Bruce B. Lawrence - On Violence: A Reader

What is violence, and how is it calculated? September 11, 2001 has become the milestone of violence for the twenty-first century and for American citizens. On that day four U.S. commercial airliners were hijacked and transformed into weapons of mass destruction. One plane hit the Pentagon, destroying part of a major annex and exacting a high death toll. One plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing all on board. But the deadliest two planes were guided into the World Trade Center towers, major monuments of U.S. financial prowess located in New York City; both towers collapsed, and the lives of thousands were lost.

But how many thousands died? One day after the attack the U.S. media reported that 7,000 lives had been lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The final count, tallied less than four months later, was 2,893.

Airplane wrecks can lead to indirect as well as direct carnage. In April 1994, following a plane crash that killed both the president of Burundi and the president of Rwanda, rumors abounded about the cause. Some suspected that the plane had been shot down due to ethnic rivalries and desires for vengeance. Riots flared in Rwanda. The estimated number of Tutsi and Hutu killed varied between 10,000 and 200,000! But, indisputably, the greater number of those killed were Hutu, so much so that the violence in Central Africa is now called Hutu genocide, albeit, outside of Rwanda, a faceless and nameless genocide

Not so the death of Amy Biehl. In August 1993 in South Africa, Biehl was dragged from her car in a black township near Capetown and beaten to death by three shantytown black youth. Her murder shocked. It, and the trial that followed, drew extensive media attention. Many black deaths also took place during 19931994, yet they continued to be reported unceremoniously in South African newspapers as mere body counts, a persistent residue of the apartheid years. White deaths countthe victims have names, personalities, histories and grieving family members. Black deaths do not, with African murder victims normally reported as faceless, unidentified bodies.

Whether the goal is to count victims of violence or to represent them, the lesson is the same: context matters. Violence always has a context. Context shapes not just the actors or victims but also those who represent them. What is celebrated in one place may be mourned in another. Memory is never an equal balance, or a neutral lens, of human experience and history. What may be remembered and highlighted in New York may seem unimportant, even inconsequential, in Africa, but more often the reverse is true. The ongoing, massive violence in Central Africa, for instance, concerns almost no one outside of African aid agencies, or arms export merchants. It is as if a thick curtain of silence has descended on the blood-soaked landscape of Rwanda.

One might say that the news media, whether dealing with Rwanda or some other crisis area, is just doing its job: telling prospective readers about the violence that defines their everyday lives. Yet the media also create and respond to expectations that news stories be shocking. In the early twenty-first century newspapers and magazines are confronting new rivals, having lost circulation nationally and worldwide to telejournalism and, since 1994, to the World Wide Web as well. Yet all media, from the oldest newspaper to the newest Web site, rely on the dramatic story that compels readers to buy or to tune in and turn on. Violent incidents still shock; their stories still sell. The chain of violence forged through image and narration thus cannot be broken by holding accountable the news media, whether print or visual or virtual. What is produced through the New York Post in the United States or the Daily Mail in London is magnified on MTV and CNNand even, since the late 1990s, on Al-Jazeera. Market forces are driven in part by consumer interest, and violence sells.

On Violence projects violence as an element in the life stories of both editors, who are keenly aware of the shadow of violence that has claimed so many victims. It has made them both recognize how fragile and contingent is ordinary, unviolated existence. Aishas earliest memories go back to the Pakistani-Indian skirmishes in the early 1970s. There were frequent blackouts, and every evening, as Aisha and her family tried to sleep under the stairs of the apartment building, crammed in with the other four families that inhabited the same space, they wondered whether they would survive the night or whether they would be bombed out of existence. Many of those who shared that apartment building did not live to see the end of the last major war between India and Pakistan, which resulted in the formation of Bangladesh as an independent politybut only after exacting a high human toll.