Image 1: Chanting “White lives matter!” and “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists carrying torches marched in a parade through the University of Virginia campus 11 August 2017, photo by Evelyn Hockestein for The Washington Post
This discussion paper offers two contributions to our collective discussion on the theme of fascism: (a) an integrated set of elements comprising our definition of the concept; and (b) abbreviated notes on the applicability of each element to the present moment (see also Gordon and Webber 2023)
We argue that fascism is a mass movement rooted in the radicalizing petty bourgeoisie, or middle class. Fascist movements may participate in the bourgeois electoral arena, but ultimately the source of their strength and the centre of their political action is in the streets and the exercise of extra-legal violence. While outside of existential crises the bourgeoisie is not favourably disposed to fascists (some exceptions notwithstanding) the bourgeoisie may nevertheless appeal to them in an effort to impose order in such moments if political alternatives are unavailable or insufficient. The threat of fascism is co-extensive with capitalism – and not simply one of its stages – because capitalism systematically produces crises that profoundly destabilize the social order and its class relations. The possibility of fascism deepens when such crises reach a civilizational scale and become irresolvable on the terms of capital (i.e. the restoration of profitability and capitalist hegemony) either through bourgeois democratic means or other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship. Historically, a feature of those crises and obstacle to their resolution includes partially weakened but undefeated, mass revolutionary forces. As long as there is capitalism, then, the fascist threat remains alive. The intensity of the threat obviously has its ebbs and flows, but it never disappears.
As the definition outlined above would suggest, our preferred point of departure in what follows is a critical return to – but also extension beyond – the classical Marxist theories of fascism, particularly that of Leon Trotsky. In our view, two elements common to most classical Marxist theories of fascism need to be abandoned. The first is the unjustified view that fascism is specific to the kind of inter-imperial rivalry characteristic of the early twentieth century, and the related point that fascism is limited to countries of the imperialist core. The second is the connection of fascism to a “stage” of “monopoly capital,” a theory that was incorrect at the time and is equally without value today. Finally, we also believe that the interrelated phenomena of colonialism, racism, and white supremacy need to be fully integrated into the foundational elements of fascism identified by classical Marxists and synthesized below.
This is the master logic around which the seven elements of our concept of fascism and its potential development into a movement that can contest for power are articulated. We agree with Geoff Eley’s (2021) methodological point on the necessity of “portability” in any conceptualization of fascism that is to be of continued relevance across different historical periods, even as we disagree with his substantive characterization of the present conjuncture. Hence, we intend our concept of fascism as sufficiently abstract to be portable across different times and spaces of the industrial capitalist epoch, but nonetheless sufficiently coherent so as to be able to distinguish the phenomenon of fascism from other closely related phenomena.
First, with regard to context, the rise of fascism requires a severe and sustained crisis of capitalism beyond the mere immediate “conjunctural fluctuations,” and which makes the normal process of capitalist accumulation difficult if not impossible (Mandel 1971). Fascism’s historical role is to radically alter social, political, and economic conditions in order to facilitate a renewal of stable accumulation to the benefit, especially, of big capital. This is the master element whose logic articulates the other elements into a coherent totality. Clearly, the global crisis that erupted in 2008 and the economic stagnation that followed for much of the world – the worst slump in global production and trade since the 1930s, and one compounded by the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic – meets this contextual requirement.
Second, it is necessary that there be a foreboding sense of civilizational degeneration on the scale (but without necessarily the same content) that shaped the political zeitgeist from which classical fascism emerged. Such degeneration radicalizes the petty bourgeoisie. Most pertinent in the inter-war period was the crisis of global imperialism, culminating in the brutality and devastation of the First World War and inurement towards violence. Militarism crystallized in the European psyche generally, and especially among those who gravitated to fascism. The anxieties and traumas of postwar life, amidst economic volatility, were in turn successfully transformed by fascism into a focused hatred of Communism and alien others (Traverso 2017). Muted elements of this contextual factor exist in an incipient manner today, taking most dramatic form in the ecological crisis, the inurement to large-scale needless death and debilitation associated with the management of the COVID pandemic, the heightening of inter-imperial rivalries, the onset of major new wars, and a widespread cultural pessimism reminiscent of classically pre-fascist sentiment. Yet the sense of civilizational degeneration today is not yet comparable in scale to that of the era in which classical fascism was forged.
Third, the crisis of capitalist accumulation must develop into a crisis of bourgeois democracy. The historical context generative of the rise of fascism was one in which social classes deviated from their traditional political parties, and “the immediate situation became delicate and dangerous,” with an acute crisis of authority, “or general crisis of the state” (Thomas 2011). Today, clearly, there is a widespread international context of bourgeois democratic decline and weakening of traditional parties, but not yet the proliferation of the actual overthrow of bourgeois democratic regimes and the installation of military dictatorships – with some important exceptions, such as the counter-revolutionary wave in the Middle East – much less fascist dictatorships.
The fourth element of fascism – the inadequacy of traditional military dictatorship – flows immediately from the third. Traditional forms of police and military repression and dictatorial rule reveal themselves to be inadequate in the face of a strong working-class movement or an unreliable military. As a reactionary and militarized mass movement, with a capacity to mobilize supporters in the streets and electorally, fascism offers a solution. In the current context, by contrast, traditional forms of police and military repression within bourgeois democratic parameters, or in some cases military dictatorship (whether temporary, or longer term), have proved sufficient for the reproduction of capitalist rule.
The fifth component has to do with the petty bourgeois composition of fascism’s mass base. While inter-war European fascism drew cross-class support, at its core it was a petty-bourgeois movement of small business owners, rural landowners, managers, civil servants, professionals, and military and ex-military members. More and more, this radicalizing middle class was drawn to a revanchist politics premised on fortifying the nation, martial discipline, and order. Because of its precarious class location within the capitalist hierarchy, nestled uneasily between a globally ambitious set of large capitalists and an internationalist working-class movement, the petty bourgeoisie is disposed to conflating itself and its interests with those of the nation and to a conservative politics. The petty bourgeoisie is also a sufficiently large section of society to constitute the basis of a mass movement. The contemporary far-right draws heavily on petty-bourgeois radicalization, but the petty-bourgeoisie has not been mobilized and transformed into mass movements willing and capable of regularly engaging in organized paramilitary violence.
Sixth, before fascists are able to take power, with support from the bourgeoisie, they must first alter the balance of forces in their favor by inflicting partial setbacks on movements of the exploited and oppressed. We can call this theweakening, short of defeat, of the revolutionary threat from below.The revolutionary threat once posed by the proletariat may have dissipated, and any civil war scenario between the classes may have abated, but the organizational capacity of the workers’ movement to resist the depression of wages and increases in exploitation through normal means persists. In most of the world where the far-right has strengthened it has not done so in response to a revolutionary threat of any kind, so fascist violence has not been necessary to deliver a weakening-short-of-defeat of such a threat. In the major exception, the revolutionary wave in the Middle East, the counter-revolutions assumed traditional forms rather than fascist ones.
Seventh, and finally, there is assimilation into the bourgeois state and the restoration of capitalist stability. With its victory fascism is “to a large extent assimilated into the bourgeois state apparatus” and thus the most extreme, unassimilable elements of the movement, are of necessity liquidated (Mandel 1971: 20). Fascist rule is put to the task of restoring capitalist stability. Observing the sharp increase of capitalist profits under the Nazis, Mandel notes that while some capitalists, such as those in the arms industry, benefited more than their compatriots, “there clearly emerges a collective economic interest of the capitalist class” (Mandel 1971: 16). The winner in all of this was not a fraction of German capital but large German capital as a whole, which remained very much under the command of the German bourgeoisie, rather than the state or the fascists (Neumann 2009: 435-36, 613). Nowhere in the world have fascists captured state power, and so nowhere have they subsequently been assimilated into the bourgeois state. While some far-right parties with fascist roots have entered into government or hold the balance of power in government in parts of Europe, presently they act within the parameters of bourgeois democracy rather than seek to overthrow it (even if they wish to weaken it).
Todd Gordon is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and an editor of Midnight Sun. He has written on the Freedom Convoy for Midnight Sun and Studies in Political Economy.
Jeffery R. Webber is a political economist with research interests in Latin America, Marxism, social theory, the history of the Left, international development, capitalism and nature, imperialism, the politics of class and social oppression, and social movements.
References
Eley, Geoff. 2021. “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?,” History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1: 1–28.
Gordon, Todd, and Jeffery R. Webber. 2023. “The Authoritarian Disposition: Capitalism, Liberalism, Fascism,” Spectre, Issue 8, Fall 2023: 42-55.
Mandel, Ernest. 1971. “Introduction,” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, by Leon Trotsky. New York: Pathfinder.
Neumann, Franz L. 2009. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Thomas, Peter D. 2011. The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Traverso, Enzo. 2017. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945. London: Verso.
Cite as: Gordon, Todd & Webber Jeffery R. 2024. “The Return of Fascism?” Focaalblog, 29 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/29/todd-gordon-and-jeffery-r-webber-the-return-of-fascism/
Image 1: The United States Capitol Building stormed by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, photo by Tyler Merbler
On November 14, 2023, at the University of Toronto, we, the conveners of the Political Economy Discussion Group, an informal transnational group of anthropologists working in political economy, brought together an in-person group of more than 25 colleagues to discuss the question of the status of contemporary fascism. As part of this process, we invited five of us to sketch out their own ideas in short “position papers” on fascism which were pre-circulated. These papers, only slightly revised, now appear as a feature on fascism on FocaalBlog. We hope these will generate and encourage research among anthropologists on contemporary extreme right-wing formations, whether these are called fascism, proto-fascism, “authoritarian populism,” (Hall 1988), “authoritarian statism” (Poulantzas (2014 [1978]), “authoritarian neoliberalism” (Bruff 2014), “illiberalism” (Rosenblatt 2021), or by some other term. Certainly no one will argue that this topic is not timely or in urgent need of discussion today.
Fascism is fundamentally anti-democratic and violent. It attacks the rights of people to criticize its governance regime or to realize their different realms of freedom and relative autonomy in everyday life. Here we wish to think about contingency and alliances as this is where people agree that they are fighting for the right to exist and exercise realms of autonomy in their lives. We are far from sure that we are confronting the same fascisms as in the past, and we believe we need to generate new tools and new analyses as we face our current disasters. In order to contribute to such a discussion, we see it necessary to draw on a wide range of theoretical analyses from both Marxist and other sources. The effort is to illuminate the present and to prepare for what we expect may be coming in whatever way seems most constructive and strategically valuable.
We begin by considering Marxist analyses of fascism, alerted by the warning posed by Alberto Toscano in his brilliant Late Fascism (2023) that drawing historical analogies between the fascisms of the past (notably in Italy and Germany) and the fascism-candidates of the present is at best unrewarding, and at its worst, given the acceleration of the global rise of the ultra-right and the imperative to respond, a waste of time. But we also need to parse out, given the many Marxist theorizations and numerous Marxist theorists of and organizers against past fascisms – who were among fascism’s first victims! – what was most rewarding from those analyses and what needs to be left behind.
The Inter-war struggles by communist and socialist parties, both before and after fascist movements took state power, provoked insightful inter-war critical Marxist theorizations of the causes of the rise of fascism by Gramsci (1971), Trotsky (1971), Clara Zetkin (1923) and others over and against the conservative and liberal formulations that marked conventional scholarship in the West. These analyses were rich in their sense of contingency and their openness to the social contradiction arising from the economic crises brought on by the uneven and combined development of capitalism.
Among Marxists not all interwar theorizations of fascism were the same. Most held that capitalists were crucial to fascist movements in attaining state power and that, once these movements came to power, the fascist state worked to the benefit of capitalists, even if they did not directly lead it, while it consistently showed extraordinary violence against the organized working class and its supporters on the left. However, here agreement among Marxist conceptualizations ended.
Marxist theorizations that were politically dominant within the Comintern saw the growth of fascist movements and the fascist state as no more than a teleological outcome of hypertrophied capitalism at an inevitable stage of its development, with which these other classes came to be inexorably aligned (Renton 2020 [1999]: 79-84). These approaches, when put into practice, had catastrophic effects. To put not too fine a point to it, these interwar Marxist analyses of the German and Italian cases of fascism (i.e., those coming out of the Comintern after 1928 with the ascent of Stalin) were grossly flawed because they defaulted to an economistic and rigid evolutionist account of capitalism. They failed to offer adequate theoretical accounts of German and Italian fascism’s mobilization of their bases through racism, antisemitism, ethno-nationalism, anti-Leftism, and patriarchy associated with their past bourgeois-imperial and colonial histories. These after all were histories of repression, genocide (viz. Germany’s extermination of Hereros), and ethnic cleansing whose effects continue into the present.
