We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.
My attitude toward peace does not depend on which war we are discussing. I think that words should do the work of bombs.
I was doing a bit that stupid people should be slapped. But the more I did it, the more I didn't like that connotation, the violence and all that. The more I thought about it, I thought they should just wear signs. And, man, it just took off.
If peace activists really want to make changes, they have to start putting intense pressure on their elected officials. Of course, everything should be non-violent, because we are trying to create a peaceful world, and violence can't produce peace - no matter what George W. Bush and his buddies say.
Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated - there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
I'm not trying to say I'm a big tough guy... I'm a typical American-waist deep in this violent culture.
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
Is there a more violent book than the Bible?
There is no such thing as an "atrocity" in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
I've told the kids in the ghettos that violence won't solve their problems, but then they ask me, and rightly so; "Why does the government use massive doses of violence to bring about the change it wants in the world?" After this I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without also speaking against the violence of my government.
Extraneous violence is totally wrong. 'Robocop' was violence for violence's sake - you don't shoot somebody's arm off.
The phrase surgical strike might be more acceptable if it were common practice to perform surgery with high explosives.
I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.
A lot of more modern films seem to just be out for violence or sex or what have you, without relating it to what's going within human beings. But every now and then one comes along that does that, and it's a joy.
I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.
