Word: slaughterous
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...second half of the violence proposition, advanced more glumly, is that violence in Mississippi seems inevitable. In the limited sense that rights workers and Negro passers-by may be beaten and slaughtered by poor whites and local police, that is certainly true. Such slaughter arouses indignity and compassion for the cause in the North, and as such is tactically advantageous as well as inevitable...
...great divide, however, lies between such slaughter and violence as we have used the term here--the violence of the racial clash. Because the clash evokes confusion rather than compassion, it is the violence rather than the social indignity that popular opinion demands be ended. Tactically such clashes must be avoided no matter how great the pressure to retaliate becomes...
...advocates of defensive violence have been capitalizing on the rhetorical confusion of inevitable and useful violence. Taken by itself, the second section defending the utility of violence is weak, and that is why it is always argued in conjunction with violence's inevitability. In fact the two are separate. Slaughter is sadly inevitable and tactically advantageous. Violence can destroy the civil rights cause...
...become the issue. Those headed south have been declaiming at the dinner table that: "I asked myself whether my commitment was great enough to go down and fight for civil rights this summer." This is an important question, but not the crucial one. Violence is easy to risk; slaughter--even in its middle stages--is terribly hard to accept. Ask yourself if you are ready not to fight back. Not under any conceivable circumstance. Will you do anything to stop others from fighting back? Can you subdue the instinctive urge to retaliate in the interest of the cause...
Presidium member Polyansky, on the other hand, is only 47 years old. His first memories are not of the revolution, but a peasant family's view of the early Stalin years. He has not experienced the elation of participating in the revolution; he has only seen the hardship and slaughter that followed it. The policies he would pursue if he gained power would certainly, within the limits of rational interest, be different...