Decolonial Thought in Times of Genocide: Renewing the 'Communities' of Knowledge and Praxis
Translation of Mireille Fanon's Work
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I am partially using an article written a few days after October 7, before the genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people reached the figures we know today, and before the Zionist regime turned its colonial war into a regional war.
In addition to the systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip, a new weapon of mass destruction has been orchestrated by the criminal occupiers-colonizers, which could go unnoticed: starvation maintained by those who decide what is allowed to enter this territory, besieged by the murderous claws of a state that claims to block barbarism in the name of democracy. Bodies sink under the rubble, others are left wounded for life; others agonize in the midst of hunger... It is, in fact, a war of extermination in the sense understood by Raphaël Lemkin (1944): “An act of genocide directed against a national group as an entity, and the acts in question are directed against individuals, not as individuals, but as members of their national group.”
But all of Israel’s allies, led by the U.S., object to the use of the word extermination. They say the State of Israel has the right to defend itself.
The call is to fight for democracy against barbarism; whatever the price to be paid in terms of dignity and fundamental rights, including the right to life. It took the word of the South African state to finally put the appropriate term to this live massacre, which is displayed every night on television screens around the world, and since then South Africa has been the target of attacks and threats. It is not irrelevant to consider why a country that was a victim of anti-Black racism during apartheid should rise up and use jus cogens norms to denounce the crime committed against Palestinian life.
How proud we were to follow the live hearings and see our brothers and sisters from South Africa accuse the criminals who represent the democracy of the white world. A great moment. The white world has so deeply instilled in the collective mind of humanity, from the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and colonization, that a Black life is worth nothing, just like an Arab life. Beware of those who oppose such a mantra!
This is reflected, among other things, in the refusal of the white world to be held accountable for the crimes committed against millions of Africans uprooted from their continent for more than four centuries, and against thousands of indigenous people exterminated to corroborate the narrative propagated by the colonizers: a land without people—a land empty of people. This lie has never ceased to be uttered, whether in Palestine, Western Sahara, the French colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Kanaky, Réunion, and several more. Sovereign and independent countries stripped of their natural resources, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, and many others.
The main thing was to ensure that none of these crimes could dethrone the crime of all crimes, that of genocide, for which this unique term was coined. The supreme offense would be for it to be used for other crimes committed by whites against Blacks or Arabs. No, this term must remain to designate the crime committed by whites against whites. Nothing can or should diminish this supremacy in horror.
In 1951, African Americans pointed this out to the UN: “We Charge Genocide” (Civil Rights Congress, 1951) for slavery. The UN never responded, which shows, for those who still doubt, where the Nations lean. It should even be noted that the man who had given the Western world the term “genocide” spoke out against this petition, arguing that “These accusations are a distraction maneuver designed to divert attention from the crimes of genocide perpetrated against Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, and other peoples subjugated by the Soviets” (William Patterson, 1951). So African American organizations decided to establish a People’s Tribunal to rule on whether transatlantic capture, enslavement, and segregation constituted genocide. Despite the indisputable verdict of the judges, the UN, the media, and most politicians remain silent. The concept of genocide cannot concern Black lives, indigenous lives, or Arab lives.
The term genocide is denied to crimes committed against peoples and bodies reduced to slavery and/or colonization and colonialism. This perpetrated crime is an integral part of the foundations of the capitalist system, and for that system to endure, this crime must remain in the subconscious, ignored, forgiven, assumed by the victims themselves and now by all the descendants of this history. The liberal domination system will only grant them memory, which, of course, will be shaped according to the will of the dominants and, above all, the balance of power at play.
Therefore, it is natural to conclude that, for these populations, political power relations prevail over law, particularly when it comes to international law and international humanitarian law, which were established to regulate power relations; however, in the colonial context from which we have never departed, these norms are confiscated, manipulated, and instrumentalized by dominant white powers, so that they are reduced to a set of paradoxically imperative norms. More worrying is that they are practically unknown to the people, who see them as unattainable and do not view them as a political lever for resistance.... Nevertheless, millions of people, mobilized in support of Palestine’s right to resist the illegal occupation of their country, continue to call for an immediate ceasefire, while urging the International Criminal Court to take up this crime of genocide as soon as possible. They carry with them the human dignity that is desperately lacking in those who use this system to prohibit in order to better destroy and dominate. But there are those who choose to love the other, recognize dignity, and respect otherness, relinquishing their position so as not to be complicit in genocide, like Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who resigned in protest against the United Nations for failing in its duty to prevent what he describes as “the genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza under Israeli bombardment”; he also mentions States “fully complicit in this horrific assault,” including the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe.
