Violence with impunity is practiced in the name of civility

Evidence

Civility as historical process accordingly is not the purging – ending – of violence but its veiling (the iron hand in the velvet glove), the positioning of socially sanctioned violence out of sight – behind walls (e.g., execution, torture, harassment, sweat shops) or “over there” (colonization, foreign wars, desperately cheap factories, in occupied territories), placing curtains between public and private violence, between publics and violence in their name. Civility, in short, becomes a – the – mode for monopolizing the means of public violence while expressing disinterest in it. As such, it is a principal (and sometimes nominally principled) process for establishing and sustaining modern state domination in the Weberian sense of monopolizing the forms and conditions of expression of legitimate(d) violence and force. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 250 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

What in fact has happened in the course of the civilizing process, is the redeployment of violence, and the re-distribution of access to violence. Like so many other things which we have been trained to abhor and detest, violence has been taken out of sight, rather than forced out of existence. It has become invisible, that is, from the vantage point of narrowly circumscribed and privatized personal experience. It has been enclosed instead in segregated and isolated territories, on the whole inaccessible to ordinary members of society; or evicted to the ‘twilight areas’, off-limits for a large majority (and the majority which counts) of society’s members; or exported to distant places which on the whole are irrelevant for the life-business of civilized humans (one can always cancel holiday bookings). — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Moralistic bourgeois rhetoric can be backed by hidden violence and therefore never trusted — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 459; Lawmakers and the public label any non-accepted protest as violent — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2596; The civilizing state embodies the very violence it claims to purge. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 238 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Civility veils rather than ends sanctioned state violence #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 250
• The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it #corroborates (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285