Quotes About Violence

The military rebels issued secret orders dating back to April 1936 that indicated maximum force was to be used: this was violence as the end of the argument over constitutional reform.

Rebel violence was targeted against the socially, culturally and sexually different.

This "cleansing" violence, or limpieza, claimed its most famous victim in the poet Federico García Lorca,

vigilantes. What occurred was a massacre of civilians by other civilians.

this was a "dirty war" and it "disappeared" some 30,000 people during the war of 1936–39.

like Stalin, Franco pursued an intransigent political idea of "purifying" state and domestic order with extreme levels of brutality and coercion.

unprecedented wave of anticlerical violence,

the wave of priest killing that occurred once the military coup had collapsed public order, was entirely unprecedented.

extra judicial murder (the ley de fugas – prisoners "shot while escaping")

As early as 1977, the now iconic comic strip Paracuellos appeared. It was provocatively named – for Paracuellos, the village outside Madrid where the Republicans shot over two thousand prisoners during the wartime siege of the capital,12 lay at the heart of regime martyrology.

the not uncommon sexual humiliation of priests as a prelude to their murder,

But other priests were perpetrators, participating directly in the firing squads.62

The kind of killing perpetrated by civilian vigilantes – often called the "hot repression" – tended to be what happened in the period immediately after rebels took control of a specific town or village.

Terror could only happen because the military allowed it.

The 1930s in Spain saw the development of a series of culture wars that would play out during the years of the Civil War itself. As in all culture wars, the way people mythologized their fears generated violence.

the tens of thousands of people killed in the Francoist repression – by the end of the 1940s the figure was at least 150,000

the death squads came, by night to "take out" of gaol in the deadly sacas, exactly the same form of extrajudicial execution that ended the lives of her two brothers and of tens of thousands of others across Spain.

The Spanish Civil War was the first fought in Europe in which civilians became targets en masse, through bombing raids on big cities.

Notwithstanding the currency of ideas about 'two Spains' ready to confront each other on 18 July 1936, 'us' and 'them' were categories actively made by the violent experience of the war and did not fully exist prior to it.

No war can ever be just air.

The women of Juarez, and women across the world, do not want to have to take revenge, any more than Procne and Philomela did. What they want is to be able to rely on the modern gods -- the police, the courts, and the media -- for justice.

As British writer Gordon Burn wrote in Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son (one of the very few good books written about serial killers),

How did it go from "Füst should apologize to the woman he beat up" to "Füst should apologize to his fiancée" to "Füst should apologize to us"?

I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture. Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power to torture and kill. The paths of history are stained with the blood of those who have fallen victim to "God's Avengers." Kings and Popes and military generals and heads of state have killed, claiming God's authority and God's blessing. I do no believe in such a God.