Language and Violence

An exploration “from first principles” of the systemic nature of violence, “how it permeates the human project at every level, and how language is deployed to obfuscate, distract and even deny that which we bear witness to.” Covering different points in history, beginning with the Iberian conquest of the Americas, Amrith, author of The Burning Earth, and Donald reveal “the incontrovertible relationship between violence against the earth and violence against people”, and how “the justification to extract life from the non-human world inevitably justifies the hierarchies which then see the world’s most vulnerable human beings exploited and even killed.” We learn of the injustice with which not just modern capitalism, but “the human project” overall was built, and about the ideologies that have “justified rampant destruction and extraction”, considering how to imagine “a better world tomorrow with the political language the past has to offer.”