If the UN Charter recognizes the right of an attacked State to defend itself (Article 51), it does not recognize the right to use disproportionate force, as is currently the case with the colonizing State, Israel. The principle of proportionality introduces the fact that an action should not be more devastating than the harm already suffered. However, in its response, the State of Israel has chosen indiscriminate violence, violating the principle of proportionality and acting illegally, as it respects no balance between the objective—saving the hostages—and the means employed, which have the sole aim of making Gaza uninhabitable for all Palestinians. The objective: to eliminate as many of them as possible, regardless of whether hostages are sacrificed in the process; Hamas must be eradicated in the name of “their” democracy. And many States have followed them in this massacre!
What then authorizes this State to disregard the principle of proportionality by violating the norms and principles of war? Does the notion of principle not only cover the need to optimize values and interests, while norms and rules are often presented as ontological in nature? Does the principle of proportionality not prevail over rules and norms, especially when a prime minister claims that Hamas must be eliminated, and in return receives the backing of the entire international community, and in particular of his supporters who, like him, oppose barbarism? At that moment, it is easy for him to decide the quota of this proportionality. And it is at this point that we must question the role played by various Western States, in their inability to think of the war waged against Palestine since the forced creation of the State of Israel, as anything other than the price to be paid for the crime committed by whites against other whites of Jewish religion. This guilt has become a principle, a rule, a norm that sometimes is worth more than jus cogens, to the point that those who claim it have lost the meaning of words, deliberately confusing, among other things, anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.
On the part of many Western countries, there is a manifest will to lie, to falsify narratives, to be complicit in the commission of indescribable crimes. No word will ever be able to describe this genocide, which carries with it all the duplicity, arrogance, vengeance, and inhumanity of the white world, which feels threatened everywhere by the emergence of those it has made invisible, killed, and silenced, considering them as Non-Beings who now claim dignity, humanity, and responsibility.... The dehumanization of bodies considered as not belonging to those who inhabit them is nothing new. Was it not thus that the self-proclaimed “discoverers,” and the kingdoms to which they belonged, resolved the question of forced labor by claiming that both indigenous peoples and Africans had no soul? This allowed colonial power to uproot them from their continent, summarily execute them, and, above all, consider them as things. With Palestine, the same paradigm of colonial domination over bodies is being implemented, which is supported by all the friends of this murderous State. They assure us they are fighting against barbarism, assuring us that they are only animals, forcing them to endure eternal forced displacement, depriving them of any possibility of meeting their basic needs, and, finally, letting them starve to death. There is nothing new under the sun of imperial democracy, sustained by a deadly capitalist system that decides who lives and who dies, while the mainstream media are used to provide arguments to convince anyone listening that there is no alternative to saving the white world.
If any country can account for these hegemonic powers, it is Haiti. Since it gained independence at the cost of a struggle against the colonizer and enslaver, the latter had the audacity to charge the price of this liberation. The imposition of an illegal debt by France is not enough, more is needed. Then, the United States will occupy this first Black Republic and take all the gold from Haiti’s banks. But that is not enough: the former colonizers will participate in the election of presidents, fostering corruption and the rise of gangs that today have brought the country to paralysis. This is a good opportunity for colonial power to seize what it considers its property. For the dominants, Haiti’s liberation was a mistake, it must be returned to the hegemonic empire. Haiti is in flames and blood, and the UN allows itself to be used by the white powers that created it for their own interests, as a Trojan horse in the struggle for the independence of countries aspiring to emancipation.
Even so-called aid must be questioned. For now, the UN acts according to the wishes of Haiti’s “friends” (the U.S. and central countries), who want the gangs to end their despicable and murderous activities, because they prevent them from taking control of what remains of the country’s natural resources and, above all, limit drug trafficking from Colombia to the U.S. and Europe. So a brilliant idea was germinating in these minds clouded by the coloniality of power: to send a police force led by Kenya to fight the gangs and restore “security and order,” an eminently colonial slogan. Blacks against Blacks; thus, if a massive crime is committed, whites will be neither accomplices nor responsible. They organize the unspeakable and wash their hands, as in Rwanda. They continue to accumulate ignominy, violating the right of peoples to self-determination and political sovereignty. We must vigorously question the aid sent by imperial power and mobilize with the Haitian people, who firmly reject this intervention. Will they be abandoned, alone, to face new occupiers, when we know that one of the keys to the emancipation of Africans and Afro-descendants is the decolonial emancipation of Haiti?
