Slideshows about nonviolence and nonviolent resolution of conflicts, economic alternatives, ecology, social change, spirituality : www.irnc.org , Slideshows in english warlike violence; XXth century bloddbath; dictatorships, massacrs and genocides; violence of an economic system; human sacrifices, crusades, slavery, torture, wars of religion, duel, conquests, racial segregation, etc. Human rights, international tribunals, responsability to protect,

1. Is humanity growing
away from violence ?
Historical overview
Étienne Godinot
Translation : Claudia McKenny Engström
01.02.2015

2. Is humanity growing away from violence ?
Historical overview
Contents
• Introduction: what aspect of our nature do we want to develop ?
Is Man perfectible ?
- We could say not, looking at the evolution of weaponry; dictatorships,
wars, massacres and genocides during the XXth Century; violence of the
economic system.
- And yet, humanity has abolished (or is in process of abolishing)… human
sacrifices, circus games, slavery, servitude, judicial torture, elimination of
political opponents, duels, absolute regal power of divine law, limited
suffrage, colonisation, racial segregation, corporal punishment, vendetta,
sexual mutilations, death penalty
-Contemporary progresses : Declaration of human rights; 2. International
interference in conflicts 3. Fight against different types of violence; 4.
Nonviolent conflict resolution.

3. What aspect of our nature do we want
to choose and develop ?
The human being is an omnivore mammal, sexually
erratic, with a tendency to herd mentality, egoistic and
aggressive, the only living being capable of hate and
torturing.
Each one of us in holds the best and the worst.
But Man also feels he can be better and refrain or
surpass his animal nature, which can manifest itself in a
superior dimension, the one that granted him the name
of homo sapiens.

4. Is Man improvable ?
Social norms, commitment to marriage, mutual
assistance, consented respect for the rules organising
the public good, etc. are manifestations of the
commitment to humanity.
Is Man improvable ? Perfectible ?
To not hope for that would lead to desperation and be
tend to demobilisation.
Believing it naïvely, without permanent watchfulness on
the objectives and means to improve Man and society,
leads to cruel disillusions.

5. Is humanity growing away from violence ?
1 - We can say “no”!
Warlike violence
Weapons designed to kill in time of war are more and more
anonymous, cowardly and destructive.
- after the club, sword, bow and arrow, mass weapons and
battles on ground came
- naval combat, the crossbow and arquebus,
../..

6. Warlike violence
- then the rifle, the sub-machine gun, dynamite, the army
tank, areal war and submarines, asphyxiating gases and
other chemical weapons
- and later the atomic bomb, the botulinal toxin and other
bacterial weapons, landmines, the neutron bomb, war in
space.

7. The XXth Century bloodbath
During the XXth Century, the unit of measurement for
violence was done in millions. This century was the one
of colonisation and decolonisation.
Two World Wars took place in a period of 21 years
(provoked wars, such as the Conquista, slavery,
triangular commerce, colonisation, by “Christian” claimed
nations…).
The Second World War ended with 25 million military
deaths and 24 million civilians, 9 million of which
perished in concentration camps.

8. Dictatorships, massacres and genocides
The dictatorships generated by the “Aryan race”, the
“classless society”, the “dictatorship of the proletariat”,
the “cultural revolution”, the “new Man”, the “ideological
uniformity”, “ethnical cleansing”, provoked slaughters,
massacres and genocides :
- in Turkey, 1 to 1,3 million victims of the Armenian
genocide (1915-1916),
- in Europe, between 1939 and 1945, more than 6 million
Jews (72 % of the Jewish population) and Gipsies were
victims of a genocide,
Photos : Enver Pacha (Armenian genocide)
Adolf Hitler (Holocaust)

9. Dictatorships, massacres and genocides
- in USSR (soviet regime), 28 million prisoners, 1 million people
executed, 1,5 million dead in Gulag or deportation, 11 million
dead of hunger,
- in China, 1 million dead during the “cultural revolution” (1966-
1968) and 30 million starved due to Mao Zedong’s policies,
- in Tibet, 1,2 million dead in combat, torture, internment and
hunger following Chinese invasion,
- in Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge (or Red Khmers), more
than 1,5 million people died,
Photos : Joseph Staline,
Mao Zedong,
Pol Pot

10. Dictatorships, massacres and genocides
- in Rwanda in 1994, 800 000 Tutsis fell, along with
supportive Hutus,
- in Ex-Yugoslavia, 98 000 Bosnians, Bosnian Serbs
and Croatians died during the Bosnian war,
- in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 4,5 million
were massacred or starved; in Darfour, 300 000 dead.
etc.

