{"id":12020,"date":"2023-12-20T23:49:19","date_gmt":"2023-12-21T04:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=12020"},"modified":"2023-12-26T23:39:59","modified_gmt":"2023-12-27T04:39:59","slug":"against-colonial-narcissism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/12\/against-colonial-narcissism\/","title":{"rendered":"Against colonial narcissism"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the period of decolonization the colonized are called upon to be reasonable. They are offered rock-solid values, they are told in great detail that decolonization should not mean regression, and that they must rely on values which have proved to be reliable and worthwhile. It so happens that when the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the beginning of the 20th century, under the reign of King Leopold II of Belgium, the rubber plantations of the Congo were perpetually littered with the severed hands of insufficiently productive colonized workers. While the peoples of Africa and Asia were dehumanized, tortured, and murdered, far away in distant Europe, the socialists of the Second International came together to debate their colonial policies.<\/p>\n

Belgian \u201csocialists\u201d like Hendrick van Kol and Modeste Terwagne lauded the civilizing mission of colonialism and the immense benefits brought by colonial economic development.1

Recently, Dan La Botz and Stephen R. Shalom took it upon themselves to upbraid those socialists in the United States of America whom they deem insufficiently critical of Hamas\u2019s actions on October 7, demanding condemnations as a moral imperative for all socialists. La Botz and Shalom make some faulty assumptions in their piece: that Israel is winning this war (it is not<\/a>), that Americans and others retain significant faith in public institutions like legacy media, international law, or the institutions of liberal democracies (especially for younger people, they<\/a> do not<\/a>), and that the audience for revolutionary politics can be found among settlers of the Zionist entity (they cannot<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But perhaps the most egregious assumption that La Botz and Shalom make in their short article is that socialists in the United States are the proper referees of anticolonial movements the world over.<\/p>\n

The ongoing Nakba<\/h4>\n

On April 9, 1948, Zionist forces burst into the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, spraying the houses with machine-gun fire and murdering many of the villagers. Those who survived were rounded up and murdered, their bodies abused and the women raped before being killed. Fahim Zaydan, a twelve-year-old, witnessed his own family being murdered in front of his eyes:<\/p>\n

They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him\u2014carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her\u2014they shot her too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ilan Pappe has written of the Zionist forces’ complete disregard of any combatant\/civilian distinction, extending even to the slaughter of thirty babies in Deir Yassin.2

These atrocities served a political end for the emerging Zionist entity. As the scholar of settler colonialism Patrick Wolfe has argued, settler society requires the \u201celimination of the native\u201d in order to establish the settler society on their land. This is not just a one-off occurrence: \u201cSettler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.\u201d3

The history of the Israeli occupation is filled with atrocity after atrocity. For years, Israel has limited the calories and electricity allowed to enter the Gaza strip, allowing just enough food and water in to maintain the Palestinian population at subsistence level. La Botz and Shalom invoke Israeli children five times in their short piece, but for Palestinians in Gaza the very concept of childhood has been robbed<\/a> from them. Thousands of Palestinians have languished for years in Israeli jails, and almost every single freed Palestinian prisoner in the last month reports<\/a> abuse, sexual assault, and torture. A 16-year-old child in Gaza today has lived through six different wars already, subject to deep poverty and intense, prolonged, and repeated trauma their entire lives.<\/p>\n

\"A
Source: visualizingpalestine.org<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since October, the settler colonial entity known as Israel has been conducting a systematic genocide<\/a> of Palestinians. With cold intention, Israel targets journalists, doctors, and vocal critics. Israel sought out the brilliant poet and teacher Refaat Alareer, silencing the \u201cvoice of Gaza<\/a>\u201d and many from his family forever with a missile. Right now, the world watches Al Jazeera and Instagram as beloved Palestinian journalists document unspeakable horrors, rescue children from collapsed buildings, and find small joys in shared meals with the survivors. The world watches while Israeli airstrikes obliterate hospitals, shelters, and anyone willing to speak out defiantly against the colonial occupier.<\/p>\n

All of this is made possible by the unconditional political backing of the United States. The United States supplies weapons, including hellfire missiles and white phosphorous<\/a>, for seemingly endless Israeli war crimes. The U.S. is chiefly responsible for preventing other states from intervening to stop the bloodshed. This is the context in which La Botz and Shalom are dissecting the Palestinian resistance.<\/p>\n

Writing from the United States, La Botz and Shalom argue that we should \u201cretire\u201d Malcolm X\u2019s famous slogan \u201cby any means necessary\u201d from our liberatory lexicon, and \u201cban the term \u2018unconditional support.\u2019\u201d \u201cHow can we not have conditions relating to our support?\u201d they ask. Only \u201clegitimate means\u201d are permissible in the struggle for liberation, according to La Botz and Shalom. The arbiters of such legitimacy, presumably, are also to be found in the United States of America.<\/p>\n

Such sentiments, expressed from the U.S. imperial core while the U.S. government is supplying the bombs dropping on Palestinians, are at best irrelevant and at worst quite harmful to the cause of Palestinian liberation. They are also out of step with a longstanding historical approach to the alleged \u201cexcesses\u201d of liberation movements among the oppressed.<\/p>\n

The violence of the oppressed<\/h4>\n

It may be surprising given the intensity of today\u2019s moral outrage among some sections of the Western Left, but violence by resistance movements of the colonized and oppressed is not a historically new phenomenon.<\/p>\n

\"A
Black slaves killing white slavers in the Haitian Revolution. Source: Picryl<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Slavery began in Haiti soon after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. For more than two centuries, the white slaver class subjected an enslaved Black population to unspeakable atrocities, torture, and comprehensive dehumanization. In the early months of 1791, \u201cneglected and ignored by all the politicians of every brand and persuasion,\u201d the enslaved people of Haiti organized themselves to take their freedom into their own hands. C.L.R. James repeatedly emphasizes the \u201cthoroughly prepared and organized\u201d character of their revolt.4

Righteous as it was, the insurrection was replete with brutality:<\/p>\n

The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labor on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilization had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all, yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. \u201cVengeance! Vengeance!\u201d was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard.<\/p>\n

And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. They did not maintain this revengeful spirit for long. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased. As the revolution gained territory they spared many of the men, women, and children whom they surprised on plantations.5

There is nothing to celebrate or condone in such horrors. But do socialists have a moral responsibility, when discussing the world-historic revolution of the enslaved people of Haiti and the social earthquake it caused around the world, to forefront a condemnation of the \u201cimmorality and strategic idiocy\u201d of their means, as La Botz and Shalom advocate now?<\/p>\n