THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#19, MARCH-MAY/2024
The hyperproliferation of media in our contemporary world makes it well-nigh impossible to prevent unregulated news and information regarding imperial atrocities from breaching public consciousness. However, the normative gaze[1] of modernity has thus far proven itself as more than up to the formidable task of providing an unreflective background ideological framework and socio-ontological filter towards ensuring that everyday people see themselves, look at one another and engage the world almost exclusively from the sanctioned perspectives of western imperialist power.
The normative gaze is therefore able to maintain the social stability of a western imperialist continuum without needing to deny the scope of structural-inert violence being imposed upon racialized populations of ascendant humanity, but instead stridently reproaches those who seek to disclose that such a systematic constancy of violence against human ‘being’ renders such violence as objective in-itself and hence without meriting any serious moral scrutiny. This is coupled with the fact that the normative gaze grants sanction to such objective violence precisely because its inherently constitutive anthropological impetus defines a modern humanist divide between the imperial mainstream and the underground of modernity as a lived positionality to western imperialist power.
In other words, because of the systemic coercive effectiveness of the normative gaze of modernity, Empire need not exhaust itself in denying the structural-inert violence it continuously generates against the underground of modernity, inasmuch as western imperialist power only begins to feel threatened when the sovereign legitimacy of its violence is unapologetically called into question and thus loses the totalitarian rationality of its appearance as the Real.
Indeed, the normative gaze of modernity enables and endorses the genocidal campaigns of a Zionist settler-colonial praxis through structurally negating the assertion of human ‘being’ that accompanies Palestinian resistance by socio-ontologically positioning Palestinian community outside the margins of human consideration, ethical regard and legal redress. Situated thus as the wretched of the earth, as the underground of modernity; the everyday people of Palestine are now being pushed to the margins of existence itself, and thus outside of history.
And yet, Palestinian people are not alone in their asymmetry to Empire, in that “the cynical and systematic use of absolute violence” is something that the underground of modernity is historically accustomed to face, especially when it comes to biopolitical “methods of pacification” against racialized populations teeming with abundant potentialities of ascendant humanity both within the confines of globalized imperial metropoles and throughout the Global South.[2] In fact, what so clearly designates the racialized positionality and socio-ontological dimension of the underground of modernity more than anything else, is that such “war crimes” like “pillaging, rape, reprisals against the civilian population, summary executions, use of torture to extract confessions or information”[3] take place against human ‘being’ without immediate geohistorical consequence, so long as it does not unsettle the deep moral sleep of the imperial mainstream or disrupt the flow of capital to the ruling power elite.
As such, whenever we hear tales of horrendous terror, violence and brutality being visited upon a Zionist settler-colony, how can we not understand this as the reconstituted structural-inert banality of ongoing violence, terror and brutality – as remorselessly experienced by Palestinian community at the hands of an occupying praxis of racist dehumanization and western imperialist power – Returning back into history with a vengeance? This, notwithstanding the fact that the difficulties of distinguishing between what constitutes terror and what constitutes authentic resistance to Empire, increase a thousandfold when we have nothing but the compromised corporate media of the imperial mainstream and the epistemic sychophants of the Academy to rely on. For both terror and resistance are indicative of distinct ways the originary violence of western imperialist power Returns back to source.
Let there be no doubt then, that were it not for the structural-inert violence of western imperialist power upon everyday people in places like Gaza and the West Bank, the emancipatory imperative towards Revolt against Empire, that can then be mutilated into terror or channeled appropriately into organized resistance, would have no socio-historical force.
Indeed, is it not then tragic, that occupying forces representing a Zionist settler-colony slaughter everyday Palestinian people according to a principled fascist allegiance to national Blood and Soil that informed the genocide of everyday Jewish people by Nazi Germany? Such a genocidal slaughter of the Jewish population in Europe at the hands of the Nazis forced the world to bear witness to the Holocaust as an implementation of coloniality in the Raw[4] upon Europe itself, by Europe itself. It also serves as the very condition of geohistorical possibility for the rise of political Zionism and its express purpose of embarking upon another genocidal European colonial enterprise at the expense of the humanity of the Afroasiatic world.
