And mimetically, of course, no in-group can see itself as the aggressor. Your side's policies are justice, the other side's are violence — and the bilateral version of this blindness is structural. The libertarian and anarchist traditions (Spooner, Rothbard, Huemer, the early Nozick of Anarchy, State, and Utopia) have been pointing all this out for a long time. Their marginalization isn't because the argument is weak. It's because once you grant the premise, you have to either justify the violence on its own terms — which liberal theory finds embarrassing, since it prefers to deny that violence is what's happening — or move toward some form of anarchism, which is a non-starter for almost everyone. So the question gets foreclosed before it can be asked.