Edwardian Synthesis Ash.P4.T5

Violence was a widespread ideal during the Edwardian era that was reflected from the time period’s attitude towards imperialism to the arts. Following industrialization in the Edwardian era, Britain indulged in their successes with their advanced technology and new luxuries. They looked through the eyes of racism at Africa, in which they controlled colonies, with the belief of African people being inferior, primitive individuals. Atrocious brutality towards those people by the European colonists exemplified immoral violence that they thought as retribution with the inadequate justification of racism and hunger for more power. Waging war does not make this violence any less amoral, as technologically advanced Europeans fight with powerful artillery against relatively undeveloped tribes in African forests, showing the Europeans ignoring if their greedy violence is morally right or wrong. This aggressive colonization is portrayed in Heart of Darkness as one of the characters, Kurtz, does not think twice about his horrible and monstrous actions as immoral until near the end of his life. Acts out of racism were also done during the mid to late 1900s during the Civil Rights Movement in America, during which the color of one’s skin determined if brutal retribution was the idea looked to. Presently, we mostly justify our violence out of security and self-defense. A picture that represents that idea is “US soldiers during WWI,” which conveys the hardship during this time and exemplifies a war that was justified violence as a righteous retribution between nations’ alliances, in which the United States’ joined following the attack on its ship. Thus, violence was often looked to as the solution to disagreements, whether morally justified or amoral, during the Edwardian era.