ABSTRACT
In 1981, looking back on his time in the German Rote Armee Fraktion, Horst Mahler3 said: ‘We were from our point of view in something like a war. It was in order to be able to face the problem of death that we defined ourselves as soldiers.’4 Describing their situation in war terms was the enabling factor that allowed the group to use violence while seeing themselves as morally good. One has to reconcile the use of violence, facing the ‘death problem’, this terrible act of hurting others, with a self-description of oneself as a moral actor. Violence has to be explained, perhaps explained away, but it cannot remain unexplained. Violence is prepared through a rhetorical excess. The language of violence prepares and enables the practice of violence. We all, with few and insignificant exceptions, support violence for some specific purpose, while simultaneously being against violence as such. This seeming paradox helps explain basic moves, reconciling the violent actor with his or her morality. Violence is always problematic. It is obviously problematic for the victim of violence but also for the perpetrator. It challenges the violent actor as a moral and thereby commendable individual. The problematization of the self opened up by the use of violence is not allowed to last. The status as a moral individual or collective has to be re-established. No one, with the possible exception of psychopaths, can understand themselves as cruel or evil. We may realize that we, in a given situation or a moment’s lapse, acted cruelly or evilly but we probably cannot consider ourselves evil as such. We cannot describe our inner motivation and being as evilness. Everyone needs to be able to explain and view themselves as moral beings, even the violent one. Violence has to be explained as something other than evilness or cruelty – as necessity, defense, charity, love, accident or whatever, but explained
it must. ‘Violence’ just as ‘evil’ is a term used by the victim or spectator rather than the violent actor. European modernity, like most other cultures, does have a tradition for celebrating militarism,5 seeing armed conflictuality as inevitable and even necessary, and for bellicism, seeing violence as ennobling man regardless of purpose, celebrated by, for instance, Ernst Jünger and Julius Evola in the inter-war years and summed up by Mussolini in 1932:
War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it. All other tests are substitutes which never place a man face to face with himself before the alternative of life or death.6
