sexta-feira, 1 de dezembro de 2017

A Silence Made of Flames.

 
 
A Silence Made of Flames:
The logic of settler and indigenous Cruelty in Colonial Guinea-Bissau (1956-1974)




 
In Memoriam of all those who perished guilty of being innocent.
 
 
 
1.     Introduction
 
There is a common understanding that the Portuguese Bullfights are less violent than the Spanish ones, given the fact that the bull is not killed in the arena in front of everyone. Naturally, this is an inaccurate assumption if one considers the torture inflicted to the bull in both spectacles, independently of their different outcome. In this comparative metaphor, however, it is possible to find the deepest roots of what is the difference between simply killing and painfully orchestrating the other’s death. Bullfights are widely described as cruel because their purpose, no matter the regional nuances, is to inflict pain to the bull until it gives up on resisting. This “infliction of pain” traditionally confirms, if successful, the bullfighter’s superiority as his dominion over the bull aches to a performing Art[1] by opposing the rational sophistication of a human to the brutish nature of an animal.  Simply killing the bull without all the ceremony would undermine the artistic and visual meaning of the spectacle.
Normally, what comes to define cruelty in such situations is that there is a “wicked” purpose of planning and even phasing the process of painfully killing a living being. Would it be, then, less cruel to replace torturing the bull with simply killing?  Would that not be equally “wicked” if one considers that the bulls’ passiveness in their natural environment is deliberately altered by enraging it when entering the arena? The bull’s violent reaction is rationally provoked to posteriorly justify its own annihilation. Two questions remain: 1) what triggers the bull to react in such violent way? 2) what is the rationale behind the need for triggering the bull’s violent reaction?
The spectacle is the answer by exploring the bull’s natural instinct to react, in a process that aims to attest one’s superiority who would be originally weaker in confronting the first. Similarly, War is a brutal spectacle for power. Somehow, the difficulty to understand War’s nature, like in what happens with bullfights, derives from the difficulty of understanding Cruelty as an end rather than just a mean. Resorting to Violence in War is not always instrumental nor an illegitimate crime[2], it might be one legitimate purpose of the war itself. Cruelty in warfare might be situated in the tenuous line between the utilitarian instrumentality of killing another that is equally willing to kill and the meaning of which that killing is based and processed.  
This dissertation proposes Cruelty as an autonomous and a non-essentially contested concept within Theories on Violence, by tracking its philosophical and theoretical understanding and tracing its History as a means-to-an-end in conflicts. Being an end in of itself means that, in specific situations, there is no instrumentality in resorting to Cruelty to reach strategic advantage over the enemy. Cruelty can be an objective itself. Thus, the core argument is that Cruelty is a rational element of strategy-making, particularly in contexts of asymmetric conflict. The aim is to refute the current Neo-liberal Paradigm that War is a deviation of Human behaviour and the application of extreme physical violence can either be a pathological issue or the product of bureaucratic War Practises of Reciprocity. The argument will be tested in the case study of the Portuguese Colonial War in Guinea-Bissau, whose focus will be the logic behind the enactment of Cruelty by both settler and indigenous armed forces from 1956 to 1974.
2.     The Concept of Cruelty

“(…) this ‘believing in our virtue’ – isn’t that essentially what used to be called a ‘good conscience’, that venerable, dangling conceptual pigtail that our grandfathers attached to the back of their heads, and often enough to the back of their understanding?”[3]


