Читать книгу Decolonising the Human - Группа авторов - Страница 8

Threats and implementation of violence are principal factors in disciplining humans and human subjectivities into dominant and oppressed groups. In the present world order, war and violence have given time and place their identity. At the end of the twentieth century, Mamdani (2004, 3) could argue that ‘we have just ended a century of violence, one possibly more violent than any other in recorded history’ for its ‘civil wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions’. Staggering violence should not surprise us in a modernity where ‘violence has become the midwife of history’ (Mamdani 2004, 3). Perhaps the normalisation of violence in the modern colonial world has not found a more perfect expression than in the representation of war as a natural accompaniment of the human condition. For instance, it was with the force of argument and refined erudition that Nietzsche preached of war as part of life in the modern world: ‘Life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war’ ([1906] 1968, 33).

For Nietzsche, and an entire tradition of other philosophers and influential thinkers, peace was something to be dismissed as decadence, and a disturbance of the normal and natural state of war. For a philosopher who boasted of his rare intelligence, it was a canonical observation of the epoch to note that humanity ‘should love peace as a means to new wars – and the short peace more than the long’ (Nietzsche [1885] 1969, 74–75). Nietzsches' celebrations of war could be dismissed as the musings of a bored philosopher ranting from his closet and meaning no harm to the world, if such leaders of the world as former US President George Bush had not waged wars in Nietzschean ways. Wars have given meaning to nihilism and relevance to brute force, in that claims of democracy and freedom have been accompanied by new wars and productions of unfreedom. More recently Azar Gat (2008, xi) has stated that ‘[with] war being connected to everything else and everything else being connected to war, explaining war and tracing its development in relation to human development in general almost amount to a theory and history of everything’.

War, in spite of its punishments and costs to humans, has become accepted as part of the very identity of life. For the Global North, the political power of states and their economic prosperity, the wealth of nations, has been connected to wars and genocides of conquest that led to the exploitation of slave labour and the extraction of resources from the colonies in the Global South. Fanon (1963) and Eric Williams (1964) differently but with equal force describe how the power and opulence of the West was founded on the proceeds of slave-based, imperial and colonial crimes against the humanity of Latin Americans, Asians and Africans. In this sense, ‘to understand war is thus to understand ourselves’ (Gelven 1994, 8). Writing as a Westerner, Daniel Hallin (2008) could say ‘you have to understand war in order to understand our culture’. A hegemonic culture of war (Maldonado-Torres 2008) pervades world political thinking amongst the ruling regimes of powerful nations, failing and failed states, and so-called terrorist and dissident organisations. Albert Camus (1953, 1) understood the war and violence of the present world as that which has been not only naturalised and normalised, but philosophised and decorated. As far as war is concerned, Camus notes that criminals have been elevated to the position of judges. Powerful states that claim to be peacemakers of the world occupy the front seat in propelling wars. For leaders of superpowers who declare war on their enemies and those of dissident organisations that valorise violence and war, war is no longer ‘unique like a cry; now it is universal like science, yesterday it was put on trial, today it is the law’ (Camus 1953, 1). The powerful use their power to give permission and respectability to violence.

Based on a reading of the human as ‘Economic Man’, economics, a privileged social science whose claim is that it has the duty to calculate, measure and help in the creation of wealth and happiness, has also been weaponised. World economics, through such international financial organisations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has itself not just failed to escape but has participated in causing and promoting violence and wars. In the same way that the genocides of conquest and their fruits of slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid had both hidden and overt economic objectives of dispossessing and displacing the other, and of exploiting labour and other resources, world economics from Adam Smith to the present has been implicated in violence and war. Yash Tandon (2015) describes the present systems of world economics, trade and accounting as the ‘Wests' war’ against the rest in the way asymmetrical power and economic relations are sustained and promoted, poverty is globalised and the poor are kept fixed in their poverty. Capitalist economics ensures the production of poverty and misery as much as it guarantees the wealth of a minority of states, and of global corporations that have become richer and more powerful than some countries of the Global South.

In political and economic relations with ‘the rest’, the West has presented its political power and economic leadership as violent, warlike impositions and forms of domination. Refusal and resistance are met with cruel punishments. In observing this, Ramón Grosfoguel (2007, 217) notes that as the Global South we have received ‘[no] respect and no recognition for Indigenous, African, Islamic or other non-European forms of democracy. The liberal form of democracy is the only one accepted and legitimated. Forms of democratic alterity are rejected.’

On pain of war the Euro-American Empire has forced itself upon the world. For the reason that the paradigm of clashes and war rules the world in theory and in practice, Samuel Huntington (1996) advances a political proposal to the USA, disguised as an intellectual observation, that civilisations of the world, mainly the Islamic and the Western ones, are inevitably headed for a ‘clash of civilisations’: a cultural, political and military war that the USA and the West at large must win. Huntington does not condemn or discourage war, but uses his powerful position as a trusted political advisor to the worlds' most powerful and warlike nation to implicitly encourage it. Achille Mbembe (2001, 25) is correct in his argument that conquest, with its enforced rules and regulations, founds itself, legitimates itself and eventually maintains itself through physical and symbolic rituals and ceremonies of violence that remain fixed in the imaginary of the conquered, who are domesticated through fear and guilt. The brutality of the event of conquest, and the actions that accompany domination, remain silently but forcefully lodged, like any other trauma, in the psyche of the conquered, creating a ‘past that is not past’ (Sharpe 2016, 23).

What has effectively been put paid to is Francis Fukuyamas' optimistic but violently Euro-North American-centric prediction of the end of history and the total victory of neoliberal democracy and capitalism in the world, where the ‘end of history’ would mean the end of wars and bloody revolutions. In Fukuyamas' thesis, given their agreement on goals and intentions men would no longer have any large causes for which to fight in the neoliberal paradise. They would satisfy their needs through economic activity, and would no longer have to risk their lives in battle (Fukuyama 1992, 311). Contra-Fukuyama, the Wests' own wars of invasion of such countries as Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, the present stalemate in Syria, and such events as the attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington DC and other so-called terrorist attacks in different parts of the world, have created conditions in which human beings, especially the poor and the weak, endure rather than enjoy life. In sum, modern politics has indeed been corrupted by a ‘fetishism of power’ (Dussel 2008, 3) that is violently opposed to the ‘will to live’ (2008, 13) espoused by the decolonial philosophy of liberation, which holds power to be peace and liberation itself.