Post

I can't stop thinking about anthropologist Michael Taussig's book about the terror of the rubber trade in Colombia. In it, he describes how colonizers wantonly tortured Putumayo workers, with violence becoming a culture in itself, for its own sake. Like it was a sunk cost they couldn't escape

Every new violent line the colonizers crossed trapped them in a cycle where stopping would mean they'd have to reckon with what they'd done. And the shame was too great, so they'd dig deeper, go even darker. Worse atrocities. I think about this all the time in relation to lsraeI. And lCE.

I often see people saying that capitalists, and their footsoldiers of state violence, have no shame. I think it's exactly the opposite. I think they spend every waking second pushing an ocean of shame down. I think it drives everything they do. We know this about how narcissism functions

Maybe they have no remorse, or some other word that describes their willingness to confront their own wrongdoing on a surface level. But I think, at their deepest core, they swim in shame. They loathe themselves so much they're barely alive. They are disconnected from what love would even feel like

It's why I feel like something is deeply missing from our understanding of fascist violence, and especially from conversations about what to do about it. How do we move forward if dehumanizing our oppressors in turn is the only move we have space for? If vengeance is all we can think about?

I know this is partly my fault for constantly exposing myself to social media wherein the average conversation doesn't go farther than "those guys are bad people who need to be punished." I crave more than that. I get it in my offline organizing spaces, I just want to believe we can do better here

tl;dr I think colonizers, especially those attracted to positions of power & violence like certain agents, are acting from deep generational trauma from patriarchy and disconnection from nature & relationality that goes back centuries, and I don't think we'll stop the cycle until we reckon with that

Companion thread for consideration:

This is an important example too. Whiteness is not the only factor at play here, broadly (though it is highly relevant in the North American context) and it helps us to look at cross-cultural examples