        Nietzsche’s quote is not innocent as he did not himself believe in conceptual innocence. If the scientific neutrality of concepts has been contested since, at least, the last two centuries, their ethical connotation is equally and necessarily questionable. What does define the wrongness or the rightness of an action? Moral realism[4] reports to existing undiscussable moral facts which will then define the moral falsehood or truth of something. This is achieved by the individual’s rational understanding of his actions’ morality. In this aspect, Sidgwick’s[5] contribution of proposing “Methods of Ethics” is useful to track the very roots of moral objectivity as being defined as a rational procedure by which one determines what individuals should do or what is correct for them to do. For instance, moral non-cognitivism[6] rejects any kind of Moral’s objectivity as it depends on either individual or collective interpretation. Thus, this and other questions on Morality are intrinsically biased as no one can give an impartial answer, but rather express a personal judgement/perspective. Nevertheless, this Meta-Ethics’ core problem crosses all ranges of Social Sciences by observing social phenomena which are themselves socially constructed and differently perceived. For instance, if one is questioned on Cruelty, Cruelty is consensually condemned, despite the absence of a proper definition of what cruelty. This is because there is not a proper conceptualisation of Cruelty thus far.  What makes Cruelty then so intrinsically bad? Can something be cruel just because it is considered cruel?
Assuming so, Cruelty might take part in any episode of our daily life as the term has been made banal by media outlets and political speeches to condemn something. One can observe somehow what Arendt[7] would call regarding the famous Eichmann’s trial the “banality of Evil”, where people do evil without realising that they are practising it, but in an opposite sense, since people see irrational cruelty everywhere when there is not even a proper conceptualisation of what Cruelty could be. Cruelty is a vulgar adjective to describe extremely violent crimes, psychological assaults or slaughters within conflicts, frequently found in varied political and intellectual discourse on these issues. Unconsciously, people generally even establish some sort of hierarchy between different “existing levels” of cruelty, which is inaccurate. Thus, that is why it is important to reflect on whether Cruelty is an essentially contested concept or not and, thereafter, to assess whether it has conceptual autonomy or if it is a mere derivation of a broader concept of violence. Even if it fails to prove the conceptual autonomy of Cruelty, understanding the phenomenon might be an important contribution to the dissection of the logic on which Cruelty lies.
It is not possible, however, to conceptualise Cruelty without firstly exploring the conceptual meaning of Violence. Bufacchi defends that Violence should be conceptually understood in two different perspectives: the narrower and the broader one[8]. The narrower or the minimalist[9] explains Violence as an exclusively physical and deliberated act of force, with the purpose of destruction and harm against others’ physical or material integrity, following the contributions of Geras[10], Coady[11], Dewey[12] and Pogge[13]. Also important is the note made by Audi that “(…) violence in this sense is always done, and it is always done to something (…)”[14] as it is consequently restricted to the consciously perpetrated action rather than anything else.  The broader or the comprehensive[15] extends its analysis to other kinds of violence, such as the psychological as proposed by Audi[16] and developed by Galtung, generally in Conflicts. The latter claimed that a different kind of violence was deathlier than the conventional one which has been named by him as “structural violence”. Structural Violence reports to an intrinsic violence to social structures that produces “unequal power and consequently (…) unequal life chances”[17].
The Minimalist Concept of Violence will be the methodological reference of this piece onwards for two main reasons: 1) the physical nature of violent acts is empirically more reliable and objective than psychological ones, despite being acknowledged that psychological violence exists but as consequence of physical violence (e.g. massive rape is a type of physical violence with strong psychological damages apart from the physically obvious) 2) a narrow perspective on Violence allows approaches to be focused on Cruelty as a rational element of strategy-making by only considering physically observable acts as elements of violence, apart from normative considerations. Nevertheless, Cruelty is widely regarded as a normative phenomenon given that is always evaluated from a moral perspective, despite not even having clear subjective parameters for being measured as such. Even violence, being accountable for the physical marks it leaves, can be an object of conceptual contestability.
In literature, Toal[18] points that Cruelty has been a matter of fascination from the beginning of the XIX Century onwards by influence of Sade’s controversial literary contribution. In this regard, an interesting observation was made by the French poet Antonin Artaud who assumed that whenever he mentioned cruelty, people would immediately associate it with blood. This is because the Latin etymological origin of the word “cruel” is “cruor” that means “flayed and bleeding flesh”[19].  Etymology of Cruelty, then, supports the methodological option for the Minimalist Concept of Violence as it is essentially physical, even according to the etymological origin of the term “Cruelty”. Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that the literary use of Cruelty and its visual component impacts on other’s psychological integrity, which might have contributed to Cruelty becoming a normative phenomenon. Such framing is owed to a particularly individual, chronological, special and cultural interpretation of it. For example, killing a cow in Portugal is not considered cruel, but killing one in India is deemed so cruel that it is illegal, nor was slavery as cruel (or illegal) in the XVII Century as it is seen nowadays. This relative understanding derives from and contributes to Cruelty as an essentially relative and contested concept.
Gallie[20] enounced four essential conditions for a concept to be essentially contested: 1) it “accredits some kind of valued achievement”[21]; 2) “this achievement must be of an internally complex character”[22]; 3) “the accredited achievement is initially variously describable”[23] and 4) the concept must be “open in character” by admitting “considerable modification in the light of changing circumstances”[24]. Following this line of thought, De Haan framed Violence as an essentially contested concept since it is, in his belief, universally accredited, variously describable, has a “wide variety of definitions”[25], is internally complex by creating “(…) ample controversies concerning the question what violence is and how ought to be defined”[26] and, finally, is revisable and modifiable whenever the debate requires without being “prescribed”[27] to previous definitions or further modifications. Why does the classification of the concept of Violence as an essential contested concept matter for the discussion over Cruelty being or not an autonomous concept? Not only Cruelty is based on the conceptual complexity of Violence as it is not only read as its wickedest exponent but also represents an essential contested concept itself by mirroring the philosophical and theoretical debate on Violence and the various perspectives on it. But if Cruelty stands for a mere conceptual reflection of Violence, why not use Cruelty also as a synonym of Violence?
The reason is that from the Latin term “cruor” derived both “crudelis” which contemporarily means “cruel” or the status of something being in flayed and bleeding flesh and “crudus” which means something “raw or indigestible”[28]. Two illations can be drawn from this fact. Firstly, Cruelty can only be conceptually applied if regarding animal living beings as its core etymology refers exclusively to bleeding flesh, contrary to the wider range of matters on which the concept of Violence can be applied. In fact, Violence derives from the Latin word “Violentia” which means “vehemence, a passionate and uncontrolled use of force”[29] which charges the concept with an intrinsic subjective charge as well with a certain degree of irrationality. Conceptually, violence can either be observed in acts against living beings or mere inanimate objects.
One may argue that the psychological dimension of Violence might undermine the discretionary nature of objects on whom violence is applied because to psychology, one needs to find consciousness in such objects for them to be considered. However, the psychological dimension is a consequence of the product of violence and neither a product by itself nor even a mean which the reason for the structural nature of Violence lies on, as pointed out by Galtung[30]. Violence depends on a diversely complex structure composed by several different factors and inputs which then naturally lead to the various interpretations of it.  Secondly, Cruelty implies physical violence as its consequences lead to severe and irreversible harm on whom it is applied, according to the own etymological definition. More: being physical, Cruelty leads to Cruelty as a product, which secondary damages or consequences should not be fallaciously related to, because a flayed and bleeding flesh is a product of objectively flaying flesh. Being conceptually focused on an exclusively physical product, an act of Cruelty is rational as it defines a scope of physical harm towards a considered target. A point which might allow this dissertation to identify Cruelty as an end of strategy-making.
From this argument, one can deduce that Cruelty has been conceptually misused by reporting to a subjective dimension that does not match with its original meaning, objectively provoking harm in the flesh, if one can summarise it so. The subjective dimension of Cruelty is product of a deviation from the objectivity of “cruor” to the subjectivism of “crudus” as indigestible began to be used as a literary synonym to express something that is not tolerable.
What does define Cruelty, then? Cruelty can be defined as an exclusively physical action in both means and ends by resorting to extreme violence as a mean to achieve the end of expressly and irreversibly damaging the physical integrity of others without any secondary goal.  Following this logic, one can assume that cruelty is neither an autonomous concept from Violence due to the first’s exclusively physical nature nor an essentially contested concept because it was found to be neither variously describable nor internally complex, not even open in character. A beheaded head on a spike will always be objectively a beheaded head on a spike, and therefore, a cruel sight.

