Violence can be legitimate when its purpose is creating meaning rather than material effect.

Evidence

There are cases still more disturbing because there the violence is not immediately efficacious; the violences of the Resistance did not aim at the material weakening of Germany; it happens that their purpose was to create such a state of violence that collaboration would be impossible; in one sense, the burning of a whole French village was too high a price to pay for the elimination of three enemy officers; but those fires and the massacring of hostages were themselves parts of the plan; they created an abyss between the occupiers and the occupied. Likewise, the insurrections in Paris and Lyons at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or the revolts in India, did not aim at shattering the yoke of the oppressor at one blow, but rather at creating and keeping alive the meaning of the revolt and at making the mystifications of conciliation impossible. Attempts which are aware that one by one they are doomed to failure can be legitimized by the whole of the situation which they create. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 140

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: This is a hard claim to operationalize — how do we weigh ‘creating the meaning of revolt’ against burned villages and massacred hostages? Worth chasing.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the sacrifice essay’s framing: violence as a meaning-making act that reorders a community, even when it ‘fails’ militarily.