Defining Violence: Part III

What makes the 20th century unique from those previous is the event of globalization, the rise of nationalistic aspirations, and the development of increasingly “sophisticated” weapons. Yet these events represented the culmination of human ambition and ideology, which was conceived upon the dawn of civilization. Throughout the early modern period oppression occurred in a disturbingly intimate context. After the fall of the Roman empire feudal kings imposed their rule over small provinces, established laws and levied taxes over the subject population with absolute authority.

Such rulers persecuted resident minorities which commonly included pagans, gypsies, homosexuals, individuals suffering from disease or deformity, as well as people of differing faiths and ethnicities within their kingdom with immunity. Each ruler acted upon varying ideologies thus the persecution of a given subset differed greatly from region to region. The rise of Christianity during this period led to the genocidal killing and forced conversion of all the pagan people of Europe. Even among Christians, Protestants and Catholics fought bitterly and the rise of one faction or another to power often led to the slaughter of the deposed party. It is difficult to know how many people were killed because of the zealotry of individual leaders. The extermination of innumerable people throughout Europe and even the Middle East during the early modern period, although not as systematic as what occurred during WWII, was considerably more pervasive and there for more deadly.

In these agrarian societies peasants were legally bound to the land as serfs, land itself being owned entirely by the king. Under this system laborers turned the entity of their production over to the ruling authority, which divided the surplus among the urban population, before returning a small percentage of the share to the peasants themselves. These small returns were often not a enough to subsist upon, and serfs often died of starvation even as their labor fed the kingdom they were subservient to. Without birth certificates or proper medical records it is impossible to determine how many people died in this manner. We are aware through various accounts that the peasantry from England to the Ottoman empire suffered beneath such a feudal and indifferent system. Thus the collectivization of the agriculture within the Soviet Union was not only reminiscent of such a feudal system, it resurrected the feudal order within the ideology of Communism.

What is notable about the genocide committed during WWII, or the starvation of rural populations under Stalin, is that they were in contrast to much of the rest of the world. Such things no longer being common in our society made them atrocities. The manipulation of national aspirations, as well as the employment of new technologies, allowed for the full infliction of suffering as was in mans nature. Prior to the 20th century man only lacked the capacity for such violence yet the will to power was forever present.