 
3.     The Historical Path of Cruelty.

 
Previously, Cruelty revealed to be a misused concept to define broader phenomena of extreme violence rather than specifically define the phenomenon that factually its original etymology reports to. Despite Latin etymology being the oldest known, Cruelty as a social phenomenon has deeper roots. Giorgi determines that the shift for a crueller way of physically opposing others occurred in the “Upper Palaeolithic Period in Northern Europe and Asia”[31] due to an adaptive process of “hunting large mammals”[32] that psychologically and physically transformed the hunting-gatherers’ groups. Two reasons may be considered: 1) if the hunt’s objective was to subsist and hunting larger animals provided more supplies, then it would imply a more efficient and lower-risk way of doing it by violently harming the prey, simultaneously a predator in many occasions. 2) as the process of subsisting became more violent, the proper “social fabric of humans”[33] shifted in a way that the group’s action became progressively coordinated by few, especially those who were more efficient in killing. This not only explains why the hierarchy tended to be dominated by men[34] but also explains the path that structured power in violence. Rummel, for instance, highlighted the brutality of the Assyrian Empire whose soldiers were rewarded for every severed head brought in from the field, “whether enemy fighters or not”[35] as the oldest historical example of cruelty. This became a pattern as will be shown below.
Nevertheless, if they were rewarded, then harming the other was not an end by itself. There was a secondary goal: getting material benefits. One would be right in concluding as much, but would also be ignoring the broader picture: they were rewarded because there was an end-goal of exterminating the enemy. One should not confuse incentives with ends. It is reasonable to observe that much of the historical examples of Cruelty were materially incentivised but that does not invalidate that goals would physically destroy the enemy’s integrity by going beyond conventional violence. In this regard, Martin & Frayer[36] pointed out that violence is not an exclusive phenomenon of warfare as there was non-warfare violence in primitive societies that Rousseau previously defined as “noble savages”[37]. The absence of War does not necessarily mean the absence of violence but, most important of all, there is a kind of violence that escapes to the conventions of war and even, if one wishes, that is not subjected to the Clausewitzian understanding of violence being instrumental to achieve political goals.
A window is opened to the acknowledgement of instrumental violence not having other goal rather than harming, which Cruelty stands for[38]. For example, Robb’s argument was that violence should be understood in its own cultural terms[39] rather than being merely categorised as irrational. The fact French Jesuits did not understand the “parallel and isomorphic”[40] meaning of both body and spirit to the Huron tribe in Canada, while the first described it as “innate barbarism”[41], reveals that the object of analysis was obvious despite having a deeper meaning: Iroquois prisoners were tortured, burnt alive and then beheaded to feed those Huron villagers who were assisting to their executions. The meaning of violence can be historically and culturally discussed as “the French equated the excessive and unregulated cruelty with diabolical unreason”[42] which was not perceived as such by the Huron, but the fact is that Huron consciously inflicted harm to their prisoners according to a death ritual that was an end by itself[43]. Consequently, one might have the temptation of assuming Cruelty as a civilizational matter.
Nietzsche was the most prominent proponent of such argument by stating that “almost everything that we call “high culture” is based on the deepening and spiritualizing of Cruelty”[44]. Why is this? Nietzsche once questioned what both the Roman Gladiator, the Spanish Torero and the Working-class Parisian have in common and the answer he came up with was: they “aspired to drink (…) the spiced brew of the great Circe “Cruelty””[45]. Cruelty, according to Nietzsche, is not just about making the others suffer but also about our own sacrifice that is inspired by a deeper “religious sense”[46] which can be found in men’s demand for knowledge against their own will. Thus, this “intellectual sacrifice”[47] is the very basis of a civilizational tendency for harming “the will of the spirit”[48] and making the infliction of pain a constant necessity for the drawing of “appearances and surfaces”, producing a certain cultural and even individual coherence.
Despite Cruelty being exclusively physical, there is no contradiction as Nietzsche was referring to the centrality of suffering in the making of civilizational legacies. A suffering that is constituted by the inner appetency to inflict pain either in ourselves or in others because of one’s own “desensualized and decorporealized”[49] existence by obeying to higher puritan values. The idea of one being “decorporealized” was enough for Nietzsche to believe that one stands before a phenomenon of Civilizational Cruelty. It might be rightfully questioned if the concept of Cruelty fits in such understanding, but the important point is that the physical component of suffering, as the individual was being deprived of their own body, sustained Nietzsche’s argument. Thus, Nietzsche’s understanding of Civilizational Cruelty does not collide with the exclusively physical dimension of Cruelty. In fact, reinforces it.
Nietzsche identified Cruelty as being more than a product but a path by stressing that both Romans, Spaniards and Parisians shared that common trace in different historical periods. Can it be proved? If so, what does it imply for the understanding of Cruelty as an end? Jones found in the Antiquity the roots of Cruelty as a social phenomenon by identifying Homer’s commemoration of Agamemnon’s implacability with his enemies by leaving “(…) none alive, down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs – not even they must live” [50] as the classical influence for the Western cultural pattern of extreme violence as a mean. This would be latterly complemented by the Old Testament and the Book of Genesis “where God decides “to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven””[51]. These two combined would settle the basis for Cruelty to be an absolute and universal phenomenon of transformation of a certain reality in favour of a radical new one by the ultimate and total sacrifice of the living flesh. Ever again, one should not interpret this as Cruelty being merely instrumental because, even though the use of physical violence in these two examples was effectively definitive as physically destroyed the other to impose an incoming change, there was no other goal in those very specific episodes beyond the intrinsic one of flaying the defeated flesh. Ironically, neither God nor King Agamemnon needed to gain advantage over others - cruelty was the consummation of their own irreversible advantage.
      Those classical influences are crucial to understand the cruel dimension of some particularly violent historical phenomena such as the Crusades[52] or the Inquisition[53] but especially that of the French Revolutionary Period from 1789 to 1815, which was the paradigm of contemporary other examples. According to Tilly, unresolved tensions are not enough to explain the violent nature of Revolution[54] as there is no linearity between the individual demands and the endurable violence that is expressed in a “collective culture”[55]. This distinction between the individual and the collective levels of violence is important to contest the broader literature that associates phenomena of cruelty as being a product of a collectively expressed violent tendency, driven by individual impulses[56]. This understanding of phenomena of Cruelty as confirming the validity of Frustration-Aggression Theories was revealed to be insufficient to explain them. Therefore, Dwyer has identified the extremely violent nature of the French Revolutionary Period with the consequence of the “extreme (…) rhetoric calling for the extermination of the enemy”[57]  shared by both revolutionary and reactionary parties of the conflict. One can argue that even this cruel way of violence is purely an instrument to achieve political goals in this case. Indeed, there were political and ideological goals in the massacres that occurred in both Vendee Civil War and the subsequent Napoleonic military campaigns, but such does not invalidate Cruelty as an autonomous and non- essentially contested concept. As quoted by Dwyer “the “normal rules of war” disappeared”[58]. If on one hand one could observe conventional violence taking a tactical place to achieve political goals in this specific period, on the other hand there was also a clear gap between the conventional political use of violence and atrocities[59] being frequently committed by both sides with no particular end.   
For example, the sacking and massacre of Montellano, a Spanish village, by Captain Ballue’s troops in April 1810 was justified by urging to retaliation based on false facts[60]. The Peninsular War was particularly paradigmatic in what concerns to Cruelty practised by both sides as Captain François remembered that usually “tongues were torn out, ears and noses cut off, (…) [French] captives were slowly burnt and flayed alive (…)”[61]. Dwyer admits that these acts were usually carried out by lower ranks of the French Army or by popular resistance as retaliation[62], but the truth is that most of these acts were also encouraged and sometimes dictated by higher ranks. [63] If it is understandable that soldiers in their psychological[64] and physical exhaustion could react more violently on brutal attacks perpetrated against their comrades, the prior existence of instructions from higher-ranks to commit atrocities cannot be understood in the light of retaliation. Not even intimidation can be considered because the reaction towards the invader proved to be fearless and equally brutal, once those attacks occurred, but especially because both military codes and the 1796 French Penal Code prohibited such acts[65]. If that is the case, what was the point of officers instructing their troops to burn and eradicate entire villages in the most violent way possible when they were consciously already enjoying strategic advantage?
Hull, for instance, suggested that extremely violent war practises might have been a product of “institutional routines and organisational dynamics”[66] without being driven by a rigid totalitarian ideology. Such argument was applied to the German massacre of Herero tribes in Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1907, as the author stated that was the Prussian military culture of actionism[67] and annihilation “as the sole goal of war”[68]  which made the German Army more prone to resort to extreme solutions[69] towards the eradication of their enemies. However, there are two debatable points in this assumption: 1) Hull is not considering colonialism and the logic of civilizational superiority as an ideological driver for such a product, which is not accurate as Ferguson[70] would notice when asked what had made the XX Century so bloody; 2) it is important to conceptually distinguish genocide from cruelty as the first is perpetrated with clearly socio-political goals of extermination[71], while the second does not stand for it. While genocide has the sole goal of eradication of communities according to their breed or culture, Cruelty is a goal by itself with no other purpose rather than destroy by inflicting exclusively physical harm to opponents, regardless of any other identities they have.   
This is an important note because there is a tendency to identify genocides as acts of Cruelty when they are not. Shooting or gassing thousands is not the same thing as dozens being hanged by their own bowels or being buried alive with their mutilated genitalia in their mouths, not even at a theoretical level. That is also the reason why this chapter will not approach the German Holocaust or the Chinese Cultural Revolution as part of Cruelty’s historical path. But if Cruelty is neither a mean to political goals nor a product of military cultures, as was shown above, what is the rationale behind it?