We suggest following Toscano (2023) that instead of assuming that liberal capitalist states, including neoliberal states, provide universal safeguards against fascism, that the practices and ideologies of fascism are far from incompatible with liberalism and the liberal state – and in fact lie within them. After all Western liberalism had indulged in colonialism, slavery, and genocide for centuries before Central European fascists began creating their violently vengeful empires. The latter did so with explicit envy and admiration for the earlier white Atlantic expansionism. This means that instead of regarding fascist movements and even the emergence of fascist states as sudden and unpredictable eruptions of political violence incidentally associated with the economic crises of capitalism, we must go beyond the economistic analyses of fascism to explore the “fascist potential” (Toscano 2023) of what appear unexceptional, even “ordinary” features of contemporary liberal capitalist states (e.g., incarceration, police violence toward Blacks in the U.S.) if we wish to more critically explore the possibilities of fascism today.
We start by pointing out that like the prehistories of German and Italian fascism, the histories of other Euro-American political formations (U.S., Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands) are characterized by the racialized violence of colonization, enslavement, exterminism, and accumulation by violent dispossession of the non-European peoples they came to dominate politically. This has its theoretical corollary. Instead of only undertaking economic analyses of capitalism, there is the imperative of exploring the possibility that late neoliberal states already, like liberal democratic states before them, for historical reasons contain within them fascist potentials. We think, for example of the totalitarian treatment of huge numbers of incarcerated poor and racially marked populations in the United States, or the new state and popular violence against the Roma in central Europe or against North African, Turkish, and other immigrants in western Europe.
Marxist analyses of fascist potentials today must thus take into account the continuities and legacies of racialization, antisemitism, misogyny, and xenophobia that are associated with capitalism as a historical social order but are never merely reducible to its economic logics, in exploring the potential of new fascist emergences as these are occurring globally today. We must instead examine the racialized and gendered violence and ideologies encysted in neoliberal states today and think more of economic crises as the impetus and context for their emergence, instead of being their ‘cause’. In this regard, we could start by drawing on the concepts of racial capitalism, imperialist racism, and abolitionism within the Black radical intellectual tradition of Cedric Robinson, Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and numerous others (Toscano 2023: 25-48).
This might lead us, for example, to see fascist potential in the nostalgic imaginary by the Republican base (many of whom are not economically working class) of a golden age centered on a male “white working class” privileged by industrial employment and U.S. Cold War hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s (Toscano 2023: 8-9). Believers in this white supremacist imaginary, emboldened by Trump’s January 6, 2021 insurrection, form this base that he and the Republican Freedom Party elite now pander to with their MAGA cult of “popular” grievances — that the U.S. is being “invaded” by immigrant “rapists and murderers,” and that “the election was stolen” by “illegal” Black voting in Detroit and Atlanta as well as the age old theme of “the Jews will not replace us.” Above all, Trump and his elite have successfully incited violence against people of color, Jews, women, and trans people – those shut out of the golden age.
Going forward, while continuing to benefit from the classic analyses by Trotsky, Gramsci, Zetkin, et al. of capitalist crises, historical blocs and fascist formations while going beyond them to consider racialized and gendered fascist potentials, we can also draw from non-Marxist critiques of fascism to consider the ideas and practice of democratic freedoms and the ideologies of racism that deployed historical representations politicized in a fascist context. We need to take seriously, for example, the relationship between fascist formations and patriarchal structures as well as the diverse histories and forms of racism employed – from the racial ordering of color and US racism to the images of a Jewish race controlling global power and banks.
We are also attracted to other Marxist approaches which show more strategic openness to trying to tip the balance during periods of fascist ascent by attempting to build coalitions between the organized working class and other classes (e.g., the petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, lumpenproletariat) who could be converted to opponents to fascism, and who might otherwise join fascist movements. There were also strong democratic movements against fascism in many European countries, such as the Popular Front and the French and Italian resistance. These approaches have to be taken seriously in terms of questions of democracy and their possible effectiveness in different nations of the time which did not succumb to fascist domination. Some non-Marxist theories also viewed class relations and class struggle as relevant to the emergence of classical fascisms. However, many such analyses concentrated on fascist ideology or aesthetics, and lacked economic and social context.
For our November 14 session on fascism, we attempted to bring together a broad set of discussions, not in any way limited by the traditional Marxist debates but paying attention to them as part of crucial ammunition for addressing the threatening situation we face today. Are we confronting fascist movements at present that could assume state power by ostensibly democratic means, then transform radically into violent rule? Or are quite different right-wing formations from fascism ascending with very different trajectories if they assume state power?
For the November 14 session, we asked the authors of the blog pieces that follow not so much a factual as an epistemological question to engender discussion, leading off with “How would you know contemporary fascism when you see it, in the one or two cases you know best from your ethnographic or historical knowledge?” We also asked whether the formations in these cases might better be characterized by other terms and theories.
We concluded our questions by pointedly asking our authors about interventions in struggle. If the contemporary right-wing formations now in existence pose a risk to political democracy, peace, and the capacity of large populations to engage in social reproduction – as we believe they do – we asked, “What would be the most effective preemptive responses by the Left to them?” And lastly, “What would be the disposition of social and political forces and economic conditions that would make these responses feasible?” These last two questions were what we as conveners hope that these blogs will provoke the readers of FocaalBlog to respond to, given the grave political crises and economic and ecological contradictions now before us. There is already much practically at stake in these questions: theorists and organizers on the Left are already facing repression from the rising tide of extreme rightwing forces around the globe.
Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His latest book is Food Activism Today: Sustainability, Climate Change and Social Justice (New York University Press, 2024). His new research project examines racial capitalism and its eco-politics.
Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is currently studying urban social movements, class and commoning in France, Spain, and the United States.
References
Bruff, I. 2014. “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism.” Rethinking Marxism 26: 113-129.
Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith, eds. New York: International Press.
Hall, S. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
Poulantzas, N. A. 2014 [1978]. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso.
Renton, D. 2020 [1999]. Fascism: History and Theory. London: Pluto Press.
Rosenblatt, H. 2021. “The History of Illiberalism.” The Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism. A. Sajó, R. Uitz and S. Holmes. New York: Routledge, pp. 16-32.
Toscano, A. 2023. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London: Verso.
Trotsky, L. 1971. The Struggle against Fascism in Germany. London: Pathfinder.
Zetkin, C. 1923. “Facism.” Labour Monthly, August 1923, pp. 69-78.
Cite as: Nonini, Don and Susser, Ida. 2024. “Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/24/don-nonini-and-ida-susser-introduction-fascism-then-and-now/
In the midst of India’s extensive urbanization, with more than 34% of the population dwelling in urban areas as of 2021, as per the World Bank, the complex relationship between urban transformation, poverty dynamics, and the impact of capitalism gains prominence. Amidst this swiftly urbanizing landscape, it is relevant to ask about the enduring significance of street shrines and the deities they embody. This blog post unravels the complex interplay between urbanization, poverty dynamics, and capitalism in shaping the evolving narrative of street shrines in Delhi. By examining specific examples, we seek to contribute to the understanding of the socio-political implications of religious transformations, shedding light on the informal mechanisms that influence the cultural and political dimensions of urban India.
As Hindu deities increasingly dominate street shrines, such as those near Jama Masjid, Red Fort, and Chandni Chowk, the very essence of these spaces undergoes an accretionary conversion over time. This transformation is not merely a happenstance but a result of a complex collusion involving diverse social and economic players who shape the city’s evolving political, religious, and cultural landscape. Old Delhi, with its labyrinthine lanes and historical significance, is undergoing a palpable cultural reshaping as Hindu dominance unfolds within its streets.
Street shrines, once reflective of the syncretic blend of Hindu and Islamic traditions, are now marked by a pronounced prevalence of Hindu deities. This is largely due to the ongoing influx of labor migrants from the neighbouring states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh into the city who are reshaping the sacred spaces in both their structure and function. The diverse backgrounds, cultures, and religious practices of the migrants contribute to a rich tapestry of beliefs that find expression in the street shrines. The choice of the deities is a reflection of their faith. Migrants, seeking a sense of community and continuity with their cultural heritage, often contribute to the embellishment and maintenance of these shrines. The shrines may adapt to serve not only as religious spaces but also as community hubs where migrants find support, share experiences, and build social networks.
Icons like Shirdi Sai Baba and Hanuman, along with other Vedic motifs, have become the visual protagonists, signifying a transformative narrative that overrides the Islamic heritage that was historically ingrained in this part of the city. In the intricate lanes of Old Delhi, the evolving narrative of cultural transformation is discernible through the gradual transition of temporary religious symbols into enduring fixtures. Local spaces, once harmoniously shared, now bear markings that define them for specific purposes, subtly alienating those who traverse them and instilling a sense of unease. This shift, woven into the fabric of the city, holds profound implications for understanding the social and ethnic conflicts that manifest within its boundaries.
The multifaceted nexus signifies that as urban centers burgeon, various economic and social forces come into play, fostering both economic opportunities and disparities. The growing number of street shrines might be interpreted as a reaction to the changing cityscape, complexly influenced by issues of poverty, capitalism, and religious practices. The chosen field sites in New Delhi were intentional selections, serving as gateways into regional politics entwined with land acquisitions, unraveling layers of influence on the transformation of public shrines and art.
Image 1: A Shrine for Hanuman right behind Connaught place in New Delhi (Photo by Smytta Yadav)
The following provides some examples of street shrines and the changes they have undergone.
Hanuman’s Ascendance: In the heart of Old Delhi, near the iconic Jama Masjid, street shrines that were once adorned with Islamic calligraphy and symbols now prominently feature the figure of Hanuman. This ascendance of Hanuman in the visual landscape signals a shift in religious and cultural prominence, eclipsing the Islamic heritage that was historically intertwined with this area.
While administrative authorities recognize that these religious shrines can be leveraged for land acquisition, the marginalized inhabitants dwelling in their vicinity perceive them as a safeguard against eviction, highlighting the intrinsic connection between religion, politics, and commerce —exemplifying the strategic integration of religious practices and turning these humble street shrines into vibrant expressions of cultural and spiritual amalgamation while at the same time legitimising the ownership of the marginalised communities residing in the slums of the capital.
Image 2: An Ancient Muslim Shrine; Hasrat Sheikh Imadudin Firdousi at Nizamuddin (photo by Smytta Yadav)
Furthermore, demolition notices have been issued by authorities to mosques located on land that the Delhi Waqf Board asserts as its own. The board has filed a challenge to two of these notices in the High Court because of the Places of Worship Act 1991 of the Indian constitution, according to which a mosque, temple, church or any place of public worship that was in existence as of 15 August 1947 will retain the same religious character that it had on that day – irrespective of its history – and cannot be changed by the courts or the government. It is worth noting that these actions targeting Muslim sites transpired simultaneously with other initiatives, such as the purported demolition of dwellings in squalor areas prior to the G-20 summit that was hosted in Delhi on September 9 and 10.
Image 3: Hanuman Statue near the famous Chandni Chowk in a heavily Muslim neighbourhood. (Photo taken by Smytta Yadav).
Some other examples of dominance of Hindu street shrines in predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods are:
Symbolic Transformation near Red Fort: Walking towards the iconic Red Fort, another bastion of Delhi’s historical legacy, one can observe a symbolic transformation in the street shrines that line the route. Hindu deities, particularly Hanuman and Shirdi Sai Baba, now take centre stage, subtly overshadowing the Islamic architectural marvels and their associated religious symbols.
Syncretism Eroded in Chandni Chowk: Chandni Chowk, renowned for its historical syncretism, is experiencing a erosion of this syncretic cultural tapestry. Street shrines in this area, once a testament to the harmonious coexistence of Hindu and Islamic traditions, now showcase a pronounced prevalence of Hindu deities. The visual language is evolving, rewriting the narrative and erasing some of the syncretic elements that defined Chandni Chowk.
Influence in Kinari Bazaar: Kinari Bazaar, a market known for its traditional charm, reflects the broader influence of Hindu dominance in Old Delhi. Street shrines along the narrow lanes prominently feature symbols associated with Hinduism, subtly reshaping the cultural and religious landscape of this historic market.
The evolution of Hindu street shrines in New Delhi is intricate and multi-layered, intertwining individuals and households based on factors such as caste, religion, regional origin, language, or ideology. This complexity is vividly illustrated by the diverse ways in which these communities engage in political strategies, aligning themselves with various political parties. This involvement emerges as a pivotal dimension in the larger quest for social mobility and empowerment in the city.