11. The violence of an economic system (I)
Neoliberal economy and globalization go hand in
hand with technological power and other factors of
constant leap forward : consumer credit, planned
obsolescence of products, advertisement meant to
exacerbate desires.
Put together, the system provokes :
- an explosion of speculation and financialisation of
our economies,
- delocalisations, economic crisis, mass
unemployment both South and North.

12. The violence of an economic system (II)
- the ruin of local agriculture of subsistence in the South
by import of food products thanks to exorbitant
mechanical means and often subsidised by rich
countries, food crisis,
- exhaustion of natural resources , pollution of earth,
water and air, diminishing of biodiversity

13. Is humanity growing away from violence ?
2 - And yet…
And yet, in human history, we observe, taking a step
back, that the culture of violence is weakening
- in mentalities, customs and traditions of a people,
- in Law, the corpus of rules that organise social life
between Men.

14. Human sacrifices
Human sacrifices were religious rituals common in ancient
civilisations, generally of settled agricultural ones, done in
the name of a divinity to conjure an evil, such as drought :
Celts,
Canaanite
China until the Chang dynasty
Ancient Egypt
Jews during the first Temple
Ancient Greece
Aztec, Maya and Inca Empires
Dogons in Africa

15. Circus death games
Roman emperors often held bloody “shows” in popular
arenas :
- gladiator fights (war prisoners, sentenced men,
professionals, adventurers),
- fights between Man and animals (bears, lions, bulls,
crocodiles),
- execution of a person sentenced to death.
And even fights in the waters of rivers or seas.

16. Murderous practices of military discipline
Decimation (decime : 1/10th) was a sentence Romans
inflicted on soldiers who had abandoned their post or
demonstrated an opposition or sedition during a military
campaign.
The names of the guilty ones were written and dropped
in a helmet or urn, and, according to the nature of the
contestation, the general would pull out of the helmet
1/5th, 1/10th or 1/20th of the names.
The soldiers thus designated were executed and their
bodies most often, unburied.

17. The crusades
The crusades of the Middle Ages are military pilgrimages
commanded by the Pope (Urban II in 1095 and Nicholas IV in
1289) to free the Holy Land occupied by Arabs since 638.
Are included in them the Spanish Reconquista (when
Christian sovereigns reconquered the Muslim realms of the
Iberian Peninsula) and all other wars against the “Infidels” or
“heretics” sentenced by the Pope, who accompanied them
with indulgences (partial or total remission of the sufferings of
the Purgatory).
Photos :
- Saint Bernard of Clairvaux preaching for the 2nd Crusade, in Vézelay, 1146.
- The fire and pillage of Constantinople. To finance itself, the 4th crusade
(1202-1204) called by Pope Innocent III is deviated, at the initiative of the
Venetians, to Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, capital of Greek
Orthodox Christianity.

18. Slavery
The slave is a non-free and non-paid worker or servant
who was legally the property of another person and
therefore negotiable (for sale, lease, to be bought) as a
domestic animal or an object.
Oriental and transatlantic slave trade are the most
emblematic example of slavery
- by their length (several centuries)
- by their size (several millions of slaves)
- and by their historical impact (namely in the USA or
Africa)

19. Servitude
Contrary to ancient slavery, the serf of the Middle
Ages was a legal person, but that was attached to a
land, a kingdom.
He worked on the land of the lord and owed him
loyalty and a part of his harvest. In the absence of an
heir, his goods would become those of the Lord.
As counterpart, he benefited from the lord’s
protection, but also had to tend the woods and take
care of the castle and castle moats; in case of war, he
was enrolled in the military body.

20. Legal torture and public executions
For centuries, torture was used as means to render justice
- either to obtain the truth
* ordeal by branding, boiling or freezing water to know
the “Last Judgement”
* the question, confession being considered as queen
of proofs,
- either to execute a sentence (crucifixion, breaking wheel,
impalement, the stake, dismemberment, nailing, etc).

21. Wars of religion
In France, we call “wars of religion” a series of eight conflicts
that ravaged the Kingdom of France during the second half
of the 16th Century, opposing Catholics and Protestants,
and until the Edit de Nantes, a text for tolerance adopted by
Henry VIII in 1498.
After the revocation of the Edit by Louis XIV (Édit de
Fontainebleau, 1685), Protestants, whose number had
already considerably reduced during the previous century,
were obliged either to convert or to flee. Religious tolerance
was later recognised in 1787 with the Édit de Versailles and
in 1789 with the Declaration des droits de l’Homme.
Photos : - Massacre of Saint Barthélémy (23-24 August 1572) : 3000
Protestants were murdered in Paris, hundreds in Meaux, Orléans, Lyon, etc.
-Marie Durand (1711-1776), imprisoned for 38 years in the Tower of
Constance in Aigues-Mortes for having refused to abjure her Protestant faith.
Another woman, Marie Robert, was imprisoned for 41 years.