 
4.     Cruelty and Rationality
 
      The understanding of Cruelty as being irrational derives from the misunderstanding that Violence as a mean is irrational. Since the end of World War II that many thinkers have identified any kind of violence as simply an expression of Humanity’s most primitive instincts, defending that to argue would always be more rationally acceptable than fighting[72]. Popper would define it as the “attitude of reasonableness”[73] but it seems rather insufficient to explain why most of the times negotiations fail and lead to conflict as that conflict tends to end always with talks. One can infer from this assumption that not only the instrumental nature of violence is a fact but can also have positive outcomes, the same positives outcomes that reasoning and arguing failed to deliver before[74]. A counter-argument could be that violence is a costly mean if, for example, collateral damages are considered, but what one fails to explain is why did reasoning fail in mediating an existing tension. Even if one explains that failure with a pre-existing violent impetus that push the talks to an end, one is admitting that violence emerged and replaced arguing as a circumstantial necessity. The point is that it might argued that violence as a mean should be invalidated because of its irrationality, but from the moment when violence is assumed as a necessary resource, one cannot deny the rationality of it. Once is understood to be necessary, it is rational as it respects a mean-end’s logic.    
By not having a coherent argumentation, rather than simply assume that arguing could reasonably replace resorting to violence on solving queries and conflicts, those who oppose the acceptance of Violence’s rationality adopt a subjective position which is based on ethical appreciations of such a mean as being intrinsically wrong. Is that wrong? Mill refuted[75] this notion by suggesting that an action could be right or wrong not depending on its instrumental utility nor on its benefits but rather on the understanding that the individual derives from it. Then, the remaining question is what takes someone to painfully killing the other? Sustaining that killing is an emotive act fails to address the question of killing by duty. Consequently, what takes someone from killing by duty to start enacting Cruelty as it was previously conceptualised?  
Three justifications over this issue have been suggested: 1) the excitement of danger activates a Freudian death instinct which motivated “men keep fighting because they wanted to.” as Ferguson suggested[76]; 2) the so called “death instinct” is a product of an intensive training as Bourke[77] pointed out that recruits were initially reluctant in killing in World War One because they were being taught all their lives that killing would be morally wrong; 3) Gray, for instance, alluded to “the delight of destruction” as men sought some compensation[78] for their war efforts by cruelly torturing and killing the opponent. Such explanation might also be found in an unexperienced sense of freedom that Nadelson[79] observed in Vietnam’s fighters. Both Gray and Nadelson share the belief that killing has the purpose to fill some sort of a gap as both also agreed that violence is indeed instrumental to do it. Moreover, both perspectives report to some sort of rational process of inputs and outputs, which synthetises the act of killing by duty in a linear sequence of an imposed context, a necessary choice and an unavoidable consequence. Thus, where does Cruelty fit in?
This Dissertation proposes Cruelty to be a cumulative process of “creative destruction”[80] being subjected to the principles of the emergence theory of creativity: 1) Constraint; 2) Application; 3) Ideology. Regarding Constraint, performing Cruelty is a micro-level phenomenon as it is not widely spread nor commonly observed, which makes it locally constrained either by physical or human factors.  Regarding Application, those situations have a “microdomain”[81] – an unreproducible all-or-nothing environment where conflicting parties are constrained by a mutual animosity built on the pursuit of different and irreconcilable social, political, economic and cultural absolute goals that drive them to a definitive but unknown solution in terms of action and its temporal and spatial distance. The fact of not knowing the outcome originates “constrained generating procedures”[82] which can be a gradually driven offensive against the enemy by rationally increasing the degree of violence and harm applied as the outcome is becoming to be known. Like an entrepreneur who gradually constructs his final product by testing and sophisticating the creative approach based on preferences and utilities[83], those enacting Cruelty follow the same logic of sophisticating the violence that is applied until an end of physical destruction of the opponent is finally reached at the microdomain. Finally, regarding Ideology, one must consider that if absolute goals are ad principium dogmatic, there is no space for alternatives.  Thus[84], those fighting for absolute goals and causes would give up on their own lives, as an absolute value per se, to make such goals possible. Being a binary option, either to live or to die for the cause, procedures will be consequently framed by rational choices, even without being evident, as Kauffman suggested[85].              
 