For instance, certain street shrines may become focal points for followers supporting different political parties, reflecting the dynamic nature of political affiliations within these communities. The cultural movements and societal struggles that unfold within these religious spaces seamlessly transition into political conflicts, with tangible manifestations in territorial disputes over physical space in New Delhi. For instance, recently in Jan 2021, an idol of Shirdi Sai Baba was demolished by a BJP supporter and a realtor because a Jat Hindu Guru had claimed Shirdi Sai Baba was born a Muslim, and the realtor did not want that to be placed in a Hindu neighbourhood.
In essence, the nuanced dynamics of Hindu street shrines not only mirror the cultural diversity within the communities but also serve as arenas where political ideologies and affiliations converge, shaping the broader narrative of social dynamics and empowerment in the dynamic context of New Delhi.
It is essential to have a clear understanding of the fact that political and religious imbrications are connected to rural-urban flows, transitions, and networks, as well as the caste and regional conflicts that are involved in these transitions and connections. Furthermore, it is important to note that these imbrications are not simply the result of government action or inaction on urban and spatial planning: caste and regional conflicts are also involved.
At the same time, publicly addressing the contentious issues that arise from these conflicts and struggles cannot be addressed purely through formal state or urban planning mechanisms, as these play out primarily through informal channels, in spatial patterns that are informal, and in public spaces that through long term practice and local sanction have been earmarked for informal uses. Because politics, religion, and culture are much more closely linked in the Asian context to issues of dominance, inequality, and hierarchy – all of which operate through informal mechanisms – it is not surprising that battles around these take place in informal spaces, and perhaps even achieve a greater degree of success than formal or institutionalised attempts to democratise Indian society.
The ethnographic observations about these shrines offer a glimpse into the ongoing negotiations between tradition and modernity, the sacred and the secular, thus contributing to the broader scholarly debate on the cultural and political dimensions of urban India. The enduring legacy of these shrines, amidst the dynamic changes of urbanization, reflects not only a rich cultural heritage but also a resilient adaptation to the evolving socio-political landscape.
In conclusion, this exploration into the realms of street shrines offers insights into their evolving cultural and political significance. The dynamic mosaic of street shrines in urban India serves as a vivid representation of the intricate interplay among diverse cultural dimensions. Amid conflicting perspectives on land utilization and decision-making authority, the delineation of sacred boundaries becomes increasingly intricate, particularly in a country like India where finite land resources pose challenges. This ethnographic journey seeks to unravel how these sacred spaces engage with the dynamic geography of the city, thereby reshaping the ancient Islamic architecture in Delhi’s urban landscape.
Dr. Smytta Yadav is an Anthropologist and currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. The above article is an output of her AHRC grant number AH/T000864/1 which she held at the Queen’s University of Belfast. The title of the grant was Ancient Vedic Gods in Early Urban and Pre-Mughal India.
References:
Kennerly, R. M. (2005). Roadside Shrine Cultural Performance: Poststructural Postmodern Ethnography. Agricultural and Mechanical College, LSU.
Mayaram, S., Pandian, M. S. S., & Skaria, A. (Eds.). (2005). Muslims, Dalits, and Historical Fabrications (Vol. 12). Oriental Blackswan.
Cite as: Yadav, Smytta 2024 “Shifting Landscapes: Urbanization, Religious Transformations, and Cultural Resilience in Delhi” Focaalblog 16 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/16/smytta-yadav-shifting-landscapes-urbanization-religious-transformations-and-cultural-resilience-in-delhi/
Far-right political leader Geert Wilders was convicted of inciting hatred against Moroccans when he called them “scum” at an election rally in 2016. [GETTY]
Last week, Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the Dutch national elections. The political figure is known internationally for his Islamophobia, and demands for, among other thing, the closing of all mosques in The Netherlands.
Crucial to his victory is the radicalisation of former supporters of the mainstream conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of the incumbent prime minister, Mark Rutte. As Dutch news satire website De Speld explained, VVD’s new leader Dilan Yesilgöz had run an excellent campaign…for Wilders.
Rutte had triggered the fall of his own coalition-government by demanding further restrictions on refugee rights that were unacceptable for part of his coalition. The VVD hoped the elections would be dominated by migration, and not other urgent issues such as the country’s housing crisis and the rising cost of living.
During the campaign, Yesilgöz exaggerated the supposed ease with which refugees enter the Netherlands. The main beneficiary of this tactic ended up being the PVV, the political force that for a decade-and-half built its political profile on hostility towards migrants.
The VVD lost 10 seats, leaving them with 24. Of the new PVV voters, one out of four previously voted for VVD.
Like many of his voters, Wilders is a product of the right-wing establishment. In the early nineties he worked for the VVD and in 1998 he represented the party in parliament. He also wrote speeches for the future European Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, a pioneer in the ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric regarding the West and Muslim societies in Dutch politics.
Wilders eventually left the VVD in 2004, partly because they would not categorically oppose Turkey joining the European Union.
Since founding the PVV in 2006, Wilders gathered a loyal base; almost 80% of those who voted for him in the previous national elections, did so again last month. Whilst the PVV largely rallied support as an opposition to Rutte, it is important to highlight that Wilders is not a political newcomer. Voters showed up for a seasoned politician who for years has remained consistent in his main policies. His popularity therefore shows how mainstream Islamophobia has become in The Netherlands.
Indeed, the PVV’s manifesto presented the racist and authoritarian positions that characterise the party. Pledges ranged from the petty revoking of the government’s apologies for the role played by the Dutch state in slavery, to the deportation of criminals with double nationality, to the deployment of the army against ‘street scum’, and the closing of borders for refugees and preventive arrests of ‘jihadist sympathisers’. Particularly drastic was Wilders’ long-standing insistence on ‘no Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques’.
However, it is not only racist and xenophobic politics that has attracted voters to the PVV. Wilders was originally an explicit supporter of neoliberal economic policies but for the past decade, his party increasingly posed as defenders of the welfare state. The PVV programme contained seemingly progressive positions, such as raising the minimum wage, lowering healthcare costs, and returning the retirement age from 67 to 65.
Though such rhetoric is contradicted by the party’s actions.
In his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (2012), Wilders described the role of the PVV as supporting the austerity plans of Rutte’s first cabinet in return for measures to ‘restrict immigration, roll back crime, counter cultural relativism, and insist on the integration of immigrants’. In parliament, the PVV introduced a proposal to make collective bargaining agreements no longer binding, and supported further restrictions to access to social security.
Not to mention, today the PVV seeks to form a government with the VVD – the party that for the last decade headed the government’s implementation of neoliberal measures that they claim to oppose.
Whilst a substantial number of Wilders’ voters are certainly committed to far-right politics, part of his appeal is that he has been able to pose as an opposition force to an establishment that included the left-wing parties like the Labour Party.
In an attempt to present itself as a legitimate party that could govern, Labour entered a coalition headed by Rutte back in 2012 after they had won close to 25% of votes. They remained despite the deeply unpopular harsh austerity measures that were implemented, and even ran a former minister in the government as the candidate on a joint Labour/Greens ticket.
The result was a modest advance mostly through votes coming from the centre and other left-wing parties, but it hardly attracted new voters. In the elections last month Labour/Greens won 25 seats, and became the second largest party, but finished far behind Wilders.
Another error made by parts of the Dutch left is that anti-racism and migrants rights are considered secondary to social-economic issues. However, as the recent election dramatically showed, these are incredibly decisive issues in Dutch politics.
When Wilders’ electoral victory was announced, hastily organised protests took place in some cities. A coalition of progressive groups called a national demonstration in defence of civil liberties, freedom of religion and human rights. Such protests are of course not only important, but urgent because they make visible the opposition to Wilders’ agenda and show solidarity with groups that are threatened, especially Muslims.
After all, the case of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy shows what can happen when the far-right is in power; it may moderate some of its rhetoric, but it will not abandon its authoritarian and nativist project.
But protests alone are not enough. For years, Wilders pushed the mainstream to the right, pulling voters to his side. The Dutch left can learn something from this; instead of pandering the right, it needs to pressure them. As for rebuilding a left that can effectively pressure the centre and win new supporters, this will need to be a long term project.
What is needed now more than ever is a left that sees itself not as a government-in-waiting but as an opposition force.
Originally published in The New Arab. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/geert-wilders-left-needs-be-real-opposition
Alex de Jong is co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) in Amsterdam, Netherlands and editor of the Dutch socialist website Grenzeloos.org.
Cite as: de Jong, Alex 2023 “Geert Wilders’ election victory: The left must concern itself with being a real opposition” Focaalblog 18 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/18/alex-de-jong-geert-wilders-election-victory-the-left-must-concern-itself-with-being-a-real-opposition/
By taking control of 22 Israeli military bases and localities, sequestering over 200 hostages, and killing more than 1,000 civilians and soldiers (although many details remain ambiguous), Hamas accomplished militarily on October 7, 2023 what no other Palestinian faction has ever accomplished. Early on during the operation, Hamas declared that its goal was to liberate the 5,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons by means of a hostage exchange;[1] meaning that the uprising was a spectacular show of force by which to negotiate on better terms with the enemy. In this crux between military success and negotiated exchange, Hamas burst open old-new debates regarding the role of armed struggle in Palestinian movements. The predictable Israeli response is the currently unfolding psychotic war of revenge and accompanying propaganda campaign. As of the time of writing, there are some 20,000 dead Palestinians, tens of thousands more injured, over a million displaced, critical infrastructure irreversibly damaged, one of the oldest cities in the world all but razed to the ground, and 3,000 newly arrested prisoners. More horror likely awaits in the very near future. Was the uprising worth all the death and destruction?Will any good come out of this? Away from the media frenzy of political talking heads and party pundits, these are the kinds of questions that have emerged on the streets of Ramallah, Jerusalem, Amman, and elsewhere, where misery and despair fuse headily with pride and possibility. Misery and despair, that is, because a genocide of Palestinians not only in Gaza but also Jerusalem and the West Bank seems frighteningly plausible; and pride and possibility because for some it has become conceivable for the first time—unlikely perhaps, but somehow still conceivable—that Israel can be defeated militarily.
The nature of Palestinian resistance has had historical ebbs and flows (see Qumsiyeh 2011). Tracing Palestinian uprisings from their first instances in the 1920s (four decades after the establishment of the first Zionist settlements) to October 7, one can observe clearly identifiable Zeitgeists, from periods of political petitioning, times of boycotts and other grassroots satyagraha, other times kamikaze attacks, and seasons of war. In recent decades, the pax americana that was supposed to have been the Oslo Accords ushered in an era of liberal politics in the 1990s (see Haddad 2018, Rabie 2021), which then exploded into the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. After this, the nature of Palestinian movements changed; fragmented, the Palestine Liberation Organization[2] placated by an end-of-history worldlessness,and a Palestinian public was left disenchanted with the failure of liberal politics but without knowing where else to turn. Hamas, during this period, became the unlikely vanguard of Palestinian resistance; a national liberation movement without the nation mentioned anywhere in its name.[3]
In contextualizing the place of armed resistance in the current chapter of the Palestinian story, I present below translations of three short texts by Bassel al-Araj (1984-2017), a Palestinian pharmacist by day and blogger by night who was assassinated in his apartment by Israeli forces in 2017. Al-Araj left behind a body of writing, often blog posts, that has greatly inspired the current generation of leftist Palestinian activists. Al-Araj advocated that the intellectual in Palestine not be a passive commentator but actively “engaged” in resistance, and he coined the term al-muthaqaf al-mushtabak “engaged intellectual;” a nod to the New Man of Guevara-esque romance, in a play of words that is more poetic in Arabic than in English. Some erroneously confuse the epithet with the even more irresistible al-muthaqaf al-musalah “armed intellectual,” a slip that Al-Araj would not have protested. His agitating against the security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel landed him in a Palestinian prison in 2016. He was released following a hunger strike. Six months later, he was killed by Israel. He was thirty-three years old.
The following pieces are translations from Arabic taken from a collection of Al-Araj’s writings, letters, and Facebook posts, published by the Beirut-based leftist publisher Bisan in 2018. In the first piece, written after the 2014 Israeli campaign in Gaza, Al-Araj offers a very original analysis in the aftermath of this event, observing that Hamas’s strategy of armed struggle does not break from the overall arc of armed struggle in Palestinian history. Al-Araj insists that Hamas’s strategy in the conflict was not to defeat Israel militarily, but to arrive at better conditions for negotiations. In the second piece, Al-Araj examines the gains and losses of the Second Intifada, challenging the position that the lesson from Israel’s brutal quelling of the uprising is that such uprisings are not to be repeated. Rather, Al-Araj speculates on what lessons can be learned from the intifada’s defeat so as to be able to succeed in a future iteration. In the third piece, more literary in flavor, he asks whether Palestine, as a national-territorial concept, is worth all the blood that is shed in its name. In this brief communique, he employs a revolutionary-poetic minimalism reminiscent of leftist writers of the twentieth century like, for instance, Eduardo Galeano.
