Galtung was intriguing the way he defined the different types of violence and what constitutes violence. I started thinking about this more after I had to rewrite my definition paper. I really like the way he describes the different degrees of violence. One example is shown here. “For ‘killing’ read extermination, holocaust. For ‘alienation’ read spiritual death. For ‘repression’ read gulag/KZ. For ‘ecological degradation’ read ecocide. For all of this together read ‘omnicide.’” I thought this was very interesting how he called alienation a spiritual death. That it does not hurt a person physically more that it kills their insides. It seems like the violence are in order from the worst to the least, and alienation comes before repression. This alienation also connects what he says to the other readings about the soul and God being a part of everyone and that religion breeds non-violence. So it may seem that by alienation, according to Galtung, that it could possibly kill a persons non-violent nature. It seems that it reaches the root of a person and destroys what is deepest inside. This makes sense that it would be the closest type of violence to actual death, extermination, and genocide.
A lot of what Galtung seems to propose is that the majority of violence is cultural and that repressing a persons freedom is violence. He talks about religion, which ties into alienation and the freedom of religion. In essence I suppose have religion repressed would in turn alienate these groups of people which would kill the deepest part of a person. His definition for violence is extremely broad and rightly so. “I see biolence as avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life, lowering the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible.” Never before had my mind been pushed further open on a topic I thought I already knew about. When I compared my ideas to this general definition, it pushed me to think of new ideas in the realm.
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