PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POLITICAL VIOLENCE
The usefulness of violence as a means of obtaining political' ends is most respect- ably recognised in such instances as war and punishment; and in the activities of wagingwarfare and of exacting punishment what might be called public violence is justified. And a rough and ready rule of thumb may be applied to warfare and to punishment to test their justification, which is that the effect of just warfare, or of just punishment, should be to re- duce the amount of violence which might otherwise be reasonably expected to ensue. Such a rough and ready rule of thumb contains, however, omissions which prin- cipally have to do with wealth and pro- perty. Civil government, for instance, often seems more concerned to relate -punish- ments to property values than to physical violence; and wars designed to amass or to protect wealth have not been held- to be aggressive on that score, even though by any reasonable reckoning they may have produced far more violence than they could possibly be supposed to prevent or avoid.
By public order is normally meant not only the protection of individuals from the violence of others but also the pro- tection of property from the depredations of others. The right to own property is not negligible: few ordered and no ad- vanced societies have managed to dispense with it; and despite that the original acquisition of property may well have involved violence or the threat of violence, the possession of personal property is a right conceded by governments of all but utopian political persuasions. Thus the argument that proceeds from the Marxist premise that property is theft, via the consideration that theft is violent, to the conclusion that physical violence is per- missible if no other way to destroy pro- perty rights can be found readily to hand, is one that is admitted no more within communist, or totalitarian. countries than in catiitalist• ones. It is, indeed, an argu- ment put forward only by anarchists of one or other faction.
In any conceivable real world, as op- posed to the ideal or utopian worlds of which the sweeter-natured anarchists may fondly. idly, dream, anarchy itself cannot but be produced by violence and cannot itself yield any other human state but the state of violence. And insofar as re- volutionary objects and methods are not anarchic, but seek to bring about through violence a system of rule which would not come about by peaceable methods, then revolution, like anarchy, yields violence also, the violence of dictatorship. • A liberal and democratic. community need feel no qualms in protecting itself against the violence of anarchists and other revolutionaries, nor in the protection of property; although here it should be remarked that to the extent the law and its custodians have hitherto seemed more concerned with the protection of property than with the protection of life and limb, the balance should be redressed and crimes of violence against the person -should be regarded as much the most serious of all crimes, exceeding in the severity of the punishments they attract all other crimes. That they do not—murder and rape some- _ times apart—is due in part to an exces- sive regard shown by legislators and law- yers for property, and in part to .the sentimental concern most frequently shown by social reformers for crimes of violence among the young and politically motivated, hooliganism, vandaliSm, rioting, ganging up and so forth. In particular, political motivation should not, be seen as a mitiga- tion of whatever offence of violence is committed, but instead as an aggravation: those who act violently but mindlessly deserve more show of mercy than those wit-me violence is deliberate, aforethOught. cold-blooded, politically purposeful and maliciously designed to breed further vio- lence and disruption. The liberal and democratic and peaceable* community whose legislators set maximum penalties for crimes have every right to expect that when crimes of violence are committed for political purposes, then normally rather than abnormally those maximum penal- ties should be exacted. The violence of the politically motivated is not only bad in itself but marks its perpetrator as a very consciously committed enemy of the liberal and democratic and peaceable' community itself.
The test here lies in the use of violence. The liberal and democratic and peaceable community can tolerate an immense, per- haps an infinite, amount of argument and propaganda from those who wish to sub- vert it: for its arguments and its propa- ganda are better than its opponents' and it is part of its liberal and democratic nature to permit freedom of speech, which is to say, to permit dissension and the peaceful arguing of subversion. But since obviously violence cannot be part of its peaceable nature, violence, must be con- tinually stamped out as a fire is con- tinually stamped out until the violence or the lire is extinguished. The act of stamp- ing out violence or fires is itself necessarily a violent act: but the violence, .which is necessary, should nevertheless be no more than is necessary. At this present time, no more than is necessary means • also no less than is necessary; for it can hardly be argued with much force that, lest the violence. spread, lest the fire get out of control, it should be stamped out with less than exemplary forte.
This said, a kind of caveat remains. Although we discoUnt the argument from the assertion 'property is theft', . and al- though, we assert the desirability, from a liberal and democratic vices, of giving out maximum and exemplary punish- ments for crimes of violence against the person when committed for political rea- sons, it remains very much the case that such punishments arc most tolerable when given_ out by those with clean hands. The sympathy which many liberal andltumane democrats instinctively feel for youthful and violent revolutionaries may well he foolish and misguided; but it can easily be reinforced if it appears that in the conduct of affairs of state, public pol- itical violence is as much in. evidence as the private political violence of the re- volutionaries. If the governance of a country is itself violent in its nature. or tyrannous either within or without its national borders, then and only then it could be argued that revolutionary viol- ence would be justified in order to reduce the existing violence of the governance. Since—whatever may be the case else- where—no such argument could intel- ligently be applied to the state of affairs in this country, it follows ineluctably that public authority is entitled and obliged to stamp out with all requisite force each and every outbreak of private political violence that occurs, whether it be in Bel- fast, in Cambridge. or in Hadley Green.
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