Reading Al-Araj in the context of the current bloodshed, hopelessness, and despair, we might ask again: Was the uprising worth all the death and destruction? Whatever the answer may be, Al-Araj invites us to recognize the complexity of this question, and to remain faithful to rational analysis even in times of an unbearable irrationality of being.
Yezid Sayigh says in his book on the Palestine Liberation Organization that the Fatah movement never took the military conflict seriously, and never viewed the armed struggle as an end in itself or the only path to liberation. Rather, the armed struggle was a means by which to negotiate a diplomatic solution.
I believe that Hamas’s experience in Gaza follows the same approach. Their political leadership views armed struggle exactly as Arafat [4] viewed it.
This is an essential difference between Hezbollah’s experience, for example, and our experience. It is also the difference between the Algerian, Chechen, Vietnamese, and Cuban experiences, and our experience.
In these other experiences, they believed that they could defeat the great powers that were their enemies. We came to the conviction that it was impossible to defeat Israel, and we never believed that returning to Palestine would involve changing the reality on the ground, but rather by appeasing the capitals of influence in the world.
2.
On the allegation: “The Intifada ruined us” [5]
2013/26/09
At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the Black Hand uprising began in Palestine. It was completely crushed and its participants were eliminated within 4 months. They were either martyred, imprisoned, or exiled. During the same period, the Communist Party attempted to launch an uprising in Vietnam, which was also suppressed and the Communist Party was almost extinguished.
The important thing is that these two uprisings were two of the most excellent uprisings that humanity has ever seen: The Black Hand uprising, which was one of the most important factors leading to the 1936 Revolt [6], and the Communist Party uprising, which was one of the most important factor leading to the Vietnamese rebellion against France. The leaders learned from their mistakes, dealt with them, and corrected them.
People at that time did not renounce the option of armed struggle, nor did they brood over the colonial discourse regarding the usefulness or uselessness of armed struggle. Rather, they reviewed their experience, analyzed it, and launched subsequent uprisings that avoided the same mistakes. In contrast, Palestinians brood over the destruction the Second Intifada brought, and are reluctant to engage in any future uprising for fear of the same results.
I do not know whether Palestinians have sat down to evaluate the results of the Second Intifada in a scientific manner, especially the results of the Intifada’s military experience. Usually, when you hear a person talk about the destruction, the tragedies, the losses, and the setbacks, he is reproducing Zionist propaganda, but in his own language. This propaganda is constituted by multiple mechanisms and begins altering the Palestinian discursive space in a way that does not end only with the official line of the Palestinian Authority (the line of Mahmoud Abbas). The war against us has still not ceased, nor has the symbolic violence and hidden oppression that are the real masters of the situation. Usually when any experiment fails, the criticism focuses on the execution of the experiment, and not on the theory or ideology behind it. The results were not what we could have imagined. Was Gaza not completely emptied of settlers? And is Gaza not reaching a stage of fortification and hybrid warfare as a result of the Second Intifada? Were Tel Aviv and Jerusalem not hit hard by the early iterations of rockets that resembled cans of bug spray? Were settlements in the West Bank (in Jenin and Nablus) not dismantled because the occupation was no longer able to protect them and could no longer afford the cost of their continued existence? Did the Intifada not cost the enemy billions of shekels? And do we not realize what the Intifada did to delay the tragedy awaiting our people? Personally, I believe that the Intifada temporarily delayed a new expulsion process that was being prepared.
Evaluating the military experience of the Intifada, it appears that the armed experience of the Intifada was not actually the reason for its setbacks. Rather, there are other factors that led to this. The leadership was not able to deal with the responsibility of organizing society and preparing it for a sustained popular war. Some also had a naive understanding of armed struggle, and they flattened its essence to the extent that it did not affect the surface tensions. Recall the expression: “Carry a rifle and shoot, who will stop you?”
In addition to a lack of consciousness, as well as a lack of psychological and social readiness, there was no proper organization of the fighting forces. This led to incompetent leadership after the elimination of the first rank. As this social base was completely absent, there emerged a rift between the masses and those carrying out military action.
In addition to this, there was the counterrevolution against Yasser Arafat, and secret contacts and treasonous agreements were made under the table with the enemy. There was also an absence of preparations, equipment, strategy and combat tactics. The objective was the Oslo Accords (the homeland reduced to Gaza and the West Bank). And let us not forget here the Palestinian Authority’s dependence on the occupation for its financial, employment, and administrative system. Finally, there was a lack of conviction by some that armed struggle can change the reality on the ground. Rather, they were convinced of its use in improving the terms of negotiation, and nothing more.
In conclusion, the first thing that colonialism does is establish what is possible and impossible for oppressed peoples. Some elements of the oppressed people usually assist in this. This is done through direct and indirect brainwashing techniques, so do not trust this discourse that is transmitted and planted into our minds. Judge instead the testimonies of our people based on trusting logic and the power of liberation.
3.
Is Palestine beautiful?
I am frequently asked this question. As easy as the question seems, it is one of the most difficult questions. It is more difficult than the question “How are you?” It is difficult to answer once you realize that the real meaning of the question is: “Is this narrow coastal strip worth all this blood?” We all know that beauty is relative and that one’s environment shapes one’s aesthetic sensibilities, and that this differs from person to person. Here you have to resort to comparison to arrive at an easy answer.
But Palestine, in my opinion, is actually the most beautiful place; not because of her greenness, blueness, yellowness, redness, crops, bounty, or nature. Her beauty is that she is the one who answered my search for meaning, and she is the one who answered my existential questions, and who justifies my existence and cures my chronic anxieties.
Endnotes
[1] This number has risen to approximately 8,000 after mass arrests made by Israel since October 7.
[2] The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, was for much of its history a revolutionary guerrilla movement that eventually became Israel’s political partners with the Oslo Accords of 1993.
[3] Hamas, in Arabic, is a kind of acronym for harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya “Movement of Islamic Resistance,” but hamas also means “excitement.”
[4] Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was the co-founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was a guerrilla-turned-politician. He signed the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993 and became President of the Palestinian Authority.
[5] Al-Araj is referring here to the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israel that lasted roughly between 2000-2005. Its outcome, on the one hand, was the evacuation of Israeli settlements from Gaza, but also the loss of thousands of lives and the expansion of the Israeli security infrastructure.
[6] The Great Arab Revolt in 1936 was the first large-scale Palestinian mobilization against British rule and the Zionist settlement project in Palestine.
The author would like to thank Abeer Juan for assistance in the translations.
Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in Palestine and currently based in Berlin. His book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published by University of Toronto Press in 2024.
Haddad, Toufic. 2018. Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory. London: Bloomsbury.
Qumsiyeh, Mazin. 2011. Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment. London: Pluto Press.
Rabie, Kareem. 2021. Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank. Durham. Duke University Press.
Cite as: Roy, Arpan 2023 “Is this Narrow Coastal Strip Worth All this Blood? Bassel Al-Araj on Armed Struggle in Palestine” Focaalblog 12 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/12/arpan-roy-is-this-narrow-coastal-strip-worth-all-this-blood-bassel-al-araj-on-armed-struggle-in-palestine/
The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – often referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation.’ How are the stateless Syrians experiencing this war? And why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel? By threading the current genocide to the story of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights, this article discusses the underlying settler-colonial assumptions about religious purity and war that have fuelled imperialist projects in occupied Syria and Palestine, and in the wider region.[1]
Fear and messages on WhatsApp
On Sunday, 8th of October, my friend Kamel[2] wrote on WhatsApp: ‘the kids are worried so much… I bought food and water for them… we are preparing ourselves for a big war in the area…’ With his wife and three young children, Kamel’s family have been staying inside for the past month, working and going to school on Zoom.
We became friends in Damascus in 2009. Kamel had just finished his degree in English Literature at Damascus University, while I was doing fieldwork for my PhD. We’ve kept in touch and I’ve visited him and his family in the Golan Heights. Last time this May, I promised Salam, his wife, that I’ll bring my own young children to Majdal Shams, the biggest of the occupied villages in the Golan, next time I visit in February 2024. Our kids are of similar ages, our families in similar stages. If we lived closer, we’d have playdates and family dinners.
Image 1: The border fence between occupied Majdal Shams and Syria, Druze flag [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
People, Kamel tells me, are really afraid to go outside their houses. Out of fear of arrests and, even more, out of fear of pogroms against Arabs, most dare not leave their villages to travel into Israel. For friends from the Golan Heights that live and work in Israel and in the West Bank, the situation is sheer terror. ‘We are afraid to go to work, we are afraid to speak Arabic in public,’ Kamel adds. People have been arrested by Israeli police for writing pro-Palestinian posts on social media. Throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories people get arrested and held without charges, university students and workers, Arab and Jewish Israelis. Sara, one of the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights, has stopped going to work in the Israeli eco-project that she was working with before the war on Gaza: ‘Israeli society has become, overnight, so extreme, so racist,’ she tells me.
Others, especially from the older generation, are not surprised by the state of Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians. ‘The tree of occupation never bears good fruit,’ Salman tells me on the phone. The ‘tree of occupation’ is the 75 years of occupation, killing, dispossession, and apartheid that Palestinians have endured in the hands of the state of Israel. This is the ‘root cause’ of violence.
Salman is one of the community’s leaders and revolutionaries, also a former political prisoner in Israel. He is a friend and a co-author, whose field research and hospitality have shaped my own field visits in the Golan over the past years. We speak on the phone often, he is worried about the ‘total siege on Gaza,’ and emphasises that Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a ‘complete siege on Gaza’ saying that they are fighting ‘human animals.’ In his speech, and throughout the past month, Palestinians have constantly been dehumanised in the Israeli press. ‘They don’t show any pictures from Gaza, nothing!’ Salman exclaims.’ In a state of war, Israeli public media focus on Hamas’ massacre and Israel’s ‘right of self-defence,’ egging on the ‘flattening of Gaza.’ Like many others, Salman is afraid because Netanyahu, Gallant and others sense that their time is up, and they want to cause as much destruction as possible. From academics to the UN, the word genocide is used to describe the collective punishment of Palestinians unleashed by Israel.
Back to Kamel, we send each other video messages and funny things that the kids do. I keep thinking: how do you keep young kids busy amidst a war? In what stories do you translate your fears? Do you speak to them about the killing of so many children? How do you contextualise the sound of rockets across the border, and the constant humming of drones over your head? Do you tell them that the Israeli soldiers in their streets use them as human shields when they fire from the military bases within the Golan, to Syria and Lebanon? Can you make the rockets that get intercepted by the Iron Dome seem like fireworks or early Christmas lights?
As human beings and anthropologists, how can we make sense of this brutality? We watch live the purposeful and vengeful collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, mosques and churches. We (mis)measure again the different value of being a human, where Palestinian children are cast ‘outside of humanity’ (Fernandez 2023). We bear witness to state terrorism and murder (De Lauri 2023), to starvation and siege, to war crimes, and to the genocide of a people by the machinery of one of the most highly armed nuclear states in the world. These techniques of extermination are a continuation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that started with the al-Nakba, furthered through the wars of 1967 and 1973, and has continued unabated until today (Pappé 2007).
Although I don’t have answers to the above questions, this piece is a way to make sense of the pain, war, and defiant hope that come out of years of ethnographic fieldwork, and of the most recent genocidal war and the reign of fear. For, although the Israeli occupation in the Golan has been the least violent in comparison to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we can see that from ethnic cleansing to the religious engineering of a compliant minority, the sectarianism of the occupation is part of a larger arsenal, one of the means towards the same ends.
The weaponization of religious difference, or, how the Israeli occupation in the Golan was from the start ethnic cleansing and religious engineering
“If you live, live free. If you die, die standing like a tree.” These lines are carved onto the tombstone of Hayel Abu Zeid (1968-2005), who died, the epitaph continues, ‘for the resistance and hope.’ Hayel is one of the martyrs and revolutionaries from the Israeli occupied Syrian Golan Heights who dedicated their lives to the cause of liberation from Israeli occupation. Next to his tomb is a commemorative plaque for Amir Abu Jobal, a boy of 5 years who was killed by an Israeli mine near his home. In the cemetery in Majdal Shams, the largest remaining occupied village, there are many other tombstones commemorating resistance, heroism, and the unjust loss of life as a result of war and occupation.