Even those two words – Never Again – that aim at drawing a line in the sands of time against any future genocide by capturing the radical imagination when enunciated through concerted Jewish participation in ongoing resistance movements against Empire throughout the diaspora, lose all emancipatory imperative when uttered by settler-colonial propagandists and Zionist political ideologues as rhetoric that inherently veils an unmitigated complicity with western imperialist power by divorcing the singularity of Palestinian experience from the lived universality of the human condition we all share.
To be certain, many are the lessons that a lived experience of coloniality in the Raw impresses upon the situated consciousness of globally displaced and socio-ontologically subjugated communities. Among these lessons arises the knowledge that the objective violence of Empire itself has “shown the hesitant that no solution was possible other than force. The only good thing about colonialism is that, in order to last, it must show itself to be intransigent, and that, by its intransigence, it prepares its ruin.”[5] For the ruin of Empire begins with emancipatory praxis that constitutes potentialities of ascendant humanity through spiritual unity and collective struggle that speaks to a radical universality of human ‘being’ as the condition of possibility which introduces disequilibrium within the normative gaze of modernity and hence might free both oppressed and oppressor from a Manichean socio-ontological tyranny of coloniality in the Raw.
Disrupting the normative gaze of modernity is therefore imperative for sustaining socio-historical liberation struggles throughout the various stages of their lived trajectory against a western imperialist continuum. “Normally people are not radical, normally people are not moving against the system: normally people are just trying to live, to have a bit of romance and to feed their kids. And what people want is to be recognized, to be incorporated. And when we understand that recognition and incorporation” within the normative gaze of modernity “are generically anti-Black, then we don’t typically pick up the gun and move against the system, we typically find ways to be recognized, to be incorporated, even though that’s impossible”[6] without gradually becoming more and more accommodating to established structures of meaning and power that sustain anti-Blackness. This is the double bind of Palestinian resistance, and indeed all liberation struggles that inherently speak from a nationalist register, what does it look like to enunciate Revolt against a western imperialist continuum without seeking recognition from and incorporation within the normative gaze of modernity?
However, insofar as the racist dehumanization of anti-Blackness is such a key spiritual indicator of neocolonial subservience to Empire, the existential movement of constituting human subjectivity-as-lived universal out of emancipatory praxis introduces disequilibrium against the normative gaze, and works as a necessary guarantee that mediates against the all too familiar transformation of nationalist liberation struggles into neocolonialist surrogacy to western imperialist power through economic subservience to advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization accompanied by blind cultural adherence to a socio-ontological coherence of hierarchal positionality within the normative gaze of modernity based upon that rational signification of subhumanity as ‘race’.
As such, it has never been more important to understand that “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon”[7] from the perspective of established structures of meaning that merely replicate the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum. Indeed, there is no form of Palestinian resistance against an occupying praxis of western imperialist power and the racist dehumanization such a Zionist settler-colonial project sustains and replenishes, that is not subsequently understood as an incarnation of illegitimate violence and unjustifiable terror by the normative gaze. “Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.”[8] Thus, the question of ethical justification being placed at the feet of those who choose to resist against the global injustice of Empire, only serves to obfuscate the Real of history. For is it not that socio-historical projects of systematic oppression themselves generate a myriad of naked ontological ventures and elusive forms of emancipatory praxis through which such structural-inert violence is reconstituted towards Returning back to source?
