Vigilantism

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Vigilantism ( Latin vigilans , vigilant ) describes the violent enforcement, prevention or punishment of undesirable behavior by non-state actors that goes beyond the state-approved possibilities. Supporters of self-appointed vigilante groups or neighborhood guards who “take the law into their own hands” ( perform vigilante justice ) are known as vigilantes .

A modern inspection form is the denunciation of alleged offenders in the Internet ( English Internet Vigilantism ) as a radical form of online activism .

Overview

The political scientist David Kowalewski counts vigilantes "among the most violent social groups of all".

While a large number of the authors examine vigilantism based on the history of the western states in the USA, more recent research on violence looks at the phenomenon in an international comparison. The field of research ranges from Salvadoran death squads and European skinheads to the murders and the disappearance of "dissenters" in the Pine Ridge reservation , the crackdown on dissidents in the Soviet Union by veterans of the Afghan war and vigilantes from Operation Phoenix of the CIA in South Vietnam to the US Prohibitionists .

The vigilantes feel that their terror is covered by political elites , especially when the "supporters of a counter-movement" are denounced by the elites as "sympathizers". Sometimes vigilantes are not only tolerated by the government or social elites, but are also provided with information, accommodation and weapons so as not to get their hands dirty (“Pontius Pilate Syndrome”). In contrast to general violent crime, vigilantism is not shaped by selfish motives such as greed, but claims the normative control of the behavior of others and the defense or restoration of " law and order ". In Colombia, for example, vigilantes mainly killed beggars, prostitutes and homosexuals.

In order to counter the violence, self-protection organizations such as the “Deacons for Defense and Justice” emerge, which organized themselves against the terror of the Ku Klux Klan .

Typology

Vigilantism stands in a specific tension to the state's monopoly of force . In this respect, three ideal types of vigilantism can be distinguished.

  • Acting instead of the state: The vigilantes act on behalf of a state power that is not present for various reasons. Action is legitimized as a defense measure and protection of one's own legal interests. It temporarily takes the place of an actually desired state order. A historical example is the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 (see History of the City of San Francisco ). Another example: the Overath Potato War . In German law this is legitimized by the self-defense paragraph , according to which force may be used in the event of self-defense, regardless of the principle of proportionality ("The law does not have to give way to the injustice"). However, this right is purely defensive to defend against an immediate current illegal act on yourself or others, but not for preventive defense.
  • Acting as the better state: The actors are directed against the concrete state legislation and practice of punishing, which is perceived as “not tough enough” and should therefore be “expanded”. The state's monopoly on the use of force is aggressively broken in order to arbitrarily sanction behavior that the state tolerates, in particular cultural deviance such as homosexuality or abortion. Action has a signal function. It mostly serves to establish “true” or “higher” justice and is intended to influence the legal and political debate.
  • Action beyond the state: An order other than the state should be established by force. The existing order is rejected as illegitimate, but should not necessarily be abolished entirely. The vigilantes have a high degree of organization, for example in the form of armed militias and gangs, which can limit themselves to the control of certain parts of the country in order to establish their own legal area there. One example is IS .

Vigilantism in Europe

Critics see such groups as a democratically illegitimate private police force whose vigilante justice undermines the state monopoly on the use of force . While most vigilantist vigilante groups stage themselves as protest groups, the transition to (mostly right-wing) terrorism is fluid.

Vigilantist and right-wing extremist groups do overlap, but the ideological foundation of the individual vigilante groups is more complex and differs according to the group to be protected (e.g. "the people", the population of a residential area, a certain religious group) and the legitimate means to do so . For example, a Salafist vigilante group in Wuppertal , which called itself the “ Sharia Police ”, caused a stir throughout Germany . As a reaction to the refugee crisis in Germany from 2015 and throughout Europe as well as the sexual assaults on New Year's Eve 2015/16 in Cologne , activists in social networks as well as in Vienna , Graz and briefly in Cologne formed "vigilante groups" around women to protect against a perceived danger from Muslim men.

The murders accused of the NSU are also cited as an example of vigilantism in Germany.

In Bulgaria, Estonia and Hungary, some heavily armed volunteers patrol the borders to prevent illegal border crossings.

According to Mike Davis, vigilantism was found in tsarist Russia among the " Black Hundred ", in the terror of the Italian landowners in southern Italy and in Barcelona between 1917 and 1921, when employers hired contract killers against strikers.

