NM's blog

It is possible to give many instances of how the rule of colonial difference—of representing the “other” as inferior and radically different, and hence incorrigibly inferior—can be employed in situations that are not, in the strict terms of political history, colonial.  These instances come up not only in relations between countries or nations, but even within populations that the modern institutions of power presume to have normalized into a body of citizens endowed with equal and nonarbitrary rights. Indeed, invoking such differences are, we might say, commonplaces in the politics of discrimination, and hence also in the many contemporary struggles for identity. This reason makes it necessary to study the specific history of the colonial state, because it reveals what is only hidden in the universal history of the modern regime of power. —Partha Chatterjee,  The Nation and Fragments,  1993, pp. 34-35

Although Vincent Smith was not the most distinguished imperial historian of India, he was probably the most widely known in India because of the success of his textbooks on Indian history. In 1919, Smith published a rejoinder to the Montagu-Chelmsford constitutional proposals seeking to placate nationalist demands by conceding a certain measure of “responsible government” to Indians. The proposals, Smith said, were based on two propositions: “(1) that a policy, assumed to have been successful in Western communities,  can  be applied to India; and (2) that such a policy  ought  to be applied to India, even at the request of an admittedly small body of Indians, because Englishmen believe it to be intrinsically the best. 5 His argument was that both propositions were false. The policy of responsible and democratic government, “supposed to be of universal application,” could not be applied to India because it went against “a deep stream of Indian tradition which has bee...

Resist, my people, resist them. In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows to God. I carried the soul in my palm for an Arab Palestine. I will not succumb to the ‘peaceful solution’, never lower my flags until I evict them from my homeland and make them kneel for a time to come. Resist, my people, resist them. Resist the settler’s robbery and follow the caravan of martyrs. Shred the disgraceful constitution that has imposed relentless humiliation and stopped us from restoring our rights. They burned blameless children; As for Hadeel, they sniped her in public, killed her in broad daylight. Resist, my people, resist them. Resist the colonialist’s onslaught. Pay no mind to his agents among us who shackle us with illusions of peace. Do not fear the Merkava [Israeli army tanks]; the truth in your heart is stronger, as long as you resist in a land that has lived through raids and victory. Ali called from his grave: resist, my rebellious people, write me as prose on the ag...

It is a real political project Related “Settler colonialism includes interlocking forms of oppression, including racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. This is because settler colonizers are Eurocentric and assume that European values with respect to ethnic, and therefore moral, superiority are inevitable and natural.”  —Alicia Cox,  Settler Colonialism Settler colonialism (wikipedia) Colonising Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba Israel: A Colonial Settler State by Maxime Rodinson with a very good introduction by Peter Buch, 1st ed. 1973 “Rodinson himself calls for a ‘bloodless’ solution and urges the Palestinians to avoid military methods, even though this may mean resigning themselves to their dispossession. But he rises above others who hold this position by insisting that it is up to the wronged party, namely the Arabs, to determine their goals and methods of struggle and that it is certainly impermissible for their op...