Consider the events of mid-March, 2019. First a deplorable attack by a white supremacist on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing dozens. Next, an attack, perhaps in retaliation, on tram riders in Utrecht, The Netherlands, by a man presumably connected to ISIS, killing at least three. These events appear as possible evidence of an undeclared war of religions. Finally, statements by President Erdoğan of Turkey, angering authorities in both New Zealand and Australia by invoking the Ottoman defeat of the British-led invasion of Gallipoli during World War I and by implying in speeches to followers at political rallies that this is indeed a war between religions. Although tempered in a concurrent opinion piece and subsequently recanted and revoked, these statements still raise the question of what to make of all this in the 21st century, resembling a distant past, the premodern age of religious wars.
War is politics by other means, as famously noted by Carl von Clausewitz. If by politics, in this context, we understand negotiation, compromise and give-and-take between states, we may generalize this dictum to other areas of social and political life and observe that social and political actors may turn to violence when verbal communication fails. Such communication may fail because an utterance was not heard, or it was dismissed or suppressed or simply rejected for being unacceptable. An act of violence may be the last resort in search of justice or may involve an effort to put down a demand for justice. It may represent rebellion or simply oppression.
While some may have sympathy for acts of violence that appear to be in search of justice, the “root cause” may not always be easily sorted out. At any rate, in democratic society, we reject the use of violence as a means of communication and promote peaceful methods of negotiation and compromise. Moreover, whether in pursuit or in denial of some sense of justice, the easiest targets of violence are the weak, the vulnerable and the unprotected. The rise of violence in current affairs, therefore, is an indication of the crisis, if not an imminent collapse, of democratic civilization. Democracy can only survive if a government has established moral hegemony. The alternative is either a form of absolutist power or chaos.
