Cultural Violence (Johan Galtung)

While reading Galtung’s work: Cultural Violence, I felt that Galtung’s writing was strong and that he held a biased and disgust for Western culture. Even so, Galtung’s triangle of violence is very interesting and something that I believe exists in today’s world and will need to be addressed if we ever want to strive for perpetual peace. Through the examples he used, he brought a lot of credibility to his triangle of violence; and has convinced me that all three points of the triangle must be addressed to achieve peace. If not, we risk allowing the forms of violence we neglect to foster and grow stronger – we risk the peace process as a whole.

There were, however, three elements of his cultural violence definition that confused me or where his argument eluded me. The aspect of language, art, and cosmology are three of the six cultural domains “that can be potentially used to legitimize direct or structural violence,” according to Galtung. Possible the way he worded his explanations of language and art made me confused with how they could of legitimized direct or structural violence in Galtung’s explanation. Admittedly, I know that we can use language and art as propaganda tools to convince and legitimize the citizens of a nation to war. For instance, in World War II where we used pictures (art) and slurs (language) to show “who” we were fighting and why – the Germans and Japanese at the time. If this was what Galtung was talking about then I understand, otherwise the points he were trying to make escaped me. Cosmology on the other hand just went way over my head.