In a paragraph of around 100 words, summarise the four incidents of violence and the authors theory about how they were possible.
Violence
Four instances of violence come to my mind. One I read about in the
newspapers; another I witnessed; in a third I was on the receiving end; in the
fourth, the most brutal of them all, I was a perpetrator.
The first took
place an hours drive from my home in Atlanta, Georgia, when a mob in
Athens, screaming epithets and hurling rocks, attacked the dormitory occupied
by the first Negro girl to enter the University of Georgia.
The second I
saw years ago as I walked through a slum area of the Lower East Side of New
York: a little old Jew with a beard, pulling his pushcart, was arguing with a
Negro who was demanding payment for his work. The bearded man said he
didnt have the money and the Negro said he needed it and the argument
grew, and the Negro picked up a stick of wood and hit the old man on the side
of the head. The old man continued pushing the cart down the street, blood
running down his face, and the Negro walked away.
In the third instance, I
took my wife and two-year-old daughter to a concert given in an outdoor area
near the town of Peekskill, New York. The concert artist was Paul Robeson. As
he sang under the open sky to an audience of thousands, a shouting, angry crowd
gathered around the field. When the concert was over and we drove of f the
grounds, the cars moving in a long slow line, we saw the sides of the road
filled with cursing, jeering men and women. Then the rocks began to fly. My
wife was pregnant at the time. She ducked and pushed our daughter down near the
floor of our car. All four side windows and the rear window were smashed by
rocks. Sitting in the back seat was a young woman, a stranger, to whom we had
given a lift. A flying rock fractured her skull. There were dozens of
casualties that day.
The fourth incident occurred in World War II when I
was a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in Europe. The war was almost over.
German territory was shrinking, and the Air Force was running out of targets.
In France, long since reoccupied by our troops, there was still a tiny pocket
of Nazi soldiers in a protected encampment near the city of Bordeaux. Someone
in the higher echelons decided, though the end of the war was obviously weeks
away, that this area should be bombed. Hundreds of Flying Fortresses went. In
each bomb bay there were twenty-four one-hundred-pound fire-bombs, containing a
new type of jellied gasoline. We set the whole area aflame and obliterated the
encampment. Nearby was the ancient town of Royan; that, too, was almost totally
destroyed. The Norden bombsight was not that accurate.
These four instances
of violence possess something in common. None of them could have been committed
by any animal other than man. The reason for this does not lie alone in
mans superior ability to manipulate his environment. It lies in his
ability to conceptualise his hatreds. A beast commits violence against specific
things for immediate and visible purposes. It needs to eat. It needs a mate. It
needs to defend its life. Man has these biological needs plus many more which
are culturally created. Man will do violence not only against a specific
something which gets in the way of one of his needs; he will do violence
against a symbol which stands for, or which he believes stands for, that which
prevents him from satisfying his needs. (Guilt by association is high-level
thinking.)
With symbolic violence, the object of attack is deprived of its
particularity. Only in this way can man overcome what I believe is his natural
spontaneous feeling of oneness with other human beings. He must, by the
substitution of symbol for reality, destroy in his consciousness the humanness
of that being. To the angry crowds outside the dormitory in Athens, Georgia,
their target was not Charlayne Hunter, an extremely attractive and intelligent
young woman, sitting, brave and afraid, in her room. She was a dirty
nigger - a symbol abstracted from life. To the Negro who committed
violence on the streets of New York, this was not a pathetic old Jewish
immigrant, forced in the last years of his life to peddle vegetables from a
pushcart, but a dehumanised symbol of the historic white exploiter who used the
Negros labour and refused to pay him a just wage. To the screaming
rock-throwers of Peekskill who fractured the skull of a young woman returning
from a concert, the people in the car they attacked were not a family on an
outing; in this car were people who had gone to hear a black-skinned
communistic singer and who therefore were all congealed into a symbol
representing nigger-loving communism. And as I set my interval meter and
toggled of my bombs over the city of Royan, I was not setting fire to
peoples homes, crushing and burning individual men, women and newborn
babies. We were at war, we always dropped bombs on the enemy, and down there
was the enemy.
(From an article by Howard Zinn in Violence in America)
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