That (i.e., the title of this short piece) is really all I wanted to say, but probably, some explanation is in order. Let’s start with the notions of “structural” and “personal violence”, which were introduced by Johan Galtung in 1969:
Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action. It corresponds to our ideas of what drama is, and it is personal because there are persons committing the violence. […] Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another.1
Or to give another example, when Luigi Mangione assassinated Brian Thompson, he committed personal violence; when thousands of lives are ruined by UnitedHealthcare, of which Brian Thompson was CEO, and by other US health insurance companies, those are guilty of structural violence.
Importantly, there is no moral difference between killing someone with a gun or knife, or killing someone with a stroke of a pen, a computer keystroke, or a business policy. Adolph Eichmann isn’t less guilty because he didn’t personally kill all the Jews he sent to concentration camps. I’m not suggesting that American health insurance CEOs are comparable to Eichmann, of course. That would be absurd. I’m mentioning Eichmann here merely to illustrate the lack of a significant moral difference between acts of personal violence and intentional, planned structural violence. The point is that causing death and suffering by means of personal violence is just as bad as causing death and suffering due by means of intentional, planned structural violence. It’s the extent or amount of death and suffering caused that matters, not how it is caused. (Why it is caused also matters, but I’ll mostly ignore that aspect here.)
The second aspect of the claim in the title of this piece that requires some explanation is the pair of terms “entrenched” and “effective”. I’m intending the latter term here in its most general sense as “having any effect at all”, not in its more restricted sense as “having the desired effects” (or something like that). Hence, what I’m claiming is that when structural violence is so entrenched that no other action (aside from personal violence) is likely to have any effect at all, then (and only then) is personal violence an appropriate response to that structural violence.
In particular cases, it is quite debatable whether this applies, of course. Is the structural violence associated with US health care sufficiently entrenched? I think the answer is “yes”, but I’m not an expert on this matter. Is personal violence the only effective response? I think the answer is “yes” again. Neither political nor legal action is likely to do much if anything about this kind of structural violence. The organizers of this structural violence can rely on nearly unlimited funds as well as an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and so forth. Their victims are completely powerless against that.
One could deny the effectiveness of personal violence by claiming that assassinating one CEO doesn’t change anything as he (or rarely she) will immediately be replaced by someone else who is just as bad. The system selects and breeds people to fill certain roles, but it is the system that is ultimately responsible and not those individuals, and consequently, assassinating someone who plays a particular role establishes nothing. To a large extent this is true, but there are two flaws in the argument. First, it seems to assume that an assassination of the CEO of a psychopathic corporation is a unique, one-time event, which may be the case, but not by necessity. If the assassination of Brian Thompson was appropriate, and the conditions that made it appropriate haven’t changed, then further assassinations are equally appropriate. Perhaps, assassinating a single CEO doesn’t change anything, but rather than a reason not to assassinate that CEO, it may be a reason to assassinate many more – at least until things do change for the better. Second, it is not necessarily the case that a single assassination establishes nothing. It may lead to increased attention for the structural violence leading up to it. It may lead to greater awareness among the victims of structural violence and/or to greater pressure on its architects. It can have all kinds of positive effects.
But could it have negative effects as well? Is the broad interpretation of “effective” as “having any effects at all” flawed because it would imply that personal violence is appropriate even if it has negative effects? At a glance, this seems a very good point, but I think that it misses something important. If structural violence is so entrenched that personal violence is the only effective answer, then things cannot get much worse, or at least not without resulting in all out class war. Or in other words, when structural violence is so entrenched that personal violence is the only effective answer, there cannot really be long-term negative effects (except, of course, for the individuals carrying out the personal violence). The worst-case scenario is that nothing changes, but that is not a negative effect. The second-worst-case scenario is a temporary worsening of conditions, provoking class war or, at least, a significant increase in personal violence against the architects and beneficiaries of structural violence, resulting sooner or later in an improvement. In that case, there is a short-term negative effect, but on the longer term, the effect is positive.
The last term in the claim in the title that needs some explanation is “appropriate”, but there isn’t all that much to say about it. “Allowed” is too weak; “required” is too strong; “appropriate” seems just right. Or in other words, in the relevant circumstances personal violence is morally acceptable – perhaps, even morally right – but not morally required.
Although I don’t think any further explanation is necessary, I want to make one final remark in response to the many liberals who condemn the Thompson assassination because “murder is always bad”. If murdering an active serial killer is the only feasible way of stopping him, that murder may be technically “bad”, but it is the least bad of available options, and therefore, required. Hence, it just isn’t true that murder is always bad. Furthermore, liberals who feel the need to condemn the Thompson assassination are either blind for structural violence, or seem to believe that structural violence is somehow less bad than personal violence. Do these liberals believe that Eichmann was less guilty of the Holocaust because he didn’t personally kill all the Jews he sent to the concentration camps? I suspect the answer is “no”. But neither is Brian Thompson or any other CEO like him less guilty for all the death and suffering they cause because they do not so so directly and personally.
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Notes
- Johan Galtung (1969), “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research”, Journal of Peace Research 6.3: 167–91, at p. 171.