5.     Cruelty as Strategy
 
        It is a widely famous Clausewitz’s premise that War is the continuation of Politics by other means. When defining the essence of War, Clausewitz stated that “each [part] tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will; (…) make him incapable of further resistance”[86] which might induce one to confuse this definition with Cruelty’s. However, while War is not an end by itself, Cruelty is as it was proved that it has neither been used as a way of favourably shaping a strategic environment nor even reinforcing a strategic position like a tactic would do. Cruelty is not tactical because it is a non-predetermined solution which is achieved by a cumulative exertion of violence at a specific microdomain. Ergo an end, not a means to one. The key for understanding such difference is understanding that while War is to impose and to achieve “one’s war aims”[87], Cruelty is not. Such fact is explained by not having aims as Cruelty is the result of a cumulative exercise of force. War ends either in victory or in defeat. Cruelty ends in Cruelty.
Another Clausewitzian trope is the enemy’s total destruction as an effective form of winning a war. What is interesting here to the matter of Cruelty from this Clausewitz’s proposition is the concept of “adversary’s centre of gravity”[88] which concerns with dominating “enemy’s will”[89]. Clausewitz meant that either to control or to defeat opponents, one must provoke them the strong impression that waging war would led to an “infinite prolongation of conflict”[90]. This is usually known as threat of escalation which is one threatening other by using of force as a bargain and resorting to a demonstration of a “real ability”[91] of implementing it. This sequence of concepts is relevant as acts of Cruelty are usually described as acts of dissuasion by supposedly portraying a proper symbolism when applying extreme violence against adversaries (combatants or non-combatants). These have been wrongly interpreted as signals of warning that a major brutality could be further enacted.   
This assumption is not accurate as it fails to consider that Cruelty has no other scale rather than the physical perishability of the human body. Cruelty is circumstantial, surgically applied to an event which has not the possibility of being escalated. It was written previously that a head on a spike was nothing else than a head on a spike, which means that an act of Cruelty cannot be escalated to something else. One might counter-argue that retaliation could be understood as a form of escalation of an act of Cruelty. However, retaliating is not escalating the conflict, it is just confirming the already observable violence within the conflict. A subsequent counter-argument might be the proportionality of such response, but the point is that Cruelty is not proportional ad principium because of its cumulative nature. One cannot measure the proportionality of something when the measurement in observance is unfixed. Plus, an act of Cruelty occurring means that the threat of escalation was ignored before the imminent conflict started. Thus, Cruelty can neither be understood as an act of dissuasion nor an act of retaliation. As a cumulative process, Cruelty cannot be a cause but just a consequence.   
 Can consequences be part of strategic thinking? If one understands Strategy as a “system of thought leading to action”[92] by resorting to a rationalised use of violence[93] as a means to pursue an end, certainly yes because action is in this case a necessary consequence of thought. Following Betts’s suggestion that “strategies are chains of relationships among means and ends”[94], this interdependency stands for Cruelty as a rational element of strategy-making process by implicitly acknowledging that consequences also structure and systematise the process that leads to them. Cruelty is therefore an end that shapes the process that leads to it. Despite being an unknown end at the beginning, its cumulative nature determines that the gradual achieving of itself is obtained precisely with that interdependent interaction among means and ends. Is it possible to prove this empirically, though? The selected case-study is the strategic purpose of enactments of Cruelty perpetrated by both parties[95] at the Portuguese Guinea’s Liberation War, between 1956[96] and 1974.
     The shared History between Portugal and Guinea-Bissau started in the XV Century when the first expeditions[97] reached the coast of Guinea’s Gulf. The fate of Guinea-Bissau as a marginal player within the Portuguese Empire started at the same period when King Afonso V granted the commercial and exploration monopoly of this area to Fernão Gomes[98], a merchant from Lisbon, who was responsible for the establishment of Elmina Castle[99] in 1483[100]. As Guinea-Bissau’s mainland was of difficult access and limited in natural resources[101], “tiny areas of old colonial elite (…) emerged”[102] in Gulf’s different archipelagos, namely Cape Verde and Bolama[103] (which was the first colonial capital of Guinea until 1942, after being replaced by Bissau[104], the current capital of the country), where the Portuguese initially established off-shore settlements resorting to the abduction and forced exile of Jewish children there[105]. Until Berlin’s Conference in 1885, very little Portuguese presence was noticed in Guinea’s mainland which “was not “pacified” until the late 1930’s”[106] This is an important historical note because, as Chabal pointed out, both geographic[107] and human factors[108] played against an effective Portuguese colonisation of Guinea. That process, though, was mainly led by ”Cape Verdean Creoles and Christian Guineans”[109] who fought against other natives and ethnic groups on behalf of the Portuguese Authorities during the pacification campaigns of 1890-1915[110]. During this period, the first movement of proto-nationalism emerged with the Guinean League[111][112] which would later inspire the emergence of PAIGC[113] in 1956.
This historical contextualisation shows that the complexity of the process of colonisation and the solidity of anti-colonial resistance helped to shape one of the three principles of Cruelty as “creative destruction”: ideology. On both sides, one observes two absolute ideologies competing for a hegemonic legitimacy. On one side, the liberation movement led by Amílcar Cabral, PAIGC, which was politically Marxist-oriented but deeply rooted in African Traditional Elements, such as Animism[114], by calling to a “Re-Africanisation”[115] at all cost of Guinea-Bissau. The spiritualisation of Africanism was also determinant to “inciting its supporters (…) to make sacrifices and even do miracles”[116] as divine intervention would prevent them from being killed[117] by the Portuguese.  On the other side, Estado Novo’s ideology determined that Portugal was a multiracial[118][119] egalitarian[120] state, despite the Colonial Act of 1930 having established a differentiation[121][122] regime among Indigenous[123] and Assimilated – in Guinea, they were just about 0.3%[124] of the population. This belief on the benevolent Exceptionalism[125] of Portuguese Colonisation enthusiastically mobilised thousands of young and unexperienced soldiers[126] to the colonies under the singing motto “Punish the invaders / with ancestral fearlessness! / To detain!/ To Mangle! / To Win! / To Chase Out!”[127]. There was neither space for conciliation nor tolerance. 
This generalised tendency of identifying the supporters of liberation movements with invaders or even inferior animals, that had to be chased and hunted, had its influence on the military action. Second-Lieutenant Pádua remarked that “if they cut off our ears, we had to cut their ears off as well. That was the official language.”[128], which one might deduce as being an example of reciprocity. However, other testimonies pointed in a different direction. The refractory Baginha described “There were very ferocious bombardments over Tabancas[129] [Guinean villages] … [The Portuguese] burnt every plantation they found, rice plantations, everything… There were also daunting stories from Schulz’s period [Governor of Guinea from 1964 to 1968] of boats that went up River Geba[130] with people tied by their hands and feet behind their back that were thrown out to the river alive…”.[131]  Two elements must be highlighted in this testimony: 1) a clear identification of a superior hierarchical responsible, which refutes the idea that only low-ranks are prone to enact Cruelty in extreme cases of retaliation; 2) identification of a period that is particularly characterised by those “awful stories”, which means that a considerable number of incidents shared common features such as the responsible military hierarchy and the gravity of them.
Two other reports made by non-identified refractories to Dutch NOS broadcasting company in the 60’s confirmed the previous scenario: 1) “One of the operations that revolted me the most was one between Bula and Có[132], when the Commandant ordered the whole population to be gathered, to keep the young girls apart and send the others back inside the village. Then, they burnt the all village, raped the young girls. They were lieutenants, sergeants… At the end, they ordered to kill them all…”[133]; 2) “As a Section Commandant, belonging to the Parachutist Division, I was forced to act as a murderer, despite being against it… But I was the Section Commandant, I had to give the example, otherwise my superiors would persecute me… I saw them burning entire villages as I did it as well, killing children, killing women…”[134]. The entire commitment and participation of superior ranks of the Portuguese Army in ordering, forcing the execution and perpetration of such acts, with no context of previous PAIGC’s similar attacks, becomes clear. When observing such operational resemblances among those episodes, can one identify them as part of a major strategy? If so, what was the purpose? Both previously described locations that were geographically isolated, so the fear effect did not exist at least as it should be expected. And if no one survived to spread the word of such Cruelty as dissuasion, what is the strategic advantage of doing it?
Both descriptions validate Cruelty as an end derived from a cumulative process of “creative destruction”. Firstly, regarding constraint, one observes that both episodes occurred in isolated areas, which makes it physically constrained, and that both episodes were constrained to the Portuguese Army facing defenceless native populations. Secondly, regarding application, the notion of micro-domain is reinforced where two parties shared mutual animosity based on the differences we already explored, that drives one of the parts to definitive but unknown solution. Those military companies arrived at those villages but they did not know the outcome as natives may have been able to resist them or an ambush may have been planned, which happened frequently. So, the outcome, the enactment of Cruelty, is gradually constructed resorting to constrained generating procedures, in fact methods to gradually and painfully destroy those identified as opponents in that specific temporal and special frame. One might raise the issue of those populations being unarmed and thus non-combatants, but in a context of Liberation Wars, being a sympathiser of liberation movements or simply living in a liberated area transforms one’s image into that of the enemy.
Various reports confirm this idea. For example, in the day after the attack to Tite Military Base on 23rd January 1963, when the Liberation War in Guinea officially started, Guinean Folk Singer Sambu described that “Captain Curto [a Portuguese Officer] (…) used to behead people and then send their heads to their parents, saying: “Here’s your child’s head””[135]. This pattern of violence is also confirmed by the following statement: “It was torture, violence… Everything!... (…) Sometimes, they [the Portuguese Army] caught people, tied them up to cars and then they turned on the engine, started moving and dragged them on the ground till they were dead…”[136]   Other example is reported by Corporal Silva Ramos regarding the treatment of PAIGC alleged collaborators: “The way they treated prisoners[137] was using the electric chair, whip lashes, lighting matches in their noses (…) cutting off their fingers and putting them in bottles (…)”[138]
Simultaneously however, the PAIGC followed a similar strategy not against the Portuguese, at a first stage, but against their own populations who had not adhered to the movement. Forced recruitment by abduction was described by Pedro Pires (PAIGC) as “not being the pretty thing as most of the people say… (…) Many people joined the liberation cause as fighters because it was imposed by (…) PAIGC”[139]. Other tendency of Cruelty’s enactment was observed until The First Party’s Congress in the liberated area of Cassacá in February 1964, which centralised the decision and action structures of the movement, as “various chiefs of PAIGC used to burn people alive under the conviction of witchcraft (…) In other areas, they used to pierce people’s eye”[140]. After the movement being organised and centralised, these acts started to be observed against the Portuguese settlers by imitation of what other liberation movements were doing in Angola and Mozambique. A paradigmatic example of such acts is described by Merchant Cruz Alegre: “(…) I’ve seen a naked woman and her little child all mangled on the ground (…)”[141]  
The destruction of the very physical presence of the enemy, as it has been presented with resort to these last testimonies, stands for Cruelty as a rational element of strategy-making: absolutely destroying the other in a micro-scale where advantage is used not to be expanded but to be reinforced. This “illusion” of strategic advantage convinced soldiers from both parts that they fighting to be victorious. The gradual application of violence was just the way that those command structures find to empower their exhausted men by giving them the management of their own force and inciting them to explore it to the extreme. The point of being cruel is, then, being rationally and deliberately cruel. The notion of creating destruction should be sufficient to the perpetrating of acts of Cruelty as understood as strategically useful. This is because Cruelty is the last stage of destroying the enemy as Clausewitz suggested by reinforcing the troops’ own morale without having to destroy enemy’s morale first.    
6.     Conclusion
 
