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Imperialist Apologia

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An unabashed mobilisation of ancient colonial binaries, with Russian imperialism cast as the guardian of secular, modern, liberal civilization against a barbarian ISIS. Its author has stated the upshot of this perspective quite explicitly: “kill them all”. Or, to put it another way, exterminate the brutes.

One is reminded of peak Hitchens, and of the traditions of imperialist apologia that he more or less deliberately evoked. And one is impressed by how deep this goes in parts of the left. Of course, Russian imperialism is not defending secular liberalism; that’s not how imperialism works. And its targets are demonstrably much broader than ISIS. Of course, the Assad dictatorship is much more steeped in blood than ISIS at this point.

The colonial unconscious, even if it has no history, should be placed in historical context. In the aftermath of the Great Indian Rebellion in 1857, in which the British press reported (usually invented and embellished) atrocities on the part of the rebels, the response of British moralists was to blame “native fanatics”. Charles Dickens wrote that he would like to address the rebels with this threat: “it is my intention, with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with abominable atrocities’.”
When the British bombed Egypt in 1882, in response to anti-British riots, Gladstone argued that they at least ensured that “the fanaticism of the East” would not be able to kill Europeans “with impunity”. The same trope of native “fanaticism” was used to justify the war against the Mahdist insurgents in Sudan. And again in Iraq during the British Mandate, when Churchill called for the gassing of “uncivilized tribes”.

One could go on, and on. Of course, ISIS does not stand in some sort of relationship of succession to anticolonial movements. The so-called ‘Islamic State’ is, among other things, a pathology of the imperialist system, its symptom. However, it is simply not as accomplished at killing as the Assad dictatorship, and its imperialist backer. The logic of such displacements, in which ISIS embodies all of the intolerable excesses, the violence, irrationality and dysfunctionality of the Assad regime and the imperialist systeminto which it is integrated, is not difficult to discern. This simple gesture of moral-splitting and projection, is a constant feature of imperialist ideology. It allows one to side with the most relentless torturers, bombers and military despots. It allows one to call for more murder, and soon, sooner, soonest. It allows one to externalise evil, to say “kill them all”, with full confidence that the other side has a monopoly on barbarism.

Above all, by refusing to acknowledge a genuine Syrian opposition, by denying agency to anyone but ‘head-chopping fanatics’ and the dictatorship and its backers, it denies that there could be any rational, socially grounded reasons to wage a military struggle against the regime. The unconscious fantasy at stake here is that the regime has a matchless, unchallengeable right to rule; and the right to any means in its suppression of opposition.

—Richard Seymour, 07 October 2015
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