>You merely posted one word with no context
The context is what I had said about history, justice, war, etc. here. It's not as if either you or I were a newcomer here.
>The problem is there has been no "moral" "progress", by that I mean,
>minimally, a significant diminution of violence through historical
>time.
Progress lies in how a sizable number of people have come to regard various forms of violence. For instance, rape used to be thought of as a violation not of a raped woman but of her husband's, father's, and/or brother's claim to honor, property, etc. (as for men raping other men, it used to be hardly mentionable). While I don't think that rapes are now less common than before, I do think that rape has, in many parts of the world, come to be regarded as a violation of the person raped (his or her physical & psychological well-being, human rights, human dignity, etc.) -- a relatively new idea in history.
>Non-violence is what I would regard as an historically
>"determined" metahistorical norm that should be striven for at all
>times and places.
>Included in that is the recognition that one cannot relinquish the
>responsibility to
>refrain from inaugurating violence against another person and that
>no person may
>command or otherwise coerce/persuade another to forgo that
>responsibility. This is
>not to deny that there are fetters on it's universalizability. But
>the fetters are in
>each of us, not some other non-human "power". Institutionalized
>roles and classes do
>not ameliorate the issue. Somebody somewhere is always the
>inaugurator of violence.
>It is how we deal with the ethics of that choice, for that choice is
>always a choice
>irrespective of constraints and I don't deny that there are always
>constraints, more
>than the subsequent behavior--even though that is every bit as
>problematic-- that we
>need to focus our capacities for learning from history.
Generally speaking, it is the oppressed & exploited who rebel against the oppressors & exploiters -- even when rebellions take "non-violent" forms -- that are ideologically represented as inaugurators of violence. Ideology lies in obscuring the logically & historically prior violence of capitalism, imperialism, racism, etc.
Yoshie