Divided in four chapters, this dissertation broached Cruelty in its conceptual understanding, in its History, in its rationality and, finally, in its strategic utility to prove that Cruelty is factually a rational element of strategy-making. Conceptually, one concluded that Cruelty is, indeed, an autonomous and non-essentially contested concept as it was proved to be an exclusively physical phenomenon which lies on the utter undoing of the body’s integrity without any secondary goal rather than the end of destroying the other. It was also acknowledged the role of Violence as a mean and not as synonym of Cruelty, thus contesting a widely spread understanding that is also profoundly wrong according to the evidence shown, and based on the term’s Latin etymology. The objectivity present in an act of Cruelty makes the core argument supporting the essential contestability of Cruelty’s concept as a  wrongly perceived subjective matter invalid.
Historically, Cruelty was originally described by Nietzsche as a civilizational phenomenon which was validated by resorting to anthropological and historical evidences of Cruelty being a cultural process with the end being Cruelty itself. The biblical legacy of God’s omnipotent capacity to destroy “all the flesh” led others to emulate such power and became incorporated in their own way of thinking and projecting others’ destruction. Analysing the validity of Cruelty as a product of Frustration-Aggression Theories, one could observe that such an idea has no proper foundation, as Cruelty stood for rational purposes rather than emotional ones. Another hypothesis that was rejected was Cruelty being a product of bureaucratic war cultures because Cruelty does not seek other goals rather than Cruelty itself as Cruelty is not instrumentally tactical. Regarding the rationale of it, Cruelty was framed within the emergence theory of creativity by being subjected to the principles of “creative destruction” and being consequently identified as a cumulative process.
Finally, Cruelty as a Strategy was verified as being exclusively applied to micro-domains as an end and product of the previously mentioned cumulative process of “creative destruction”, which was used by command to both improve troops’ morale in extreme environments as well as inflicting definitive and total defeats on the enemy in a micro-scale. Other interesting conclusion is that Cruelty is only applied within contexts of contested superiority with an unknown outcome.  The essential question of this dissertation was what was the purpose of being cruel, if cruelty was not an instrument. The final response might be both polemic and unsatisfactory because, similarly to the logic underlying bullfights, the rational purpose of cruelty is not to prove superiority but to test it like if it was a product. A product of the performing art which is the destruction of the other.       
 
7.     Bibliography
 
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8.     Appendix A – Maps and Pictures
 
 

1 – A Map of Guinea Bissau. Source: Wikimedia Commons
 



2 - Aerial view of Bissau in the 60’s. In the center, the Government Palace and the Empire Square. Source: Edição Foto Serra
 

3 – Distance between Bula and Có. Source: Google Maps

 

 


4- Tabancas were the villages where the Indigenous used to live in remote areas of Guinea. Such exotic places used to provoke great curiosity on Portuguese soldiers as the third photos shows two men posing there, probably to send it back to their families or just for territorial recognition purposes. Source: Francisco Da Mata’s Personal Archive
 



 
5 - Military manoeuvres on the margins of one affluent of Geba River. Source: Francisco Da Mata’s Personal Archive
 

 

 
6 and 7 – Negatives of unsuccessful military manoeuvres in surrounding areas of Geba River.  Source: Francisco Da Mata’s Personal Archive
 


8- Capture of PAIGC collaborators. This photo is interesting because both semblances do not show any kind of fear or worry, which indicates a certain degree of confidence from PAIGC on keeping the war going. Source: Francisco Da Mata’s Personal Archive
       

9- Indigenous Barber being observed by Soldier.               


 
10- The preparation of an Animistic ritual.
Source: Francisco Da Mata’s Personal Archive
 

11 – Battalion marching over the streets of Bissau. Source: Francisco Da Mata’s Personal Archive
 


12 – The Portuguese flag displayed in a command post.  
 

 
13 – Portuguese Officer in Guinean Balante [ethnic group] traditional warrior costume.    Source: Francisco Da Mata’s Personal Archive                         
 


14 – Differentiation: The Child of Portuguese Settlers is posing to photography with Indigenous Servants. Source: Francisco Da Mata’s Personal Archive
 
Pictorial Sources:
 
·        "A Map of Guinea Bissau." Map. Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. October 24, 2007. Accessed July 29, 2017. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Un-guinea-bissau.png&oldid=147157522.
·        Da Mata, Francisco Coelho Vitorino. "Various Photography." Cartoon. In Personal Archive. Guinea-Bissau, 1964-1968.
·        Distance between Bula and Có. Map. Google Maps. Accessed July 29, 2017. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Bula, Cacheu, Guinea-Bissau/Co, Guinea-Bissau/@11.8223791,-14.9905674,9z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0xee6e3bd42a8f597:0x15dc1daa089f8217!2m2!1d-15.7087128!2d12.1062929!1m5!1m1!1s0xee71ddb5394db59:0x88577950ce78fde1!2m2!1d-15.811862!2d12.0806799!3e0?hl=en.
·        Edição Foto Serra. "Bissau." Digital image. Luís Graça & Camaradas da Guiné . March 29, 2014. Accessed July 29, 2017. https://blogueforanadaevaotres.blogspot.co.uk/2014_03_23_archive.html.
 
9.     Appendix B: Acknowledgements
 
In first place, I would like to show my profound gratitude to Dr Frederick Laker, Dr James Hughes and Dr Heather Jones for believing in my subject and advising me on the bibliography. I would also like to praise the Government Department for their academic excellence and professional competence in providing me a notable experience of a challenging intellectual activity.
 
 
Secondly, I would like to thank to all my friends who supported me from the very beginning with sources gathering and translation issues.
 
At last, but definitely not the least, I would like to thank my parents for their hard-work and their never-fading support to all my academic, personal and professional aspirations. 
 
Thank you all very much.
 
 






[1] Touradas, O que é a Tourada?


[2] “I find myself in the somewhat painful position of holding that no single one of the combatants is justified in the present war, while not taking the extreme Tolstoyan view that war is under all circumstances a crime.” in Russell, The Ethics of War.


[3] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 109.


[4] “They maintain that there are moral facts and that our moral statements are capable of being true or false in virtue of the moral facts.”  in Sheehy, Doing the Right Thing (Part I)


[5] Rawls, Palestras sobre a História da Filosofia Política, 437


[6] “Non-cognitivists tend to argue that moral claims are subjective sentiments of approval or disapproval or expressions of emotion or grounded in convention, agreement or our acceptance of norms.” in Sheehy, Doing the Right Thing (Part I)


[7] “As for the base motives, he was sure that he was not what he called (…)a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart—and as for his conscience, he recalled perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do (...)” in Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem – I


[8] Bufacchi, Two Concepts of Violence ,194


[9] ibid ,197


[10] “ (…) the exercise of physical force so as to kill or injure, inflict direct harm or pain on, human beings (…)” ibid


[11] (…) normal or ordinary understanding of the term ‘violence’ is in terms of interpersonal acts of force usually involving the infliction of physical injury (…)” in ibid ,195


[12] (…) violence is force gone wrong, or, put another way, force that is destructive and harmful (…)”, ibid.