22. Violence between political opponents
within a country
This type of violence opposes politicians racing for power.
For instance :
- Fight between Julius Cesar and part of the Senate
supported by Pompey’s Army
- Elimination of opponents by strangulation, dagger, or
poisoning, namely in Italy under the reign of Cesare Borgia.
Debates and democratic combat without violence have
already substituted themselves to the above mentioned
ones, but political assassination still exists (Jean Jaurès, MK
Gandhi, JF Kennedy, ML King, Itzaak Rabin, Anna
Politkovskaïa, etc.)
Photos : - The conflict between Pompeus and Cesar;
- Cesar Borgia

23. The duel
The duel was a combat by weapon governed by
precise rules, that opposed two adversaries, the first
demanding the other to repair an offence the second
committed, often for futile reasons.
(ex.: the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin who died in
1837, at the age of 37, in a duel with an officer from
Alsace who had courted his wife).
The duel was in a way a conventional implementation
of criminal law.
The last country to abolish duels was Uruguay in 1980.

24. Absolute power of “divine law”
The limited suffrage
During centuries, political power was exercised by
emperors, tsars, kings, despots or tyrants, for a long time
considered to be “Gods” or even “God”.
Some were enlightened, or surrounded themselves with
aware advisors, but the political system gave no voice to
the inhabitants of the nation or city.
Elections were for a long time reserved to :
- the richest (selective suffrage)
- the educated (right to suffrage according to capability)
- men (masculine suffrage).
Photos - Cesar
- Louis XIV

25. Conquests, the Conquista, colonisation (I)
The Conquista (after 1492) and colonisation were
expansionist processes which aimed at conquering, (by
military force), occupy and exploit a country, subjecting it,
dominating it politically, economically, culturally and
religiously.
Colonisation aimed at exploiting the advantages offered
by a territory (natural mineral resources, tropical food
products, workforce, strategic position, vital space, etc.)
for the profit of the colonising State.
The expansion was justified thanks to the argument of
“a developing civilisation”.

26. Conquests (II)
This process lasted from Antiquity until the 1950-60s,
and is still ongoing, albeit via more subtle channels,
such as the reimbursement of public debt.
Indeed, colonising countries make their former colonies
pay back the price of the infrastructures built by them in
the objective of extracting and transporting the raw
material they did not pay for (mines, rail roads, ports,
roads, etc.).
This “outrageous” debt can hence not be grounded on
international law since the populations it today afflicts
did not consent.

27. Racial segregation
Racial segregation was the physical separation of
“coloured” people from “white” people in daily life and
activities (urban areas, schools, restaurants, cinemas,
public benches, transports) in the name of the
pretended superiority of a race on another.
If legal segregation has been abolished almost
everywhere in the world, it is still a reality lived by
many…
Ex.: Racial segregation in the USA until the campaigns
led by M.L King, the apartheid in South Africa until the
election of Nelson Mandela.

28. Corporal punishments
Corporal punishments in education were for a long time
usual and normal in western societies.
They are now forbidden and anyone who uses of such
methods is liable by law, but they subsist nonetheless in
our societies.
Mistreatment and abuse in childhood has severe
consequences on the behaviour of an adult, who will
have the tendency of treating other as he or she was
treated.

29. Vendetta and kanun
In Mediterranean regions, vendetta was the vengeance for a
murder or simple offence implicating all members of a family and
generating violence and assassinations between two families
during a long period of time.
The ones who felt offended decided to make justice themselves,
not following established legal procedures.
Albania was ruled by the Code of Honour kanun. On 1st May
1990, at the initiative of Anton Celta, 500 000 Albanians from the
whole country, Kosovo, Macedonia and southern Serbia,
marched together against kanun and for reconciliation.
Photo below : Anton Cetta and Ibrahim Rugova

30. Sexual mutilations in rituals
Sexual mutilation of women (excision, infibulation,
introcision), already a commonly practiced by
Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hittites, etc. consisted in
removing by often rudimentary surgical methods, part
or all of a women’s sexual parts.
Although it is still practiced in some African countries,
it is forbidden in most countries of the world.

31. Death penalty
Death penalty consisted in executing a person sentenced for
having committed a serious or very serious crime.
In other words, it was a murder with premeditation and cold
blooded, an assassination organised by the State.
It is contrary to the respect of human life public authorities
have the obligation to protect; it is irrevocable and the
specialists’ opinion, has no dissuasive effect.
In 1977, 16 countries had abolished it. More than 100 today.
But it is still in practice in dictatorships and countries tinted
by a culture of violence: Iran, China, North Korea, Yemen,
USA, etc.