Occupation, ethnic cleansing and resistance have deep roots among the indigenous stateless Syrian people. From the very start of Israel’s invasion during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, ethnic cleansing was an important strategy of war and occupation. 95% of the Syrian indigenous population was forcibly displaced and only five villages, out of 340 villages and farms, remained. These villages were predominantly Druze (the villages are Majdal Shams, Mas’ada, Buq’atha and Ein Qiniya. The village of Sahita was later destroyed by Israel, Ghajar is an Alawi village). Israeli army officials believed that the Druze, a religious community with historical links to Isma’ili Islam, would inflict a ‘stab in the back’ to Arabism. The sectarian logic of the Israeli occupation from the start, thus, was clear: displace the indigenous population, render them prostrate, or engineer them so that they cannot unite with Palestinian resistance and no longer pose a threat. Sectarianism is the more insidious continuation of ethnic cleansing outside of war.
Image 2: Much of the occupied territory is designated by Israel as military zones [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
The belief that the ‘Druze’ would be compliant peons in maintaining a state founded upon religious and ethnic difference was not unfounded. Israel had already by 1949 achieved an alliance with the religious Druze elites in the regions of Carmel and Galilee, in what became Northern Israel (Firro 1999). This alliance with the state of Israel isolated the Druze community in Israel from their co-religionists in Syria and Lebanon. In exchange for becoming political representatives of a new religious ethnicity (not unlike the created roles of tribal chiefs in other colonial settings), the sectarianisation of political identity in the greater context of Israeli ethnocracy (Yiftachel 2006) was moulded, and the ‘Israeli Druze,’ thus, created. The creation of the ‘Israeli Druze identity’ became henceforth an ongoing project between local Druze elites and the Israeli state, a project of producing ‘ethnic difference’ in the process of ‘inventing religious traditions’ (Firro 2005).
And so, the ‘Israeli Druze’ were the first Arabs ‘to be trusted’ to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces, and until recently, they were the only Arabs to be conscripted to do so (Kanaaneh 2008). Their so-called loyalty to the state of Israel turned ‘Druze identity’ into a laboratory for the manufacturing of sectarian difference, as the Israeli state and military worked hand-in-hand with local elites to produce and fund new ‘Druze traditions,’ as well as a comprehensive and specifically ‘Druze’ educational curriculum to educate the new generations. While this project was successful in funding the architecture of religious politics, it has not done much to address the chronic poverty and impoverishment of this region. Indeed, the Druze in Israel continue to be second-class citizens living under a settler colonial apartheid state. As such, all state policies are essentially discriminatory on the basis of religion, as shown during the 2018 Druze protests against the Jewish Nation-State Law.
The Druze in the occupied villages of the Golan Heights are Syrians and different from their ‘Israeli Druze’ counterparts described above. As the tombs in the cemetery proclaim, the heroes and martyrs of this mountain community have fought Israeli occupation, sacrificing their lives to either Israeli bullets or inside Israeli jails. Although individuals can be killed, memories of such resistance, here as in Palestine (see Swedenburg 2003), are not easy to kill.
What is being Golani? The complexity of citizenship, belonging and resistance
‘Israel wants us to be Druze,’ explained Fahed, the president of a local autonomous organisation, during an interview in May 2023, ‘Israeli Druze.’ Here, being ‘Israeli Druze’ means being compliant to Israeli authority. For deeply pious shaykhly families in the Golan, being somehow connected, or dependent upon the worldly authority of an occupying power is a religious anathema, and the most religious among them, have abided by strict regimes of independence and autonomy (see Kastrinou et al 2020).
Nevertheless, Israeli propaganda posits that the Druze of the Golan do not take Israeli citizenship because they are afraid of repercussions from the Syrian regime, should the Golan return to Syria. Yet none of my interlocutors has ever mentioned this reason. Instead, during the height of the Syrian war in 2015 I heard that ‘We will still be Syrians, even if Syria ceases to exist!’ Like inside Syria, the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights underwent a similar process of anti- and pro-regime protests, while more recently from this August, some have been protesting in solidarity to the Druze protests ongoing in the Syrian province of Sweida.
Image 3: Barbed wire at a UN post on the border [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
On the basis of estimates from local representatives and academics, between 10 and 25% of the stateless population has accepted Israeli citizenship. The vast majority of Syrians in the Golan Heights remain stateless. Getting Israeli citizenship is a contentious subject for a community that is known for its resistance to Israeli occupation (Mason et al. 2022). When I asked Nidaa, a member of the women’s committee in the Golan, whether she’d still want to be part of Syria while there is a war, she adamantly said: ‘I’m part of the Syrian body, I’ll go through what the people go through.’ Yet, taking Israeli citizenship has increased after the Syrian war, but it happens for complex, and sometimes contradictory reasons – out of losing hope at the aftermath of the Syrian revolution (Al-Khalili 2023), or to be able to work within the Israeli job market and advance one’s career, rather than because people ‘feel Israeli.’ Rabiah, a young man in his late 20s, for example, took Israeli citizenship so that he would not lose his land after living outside the country for three years – ‘I did it so that Israel does not confiscate my land,’ he told me.
In the 1980s and 90s it was the norm that people who took Israeli citizenship suffered social ‘death.’ Branded as being ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators,’ they were excommunicated from social and religious affairs. Jawad’s father was one of the first people in Majdal Shams to publicly declare his support for Israel and also one of the first to get Israeli citizenship. He lost most of his business and social capital in doing so. Jawad mentioned bitterly that, when his father died, the local religious shaykhs refused to carry out the mortuary prayers and rituals; the family had to bring in Israeli Druze shaykhs from the Galilee. Yet, when I asked him where he feels his identity lies, to my surprise he replied that he feels ‘Syrian’ even though he has Israeli citizenship. And, like most people who have acquired Israeli citizenship from the Golan Heights, Jawad was exempt from serving in the IDF: ‘I don’t like the army,’ he says. ‘I’m a pacifist.’
Underpinning the process of ethnically cleansing the Golan and the sectarianisation of political identities that Israel undertook lies a simple colonial logic, namely that religious groups are, basically, homogeneous. This logic assumes that there is one homogenous Druze community running through the occupied Golan Heights and the Druze villages in Northern Israel. This assumption is simplistic, filled with colonial connotations (i.e. same religion = same everything else), and simply not correct. We can see this assumption supported by Israeli policy and propaganda which has historically tried to imprint a sectarian logic and ‘Druzification’ on the occupied Syrians in the Golan Heights. The same colonial logic underpinned USA’s ‘tribal’ policies during the invasion of Iraq (González 2009).
It is the same logic, extended, that we see used by Israel to explain the large-scale genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In the words of Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” The Israeli ex-defence minister Avigdor Liberman said that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Indeed, this is the logic that was used from the very start of the Zionist project, with ethnic cleansing ongoing since its inception (Pape 2007). The murder in Gaza is blatantly obvious whilst the occupation of the Golan is, in comparison, less bloody. But the underlying assumption of homogeneity within religious and ethnic groups is the same. The settler colonial state, then, either engineers homogeneity or works to expel or exterminate it.
Image 4: Inside a civil building in the deserted town of Quneitra, now used as an Israeli military training ground [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
But “religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way,” wrote Marx whilst exploring how capitalist states, in general, pretend but essentially fail to keep their secular, emancipatory promises. And creating a homogenous, religiously pure social entity is a risky, unstable business.
The French had already tried it. During their colonial mandate, they divided Syria into territorial chunks on the basis of the colonial assumption of obedience in exchange for religious homogeneity. It was at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of Western colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East that what Ussama Makdisi (2005) calls the ‘culture of sectarianism’ was born, as a thoroughly new and modern phenomenon. And, as it was born it was also resisted: the Syrian revolt against the French colonial rule was started in the Druze province by a Druze, Sultan Basha Al-Atrash, one of the greatest Syrian national heroes. The French collectively punished the Druze for their disobedience by burning down the village of Majdal Shams and collectively punishing its inhabitants. Indeed, it was this memory that was cited as a deterrent for villagers in leaving their village during the 1967 invasion (Kastrinou et al 2020). No one wants to be uprooted twice. The Israeli plan to move more than a million Palestinians from North Gaza to the south, along with the possibility of a further displacement in Egypt’s Sinai, could be a history repeated thrice: as tragedy, farce and genocide.
As with French colonialism and USA imperialism, the Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Golan Heights and to homogenise Druze identity in exchange for obedience, did not go to plan. When Israel decided to unilaterally and illegally annex the Golan Heights in 1981, the occupied people responded by going on a six-month strike. In their vast majority, the Syrian people of the four occupied villages, some 25,000 people, are stateless because they have not accepted Israeli citizenship. Their status is legally the same as that of Palestinians in East Jerusalem (see al-Marsad 2011, and Delforno 2019): they are ‘permanent residents’ in Israel and as such they do not serve in the IDF. Legally stateless, they don’t have passports but laissez-passer documents where their nationality is ‘undefined’. They have trouble travelling inside and outside of Israel, trouble getting jobs, accessing basic services, and they are constantly under the threat of the military occupation that steals their land (the ongoing conflict with the wind turbines is a point in green colonialism), and creates a host of other problems.
This experience of colonial taxonomical imposition, violence and ethnic cleansing resonates from French colonialism in Syria to Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today.
Sowing resistance, sowing hope
A different heritage, that of resistance, is knitted into the town’s urban landscape, the most emblematic of which is Hassan Khater’s statue ‘The March’ (1987), which depicts Sultan Basha al-Atrash, the Druze leader of the Syrian revolt against the French in 1925, surrounded by contemporary figures such as a man of letters, next to a traditionally dressed man, a mother holding her dying son – a new martyr of the resistance. On the back of the statue there are three kids, the future, holding books and wheat. Instead of religious homogeneity, the threading theme is resistance to outside occupiers. The French missed that, and so did the Israelis.
Image 5: ‘The March’, statue by Hassan Khater (1987) at the central square of Majdal Shams [Photo taken by the author, 2023]
History teaches that colonial assumptions of religious purity lead to imperialist projects of ethnic cleansing and genocide, like the televised genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the Golan Heights. Look closer, though, in the continuities of everyday practices and the threads of another history become visible: the history of ordinary resistance, what the Palestinians have exemplified and gifted to struggles far and wide: ‘sumud’ – steadfastness. In combating the ‘bad fruit’ of occupation, the occupied people of the Golan Heights, and the occupied Palestinians, continue to sow resistance and hope, what the poet Mahmoud Darwish described in his poem ‘A state of siege’:
Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time
near gardens whose shades have been cast aside
we do what prisoners do
we do what the jobless do
we sow hope
Maria Kastrinou is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London. Her research interrogates the politics of sectarianism, statelessness and resistance through the lives and stories of her ethnographic interlocutors from Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Author of Power, Sect and State in Syria (I.B. Tauris 2016), she is currently working on the project ‘Lives across divides: Ethnographic stories from the Golan Heights.’
Endnotes
[1] Acknowledgement: Many thanks to colleagues and friends in the Golan Heights who despite the war read through and made suggestions; to colleagues at Brunel University, especially Isak Niehaus, Gareth Dale and Mark Neocleous; to Vera Sajrawi, and to Steven Emery. Kastrinou’s current research about the Golan Heights is supported by the Druze Heritage Foundation, London.
[2] All names are pseudonyms and some details have been altered in order to ensure my interlocutors’ anonymity.
References
Al-Khalili, Charlotte, 2023. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity. London: UCL Press.
Al-Marsad, 2011. ‘Suggested issues for Consideration Regarding Israel’s third Periodic Report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) To Be Held On November 14-December 2, 2011.’ NGO Report. (https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/ngos/Al-Marsad_ISRAEL_CESCR47.doc) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.
Firro, Kais. 1999. The Druzes in the Jewish state: A brief history. Vol. 64. Brill.
Firro, Kais M. 2005. “Druze maqāmāt (shrines) in Israel: From ancient to newly-invented tradition.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2: 217-239.
González, Roberto J. 2009. “On “tribes” and bribes: “Iraq tribal study,” al-Anbar’s awakening, and social science.” Focaal 2009, no. 53: 105-116.
Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. 2008. Surrounded: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military. Stanford University Press.
Kastrinou, A. Maria A., Salman Fakher El-Deen, and Steven B. Emery. 2020. “The stateless (ad) vantage? Resistance, land and rootedness in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.” Territory, Politics, Governance 9, no. 5: 636-655.
Makdisi, Ussama. The culture of sectarianism: community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon. Univ of California Press, 2000.
Mason, Michael, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Muna Dajani, eds. The Untold Story of the Golan Heights:: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
Pappé, Ilan. 2007. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster.
Swedenburg, Ted. 2003. Memories of revolt: The 1936–1939 rebellion and the Palestinian national past. University of Arkansas Press.
Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2022. “Kill the Armenian/Indian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide.” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, no. 1: 35-67.