Vigilantism in the Western History of the United States

Vigilantism, especially in the reconstruction era of the United States, uses the methods of persistent terror "through baseless arrests, chain gangs , arson, massacres, murder and public lynching ". Vigilante associations also became known as factory security forces and private detective agencies such as the Pinkerton detective agency or the Californian Farmers' Protective Leagues (1933) and the Order of the Caucasians in the western USA, each of which hunted down striking immigrants, and in the southern USA the Ku- Klux-Klan , which organized its terror as an organized racist group against African Americans. To the spread of band-shaped vigilantism in California - z. B. the Glanton Gang - also included genocidal violence , brutal raids, marauding.

The first so-called " Committees of Vigilance " were formed in San Francisco in 1851 as a vigilante group, actually with the intention of "taking the law into their own hands". The members of the committee - including many respected citizens - were angry about the political conditions in the country, because the elected politicians and officials were bribes and protected many well-known criminals or did not take it seriously with the law itself. The committee arrested several felons, held them (briefly) on trial and hung them. These actions fulfilled the objective in that the demands of the committee members were met in the subsequent elections.

Mike Davis - who studies vigilantism in the history of California - states that a large number of minorities have been the targets of terror: "including Native American Indians , Irish , Punjabis , Chinese , Japanese , Filipinos , African-Americans , Mexicans and Okies (...) , as well as radicals and trade unionists of all kinds ”. Private slavery, recruitment for cheap domestic help, sexual violence and rape, and child robbery primarily affected children and women.

Vigilante-Man

The "Vigilante-Man" who, based on a song by Woody Guthrie with "sawed off shotgun in hand" shoots striking workers, became a symbol of the "Great Depression" in California in the 1930s. The vigilante farmers developed an "ethno-racist" terror against the lower classes. Complaints to the local sheriffs were initially not accepted. After the general strike in San Francisco, the constitutional law enforcement officers also took part in the terrorism against the strike movement, which was mainly composed of Mexican immigrants. John Steinbeck recalled the terror of this vigilantism in the novels Stormy Harvest and the Fruits of Wrath .

In the George Bush era, media-savvy people are called neo-vigilantes who claim to control the Mexican border by force of arms.

A resident of a gated community in Sanford , Florida, achieved particular fame when he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin while on patrol as a member of a “neighborhood watch”.

Social basis of vigilantism

According to the studies of Robert Ingalls on Tampa and Ray Abrahams on Vigilante Citizens, who researched the international manifestations of vigilante groups, vigilantism fulfills the function of maintaining the rule of elites. According to Richard Brown, who examined the vigilantism of the Frontiers , “the typical vigilante leader is an ambitious young man from the old settlements in the east (…). They wanted to occupy a position in the upper classes of the new church commensurate with those they held or aspired to in their places of origin. ”Mike Davis sees a difference in the social structure of Victorian vigilantes in 19th century California history compared to 20th century history. With the exception of the vigilante excesses of 1850 in San Francisco, Victorian vigilantism was carried out by white farmers, workers and small business owners - an extremist center of society. It was shaped by conspiracy theories according to which an elite wanted to flood the country with "foreigners" and "coolies". The Victorian vigilantism movement appealed in its nativism to the values ​​of the Jackson era and opposed the abolition of "the monopoly of white work " (Davis). In the 20th century, wealthier local elites led the vigilantism movements against Asians, trade unionists and left-wing intellectuals. When vigilantism reached unprecedented proportions in the 1930s, it was "led by the Fascist Farmers Association ".

Strategies of justification for vigilantism

One of the basic arguments to justify vigilantism can be found in claims that one must take the law into one's own hands "because the state either does not exist or is in the hands of criminals or does not fulfill its basic obligations". You yourself have the right to defend private property or enforce immigration laws . Westerners in particular justified their terror with references to the law and the frontier principle “posse comitatus”. This frontier democracy is still romanticized and celebrated today as a “healthy tradition of spontaneous local jurisdiction”. Personalities such as Hubert Howe Bancroft , Leland Stanford and Theodore Roosevelt praised and defended numerous forms of vigilantism in the western states and thus contributed to the legitimation. In contrast, vigilantes in the southern states appealed more clearly to “racially based privileges and white honor ” (Davis) and found less support outside of their region. The Manifest Destiny also served so-called white savages like Galton to justify terrorism .