32. National warrior anthems
National anthems, generally patriotic hymns chosen by
governments, are often the result of historical
circumstances.
Among the most violent we find the French La Marseillaise,
the Italian, Cuban or Mexican ones.
The vast majority of national anthems*, especially since
1945, are more pacific and celebrate the beauty of a
country, the love for a people. The most pacific ones are
found in Switzerland, Quebec, Chili or Estonia.
* The Book by Jean-Marc Cara The Concert of Nations, studies 198
national anthems.
Photo below : Young Chileans singing their national anthem

33. Is humanity growing away from violence ?
3 – Contemporary progresses
1- Declarations of Human Rights (I)
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),
adopted in 1948 is generally recognised as the ground
for international law on Human Rights.
It states: “All human beings are born free and equal in
dignity and rights”.
It is our common ground.

34. Declarations of Human Rights (II)
The UDHR must now be read together with the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
and its two Optional Protocols, and the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
as well as provisions against racial discrimination,
torture, forced disappearances, the rights granted to
handicapped people, women and children, migrants,
minorities and indigenous people.
Of course, reality often differs from the law provided,
but this law nonetheless exists and indicates the
way forward.

35. 2 - International intervention
International intervention, formerly known as colonisation or
coup d’état to overthrow the government in place, takes more
amiable forms today :
2.1 – The Law regulating International Intervention
The famine that followed the war in Biafra (1967-1970)
provoked immediate action of European volunteers (Médecins
du Monde, Médecins sans Frontières) when States remained
silent.
The concept of International Intervention was theorised at the
end of the 80s by Law Professor Mario Bettati and politician
Bernard Kouchner.
Photos : Mario Bettati and Bernard Kouchner (in the 1980s)

36. International intervention
International intervention and the right to intervene
International intervention consists in sending humanitarian
help to populations in distress following natural disasters or
violations of human rights, without the approval of the State
in which these occur. The objective is to help, assist and
protect populations in danger.
Such an intervention is legitimate only when motivated by a
disastrous situation and when framed and approved by a
legitimate international body/institution.

37. International intervention
2.2 – The responsibility to protect
In 2005, the United Nations (UN) ratified the principal
of responsibility to protect populations against
genocide, war crimes, ethnical cleansing, crimes
against humanity, including against ones one
government.
In case pacific means – such as diplomatic
negotiations, humanitarian action – are not sufficient
and national authorities fail to protect the population,
the international community can collectively decide to
act, via the Security Council acting on the basis the
UN Charter.
Photo below :UN peacekeepers mandated by the UNO

38. International intervention
2.3 - International Tribunals
The International Criminal Court (ICC), created in 2002 and
sitting in The Hague (Netherlands), is a permanent
jurisdiction in charge of judging those accused of genocide,
crimes against humanity and war crimes.
In October 2011, out of 193 States recognised by the UN,
119 had accepted the authority of the Court.
The international temporary criminal tribunals have limited
competence and were created to judge the crimes committed
in Rwanda, ex-Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Lebanon.
Photos : Logo of the ICC and its building The Hague.

39. 3 - The fight against the diverse forms of violence
Local authorities, firms, NGOs and associations, numerous and
active, mobilise
- against mass unemployment and for employment, against
extensive opening of boarder and the re-localisation of
economic activities,
- against poverty and exclusion, for integration through work,
education and culture,
- against bad housing and new forms of social habitat and
housing,
- against gender violence and for real equality between men
and women (salaries, presence in Parliament, Boards of
administration, etc.).

40. The fight against the diverse forms of violence
- against road violence, preventing road accidents through
education and repression,
- against intensive and chemical agricultural violence,
destroying Man’s habitat, water and earth, promoting an
organic agriculture respectful of the environment,
- against violence against animals, namely done by
industrial and intensive farming, promoting another type of
farming,
- against corruption, speculation or tax havens, promoting
transparency, taxation of financial transactions

41. The fight against the diverse forms of violence
- against patenting the living and for free circulation of seeds,
- against aggressive and hype advertising and for intelligent
information,
- against adventurous but dangerous technological choices
(nuclear, GMOs) and for alternative energies and
technologies,
- against nuclear weapons and weapon trade, promoting
disarmament and alternative defence,
etc.

42. 4 – Nonviolent resolution of conflict
To lead these fights, since Gandhi, we have nonviolence in
hand.
Nonviolence is both :
- a philosophy, a wisdom, a way of being that gives each of
our lives meaning, and a collective human history,
- a strategy, an effective means for political action, which
doesn’t exclude pressure or constraint to oblige the adversary
to yield and negotiate, but in way respectful of him and in the
aim of obtaining justice and reconciliation
Photos : - Gandhi
- Martin Luther King,
- Rajagopal P.V. (Ekta Parishad movement in India)
■