Yiftachel, Oren. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cite as: Kastrinou, Maria 2023 “Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan” Focaalblog 16 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/
The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my recently (re)ignited preoccupation with the genocide of the Palestinian people. A Middle Eastern, female illustrator’s art work I started following on Tuesday shows up at the top of the screen. Her drawing of Wadie Al Fayoume – white eyeballs, embraced in an arch of red flowers, the same gesture and the same happy birthday hat he wears in the pictures that have circulated online after his killing – precedes the onset of my scrolling through the tawdry spectacle of death with an uncanny allusion to what it might have looked like to be alive.
Image 1: A mural artwork in a town in West Bank features a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. The words ‘Resist to Exist’ can be read in English. Photo by Júlia Fernandez, August 2017.
After him, startled faces of terrified children, blood-dripping foreheads, cheeks covered in trails of tears and dust unfurl a grotesque witnessing of suffering; I am not immune to their affective power. ‘You Muslims must die’, the news says Wadie Al Fayoume’s murderer said before stabbing him to death in his house in Chicago. The pungent rawness of blurry video footages from Gazan hospitals revolts me, as they become, like Wadie, animated traces of lives that might soon be, if they are not yet, lost.
The narrative and visual dimensions of social media portraits of ‘what is going on in Gaza’ invert the effacing of the traces of the living that numbers on the news do, but they do so through a grammar of compassion for ‘all souls lost’ – the recognition of those as (former) living beings, and thus, Judit Butler would argue, the assertion of their grievability – with which a staggering surge of posts unreflectively registers a moral inflection toward neutrality. What I find more disturbing is not the invocation of a denial of what is in fact the very real differential distribution of grievability that is at work in such sites of violence, but how the ‘both-sides’ -or ‘no sides’- rhetoric, articulated by people who bestow themselves with the title of ambassadors of a common humanity, is oblivious to the fact that Palestinian children are not really apprehended as living until they are dead.
When the suffering of some is rendered accessible only when it can be equalized to that of others, the presumably uncomplicated language of a universal value of lives carries in fact the implicit recognition, by virtue of its omission, of what the battlefield makes evident: not all lives are counted as livable. Representations of common suffering elicit in fact interrogations of what counts as humanity, for they mobilise the term as if it were an empty signifier, sliding into ethically unfixed questions of what –and when this what– is a livable and grievable life, and what -and when- it is not. In positing a fantasy of equivalences, they omit the fact that in denying them the social conditions that enable the persistence, sustainment and thriving of life, Israel deprives Palestinians of life even before they are killed, inevitably tapping from a moral economy of suffering in which Palestinian deathis historically normalized and socially reified.
In a sort of collective aphasia (Stoler, 2011), accounts of suffering and pain are measured against each other through a grammar of false equality between what the colonizer’s absolute right to kill differentiates in terms of valuable and non-valuable lives. The long-standing pervasiveness of colonialism, dispossession and killing power becomes muffled; its monopolization of an unlimited right to self-defense denied in historically illiterate proposals of peacebuilding rooted in Solomonic repartitions of the territory and allocations of quasi sovereignties. Framings of the violence that often accompany such accounts as a ‘war’, or a ‘conflict’, often uncritically registering the tensions at stake through the performative solidarity of posting two flags together, raise unsettling questions about how the equation of the suffering of ones to the suffering of others – or the recognition of their shared humanity – seems so often to acquire meaning alongside a conceptual erasure of the long-standing power imbalances between the sides. To talk of suffering in order to speak about domination, Didier Fassin argues, is to do morals and politics with new words (2008: 532); but what kind of morals and politics are done by the omission of colonial domination that the articulation of frameworks of universal suffering seem to convey?
At the forefront of many calls for action, reflections on grief and loss, and denunciations of the ongoing violence ‘in and around’ the Gaza Strip are children whose suffering bodies, like those of Wadi or the children in hospitals in Gaza, seem to convey a sort of humanitarian discourse of ‘antipolitical moralism’ (Ticktin, 2011: 64). Children occupy, of course, a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and of the ‘world community’ (Malkii 2011), and they do so, in the case that concerns us here, by condensing very particular forms of violence into a moral problematization.
‘It is not a political view but a human response’ declares a dance school in London in their Instagram stories, now gone, imbuing the devastation felt for ‘the loss of innocent lives, especially children’, with a sort of affective affordance that attempts to justify a denial of the politics that are layered in the attribution of differential value to the lives of ones and the lives of the others. A pretension of depoliticisation that invokes in fact a very particular politics, one that reproduces the effacing of the precise context in which violence takes place. In those posts, the continued allegiance to the alleviation of suffering and the condemnation of violence emerges through a language of crisis and urgency that reproduces a particular genealogy of violence and reparation in abstract terms: victims are dispossessed of perpetrators; suffering bodies imagined outside of history and politics; they require help only out of a moral obligation (see Ticktin, 2011).
‘Let these poor innocent children be’ a Bristol based printmaker writes as a concluding demand, posting from the same city where I am. To be what? I wonder; what were Palestinian children being targeted by Israel’s last offensive? What kind of lives, if lives at all, were they living?
The idea of a morally legitimate suffering body collapses again in the figure of children in the words of Arab Israeli politician and journalist Aida Touma-Sliman: ‘a child is a child’; for which she is reprimanded by Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari with invocations of a lack of symmetry that goes in fact the other way around. Toulam-Sliman is right, but she is also not; a child might be a child within the frames of humanitarian values, but in the rationality of occupation, a Palestinian child is not the same child.
Image 2: Two young girls in a pro-Palestine protest hold banners that read ‘Bombing kids is not self defense’ and what appears as ‘To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity’. Photo from Dania Shaeeb in Unsplash
In a public endorsement of the ongoing collective punishment against the Palestinian population, Meirav Ben-Ari declares that ‘the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves’. In this rhetorical unravelling of a selective production and undoing of victims, Hamas’ attacks prove Gazan children’s culpability for their own victimization. Participants of war, children are a ‘category mistake’, Malkki (2010) would say, used in this case to deny the pretension of our shared humanity. Children are, in the colonizer’s rhetoric, perpetrators; they are Hamas’ human shields. They are, as Butler has argued, no children at all, ‘but rather bits of armament, military instruments and materiel’ (2016). The grammar of compassion with which the morally legitimate bodyof the child – and the fantasy of the equal grievability of its life in comparison to Israeli lives – is upheld fails to acknowledge that in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are not really alive as such. They are nothing but a threat against which an absolute power defends the lives of some and destroys the lives of others as it formulates itself. They are like rocks and steel, darkness in human form, a haunting specter of the pervasive threat of terrorism in its developing potentiality.
As highly politically charged sites, Palestinian children embody indeed the racial politics of reproduction that underpin Israel’s colonial settlement project. Perhaps because in the colonizer’s war on demographics Palestinian reproduction stands in the way of the continued success of colonization (Kanaaneh, 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015), Palestinian children are produced through the inscription of colonial power in their mothers’ bodies not as made of flesh and bones, but as traces of an unruly destructive power.
On October the 17th, the Israeli Prime Minister posts on Twitter: ‘this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. In the now deleted post, a divide operates through a narrative of impossible dichotomies between light and darkness, between humanity and savageness, mirroring the ubiquitous distortion of Palestinian people that articulates the same discourses that reproduce the frames of recognition in which their lives are considered nothing else but a threat to the survival of others. Perhaps in his post Benjamin Netanyahu uses Niebuhr’s novel’s title to refer to such an existential battle, yet the mention of children reinforces its emergence as a powerful signifier that seams together, even if in complicated ways, universalist understandings of humanity and the precise denials of it.
In what terms can this ‘poetics of our common humanity’ (Malkki, 2011) that permeates social media feeds not lose sight of the context in which such disturbing category mistakes – the, literally, ‘children’ of darkness – are produced? In what ways can such calls for compassion – which reify the moral authority with which children, presumably holders of an innocent, unadulterated, presociality (Malkki, 2011; see also Butler, 2016), are often indexed – be attentive to the everyday forms of criminal brutality that deny their mere existence as humans?
That there is no justification for the targeting of children, or any civilian of any age, is unquestionable. Yet, the way such claims for equidistance seem so often to compress the history of racialized and settler colonial domination into a ‘war against humanity’, obscure the frames in which Palestinian children’s lives are lives that are not only constrained and cut short, but that are ontologically already lost, placed ‘outside of humanity’, ‘dark matter’.
Júlia Fernandez is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in reproduction, care and forced migration. She has conducted research in the West Bank before, focusing on gender and political resistance.
References
Butler, J. (2016): Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso, London.
Fassin, D. (2008): The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli: Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 531-558
Kanaaneh, R. (2002): Birthing the nation: Strategies of Palestinian women in Israel. University of California Press.
Malkki, L. (2010): ‘Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace’, in Ticktin and Feldman (eds): In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care. Durham, Duke University Press.
Stoler, A. (2011): Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 121-156
Ticktin, M. (2011): Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitaranism in France. Berkeley, University California Press.
Cite as: Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/
With the destruction of Gaza by Israel under way and the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories worsening day by day, a recurrent question is raised in mainstream media, TV shows and many academic circles: Is Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks on October 7 proportionate or not? Some say it is. Others say only partially. Others say it isn’t. But the point is that the question itself is a trap. Any serious debate about the current escalation of violence cannot start from October 2023. To overlook the historical context is a violation of the truth: it pushes to one side the state of oppression that Israel has imposed on Palestine at a growing pace in the past decades, and it washes away the responsibilities of Europe in the root causes of the conflict and occupation.
Western governments and institutions have overwhelmingly shown support for Israel in its explicit attempt at annihilating Palestinians. “This is civilization against barbarity. This is good against bad”, claimed Israel’s Ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor. “We are fighting against human animals”, said Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. As the mainstream narrative goes, what is taking place is a broader battle of civilizations between “the only democracy in the Middle East” (as Israel has often been labelled by politicians and journalists) and authoritarianism (Hamas and, by extension, all Palestinians). Good vs evil. The civilized vs the uncivilized.
“You are either with us, or you are with the terrorist”, said George Bush in 2001, when the US was launching the War on Terror, which led to two catastrophic decades of human loss (hundreds of thousands of dead), devastation and destabilization. Us and them. The civilized vs the uncivilized. Yet if we really want to indulge in the depressing mantra of a battle of civilizations, we should recognize that the terms of reference are different from how they first appear to the Western intelligentsia. With current events in Palestine and Israel in mind, if we compare the speeches of Joe Biden or von der Leyen, with that of the king of Jordan at the Cairo Peace Summit, the conclusion would be that the American and the German don’t make a good impression (to use an euphemism). Indeed, I’d challenge anyone in saying on what “side” reason, justice and humanity lie in that comparison.
The decline of values, ability and courage in Western political leadership, coupled with their arrogance and double standards, is a perfect symbol of our empty times, in which social media threads determine the relevance of social issues, and a significant portion of academia is complicit with power or anesthetized and irrelevant. As I write this blog post, a turmoil was generated among some research institutes in Norway for the decision of a group of researchers to publish a Statement on the Situation in Palestine, now available on Public Anthropologist blog and taken down from the website where it was originally published.
Over the past decades, we have seen wars conducted in the name of democracy, countries bombed in the name of human rights and regimes intermittently supported or fought depending on economic interests. In the US as well as in Europe freedom of expression has been dismantled, inequalities have increased and societal cohesion has eroded.
Polarizing discourses are used to generate clicks in ways that misrepresent reality. You raise questions about the opportunity to keep sending weapons to Ukraine? Then you are pro-Putin. You maintain that it is necessary to establish a dialogue with the Taliban? Then you support violations of human rights. Journalism is compromised or controlled. Dissidence is often mocked or even cancelled. Social problems tend to be oversimplified. Nuances are often unwelcomed in political debates. And so, horrors like the devastation imposed on Palestinians go on as Europe complicitly watches. Pro-Palestinians protests are banned. Voices outside the mainstream are silenced. European governments are far from being innocent in the protraction of this humanitarian tragedy. Once again, as with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the bombing of Libya in 2011 (to mention only two relatively recent examples), the current events will remain in the history books as a terrifying injustice.
It may be appropriate to recall how in 1993 the historian Howard Zinn introduced the essay “Terrorism over Tripoli”:
“In April of 1986, a bomb exploded in a discotheque in West Berlin, killing two people, one an American soldier. It was unquestionably an act of terrorism. Libya’s tyrannical leader, Muammar Khadafi, had a record of involvement in terrorism, although in this case there seemed to be no clear evidence of who was responsible. Nevertheless, President Reagan ordered that bombers be sent over Libya’s capital of Tripoli, killing perhaps a hundred people, almost all civilians. I wrote this piece, which could not find publication in the press, to argue against the principle of retaliation. I am always furious at the killing of innocent people for some political cause, but I wanted to broaden the definition of terrorism to include governments, which are guilty of terrorism far more often, and on an infinitely larger scale, than bands of revolutionaries or nationalists.”
