Q: In your book, you talk about a "structural violence". What is the meaning of this?
Jean Ziegler: In the empire of shame, controlled by organized scarcity , war is not sporadic any more, it is permanent. It is not any more a crisis, a pathology, but normality. It does not any more imply the eclipse of reason - as Horkheimer expressed it - it is the very raison d’être of the empire. The lords of the financial war have put the planet under the scalpel of organized economic destruction. They attack the normative power of the States, challenge the sovereignty of the people, subvert democracy, wreak havoc on nature, destroy human beings and their freedoms. The liberalization of the economy, the "invisible hand" of the market, is their way of dealing with the universe; the maximalization of profit is the way it works. I call this practice and this cosmogony structural vio
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