states must downplay the use of violence. When
the Trudeau government passed the War Measures Act in response to the kidnapping and
murder of Québec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte by the Front de Libération du Québec, a
similar balancing of legitimate and illegitimate violence was evident. Here is an excerpt
from Prime Minister Trudeau’s televised speech on October 16, 1970 that addresses the
distinction, and a URL to the CBC archives’ video clip of the speech itself during the
October Crisis.
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDCC-1-71-101-618/conflict_war/october_crisis/
“Violence, unhappily, is no stranger to this decade. The Speech from the Throne
opening the current session of Parliament a few days ago said that ‘we live in a period
of tenseness and unease.’ We must not overlook the fact, moreover, that violence is
often a symptom of deep social unrest.
This government has pledged that it will introduce legislation that deals not only with
symptoms but with the social causes which often underlie or serve as an excuse for
crime and disorder.
It was in that context that I stated in the House of Commons a year ago that there was
no need anywhere in Canada for misguided or misinformed zealots to resort to acts of
violence in the belief that only in this fashion could they accomplish change.”
b. publicizing violence by assigning responsibility for its use
What Karim terms “authorized knowers”—pundits, experts, and officials—are called英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】 upon
to frame an issue, delineating the legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence. Media and
public attention is typically focused on the incendiary consequences of violence, rather
than its origins, underlying issues, or politics. So represented, violence is thus detached
from its structural context, and those employing it in ways deemed illegitimate are
criminalized.
c. creating a preferred interpretation of the problem
The nation-state is the supreme political institution in the modern world. It’s taken to be a
rational instrument of the public’s democratic will, one combined with executive functions
that reflect this popular mandate, such as the Canadian prime minister and Parliament,
and bureaucratic machinery that transforms executive decisions made by an elected body
into practice. The fact that modern states themselves were born of violence—the French
and American revolutions, to take but two important examples—is obscured, as is the
violence done against indigenous peoples in the building of such states. Such states may
then seek to suppress the revolutionary activity of other peoples—the French in colonial
Algeria and Vietnam in the 1960s, the U.S. in Nicaragua in the 1980s—on the grounds
that such violence does not meet democratic or moral criteria. The presumed rationality of
the state seems incompatible with violence, despite the abundant historical evidence of
violence against the ancien regime in 1780-90s France or t
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