Violence in Discourse

How discourse around, and narratives of violence uphold and legitimize the status quo
For two days in May of 2016, the owners and operators of the Welzow-Süd open-pit coal mine and the
neighbouring “Schwarze Pumpe” coal-fired powerplant saw one of, if not the largest civil-
disobedience campaign conducted against fossil fuel emitters on german soil halt their operation for 2
days. In these 2 days, the area was descended upon by 3500 to 4000 protesters, essentially putting
themselves in the way of heavy machinery in an effort to shut down the extraction, refinement and
burning of fossil fuels from this site. The operation, part of a global campaign of climate action called
“break free”, marked the second year of protest under the Ende-Gelände banner, and despite its short-
lived nature was considered a “successful blockade” by the organisation (Ende Gelände, 2016).
Indeed, the plant’s operating capacity was lowered by 80%, according to the Ende-Gelände website.
Protesters, arriving by bus, bike or on foot, used primarily non-disruptive methods such as mass sit-ins
to voice their discontent, even confirming a de-escalatory approach to the police (mdr.de, 2016). There
were no reported instances of assaults or injuries instigated on part of the activists. The “preliminary
arrests” of around 120 were conducted on grounds of “disturbing the peace”, “resistance against law
enforcement”, and property damage. The only parties injured in the proceeding events were protesters,
themselves unarmed, through the use of police-batons and pepper spray. Additionally, reports of neo-
Nazi counter-protesters armed with knives emerged in the ensuing media coverage (Dassler &
Metzner, 2016).
Despite the overwhelmingly peaceful methods, discourse around this event took on an
overwhelmingly negative stance. Even before the protest, Wolfgang Rupieper, chairman of “pro
Lausitzer Braunkohle”, designated the announced civil unrest as violence, threatening judicial
reprisals against activists (Arzt, 2016). The same organisation, funded by the state-owned Swedish
power company Vattenfall that owned the powerplant in question at the time, put up thousands of
posters in the region reading “Pfingsten 2016, Gewalt stoppen” ahead of the expected protests, again
using the term violence (Geisler, 2018). The CEO of Vattenfall Europe Mining, Hartmuth Zeis,
continued this rhetoric later on, denoting the movement as “massive criminal acts of violence”
(Dassler & Metzner, 2016).
It is in front of this context that in the following essay I want to discuss how discourse around, and
narratives of violence are used as a tool for upholding and legitimising the existing power structures of
political and economic life, obstructing progressive movements while emboldening right-wing
political movements. So let us first discuss this subject of violence and how our understanding of
violence has evolved over time, before analysing its role in contemporary discourse on political
culture. Remaining in the context of Germany, violence is defined rather broadly in civil and criminal
law, being the subject of considerable debate. Central to the definition is the concept of coercion,
where it was up for debate whether violence required a physical form of exercising said coercion. A
decision by the german Federal Constitutional Court did eventually require such an exercise of
physical force, though this must not be aimed directly at the victim with intent of physical harm but
can involve indirect forms of coercing them. In 1995 however, the Court explicitly denied the claim
that sit-ins, if causing disruption, can be considered violent (BverfG, 10.01.1995). Still, there remains
considerable ambiguity within german law around psychological violence, or “seelische Gewalt”.
Arguing within the confines of legal frameworks can only get us so far. Afterall, is coercion, i.e. the
persuasion against a given action, or in our case inaction, not the very purpose of a protest?
And yet, this twofold understanding of violence is not restricted to the judicial sphere of social and
political life. Afterall, what is noticeably absent in the discussions of the Ende-Gelände movement, is
the denoting of the Police’s response to the protest as violence. Why is that? Afterall, they did carry
weapons. They did use those weapons with the express goal of inflicting direct, physical harm on the
activists. Their use of batons, chemical irritants, the very act of arresting protesters should rather