What does it mean to help Israel? When countries help Israel by supplying components or munitions, like the United States, which in December 2023 sent more than 10,000 tons of rifles, more than 15,000 bombs, and more than 50,000 pieces of artillery, or simply by sending colossal sums of money to buy all the military equipment it needs, we know where their choices lie. Not to be outdone, France is the main exporter of arms, drone components, and reconnaissance aircraft to Israel.
By helping or assisting this country in the ongoing genocide, in the name of its right to defend itself, these States are complicit in the illegal occupation, colonization, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and even regarding the Bedouins, not to mention the war crimes that have been committed for more than 70 years, violating all human rights and the rights of civilians as guaranteed by the Fourth Geneva Convention (on the protection of civilians in times of war), despite numerous Security Council and UN General Assembly resolutions (among them Resolution 446 of 1979). Let me remind you that last August marked the 75th anniversary of the adoption of this Convention. I have no doubt it was celebrated with pomp and ceremony, but is this regulatory framework not more than the result of an arrogance to which only representatives of white supremacy have access?
It is important to note that States do not need to participate directly in the illicit act; it is sufficient for them to provide voluntary assistance to the commission of an illicit act or to the prolongation of this act over time, and this concerns all States that enable their companies to sign contracts for the sale of components or weapons to the Israeli state.
It should be noted that, in the case of the Palestinian people and in relation to Israel’s internationally wrongful act, obligations considered “essential” for the “international community as a whole” are at stake. In the 1970s, the International Court of Justice ruled in a famous case on this subject: “(...) An essential distinction must be made between the obligations of States towards the international community as a whole and those arising towards another State… By their very nature, the former obligations concern all States. Given the importance of the rights in question, all States can be considered as having a legal interest in the protection of those rights; the obligations in question are obligations erga omnes” (ICJ; Barcelona Traction Judgment, Reports, 1979).
We only need to think of the situation in Haiti to understand that Palestine is the sign of an international community incapable of thinking about political relations in any way other than mortifying. Haiti is to the colonial world what Palestine is to the colonial Israeli state. In any case, other States should understand that what can be inflicted on these sovereign countries will be inflicted on others. The “rule of law” of the hegemonic, racist, and capitalist liberal system is deregulation, delegitimization, destructuring, and death.
It goes without saying that one of the direct consequences of an internationally wrongful act is that all subjects of international law are obliged to make reparations. Reparation, which implies the obligation to eliminate the consequences of the international wrongful act, appears primarily as a mechanism to sanction the violation of international law.
The principle of the obligation to make reparations is deeply rooted in international law. According to the Permanent Court of International Justice, “the essential principle that emerges from the notion of a wrongful act... is that reparation must, as far as possible, wipe out all the consequences of the wrongful act and restore the state of affairs which would, in all probability, have existed if that act had not been committed...”. But, once again, everything is based on the notion of principle...
I will set aside references to legal texts. This detour only makes sense because it shows how international law and international humanitarian law are also traversed by power relations and interests. At a time when the world is facing multiple crises, international law is in a deep coma. This allows France, when organizations file a complaint for complicity in the commission of a wrongful act by supplying military components to the State of Israel, to respond with total impudence: “move along, there’s nothing to see here,” wielding the theory of acts of government, that is, that the legal procedure initiated by the organizations cannot be appealed before a French court, since the acts in question would belong to the political sphere. This reference to the theory of acts of government is a limitation on the principle of legality, which is the basis of any rule of law, and does not respect the obligation to uphold the hierarchy of norms. By acting in this way, the French State is acknowledging the aid it provides to a criminal State and, therefore, compromising its international responsibility by facilitating the perpetration of genocide.
Demanding reparations should be one of the elements that guarantee the emancipation of peoples and must constitute the common struggle of the forces of rupture that fight against the coloniality of power, which dominates both international and national law. The dignity of millions of people and the sovereignty of many peoples are at stake; in particular, the Palestinian people can no longer tolerate their sovereignty being usurped by the defenders of the liberal world order, as happened, in a way, during the era of slavery.
The international community and all international institutions must understand and admit that the racism they claim to combat can only be eradicated if the paradigm of racist capitalist domination is substantially “overthrown,” which also implies fighting for decolonial rights.