The essay ends with these words:
“Let us hope that, even if this generation, its politicians, its reporters, its flag-wavers and fanatics, cannot change its ways, the children of the next generation will know better, having observed our stupidity. Perhaps they will understand that the violence running wild in the world cannot be stopped by more violence, that someone must say: we refuse to retaliate, the cycle of terrorism stops here.”
Unfortunately, we cannot say that lessons have been learned. Quite the opposite, as the situation in Gaza blatantly reveals.
Noam Chomsky once praised Zinn’s work (endorsement for Howard Zinn on History) in the following terms: “Howard’s life and work are a persistent reminder that our own subjective judgments of the likelihood of success in engaging human problems are of little interest, to ourselves or others. What matters is to take part, as best we can, in the small actions of unknown people that can stave off disaster and bring about a better world, to honor them for their achievement, to do what we can to ensure that these achievements are understood and carried forward.”
As Palestine burns, many scholars are still reluctant to speak out, established academic institutions avoid making a public stand, unverified information is used as communication tactics, investigative journalism is invisible. Along with Palestinians, truth dies. There are times when we need to create the space for the courage of historical truths to emerge. This is one of those times.
This text first appeared on AllegraLab and it is republished here with the permission of the author.
Antonio De Lauri is is Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. He works on issues related to law, justice, war and humanitarianism. He is the founding editor and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Public Anthropologist and the Series Editor of Berghahn Books Humanitarianism and Security.
Cite as: De Lauri, Antonio 2023 “The Courage of Historical Truths” Focaalblog 30 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/30/antonio-de-lauri-the-courage-of-historical-truths/
In recent work, several authors in anthropology have analyzed how the extreme right is being configured and acquiring a considerable pull on the mainstream (see: Kalb, 2023a; Semán & Wilkis, 2023, https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina/). I want to take their reflections further and focus on the uncomfortable question about the role of “traditional” political forces in paving the way for the emergence of this neofascism. I do this from a particular vantage point in Argentina and the Southern-Cone of the Americas.
This is not about denying the existence of geopolitical interests and (transnational) capital that provide funding and platforms for the extreme right. However, the situational configuration of their advance in each country cannot be explained without considering the failure of established political representations. Not only have they failed to generate new consensual programmatic agreements, but they are also disconnected – almost pathologically – from the political needs and sensitivities of people in life contexts of overwhelming precariousness and insecurity. Engaged in palace disputes for a little place in the sun, political coalitions of several South American countries have been speaking their own language, increasingly alien to the people on the street who are trying to get by with putting food on the table, for a start.
In 2018, anthropologist Silvina Merenson and I were carrying out fieldwork in two southern Brazilian states during the elections that brought Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. Merenson dialogued with higher-income families while I interviewed female domestic workers, shopkeepers, smugglers, and trans-border farmers. To our surprise, these interviews with such different groups turned out to have common political denominators. Time and again, they expressed that living conditions had worsened, that expectations for the future were being destroyed, and that more and more sacrifices were demanded of them in aspects of life considered fundamental. They also expressed a loss of confidence in the political representatives of the Workers’ Party (PT) and the center-right parties due to the corruption scandals insistently reported by the media. Their narratives conveyed an ingrained weariness with representations from across the political spectrum’s inability to provide solutions to social anxieties.
In conversations with academic colleagues and militants of the then-PT candidate, we made clear our concern that the speeches on the good deeds of the PT governments were a mistake. People had reached a point of saturation: they needed to believe that something radically different was coming. This wish took on an almost messianic character in Brazil: the evangelical churches supported the extreme-right candidate and were key in constructing a collective “faith” in his smoothness and capabilities. In short, we had ethnographically identified a political “crossing point” for the sacrifice of people’s future horizons and their basic minimum needs. Once this limit is crossed, the weariness becomes multi-dimensional (social, psychological, physical), and society can no longer be asked to give more of itself. Exhaustion, anger, tiredness, faith, and hope: this is the combo of collective sensitivities provoked by crossing this limit, and the extreme right in Brazil knew how to capitalize on it by putting up a new messiah.
This July, I conducted fieldwork in cities in northern, central, and southern Chile, interviewing 50 female social science researchers in the country’s universities. These conversations revealed a state of fear on the part of the female colleagues on two fronts. First, regarding the stalking done by the extreme right and its slow and planned victory in the fight for Gramsci’s common sense, and second, the fact that the government was facilitating this process with “errors” (forced or not) that they found “inexplicable”.
In 2021, Gabriel Boric represented a left-wing coalition Apruebo Dignidad[Approve Dignity] made up of non-traditional political parties, organized by the student movements. His discourse was based on the criticism of the coalitions (center-left and right-wing) that had led the democratic transition since 1990 while ensuring the persistence of Pinochet’s neoliberalism. Boric won the presidential ballot in December 2021 (55.9% of the votes), beating the extreme-right candidate José Antonio Kast (44.1%). However, from the start of his government (in March 2022), strategic errors have caused widespread surprise. The first was the trip by the then Minister of Interior and Security, Izkia Siches, to mediate the Mapuche conflict in southern Chile with no prior agreements with Indigenous leaders or security planning. A female sociologist with extensive experience advising presidential administrations recounted her astonishment on seeing on television the minister being driven out of the area under gunfire: “They have a misplaced voluntarist vision. They assumed that they could discuss a territorial conflict that dates back 300 years, talk to a family whose son had been shot by state security forces, and say ‘you can trust me, I am a new type of State’”.
The director of a Chilean alternative media organization reported that he lost his best professionals in writing, audiovisual editing, and formulation of web content in the days of the convention for the proposed constitution in 2021. A network of organized businesspeople offered these professionals huge salaries to produce multimedia materials defaming the constituent process. This campaign was effective in the context of the post-pandemic crisis, inflation, rising food prices, and increased violence from drug-trafficking networks. With communicative astuteness, they managed to associate all of this with the new government and the new constitution (which was rejected in a plebiscite in September 2022).
Since then, the government has been involved in absurd corruption scandals. Allegations of several cases of fraud involved the Ministry of Social Development, headed by Giorgio Jackson, a preeminent figure of the government’s alliance. One of them concerns fraudulent agreements with NGOs led by political representatives of Jackson’s party in northern Chile. Another is about small funds for social works being used to purchase branded lingerie for a female political representative from the south of the country. On July 19, a man claiming to be the minister called a security guard of the Ministry of Social Development and ordered him to gather up 50 computers. The guard handed over 23 computers to three hooded subjects, who later returned and took away a safe. With all major media outlets aligned with the right or the extreme right, these events caused a media tsunami. Officially, the government sought to characterize this as part of a destabilization coup orchestrated by the right. This did not even convince the allied rank and file: Jackson resigned on August 11. Our female interviewees are now taking a Kast victory in the next presidential elections (in 2025) for granted. A female political scientist and militant in Boric’s front, now disillusioned, concluded: “The only way Kast will not win is if he doesn’t run”.
For a quick summary of the Chilean democratic mess: Three decades after the democratic transition, reigning political coalitions had sustained and deepened the neo-liberal model, blatantly failing to fulfill egalitarian promises of social ascent through personal effort. The social explosion of 2019 signified the outburst of dissatisfaction with these unfulfilled promises. Popular dissatisfaction was aggravated by the pandemic crisis and was capitalized on by young leaders who proposed a “new way of doing politics” and granting “dignity” to the people. This promise provided a representational outlet for popular anguish, but once in power, the new governing class was caught up by its promises and vulnerable for renewed accusations of corruption. The level of dissatisfaction with democracy grew, and people, desperate to get ahead after years of crushing and cyclical crises, turned to quick solutions that were easy to execute. Faced with adversity, complexity, and disappointment, people prefer to rely on the sense of predictability of the conservative social hierarchy that the far-right offers (see Kalb, 2023a). Talking with taxi drivers, concierges, domestic workers, and small shopkeepers in the Chilean cities I passed through during this spring, I heard again the same phrases that we recorded with Merenson in Brazil in 2018.
I returned to Argentina days before the August 13 “Simultaneous and Mandatory Open and Primary elections” (PASO). The country I returned to was even more distressed than when I had left. Argentina is going through dizzying political times, plunged into a swirl of agonistic conflicts. Institutional, economic, and political instability is linked to what they call here (borrowing from Gramsci) the “hegemonic standoff”. Between 2008 and 2022, the country was deeply divided between political forces with opposing visions. It was common to note a “grieta” [rift] between the picture of the country represented by these two blocs. This expression is not the result of poetic license. Its linguistic use has been consolidated in Argentina: it deals with the bellicose configuration of two sides in a latent state of permanent aggression. Since 2022, this latency has given way to episodes of de facto mutual violence.
Until 2022, we had the Peronist coalition on one side of the grieta, based in a myriad of heterogeneous parties and forces, ranging from the left to the right, and whose pacts and configurations vary in different cities and provinces. In recent years, this coalition has been called Frente para la Victoria [Front for Victory], Frente de Todos [Front for Everyone], and the current Unión por la Patria [Union for the Homeland]. The most important political force within the front was, until 2022, Cristina Kirchner and the faction that bears the surname of her late husband (Néstor Kirchner), namely Kirchnerismo. Despite the heterogeneity, a transcendent Peronist identity allows transversal alliances in certain historical moments. Defining this identity is not easy, but it is generally associated with a redistributive perspective on the State, an anti-neoliberal discourse (although policies do not always reflect this), the continued expansion of social rights, development policies, financial sovereignty, and the idea that the popular sectors (=lower-income) are the identity core of the country.
On the other side of the “grieta”, again until 2022, there was Juntos por el Cambio [Together for Change], the coalition with a neoliberal perspective, also composed of heterogeneous national and provincial forces. The best known are the Propuesta Republicana[Republican Proposal] (PRO) of former President Mauricio Macri and the Unión Cívica Radical [Radical Civil Union]. Macri led this coalition and won the 2015 presidential elections initiating a government that brutally deteriorated living conditions. In his term, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) receded on average 4.3% annually; the annual inflation rate went from 30.5% to 60%. The dollar increased its value by 548% (sic!). In December 2019, 40.8% of people were living below the poverty line. Seeking his reelection, Macri signed the most important bailout in the history of Argentina and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the sum of 57 billion dollars (45 of which were delivered to the country). The IMF and the government agreed a policy of austerity which drastically worsened living conditions. The loan resources were basically siphoned off in unregulated financial speculation schemes.
In this context, the Peronist coalition closed ranks around a single candidate for the 2019 elections. Cristina Kirchner, with her unique political-electoral capital, appointed Alberto Fernández for this role. Peronism’s victory was a moment of hope, of relief: the promise that better days were coming, that the sacrifice and suffering of the four years of Macrismo would loosen their grip. On December 10, 2019, millions of people flocked to the Casa Rosada (the governmental palace in Buenos Aires) to celebrate what felt like the “end of being crushed” (Fig. 01 and 02).
Fig. 01. Massive popular celebration of the victory of Alberto Fernández in the surroundings of the Casa Rosada onDecember 10, 2019. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photographer: Menara Guizardi.Fig. 02. People on the walls around the crowded Plaza de Mayo. December 10, 2019. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photographer: Menara Guizardi.
Three months after Fernández assumed power, the pandemic worsened an already extreme situation in Argentina. The government had to negotiate debt repayment with the IMF at the same time as it had to make social investments to face the pandemic. A key presidential document was written: the “present and caring State” of Peronism was going to be opposed to the “neoliberal State”. Initially, national support was massive (the President had 80% approval ratings when he announced the lockdown). However, the amount of social investment the country could afford turned out to be disappointing and insufficient. The Argentinian lockdown was extremely long. The State was present with measures to prevent layoffs by subsidizing private sector salaries. The health system was strengthened. Argentina performed better than her neighbors. However, all of this was done with a lack of hard financing, with ‘printing money’ like everyone else (‘quantitative easing’; See Kalb 2023b), and at the cost of higher private indebtedness. The agreement with the IMF was finally signed off when the pandemic was waning.
