
violently in Danish: Vold (handling)
violently in German: Gewalt
violently in Modern Greek (1453-): Βία
violently in Spanish: Violencia
violently in Esperanto: Violento
violently in Basque: Indarkeria
violently in French: Violence
violently in Galician: Violencia
violently in Croatian: Nasilje
violently in Indonesian: Kekerasan
violently in Italian: Violenza
violently in Hebrew: אלימות
violently in Luxembourgish: Gewalt
violently in Hungarian: Erőszak
violently in Dutch: Geweld
violently in Japanese: 暴力
violently in Norwegian: Vold
violently in Norwegian Nynorsk: Vald
violently in Occitan (post 1500):
Violéncia
violently in Polish: Przemoc
violently in Portuguese: Violência
violently in Russian: Брутальность
violently in Simple English: Violence
violently in Slovak: Násilie
violently in Serbian: Насиље
violently in Serbo-Croatian: Nasilje
violently in Finnish: Väkivalta
violently in Swedish: Våld
violently in Turkish: Şiddet
violently in Chinese: 暴力
Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words
all to pieces, deliriously, demonically, desperately, destructively, distractedly, fanatically, fiercely, frantically, frenetically, frenziedly, furiously, hotly, like blazes, like fury,
like mad, like one possessed, madly, rabidly, rigorously, severely, stormily, turbulently, uncontrollably, vehemently, venomously, virulently, wildly, with a
vengeance