Violence (n.) is an unavoidable element of all communities that is controlled through ritual, a blood-letting to prevent all-out blood war. The only thing that can put an end to violence, and that is why violence is self-propagating.
Violence (n.) can be pictured as one isolated crime only where a court stands above all the antagonists; take the court away and its imitative chain shows again.
Violence (n.) grows worse as the scapegoat is exposed: sacrifice loses its power, and people raise the dose, killing ever more victims in holocausts meant to be sacrificial.
Violence (n.) can become its own remedy only through a scapegoat, and the scapegoat comes only at the frenzied peak of a crisis.
Violence (n.) is most terrible in its death throes: stripped of its power to reconcile, it multiplies victims in the vain effort to get that power back.
Violence (n.) is wrongly pictured either as a parasite that safeguards can remove or as an instinct it is useless to fight; it is neither.
Violence (n.) is enslavement to a pervasive lie — a closed kingdom that falsifies our picture of God and of everything else.
Violence (n.) is always experienced as a legitimate reprisal or as self-defence; it always seems to begin with the other side.
Violence (n.) once revealed becomes its own enemy and will end by destroying itself: Satan's kingdom, divided against itself, cannot stand.
Violence (n.) cannot bear a being that owes it nothing and pays it no homage; killing him, it falls into a trap that is no trap, because nothing is hidden.
Violence (n.) once exposed betrays itself more the harder it acts to hide its ridiculous secret.
Violence (n.) can restore peace only if there is an ecological field to absorb its damage; that field is now the whole planet, and even that is no longer enough.
Violence (n.) with a difference at its heart — free men's violence versus slaves' — is the key illusion of sacrificial thinking: all violent mastery ends in slavery.
Violence (n.) becomes a fetish once an object's value is measured by the model's resistance: desire salts every pleasure with it, and in the end makes the model a beloved persecutor.
Violence (n.) comes to pass for the plenitude of being between rivals: the greatest violence seems the glorious monopoly of the winner, so each tries to outdo the other in it.
Violence (n.) now shows itself limitless and, for the first time, purely human rather than divine — the logical price of refusing the Gospel's warnings.
Violence (n.) as religion can only be a religion of the dead and of death; Dionysus is the same as Hades.
Violence (n.) can be a protest of good faith: those wrongly yet plausibly accused protest with violence, reinforcing the terror of the one they protest to.