[13] “(…) a person uses physical violence if he deliberately acts in a way that blocks another’s exercise of her legitimate claim-rights by physical means (…)”, ibid


[14] Ibid 196


[15] Ibid, 198


[16] Ibid


[17] ibid


[18] Toal, The Entrapments of Form: Cruelty and Modern Literature, 1


[19] ibid


[20] “Then I shall list, with a view to logical “placing” of this kind of concept, a number of semi-formal conditions to which any concept of this must conform (…)” in Gallie, Essentially Contested Concepts, 169


[21] Ibid 171


[22] Ibid 172


[23] ibid


[24] ibid


[25] De Haan, Violence as an Essentially Contested Concept, 28


[26] ibid


[27] “(…) and such modification cannot be prescribed or predicted in advance.” Gallie, Essentially Contested Concepts, 172


[28] Toal, The Entrapments of Form: Cruelty and Modern Literature, 1


[29] Bufacchi, Two Concepts of Violence ,194


[30] Ibid, 198


[31] Giorgi, The origins of violence by cultural evolution, 139


[32] ibid


[33] ibid


[34] “(…) modified the hunter-gatherers’ social structure (…) toward an increase in the size of bands and a decrease in consultation and gender equality” ibid


[35] Petty, Humanity and National Security, 107


[36] Ralph, An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Violence, 2


[37] Ibid, 1


[38] “Both pain and suffering, should therefore, be included in any definition of cruelty.” in Tanner, Clarifying the Concept of Cruelty, 819


[39] “(…) One way to demonstrate this is to examine cases when violence cannot be understood as a function of these other factors and must be interpreted upon its own terms.” In Robb, Meaningless Violence and the lived body – the Huron-Jesuit Collision of World Orders, 90


[40] Ibid, 96


[41] ibid


[42] ibid


[43] “(…) the French did not object to torturing people to death per se, but it had to be on their own terms. For the Hurons, inflicting pain, like warfare, was an end in itself (…)” ibid


[44] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 120.


[45] Ibid, 121


[46] ibid


[47] “(…) Pascalian sacrifizio dell’intelletto (…)” ibid


[48] ibid


[49] ibid


[50] Jones, Genocide – A Comprehensive Introduction, 4


[51] Ibid


[52] “The scenes of torture and public spectacle were duplicated by Christians themselves during Europe’s medieval era (approximately the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE). This period produced onslaughts such as the Crusades: religiously sanctified campaigns against “unbelievers,” whether in France (the Albigensian crusade against heretic Cathars) or in the Holy Land of the Middle East.” Ibid, 5


[53] “Bernard Gui gives us a sketch of the ideal inquisitor. He is (…) careful in his sentences that no ground shall be given for the charge of cruelty or rapacity.” In Turberville, Medieval Heresy and the Inquisition, 179


[54] Tilly, Revolutions and Collective Violence, 9


[55] ibid


[56] Ibid


[57] Dwyer, It still makes me shudder, 384


[58] Ibid, 383


[59] “The sacking of towns, during which soldiers committed murder and rape in what is often described as an uncontrolled ‘frenzy’, was part and parcel of eighteenth-century warfare.” Ibid, 385


[60] “(…) the rebels had been fed and armed by England.” Ibid, 390


[61] Ibid, 391


[62] “Veterans were more prone to explaining the violent excesses they were guilty of in terms of retaliation for the types of atrocities committed against the French.” Ibid, 388


[63] “Napoleon could be just as brutal; he was known to have urged the eradication of villages for resisting.” Ibid


[64] “(…)the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behaviour is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation – a feeling that is painful and can even be intolerable and overwhelming – and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride.” In Jones, Genocide – A Comprehensive Introduction, 268


[65] “(…) dispensed harsh punishments for those caught looting, raping or killing (…) Dwyer, It still makes me shudder, 386


[66] Hull, Absolute Destruction, 2


[67] “(…) a romantic ruthlessness and actionism (exaggerated driven for action (…) on the part of officers in order to bridge the gap between risk and reality (...)” ibid, 2-3


[68] Ibid, 2


[69] “(…) standard operating procedures and developing doctrine on how best to fight wars; in both, one can identify the tendency toward extreme warfare (Kriegführung) produced by military culture.” Ibid, 2


[70] “(…) the twentieth century’s problems were the consequences of extreme versions of political ideologies (…) as well as earlier evil -isms, notably imperialism.” in Ferguson, The War of the World, XXXVII


[71] “The perpetrator intended to destroy, in whole or in part, that national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Article 6 (3), Elements of Crime, International Criminal Court


[72] “If one reasons with an opponent, one might persuade him by one’s arguments and get what one wants without injury to either.”  Magil, Justification for Violence ,1090


[73]That one should be open to either possibility is characteristic of what Popper takes to be the attitude of reasonableness: a commitment to give-and-take discussion.” ibid


[74]If there are reasons for thinking that one’s opponent’s willingness to negotiate is a pretense, or that negotiations are being deliberately drawn out, this can also be weighed against alternative means.” Ibid, 1091


[75]  “If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.” In Mill, Utilitarianism

 


[76] Jones, The Psychology of Killing, 229


[77] “(…) recruits expressed an inherent resistance to killing and that this had to be overcome by training. (…)” ibid


[78] “Happiness is doubtless the wrong word for the satisfaction that men experience when they

are possessed by the lust to destroy and kill their kind. . .” ibid, 230


[79] “He argued that once an initial resistance had been overcome in training, soldiers became addicted to the excitement and sense of freedom created by the licence to kill, while the act itself could assume the quality of sexual arousal or drug-induced ecstasy.” Ibid, 230


[80] “(…) phrase for entrepreneur-driven innovation originally proposed by Joseph Schumpeter—clearly

the theoretical emphasis is on the creative side of the furor.” Liu, Thinking Destruction, 1-2


[81] “(…) In the microdomains where creativity starts, everything is perspectivally or locally enframed. After all, the cardinal rule of emergence theory is that there is no knowledge or action at a distance, whether spatial or temporal. (…)” ibid 10


[82] “(…) Holland speaks of “constrained generating procedures,” he focuses on a micro-scale far below that of the usual discussions of (…) other constraint (…)” ibid


[83]“ (…) I earlier instanced so strictly implement one of the favorite teaching examples of rational choice theory: the “menu” of choices with calculable “preferences” or “utilities. The decision trees of such algorithms—off vs. on, if vs. then—are unambiguous instantiations of rational choice that clarify the logic of preference interactions via hard-coded rule (…) ibid


[84] “(…) war’s tendency to escalate to even greater violence, the more the passions of the people are involved (…)” Heuser in Clausewitz, On War, p. XXVIII


[85] “Kauffman at last brings emergence theory to bear on “our” ideology (…) Western cognitive, artificial intelligence (…) celebrate their cause as a way to swear allegiance to democracy without seeming also to swear by any old-fashioned individualism, nationalism, or industrial capitalism making rationalist decision (…) in the background” ibid 12


[86] Clausewitz, On War, p.13


[87] Ibid, XXVI


[88] “Schwerpunkt [German original term] (…) is the attack of the main forces of the enemy in what should become a decisive battle, in which the enemy’s army is beaten devastatingly and bloodily (…)” Ibid, XXIX-XXX


[89] Ibid, XXX


[90] Ibid


[91] Ibid


[92] Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, 12


[93] Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 28


[94] Rasmussen, The Risk Society at War, 21


[95] “(…) war cannot be determined unilaterally and are instead produced by the interaction of both (or all) parties to a conflict.” Wirtz, Book Reviews, 115


[96] “The PAIGC was created in 1956 (…)” in Chabal, National Liberation in Portuguese Guinea, 80


[97] Led by Diogo Gomes in 1456. in Oliveira, “Quem é Quem? Portugueses Célebres, 252


[98] Ibid, 253


[99] Located in Ghana, Elmina Castle was established with the purpose of trading gold and slaves from Guinea’s Gulf.


