Violence warps even justified struggle because it forces crushing victims

Evidence

And violence does not merely provoke in the world the wrench of the sacrifice to which one has consented; it is also undergone in revolt and refusal. Even the one who desires a victory and who knows that it has to be paid for will wonder: why with my blood rather than with another’s? Why is it my son who is dead? And we have seen that every struggle obliges us to sacrifice people whom our victory does not concern, people who, in all honesty, reject it as a cataclysm: these people will die in astonishment, anger or despair. Undergone as a misfortune, violence appears as a crime to the one who practices it. That is why Saint-Just, who believed in the individual and who knew that all authority is violence, said with somber lucidity, “No one governs innocently.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 107

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘soldier must become a citizen again’ theme converges with the death-toll of sacrificial logics; ‘No one governs innocently’ is a strong epigraph for the sacrifice article.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone who’d appreciate Saint-Just’s dictum ‘No one governs innocently’ as a standby anti-authority line.