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The Ideology Behind Celebrating Hamas's Atrocities

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Friday, Oct 13, 2023 - 9:35
Pro-Palestine protestors.
Pro-Palestine protestors calling for decolonization. 

Footage Emerges Of Hamas Atrocities

In the wake of Hamas's massacres in Southern Israel last week, Israeli sources claimed there were especially awful atrocities, but evidence of the most lurid claims was slow in coming. Now some footage has emerged (discretion advised). 

That was a reply to a post by the Israeli Prime Minister's office including footage of babies that were murdered. Due to content restrictions, apparently, it's impossible to embed the original post. 

Video of the capture of Thai farm workers in Hamas, with the Hamas militants about to decapitate a mortally wounded one with a hoe has been released as well. 

Why Would People Celebrate This? 

As we noted earlier this week, American leftists have celebrated this as "decolonization", with some paying a price for it. 

It looks they are continuing to pay a price for it. 

Although it may seem odd to celebrate atrocities, this is a key part of Franz Fanon's ideology of decolonization, something that has been taught in American universities for years. 

Franz Fanon And Decolonization 

I first became familiar with the South African intellectual Robert Duigan via this fascinating podcast episode on which he was the guest. 

If you're looking for something to listen to on the road, I highly recommend it. 

Duigan recently wrote an essay on the left's reaction to Hamas's incursion into Israel, highlighting the role of Franz Fanon in their thinking. It's long, but I have excerpted the part about Fanon, followed by a special message Duigan asked me to share with you about South Africa. 

I have bolded a key part, which I believe explains why the Israel-Palestinian conflict has so far defied resolution. 

The Nature of Violence vs the Violence of Nature

Excerpt via Robert Duigan (emphasis mine)

Achilles drags the corpse of Hector to the Greek camp (Franz Sales Lochbihler).
Achilles drags the corpse of Hector to the Greek camp (Franz Sales Lochbihler).

It is only through organization or derangement that this instinct to self-preservation can be overridden, and so those who wish to kill exercise great efforts at steering the thinking of leaders and influential people in the direction of homicide.

But these people who resort to intellectual means for valorizing violence forget something - the knives are not always out, nor can they afford to be - many months, even years can go by without a major flare-up, even in the hottest zones of territorial contest. Animals in the wild, and political communities in society do not simply attack at any moment. There is a constant testing of boundaries, managing of peace and war, escalation and de-escalation - conflict is costly, and to be avoided unless necessary.

The best illustration of this blindness to the limiting factor of self-preservation is Franz Fanon. Fanon has now become a trending topic on twitter, over this very issue. He is seldom criticized, and much lauded by the left, who have taken it up in great number to explain to the public that Hamas marching in and slaughtering women, children and pensioners, and parading the stripped and raped corpses of young girls is decolonial praxis.

There are many who deny this, or try to push back to maintain their respectability, but it stands in black and white that decolonisation is ultimately about killing, and I have written about how decolonial intellectuals use Fanon’s ideas before on this blog.

From The Wretched of the Earth:

 

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The only real critique I have ever seen from a leftist is that of BK Jha, an Indian marxist: https://sci-hub.ee/10.2307/41855881…

 

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But I think there are aspects of this that hold true.

Nature, in man and nature-beyond-man, is violent. Law exercises itself by violence, as any libertarian will tell you, and Olof Wikström and Donald Black’s investigations into ordinary criminal violence show a link between all forms of violence - Clausewitz’s theory writ small - that we are violent in order to assert a pattern of behavior we see as right.

And by dragging others into our views on the matter, organized violence *does* consolidate political communities, even and especially in genocide. It binds all in complicity. As Phillip Gourevitch put it after covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, “genocide, after all, is a community-building activity.”

Besides, conclusive defeat tends to have a pacifying effect on one's enemy, and an incomplete victory leads only to repeated flare-ups until separate and secure resources and territorial control are unambiguously settled.

I think Fanon's own writings offer a good clue here, for what a diseased and stupid exercise of violence can be - his psychiatric notes provide a few clear examples of people who have engaged in terrorism or racial vengeance, only for it to torment them. Killings motivated by resentment and revenge fester long after the act, and continue to mutilate the soul long afterwards (from BK Jha’s essay):

 

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But an unambiguous act of self-defense does not cause this festering guilt, nor does the use of a calculated and pragmatically limited deterrent. Murder motivated by pure greed and sadism seldom causes guilt or remorse, but they become monsters who cannot be accepted into society - avatars of Cain who feel no guilt, but must always bear shame.

What makes Fanon uniquely wrong is that the whole nature of decolonization has almost universally imbued its inheritors with a insatiable burning resentment, and the violence has sealed it with a pact of blood. Every man is transformed into one of Fanons's psychiatric case studies.

You can read the rest here.

Avoiding Fanon's Decolonization In South Africa 

Robert Duigan is part of a movement to avoid the worst aspects of decolonization in his part of South Africa, via secession. If you'd like to help or at least learn more about it, please read his brief message below. 

With the progressive collapse of the South African state and the increasing hostility toward white and other racial minorities, the Western Cape province, which has the highest proportion of minorities, now supports secession from the country by 58%, and supports a referendum by 68%.

In order to compel the Liberal governing party in the province, the DA, to grant this referendum, a new party is to be formed, the Referendum Party, which has, together with the more conservative VF+ party, the capacity to steal the DA 's 3% majority margin.

International support, media, diplomatic and financial, will be vital to fortify this democratic process. For more information, visit https://capeindependence.org

 

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