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expressly fall into the definition of physical coercion, compulsion, of “Zwang”. And yet, we would be
hard-pressed to find instances of media outlets referring to the police as violent. Instead, by using the
passive voice in headlines (mdr.de, 2016) and only describing what the activists did as violent
(Geisler, 2018), we see how violence if perpetrated by state actors functionally ceases to constitute
violence in popular consciousness. This discussion of violence at the hands of the state first appeared
over a century ago with Max Weber’s work “politics as a vocation”, in which he posits that the state
and its subsidiaries are defined by their ability to claim “the monopoly
of the legitimate use of physical force” (Weber, 2013, p.78). This claim to legitimacy happens both
overtly and through a system of structural procedures that, in the increasingly specialised mechanisms
of the culture industry, are becoming less and less transparent to the consumer. Weber’s discussion
implies that the state has the power to define what is an isn’t legitimate violence in service of its own
goals. How the state exercises that power on discourse has changed considerably, as our political and
social structures changed along with it. In times of monarchy, how the head of state and by extension
its violent arm was to behave was not circumscribed by any written law; what constituted legitimate
violence here was essentially whatever the masses couldn’t stop them from doing. In this era, the
mechanisms by which the ruling class exerted control over their subjects were overt. The divide
between the law-making class and those expected to abide was far more visible and was rarely as
poignantly showcased as in the reactions of the former to the ultimate affront to the ruling order:
revolution.
During the French revolution, the intellectual class consisting primarily of aristocrats found itself
overwhelmingly at odds with the violent means of the revolution. Even Immanuel Kant, himself an
outspoken supporter of the revolutionary cause, seemingly could not seem to bear the violent means
by which it was carried out. Despite his moniker “the old Jacobin”, came to the following conclusion
regarding the use of violence as a means of emancipation:
“[…] all resistance against the supreme legislating authority, all incitement in order to express
through action the dissatisfaction of subjects, all revolt that leads into rebellion, is the highest and
most punishable offense in the commonwealth because it destroys the latter’s very foundations. And
this prohibition is unconditional, such that even if the legislative authority or its agent, the head of
state, violates the original contract and thereby surrenders, in the perception of the subjects, the right
to be legislator by authorizing the government to act thoroughly violently (tyrannically), the subject is
still not allowed to resist in any way.” (Kant et al., 2006)
How then does Kant square his staunch support for republicanism and the aims of the revolution with
his equally blanket condemnation of all forms of civil disobedience? In essence, the Kantian
perspective argues that, by watching a revolution, even cheering it on, but not participating in the
violence itself, we create a community of onlookers. The revolutionary, in their departure from what
Kant considers morality, forces this very community, still within the confines of said morality, to
engage with the questions the revolution throws up, leading them to develop morally and intellectually
in their consideration of political action (Axinn, 1971). And while it may be easy to accuse Kant of
cowardice here, it remains important to mention that not everyone has the ability to storm the Bastille,
or blockade a german coal-mine for that matter. Instead, most of us are forced into the role of the
onlooker, engaging with these aforementioned questions civil disobedience poses. And among those
questions is this topic of the state’s monopoly on violence. Here, Walter Benjamin offers a crucial
addition to previous discourse around state sanctioned violence, by introducing the terms law-making
and law-preserving violence (Benjamin, 1996). He argues that the police, despite the theoretical
separation of powers, engage not only in the preserving kind, but in the law-making one as well. It is
by these violent means that their actions, even if not necessarily legal, create law ,essentially on the
spot, in the interests of the state, in order to then, on the basis of this new quasi-legal violence,
preserve the right to the state-owned monopoly of it. This happens through the use of what he calls
mythic violence. Myth here refers to the narrative structures underpinning its legitimacy. The same
kind of law-making narratives that established colonial rule as legitimate force, that established the
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police’s violence during the Kapp-Putsch, which heavily influenced Benjamin, as legitimate. And it is
this same mythologisation that legitimises violence today. If you adopt the symbols of the ruling order,
if you liken yourself with the law-preserving crowd, your violence becomes itself preservatory, and
thus, legitimate. In the case of the police, it is the uniforms and badges displaying the mythic
“Reichsadler” that lend the power to create legitimate violence, to create law. It is by these same
mechanisms that those that align themselves with the ruling order through the adoption of its symbols,
i.e., the german flag, can give off the impression that their violence is sanctioned, even when it might
not be. This idea helps to explain why those right-wing instigators at the Ende-Gelände protest faced
neither the same media coverage, nor similar condemnation by politicians, and led to seemingly no
arrests (Fröhlich, 2019; Belltower News, 2018).
In the state and media’s unequal application of the label of “violent”, they construct an implicit
narrative of “us” and “them”, where one side represents moral expression of discontent or a
preservatory form of violence, and the other the destruction of such an order, the defiance against that
mythic law. In effect, all that is done through and in service of the existing order, an order that above
all else is ruled by capital, becomes righteous by nature and defies all condemnation as violent. And
so, political discourse becomes stratified along these lines of permissible and prohibited violence. In
doing so, we, as the community of onlookers, become pacified, unwilling to question the legitimacy of
this reactionary state of affairs, even in the face of a violence so great, so overwhelming, that it
threatens not just the individual, not just the ruling order, but the very foundation of life. What else is
the collective inaction against climate change, if not an explicit endorsement of the violence it inflicts
on the natural world. A violence not able to be captured by the flimsy legal definitions we have seen
above, nor one that can be overcome within the rigid Kantian outlook on moral political action, but
one of a structural nature. This structural violence is not just an act, like throwing a rock or pulling out
the baton, but the condition of a system based around exploitation for profit (Galtung, 1969). It is thus
imperative that in our attempts at grappling with the realities of climate change we do not lose sight of
Walter Benjamin’s concern for divine violence. While he undoubtedly favoured the kind of law-
making violence that brought about the French revolution and the ruling order of republicanism that
followed, it in effect acted as but a catalyst for a new order of repression, no less violent in nature and
no less dependent on that preservatory violence that still troubles those concerned for a better world
today. Instead, it is essential that, even if we hold on to the role of onlooker, not ourselves engaged in
the creation of a new order, possibly even critical of its means, we do not let the myth of the status quo
blind us of the reality that what constitutes its preservation is no less violent, no less a threat to the
foundations of society. Only then can we ensure that our bystanding, our inaction, is not just an act of
complicity in preservatory violence but a genuine demonstration of engagement with the questions an
ever more uncertain future poses. If our demands are confined to the morality prescribed to us by the
powers that be, we may soon find ourselves in the position of the 2016 Löfven I cabinet, comprised of
the Swedish Greens and Social Democrats, overseeing the continuation of the Vattenfall mining
project while speaking of progress and sustainability. We must ask ourselves, how our conceptions of
violence, and relatedly those of peace and a harmonious life, tie in with the political, social and
economic powers around us; how willing we are to trade justice for calm and quiet.

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