Monopoly on Violence

By Cesar Gray

Say, if violence were a product, exchangeable and possessable as any other commodity, then perhaps there are no greater examples of its monopolization than those of the totalitarian regimes of Europe in the 20^th century. Each stop along our tour of Central Europe told another tale of a state monopoly on violence and the dire consequences that the European people faced. The stories were all different, and every individual victim suffered their own unique tragedy. Yet, there is a commonality among these instances of ruthless state violence. The actors who monopolized violence were able to brutalize and oppress those labeled enemies with near impunity. This quintessential power dynamic between the possessors of supreme violence and the meek and ineffectual played out the same way each time, massacre after massacre.

This particular issue of guns and an individual or group’s right to bear arms bounced around in my head for years, but it was our trip to the Holocaust Museum in Budapest that sparked my specific interest in this topic of State control of violence through laws on firearm ownership. The museum guided us through life of Hungarian Jewry following the First World War and up through the Holocaust. It was a powerful experience to track the procedural deprivation of rights afforded to Jews as we went farther into the exhibit. We started with Jewish Hungarians returning from WWI as veterans and heroes, and we saw how the Hungarian State, under the regency of Miklós Horthy, slowly chipped away at the dignity and social standing of her own Jewish community. The most striking efforts to humiliate, destabilize, and pacify the Jews came in the form of legislation leading up to the Second World War; notably, the Horthy Regime barred Hungarian Jews from owning firearms. With the onset of WWII and the State’s need for capable fighters, Hungarian Jews, among whom many decorated WWI veterans stood ready to serve their country, were once again recruited for the war effort. However, they served in a much different capacity than other troops. Jewish Hungarian men were shipped off to front lines, not with rifles but with shovels, hammers, and axes. To a college student walking through a museum 80 years later, the message was clear, and I’m sure it was even clearer to the Jews of Hungary: sure, we are at war now, but aren’t you, the Jews, the true enemy? The Horthy Regime had monopolized violence at the expense of Hungarian Jews’ rights.

Another story of a State monopoly of violence came from our trip to Austria. If Budapest was where the bulb went off in my head, Vienna was where that bulb became a blinking neon arrow telling me to venture farther down this path. This led me to the history of the Viennese Social Democrats of the 1920s and 30s, and their struggle to hold onto power following their fall from political control. The rise and fall of the Social Democrats was illustrated in our tour of Karl Marx Hof. This social housing development is a sight to behold; a behemoth structure that, while still a functioning residence, stands as a living memorial to the Social Democratic architectures of Red Vienna and their wish for a more socially and economically egalitarian Vienna. The Interwar Period was a time of peaceful socialist initiative in Vienna. However, it was swiftly undercut by the rise of Austrofascism in the mid-1930s that resulted in Social Democrats vying for power with their opponents the Christian Social Party. With political violence ramping up in the 30s, a coalition of fascists led by members of the former Christian Social Party began cracking down on political dissent, starting with the Social Democrats. The fascist regime sought out to monopolize the use of violence, and Social Democrats, a political party that had taken pride in its nonviolent means of socialist change, resorted to smuggling firearms and keeping secret munition houses throughout the capital, as it was made illegal for them to own guns. The fascists paramilitary militias of the new government sought out these caches, and when one particular munitions safehouse was discovered, the fascist militia forces forcefully closed in on the Social Democrats. What ensued was a massacre, with reports stating the Social Democrats had fired the first shots. Nevertheless, the political minority of Vienna had been disarmed and thrown out of power. The Austrofascist regime, while only lasting a brief time prior to WWII, had monopolized legal use of violence much the same way the Hungarian Horthy Regime had; they took weapons out of the hands of their enemies and established their own hegemony on violence.

The experiences of the Jews under Horthy and the Social Democrats under Austrofascism were two stories that stuck with me and inspired me to look at the events of that time through this lens of power and violence. I started asking myself, could an armed citizenry have prevented or limited the violence against the civilian victims of WWII? It is impossible to go back in time to run that experiment. The answer will forever be uncertain. Nevertheless, I want to believe in one simple remedy. I want to have faith in my stylized fantasy of a society of states and individuals with mutual regard for one another’s inalienable right to bear arms against forces of evil: a free market of legitimate use of violence.