Indeed, how can anyone genuinely concerned with the all too human struggle for Black liberation against Empire, here in the ‘open society’ of a globalized imperial metropole, itself overdetermined by advanced neoliberal capitalism and an encroaching totalitarian security culture, ignore the fact that every major contemporary American deployment of neo-colonial police violence against Black community, implicates decades of mutually reinforcing counterinsurgent training and shared expertise with a Zionist settler-colonial police force that unambiguously imposes biopolitical pacification as an occupying praxis of western imperialist power upon Palestinian community?[9]
We do not even need to render the Palestinian struggle taking place against an imperial outpost in the Afroasiatic world as totally analogous to the struggle for Black liberation here in the domestic core of Empire, in order to see clearly that what is at stake in the biopolitical pacification campaign of apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people by an occupying praxis of western imperialist power, is the same question that is at stake in the undermining of Haitian national sovereignty, the same question that is at stake in stoking the fires of Sudanese civil war, the same question that is at stake in Cobalt mining that exploits and reifies human life towards social death in the African Congo as an ecologically friendly alternative to fossil fuel consumption for the imperial mainstream; and it is the same question that is at stake when our brothers and sisters here in America are faced with mass incarceration and accumulative slaughter by neo-colonial police. “The fact is that colonization is neither a series of chance occurrences nor the statistical result of thousands of individual undertakings. It is a system”[10] imposed by western imperialist power through racist dehumanizing violence that seeks to obfuscate and eliminate the question of the meaning of human ‘being’ and the radical universality of the human condition in deference to the normative gaze of modernity. “The purest of intentions, if conceived within this infernal circle” of the normative gaze “is corrupted at once.”[11]
No doubt, there is a significant danger of merely reconfiguring the face of the oppressor with a refracted yet assimilated face of the oppressed, whenever socio-historical resistance to systematic oppression proceeds according to acceptable perspectives that only aim towards more inclusion into the imperial mainstream-as-civil society. The normative gaze of modernity is so averse to the “whole social structure being changed from the bottom up”[12] that it can be very accommodating when the oppressed abandon the horizon of emancipatory praxis for political opportunity to traffic materially in their supposedly fair share of the spoils of Empire and to unreservedly participate as emblematic mascots and spiritual eunuchs within the global cosmopolitan culture of the ruling power elite.
As such, collective socio-historical resistance to systematic oppression must somehow find its genesis through openings introduced by emancipatory praxis towards disclosing the radical universality of the human condition against Empire. “The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man. This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. It is prefigured in the objectives and methods of the conflict.”[13] Indeed, in this day, emancipatory praxis against Empire certainly contains the seeds of a much needed geonational[14] horizon of socio-historical struggle that is altogether wasted in attempts to resuscitate dying nationalist paradigms which lead humanity to an ‘end of history’ as a mere replication of a western imperialist continuum and an ‘eternal return’ that stinks of modern humanism in all its socio-ontological sterility.
Seizing upon such an opening, and in the spirit of seeking to break through “this infernal cycle” of apartheid and genocide, we are witnessing the beginnings of an international movement that speaks to a geonational imperative confronting Empire through championing a universality of human rights from the singularity of South African solidarity with the ascendant humanity of Palestinian people. This geonational struggle for human rights is being contested through an international tribunal under the auspices/authority of the United Nations.[15] “Colonialism denies human rights to people it has subjugated by violence, and whom it keeps in poverty and ignorance by force, therefore, as Marx would say, in a state of ‘subhumanity’. Racism is inscribed in the events themselves, in the institutions, in the nature of the exchanges and the production. The political and social statuses reinforce one another: since the natives are ‘subhuman’. , the Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to them; conversely, since they have no rights, they are abandoned without protection to the inhuman forces of nature, to the ‘iron laws’ of economics.”[16] The fact that the banner of Human Rights, as championed through South African solidarity with the ascendant humanity of Palestinian resistance, is being usurped from western imperialist power, rather than being cynically imposed upon the Global South by Empire on international rivals, postcolonial surrogates and neocolonial despots who refuse to socio-economically ‘bend the knee’ to globalized capital, speaks to a concerted attempt that ultimately disrupts the hegemony of human rights discourse as an unimpeachable coincidence of the imposition of western imperialist power upon the wretched of the earth.
For by unpredictably challenging the United Nations sanctioned International Court of Justice to disregard its egregious and calculated fealty to a western imperialist continuum, the all too human South African solidarity with the ascendant humanity of Palestinian community introduces an opening towards a geonational horizon of discourse with regards to confronting Empire, apartheid and genocide. Thus, whether inadvertently or deliberately, the South African gambit illuminates world juridical potentialities that speak to a way out of no way for the underground of modernity through earnest striving towards overcoming the lived bankruptcy of human rights discourse – all by implicating the sovereign legitimacy of a geonationalist horizon through emancipatory praxis against western imperialist power.
