POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND IDEOLOGICAL MYSTIFICATION

Is political violence, used to try to achieve a liberating social revolution or to redress some grave social injustice in a society at least nominally democratic, ever justified and if so when? Political violence, like violence generally, is in need of very special justification indeed. Bombs maim and kill. Violence gives rise to suffering and acute distress. Violence is plainly an evil and if it is ever justified it must be justified as a choosing of the lesser evil. My argument is that sometimes it is the lesser evil. When violence is in response to severe and protracted injustice and oppression, when there is extensive and reliable evidence for believing that no non-violent means for correcting the situation will be available in a reasonable length of time and when we have good grounds for believing that the proposed violence will (everything considered) cause less suffering and degradation than the present injustice and oppression is causing, then the course of violence is justified. It is more difficult to ascertain when these conditions are met than is generally realized, but there clearly are some appalling circumstances where these conditions are met such as the circumstances of life in the regimes of Arnin, Macias and Bokassa and the circumstances of life sustained by recent regimes in Chile and Argentina. These are situations in which there is a justification for political violence where it has a reasonable chance of success. There are, of course, many more doubtful cases where persons of moral sensitivity and knowledge may very well deeply disagree. But there are paradigm cases as well. We are not always in a moral bog here. It is much more difficult to say when, if ever, political violence of a revolutionary sort could be justified in a country that is nominally speaking a democracy. I suspect that if such a justification can be made at all it can only be made if a socialist perspective on society is justified. For such a justification to go through it is necessary but not sufficient to believe that a