literature

  • Richard Brown: Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism. Oxford University Press, New York 1975, ISBN 0-19-501943-1 .
  • Robert Goldstein: Political Repression in Modern America. From 1870 to 1976. Schenkman Publishing Company, Boston 1978, ISBN 0-8161-8253-1 .
  • Roger McGrath: Gunfighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes. University of California Press, Berkeley 1984, ISBN 0-520-06026-1 .
  • William Tucker: Vigilante. The Backlash Against Crime in America. Stein and Dery, New York 1985.
  • Robert Ingalls: Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882-1936. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 1988, ISBN 0-87049-571-2 .
  • Stewart E. Tolnay and EM Beck: The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Markett for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930. In: American Sociological Review. 55, No. 4 (1990), pp. 526-539.
  • Stewart E. Tolnay and EM Beck: A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. University of Illinois Press, Urbana et al. 1995, ISBN 0-252-06413-5 .
  • John Boessenecker: Gold Dust and Gunsmoke. John Wiley, New York 1999, ISBN 0-471-31973-2 .
  • Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis: Crossing the Border. Migration and Class Struggle in US History. Association A, Berlin / Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-935936-59-0 .
  • William Culberson: Vigilantism: A Political History of Private Power in America. Greenwood, New York 1990, ISBN 0-275-93548-5 .
  • David Kowalewski: Vigilantism. In: Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (eds.): International manual of violence research. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 978-3-322-80377-1 pp. 426-440.
  • Matthias Quent : New Vigilantism in the Old World. Vigilante groups, violence against refugees and the ambivalence of right-wing terror . In: Berliner Debatte Initial 26 (2015), pp. 122-134.
  • Peter Vogl: Hollywood Justice. Vigilante justice in American film 1915–2015. Mühlbeyer Filmbuchverlag, Frankenthal 2016, ISBN 978-3-945378-29-8 .

Audio

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: vigilant  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Thomas Schmidt-Lux: Vigilantism as political violence. A typology. De Gruyter, Behemoth Journal on Civilization, 2013. ISSN  1866-2447 ; David Kowalewski (2002), p. 426.
  2. ↑ Whistleblowers & Vigilants. Figures of digital resistance exhibition at Hartware Medienkunstverein Dortmund, 2016; Robert Booth: Vigilante pedophile hunters ruining lives with internet stings . In: The Guardian , October 25, 2013; Celia Hatton: China's internet vigilantes and the 'human flesh search engine' BBC News, Jan. 28, 2014.
  3. ↑ a b c David Kowalewski (2002), p. 433.
  4. ^ David Kowalewski (2002), p. 435.
  5. ^ Ray Abrahams: Vigilante Citizens: Vigilantism and the State. Cambridge 1998, p. 78.
  6. ↑ Marcus Pindur: After the attack on the women's clinic. The heated abortion debate in the USA . Deutschlandfunk, December 1, 2015.
  7. ↑ Mike Davis (2007), p. 13
  8. ^ A b c Matthias Quent : Vigilante justice in the name of the people. Vigilantist terrorism. bpb , June 10, 2016, accessed June 1, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Wuppertal's police do not want to accept anything from Salafists. Westdeutsche Zeitung , September 5, 2014, accessed June 1, 2017 .
  10. ↑ https://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2016/01/14/justizminister-nervoes-deutsche-gruenden-buergerwehren/
  11. ↑ https://www.mein Bezirk.at/wieden/lokales/grund-zur-sorge-buergerwehr-patroulliert-jetzt-in-wien-nord-d1613373.html
  12. ↑ http://www.kleinezeitung.at/steiermark/graz/4925058/Graz_Buergerwehr_now-wird-patrouilliert
  13. ↑ Keno Verseck: Vigilante groups in Eastern Europe: private sheriffs hunt migrants. In: Spiegel Online . April 17, 2016. Retrieved June 9, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Mike Davis (2007), p. 17.
  15. ↑ Mike Davis (2007), pp. 11-22.
  16. ^ Bernard R. Bachmann: The Gold Rush Adventure - Memories of Théophile de Rutté (1826–1885), merchant and Switzerland's first consul in California . Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-03823-457-9 .
  17. ↑ a b Mike Davis (2007), p. 14.
  18. ↑ Mike Davis (2007), pp. 23-25.
  19. ↑ Mike Davis (2007), pp. 11-14.
  20. ^ Tray by Martin: Anyone who feels threatened is allowed to shoot. Die ZEIT, March 27, 2012, accessed on June 1, 2017 .
  21. ↑ Richard Brown: Strain of Violence: Historical Studies Of American Violence and Vigilantism, New York 1975, p. 97 and p. 111. Quoted from Chacon / Davis (2007), p. 21.
  22. ↑ a b Davis (2007), p. 21.
  23. ↑ a b Davis (2007), p. 20.
  24. ^ Brundage: Introduction. In: Brundage (Ed.): Under sentence for death. P. 4. Quoted from Davis 2007, p. 20.