[100] Magalhaes, História de Portugal – No Alvor da Modernidade, 43


[101] Chabal, National Liberation in Portuguese Guinea, 78


[102] Cahen, Anticolonialism & Nationalism: Deconstructing Synonymy, 12


[103] See Appendix 1


[104] See Appendix A, image 1 and 2


[105] Magalhaes, História de Portugal – No Alvor da Modernidade, 43


[106] Chabal, National Liberation in Portuguese Guinea, 76


[107] “This, then, was the territory over which the Portuguese exercised control in the thirties: (…) small and poor territory with no apparent resources and a reputation for a fearsome climate.” Ibid   


[108]“The main ethnic groups in Guinea (Fulas, Mandingas, Manjacas and Balantes) are related to those of adjacent French-speaking countries (…). Up to one third of the inhabitants of Guinea are Muslim, most notably Fulas and Mandingas. The rest are animist since only a handful were Christianised.” Ibid 


[109] “(…) Cape Verdean Creoles and Christian Guineans, locally called Kriston, who had for centuries been active commercial brokers on the Guinean Mainland”, Havik, Virtual Nations and Failed States, 46


[110] Ibid


[111] “(…) Liga Guineense (1910-1915), an association of Cape Verdean Creoles and local Kriton Elders (…) which shared a nativist platform with proto-nationalist elements” Ibid


,,[112] Fraga, A Guerra Colonial, 6


[113] Partido Africano de Independencia da Guiné e Cabo-Verde, Ibid 47


[114] See Appendix


[115]  Ibid, 39


[116] Ibid


[117] “(…) I prayed to the Lord asking (…) that nothing could harm us, not even bullets (…) Closed my eyes, prayed and moved forward. (…)” Own Translation from “Eu pedia a Deus que nos ajudasse e nada nos atingisse nem que as balas nos tocassem ou passassem perto de mim ou dos meus camaradas. Fechava os olhos, fazia a oração e avançava.” In A Guerra, Furtado (Dir.), perf. Agostinho de Sá (PAIGC)


[118] Coelho, African Troops in Portuguese Colonial Army, 129


[119] See Appendix A, images 12, 23


[120] Mata, Social Cleavages in the Last Portuguese Colonial Empire, 2


[121] Coelho, African Troops in Portuguese Colonial Army, 134


[122] See Appendix, image 14


[123] See Appendix A, images 4 and 9


[124] Cabral, The role of Culture in the battle for Independence, 14


[125] Manuel, Portuguese Exceptionalism and the Return to Europe


[126] See Appendix A, image 11


[127] Own translation from the original “(…) Aos invasores/ Castigar com Destemor/ Ancestral / Deter, Destroçar, / Vencer, Escorraçar. (…)”, which is the extract of the most famous War Anthem “Angola is Portugal” composed by Duarte Pestana and written by Santos Braga. Interpreted in June 1961 by National Federation for Joy in Work (FNAT). In RTP, Canções de Guerra.


[128] Own translation from “(…) Se nos cortavam as orelhas, tínhamos de cortar-lhes as orelhas também… Era a linguagem oficial.” In A Guerra, Furtado (Dir), perf. Mário de Pádua.


[129] See Appendix A, images 4.


[130] See Appendix A, images 1, 5, 6 and 7.


[131] Own translation from “Havia bombardeamentos contra tabancas de uma grande ferocidade… Queimavam-se as culturas, do arroz, de tudo o que lhes aparecesse à frente… Havia histórias muito más (…) sobretudo do tempo do Schulz… Desde barcaças que subiam o Geba com gente amarrada de pés e mãos atrás das costas e que eram despejadas vivas para o rio…”  in Ibid, perf. Fernando Baginha.


[132] See Appendix A, image 3


[133] Own translation from “Uma operação que foi a que me encheu mais de indignação foi entre Bula e Có, quando o Comandante da Força que lá estava ordenou tirar as raparigas mais novas, meter as outras lá dentro. Queimou a aldeia toda, violou as raparigas, ele e vários furriéis, sargentos… e no fundo, mandou matá-las a todas.” in Ibid, perf. 1st Anonymous Refractory.


[134] Own translation from “ Como Comandante de Secção e como pertencendo às tropas paraquedistas, fui obrigado muitas das vezes a actuar como um assassino, embora fosse contra isso. Mas como Comandante de Secção, tinha de dar exemplo senão os meus oficiais perseguiam-me… (…) Vi incendiar aldeias assim como eu incendiei algumas também, matar crianças, matar mulheres (…)”  in Ibid, perf. 2nd Anonymous Refractory.


[135] Own translation from: “(…) No dia seguinte, atacaram o Capitão Curto que estava em Falacunda, o tal que matava as pessoas degolando-as e depois enviava as cabeças aos pais e as mães: “Aqui, está a cabeça do vosso filho” (…)”in Ibid, perf. Sambu.


[136] Own translation from: “ (…) Era tortura, era violencia... era tudo! (...) Ás vezes, prendiam as pessoas, amarravam-nas ao carro e punham-no a trabalhar, a pessoa caia e iam a arrastá-la até acabar por morrer.” In A Ibid, perf. Luciano Soares


[137] See Appendix A, image 8.


[138] Own translation from: “A maneira como eles tratam os prisioneiros é como sendo cadeira elétrica, chicotada, fósforos acesos metidos dentro do nariz, (…) cortar dedos e metê-los dentro de frascos (…)” in Ibid, perf. António Silva Ramos


[139] Own translation from: “ (…)A coisa não é tão bonitinha como a gente diz… Eu fui voluntário, mas há muita gente que integrou a luta de libertação como combatente por imposição das forças dos PAIGC.” In Ibid, perf. Pedro Pires


[140] Own translation from: “ (…) Até ao Congresso, haviam chefes do PAIGC que nas suas áreas queimavam pessoas por serem feiticeiros… (…) Noutra áreas, o PAIGC era capaz de furar um olho a uma pessoa (…)” in Ibid, perf. Luís Cabral


[141] Own translation from: “(…) Quem viu como eu vi, uma mulher toda nua, toda escortinhada e uma criança toda escortinhada também...” in Ibid, perf. Manuel Cruz Alegre.




Dissertation submitted by Bernardo Marinho da Mata Candidate No 60605 to the Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science for the MSc in Conflict Studies.
 
Bernardo da Mata
 

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