As such, is there a one state or two state solution to counter the apartheid and genocide of Palestinian people that does not speak to a socio-historical imperative towards a world without borders as a geonational egalitarian community arising out of the failed project of the United Nations, much like the United Nations itself arose out of the failed project of the League of Nations? Indeed, to fail again and fail better is, yet again, the order of the day.
Nationalism, as the ultimate horizon of socio-historical liberation, is dead. Have we not learned from the examples of Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam? Each of which defeated western imperialist power on more exacting terms than South Africa, and yet all experienced a deprioritization of the struggle towards human liberation in direct correlation to pressing national security concerns in the wake of normalizing relations with Empire, only to watch their hard fought emancipatory impetus of national sovereignty abandon any geonational momentum of egalitarian world community towards a lived universality of human subjectivity, and thus subsequently erode under the economic coercion of advanced neoliberal capitalist globalization.
The question before us then, is whether there can be a nationalist project in our contemporary world that is immune to being transformed by the dictates of Empire into a neocolonial surrogate state? And what does this mean for Palestinian community and the emancipatory imperative of socio-historical resistance in the face of an unambiguous Zionist political project of settler-colonialism as explicitly endorsed by western imperialist power?
[1] A. Shahid Stover, Being and Insurrection, (New York: Cannae Press, 2019) pp.21-27.
[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, (London: Routledge Classics, 1964, 2006) p.63.
[3] Sartre, p.63.
[4] Stover, Being and Insurrection, pp.36-39.
[5] Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p.54.
[6] Frank B. Wilderson III in Dialogue with Jared Ball, “We’re Trying to Destroy the World: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson”, This is a transciption of a radio interview with Frank B. Wilderson III taped in October of 2014, in the midst of the ongoing anti-police struggles taking place in Ferguson, MO. Wilderson is in conversation with IMIXWHATILIKE hosts Jared Ball, Todd Steven Burroughs and Dr. Hate. An audio recording of the interview can be found under the title “Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness and Police Violence” on the show’s website: http://imixwhatilike.org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-2/ Transcription and zine layout by Ill Will Editions, November 2014.
[7] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963).p.36.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Edith Garwood, “With Whom
are Many U.S. Police Departments Training? With a Chronic Human Rights Violator
– Israel”, Amnesty International, Aug 25, 2016 – https://www.amnestyusa.org/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/,
Ilise Behshushan Cohen, Azadeh Shahshahani, “U.S. Police are Being Trained by Israel—And Communities of Color Are Paying the Price”, The Progressive Magazine, October 7, 2019 – https://progressive.org/latest/us-police-trained-by-israel-communities-of-color-paying-price-shahshahani-cohen-191007/,
Mershiha Gadzo, “How the US and Israel exchange
tactics in violence and control”, Al Jazeera, June 12, 2020 – https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/12/how-the-us-and-israel-exchange-tactics-in-violence-and-control,
Philissa Cramer, “ADL considered scrapping its US police training trips to Israel, decided not to”, The Times of Israel, March 18, 2022 – https://www.timesofisrael.com/adl-considered-scrapping-its-us-police-training-trips-to-israel-but-decided-not-to/,
[10] Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, p.37.
[11] Sartre, p.38.
[12] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.18
[13] Fanon, pp.245-6.
[14] Stover, Being and Insurrection, pp.255-266.
[15] Anna Holligan, Oliver Slow, “Israel officials support Gaza destruction, court hears”, BBC News, January 11, 2024 – https://bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67942983
Mike Corder, Raf Casert, “Top UN court orders Israel
to prevent genocide in Gaza but stops short of ordering cease-fire”, The
Associated Press, January 26, 2024 – https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-genocide-court-south-africa-27cf84e16082cde798395a95e9143c06?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share
Raffi Berg, “What is South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ?”, BBC News, January 30, 2024 – https://bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67922346
[16] Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialsm, p.59.
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