Unemployment, in countries with more extensive welfare states than ours, is not necessarily the same as poverty, and the wholesale brutality of states and empires engaged in wars of conquest is not the same as the retail mayhem of armed individuals.
Talking to volunteers who have seen the incompetence of the state and brutality of the state, it is very clear that even blue-eyed optimists leave as hardened political activists".
Vladimir Putin's neo-imperialist Russia and the brutality of Islamic State are medium-sized regional challenges by comparison.
THERE was never any doubting the brutality of Islamic State (IS), the jihadist group that has swept across large parts of Syria and Iraq and declared an Islamic caliphate.
Rebellion against India's rule over Kashmir is neither new nor surprising – and the brutality of the state's response is equally familiar.
It is fuelled by grief and fury, by righteous rage against injustice and institutionalised racism and by frustration at the endemic brutality of the state against those it deems unworthy.
Kaepernick's acts of protest helped hold that dream accountable for every black person who faces the unjust violence and brutality of the state.
It is not enough to acknowledge the courage of Congressman John Lewis, the late Rev. Hosea Williams, or all of those unsung men and women who suffered the brutality of Alabama state police.
"People no longer trust that a Palestinian state can be established, for one sole reason: the brutality of the Israeli state and the retreat of the Arab world," said Abdullah el-Ashaal, a former assistant to the Egyptian foreign minister and a professor of international law at Cairo University, who was articulating a widely held position in this region.
The answer for Maistre, of course, was both, and he helped provide an intellectual justification for the dim brutality of the czarist state.