Through reparations, the aim is to put an end to the perpetuation of a system of subjugation and exploitation whose model was imposed on numerous peoples of the South from 1492 onwards, and which still continues to feed the relations imposed by Modernity and Eurocentrism, regardless of the level at which they manifest. This balance of power is exercised in relation to the land in these countries. Who owns it and what right can be used to claim it when it was acquired through blood and theft?... Reparations require us to redefine the framework within which human rights must be shared and to move away from the references that have brought with them crimes against humanity, genocide, theft, war… That is why it is interesting to read both the first French constitution and the United States Declaration of Independence. One affirms freedom and equal rights for all citizens, which had already been guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, while millions of people were left aside. Enslaved, they were excluded from all rights, and it is on this second lie that, on one hand, the French nation was built and, on the other, its reputation as the “homeland of human rights.” The other, in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, emphasizes that “we hold these truths to be self-evident (...) that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” However, the enslavement of all those who were already there neither ceased nor diminished between this declaration and final abolition. Beyond abolition, this ideology of domination continued, then the United States enacted the Jim Crow laws (from 1875 to 1964) which established a new social order and then a judicial system that still does not punish crimes committed against young African Americans. In this way, impunity for law enforcement is organized and structural racism is reinforced, a common element among all former colonizing countries. Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow (2010), develops the metaphor of the Jim Crow laws in relation to mass incarceration as a means of controlling, monitoring, and punishing African Americans instead of implementing social, cultural, and political policies. This continues, through mass incarceration, the deprivation of identity that was introduced with slavery, then with colonialism and liberal capitalism that does not know what to do with all the excluded people whose numbers continue to increase.
This ontological link that continues to corrupt the perception of what it should mean to be human comes from the power that white Europeans imposed through the establishment of a moral Manichaeism based on the apprehension of the human being through “race.” This developed to such an extent that it was from this belief that the social world was organized, preventing by all possible means that the man, just out of his condition of slavery, could question the world or become an agent of transformation of that world, much less cease to accept the institutional inferiority in which he is kept by the dominators.
The dominators ended up aligning the world by constructing, at the end of World War II, a discourse on human rights, moral and compassionate, which would give rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite this instrument and many others that followed, including the two International Covenants of 1966, the condemned have not ceased to be kept in structural alienation. Human rights function as a paradoxical mandate; for this, those who hold power, with respect to the peoples, know how to use this mandate contained in the first common article of the two International Covenants, which establishes the right of peoples to self-determination. Palestine is the perfect example of this paradoxical mandate.
It is a mandate because the Western world, after the abolitions, never wanted to question the inhuman aspects of the criminal society in which colonization and slavery took place. They refused, passionately, to look at the inhumanity of their actions, and with irresistible ardor did everything possible to hide their deadly thoughts. It was necessary to save the foundations of capitalism by organizing impunity. Thus, quite naturally, these two crimes continued through colonialism, with the perpetuation of equally serious crimes, which today are presented under new forms of neocolonialism and liberalism, of which the financial system and the militarization of the world are the guarantors. For this reason, the instruments that should have universal use are only illusions that allow for the authorization or justification of structural violence and racism, the only means found to maintain control over the colonized and the condemned.... Thus, from the historical situation of the Caribbean and particularly of Guadeloupe, Martinique, or Guyana, if we want to think about the human condition, about the human, about a new man in the sense defended by Frantz Fanon, we have no choice but to question the hegemonic concept of the human dragged along by centuries of slavery, colonialism, obligation, and submission.
It must be recognized that only when “the violence that presided over the organization of the colonial world,” as Frantz Fanon points out, “(…) and that tirelessly marked the destruction of indigenous social forms, is demolished (…) the systems of reference of the economy, the modes of appearance; will be claimed and assumed by the colonized at the moment when, deciding to be history in action, the colonized mass will rush towards the forbidden cities” (The Wretched of the Earth), can we finally think about the conditions that guarantee humans to live in a human humanity. Human thought is at the center of universalism and from which this universalism must be understood.
The first obligation is to decolonize the limiting and never effective discourse on human rights and, in particular, the one that was established since the abolitions. The freedom of the new “liberated” translated into the maintenance of the established order, the obligation to work, and the recognition, without objection, of the emancipating Republic and, above all, the obligation to “forget” the past. It is the erasure of this past that is at stake in the various declarations and other international normative instruments that support measures that make it possible to restrict it in different areas and contexts.
Not to mention that, at the end of slavery and colonialism, justice was a separate justice, and above all outside of common law, which can still be observed in the Caribbean, where the land still belongs to those who acquired it through violence and theft. It is not a matter of making these Declarations more moral or fairer, but of reflecting, under the impetus of the condemned, on a new definition of the human being based on the perception that the colonized, the condemned, have of what humanity should be. In fact, the entire colonial matrix must be deconstructed to generate social relations free from the ethno-racial reference and to give rise to a humanity conceived outside the lines of force imposed by Modernity. Where man can relate to man wherever he is, because decolonial conditions will allow him to collectively escape from the zone of Non-Being.