Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies Núm. 10 / 2017 http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee 344 ULTRAVIOLENCE OR NIHILIST VIOLENCE “Indeed, atomized in the name of freedom, the person now stands alone against the forces of the global market and mega-technology. Simultaneously, violence associated with impersonal bureaucratic structures, of the kind Hanna Arendt talked about, has now acquired freer play. As wars, direct use of violence against unarmed populations, torture and blatant violation of human rights becomes less and less easy to sell, there is an increase in indirect violence, surveillance and destruction of the life support systems of communities unable to defend themselves by using modern institutional and legal remedies”21. In today’s society, in addition to a normal violence conceived as residual, there is also an ultraviolence that is different from the first in that far from being an instrument, it has become an end in itself. In both cases, states try to contain and regulate it, as was done in Ancient Rome and Greece. Currently one of the main social challenges that we face is (distinguishably young and mainly) nihilist violence: “The cultural values in Ancient Greece and Rome, where there were forces capable of restraining violence and countering its spread, were different to those in today’s society and this is the case because currently we counter violence with values that are either very week or completely ineffective.” (…) ‘At the beginning of the 21st century, we hit a dangerous turning point as regards certain expressions of violence, giving rise to extreme brutality that has highlighted several issues: on the one hand, that western societies have lost the principle of reality, recognising the existence of an objective and worrying fact: the moral inability of a large portion of western society to oppose certain values and principles in the face of this new type of violence”22. This inconsequential violence created new challenges as it shares little, other than its outcomes, with the violence that we identify as standard violence. The social processes that lead to violence have been characterised by a desire to perturb the existing order so as to substitute it for another. This tends to be accompanied by new ethics, morals and aesthetics that back up the new values of the elite assailants and that legitimate the use of violence. Ultimately, we can state that violence within a conflict is a pro- 21 NANDY, Ashis. Development and Violence. Trier (Alemania): Zentrum für europäische Studien, 1995. 22 APARICIO-ORDÁS GONZÁLEZ-GARCÍA, Luís A. «El origen de la violencia en las sociedades humanas: Violencia simbólica, violencia fundadora y violencia política.» (Opinion Document) Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos, 24 August 2015, http://www.ieee.es/Galerias/fichero/docs_ opinion/2015/DIEEEO90-2015_OrigenViolencia_Sociedades_L.Aparicio-Ordas.pdf(last consulted 20.03.2017).
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