Between 2019 and 2021, Merenson and I carried out fieldwork in working-class neighborhoods in the north of the Buenos Aires conurbation and in the south of the city proper. Both areas have a political history of affiliation with Peronism. In one of them, a former enclave of railway workers, they told us that the joy felt at the return of Peronism in 2019 had turned to sadness (Merenson et al., 2022). There was disappointment, anger, uneasiness, lack of hope, and lack of belief in political leadership. Our interviews registered two clear political sensitivities. First, the expression of fear of a repetition of the 2001 Corralito disaster: The restriction of cash withdrawal from banks to USD 250 per week imposed by the government of Fernando de la Rúa on December 1, 2001 in Argentina. The measure triggered the so-called 2001 crisis that led to the resignation of the president, and a situation of macroeconomic destruction and serious sociopolitical instability. Second, the transition of disappointment and weariness into an incipient rejection of all existing political representations. The narratives showed the resurgence of the desire “for all [politicians] to go away”, a key slogan of the 2001 demonstrations. These sentiments heightened when photos of a birthday party at the Fernández’s residence were disseminated while he was asking the nation on TV to sustain the lockdown effort. Perhaps this was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. As we also observed in Brazil and Chile, social sacrifice can only be sustained under a symmetrical exchange pact: parties agree on ways to give, receive, and reciprocate. It is not possible to ask people for so much sacrifice without reciprocity.
While all this was happening, internal conflicts in the Peronist front surfaced and escalated. The vice-president, Cristina Kirchner, and the president, Alberto Fernández, began a two-year-long battle of mutual attacks. Public opinion began to sense that there was no basic consensus on how to govern. The campaign to take office had not included serious negotiations on the directions, perspectives, and visions to be adopted. The third most important figure of the coalition, Sergio Massa (at that time in charge of the Congress of Representatives), began negotiating the conflict between the President and the Vice President, in exchange for being the Peronist front candidate in 2023.
While Cristina and Alberto were publicly airing their mutual grievances, the ministries and state agencies showed increasing difficulties to move forward in any direction. This was, partly because of a lack of consensus and partly because ministerial departments were distributed according to what has been called a “vertical lottery”. Each sector was handed over to different political forces in the coalition, which occupied (almost literally) different floors of each ministry building. There were bitter struggles for the appropriation of resources for different areas and competition for control of the other sectors. What one sector did, the other sector hindered. The government insisted with its publicity on the constant presence of a Caring State, but the daily experience of citizens was that anything that depended on the state was increasingly difficult to solve. It did not take long for the people to express this sentiment: “A present State, yes, but not this one”.
Signing the deal with the IMF (January 2022) caused dissatisfaction within Kirchnerismo and months of attack against the measure (by several representatives of this group) led to the resignation of the Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán (a man of Alberto’s trust) in July of the same year. Immediately after, an exchange-rate race ensued, with the devaluation of the peso and an inflationary shock. The dollar’s rise provokes a multi-scale economic disaster in a country with no reserves or capacity to take out international credit and which depends on so many imported inputs, paid in dollars, to sustain the productive chains.
After comings and goings of ministers, Sergio Massa took over as Minister of Economy in July 2022, concentrating powers from several ministries and, in practice, displacing Alberto as de facto president. In his inaugurating statement, he promised what he could not deliver: to stabilize the macroeconomy, slow down the exchange rate slide, halt inflation, and accumulate reserves. Between July 2022 and June 2023, inflation went from 71% to 120% annually; the Central Bank’s net reserves went from 5 billion positive to 2 billion in the negative; and official poverty reached 43% of the population. The year-on-year Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth projections went from 5.2% to minus 3%.
To ensure imports of minimum inputs, the government supports the value of the peso against the dollar with an official exchange rate that is substantially higher than the informal one. Due to the lack of reserves, there are increasing restrictions to access these “official dollars” (as they are called). When Massa took office, the “official dollar” was worth $285 pesos; currently it is worth $365.5. But the dollar circulating in the informal markets (called “blue”) trades at $720 pesos, twice the official value. Faced with this exchange rate gap, the government had to implement other “official” dollar rates to guarantee the flow of different economic activities. Thus, we have the “card dollar” ($639.2 pesos), “tourist dollar” ($721), “MEP dollar” ($657,48), “CCL dollar” ($746,53), and a “wholesale dollar” ($349,98). This monetary situation creates an almost unmanageable complexity for the basic daily activities of all sectors. Recently the Central Bank’s net reserves reached their historical negative record of minus 5 billion USD. A credit from China was agreed to avoid a sharp devaluation of the peso until August’s vote. The loan has been used to curb speculation on the peso, selling cheaper dollars to speculators and trying to bring the various exchange rates down. These constant financial maneuvers and their technocratic explanations do not elicit much trust among the wider population in Sergio Massa, who has overseen them.
The right-wing coalition, Juntos por el Cambio, did no better. Confident that the government’s disaster would ensure a wide-margin victory, the presidential candidates began their own debacle for the position of consensus candidate. Mauricio Macri announced that he would not be running: a reasonable decision given his high rejection rates among voters (Fig.03).
Fig. 03. In the celebration of the victory of Alberto Fernández, a man holds the poster: “Damn Macri. Your surname will be cursed and disowned for all eternity. The people will judge you”. December 10, 2019. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photographer: Menara Guizardi.
However, Macri started an erratic negotiation with possible successors; Patricia Bullrich, representative of the extreme right, and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, current head of government of the city of Buenos Aires and representative of a “moderate” right. The fights, cross-accusations, and scandals, were widely reported in the press and led to voter exhaustion for this bloc too.
In the last three months, social suffering has reached new heights. The country is on the verge of a new hyperinflationary shock: it is a train at high speed with no brakes and on a collision course. Pre-electoral polls and focus groups began to point out (especially since June) that Javier Milei (see Focaalblog, https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/05/11/pablo-seman-and-ariel-wilkis-rebellion-of-the-bastards-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right-in-argentina/), an extreme-right candidate running outside the two coalitions that flank the “grieta”, was going to win the most votes in the preliminaries (with obligatory public participation). It is not just an “angry” vote: its thrust is multi-dimensional in terms of political sensitivities. As in Brazil and Chile, people want to believe something different can be possible. There is faith, hope, and the desire to believe in the irrational or improbable. Because everything probable and expected turns out to be too painful, unbearable, and unfair.
On Sunday, August 13, the announcement of the results revealed that La Libertad Avanza [Liberty Advances], Milei’s party, won the most votes (30.1% of the votes), followed by Juntos por el Cambio (28.25%) and Unión por la Patria (27.15%). Milei won by a large margin in districts such as Córdoba, Santa Fe, and Mendoza and a comfortable margin in 16 provinces (Tucumán, Chubut, Jujuy, La Pampa, La Rioja, Misiones, Neuquén, Río Negro, Salta, San Juan, San Luis, Santa Cruz, and Tierra del Fuego). Recent polls for the first round put him in the lead in October’s elections. A victory for Milei would mean a much more serious social and institutional destruction of Argentina than the one Bolsonaro imposed on Brazil. Argentina starts from a much weaker position and Milei’s ultra-neoliberal proposals are much more virulent and aggressive than those of Bolsonaro.
After the PASO results on Monday August 14 Argentina plunged into another exchange rate slide. The government signed an update of the IMF agreement and further devalued the currency. In the working-class neighborhoods of southern Buenos Aires, businesses kept their doors shut until noon. It was impossible to foresee how prices would evolve. At the door of a closed supermarket, a retired woman, unable to buy bread, said in tears, “they all need to go away…”
Menara Guizardi is Adjunct Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET) and an External Researcher at the University of Tarapacá, Chile.
References
Kalb, D. (2023a). Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North. Journal of Agrarian Change, 23(1), 204-219.
Kalb, D. (2023b). Two theories of money: on the historical anthropology of the state-finance nexus. Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, no. 95: 92-112
Merenson, S., Sánchez, L., & Guizardi, G. (2022). Imágenes paganas: Recurrencias, emergencias y autoidentificaciones de clase en un barrio ferroviario del conurbano bonaerense (2019-2021). Etnografías Contemporáneas, 8(15).
Cite as: Guizardi, Menara 2023 “Notes on the Political Capitalization of Anguish and Hope in Argentina (and the American Southern-Cone)” Focaalblog 24 August. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/08/24/menara-guizardi-notes-on-the-political-capitalization-of-anguish-and-hope-in-argentina-and-the-american-southern-cone
On 1 July 2021, 148 years after slavery ended in the Dutch West Indian colonies, Femke Halsema, the Mayor of Amsterdam, said: ‘For the active involvement of the Amsterdam City Council in the commercial system of colonial slavery and the global trade in enslaved people I, on behalf of the College of Mayors and Aldermen, apologize.’ Halsema was followed by the College of Mayors and Aldermen of Rotterdam (10 November 2021), Mayor Sharon Dijksma (Utrecht, 23 February 2022), Mayor Van Zanen (The Hague, 20 November 2022), and last but not least, Prime Minister Mark Rutte (19 December 2022). It is expected that King Willem Alexander will offer his apologies for the involvement of his family, the Oranje-Nassaus, in the slave trade in the Atlantic and Asia on this year’s (2023) abolition day (Keti Koti). Why, many wondered, should we apologize for slavery? It is so long ago, we are not guilty of it.
Memory politics
Before I get to the ‘why’ question, perhaps let me start with the question: why now? For many, the series of apologies may have come as a surprise. All of a sudden and out of nowhere, they may have thought, we need to apologize for something that has happened long ago and that has never been an issue before. Why should we make a point of it now? Although slavery has never before received as much public attention as it does now, the commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands is not new. In fact, that commemoration has had its own dynamic, and has changed in terms of the political message it carries. Already in the 1950s, African Surinamese students in the Netherlands celebrated Keti Koti, Abolition Day on July 1. In 1963 there was even a public manifestation in Amsterdam. More than ten years before Surinamese independence (1975), students in particular mobilized the commemoration in a framework of Surinamese nation-building. ‘Fri moe de’ (free we must be), in that sense, was not only a reminder of abolition, but also a claim to end colonial rule.
Image 1: Detail of the National Slavery Memorial, Oosterpark Amsterdam, 2009. Photo by the author.
The commemorations continued after independence, but for the main part remained private. That began to change in 1993, when a group of African Surinamese organized a public commemoration of ‘the shared history of the Netherlands and its colonies’ on Surinameplein in Amsterdam. That commemoration was meticulously modeled after the national memorial day on Dam square on May 4, commemorating the fallen in the war. Mirroring the national Committee 4/5 May, the group called itself the Committee 30 June/1 July. Like the Dam ceremony, the Surinameplein event also includes two minutes of silence at 8pm, the singing of the Dutch, Surinamese and Antillean anthems, and a performance by a child. Now, slavery had come to carry a different political message: no longer a plea for independence, but a claim for citizenship. Whereas many Surinamese in the 1970s had come to the Netherlands with the idea of returning to an independent and flourishing nation, political events in the 1980s (a coup d’état, civil war, and economic downturn) shattered these dreams. The 1980s therefore saw a re-orientation towards the Netherlands, stemming from a realization that the Netherlands would have to be a home for the foreseeable future. As a consequence, slavery was now re-framed as a claim to citizenship – hence the emphasis on a ‘shared’ history. Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s dictum: ‘we are here because you were there’ gained popularity. Their manifesto of 2002 also included demands about pensions, education, residency, radio and TV broadcasting licences, and health insurance. These demands, although they had been made throughout the 1990s, reached ever larger audiences after the unveiling of the national slavery memorial in Oosterpark, Amsterdam. This ceremony is usually attended by high-ranking representatives of the state, including the mayor, ministers, the Prime Minister, and the King.
Recent commemorations are increasingly embraced by young people of African-Surinamese descent (and to a lesser extent people of African Antillean descent), born in the Netherlands and exposed to racism in education, the housing sector, or work. They articulate slavery as a historical responsibility of the Dutch state and society at large.
What is changing now, is that slavery is less and less presented as a ‘Surinamese’ or ‘Antillean’ thing, but as something that concerns Dutch society as such. More and more, white Dutch citizens come to the realization that commemorating slavery is not only about someone else’s pain (although clearly that is also important), but that it concerns Dutch society as a whole. Now, one might argue that there are many ways of taking responsibility for that past. Why apologies? Why that particular form?
Apologies
In fact, apologies are notoriously difficult, especially when they concern collectives. As Michel Rolph Trouillot (2000) argued, in order for apologies to work one must establish the identity, or the self-sameness of two fundamentally different entities: a collective in the present and a collective in the past. One must show that the collective perpetrating an act is actually the same as the one apologizing – an impossible task according to Trouillot. Indeed, it is easy to dismiss this, as for instance the populist politician Pim Fortuyn has done: those who suffer from traumas should visit the psychiatrist, instead of sitting at a negotiating table, he wrote in 2002. Apologies may even be the flipside of this kind of right wing populism. Take, for instance, Rita Verdonk, who upon launching her political movement ‘Proud of the Netherlands’ (Trots op Nederland) in 2007, exclaimed that the Netherlands had been a hospitable country for centuries, and that it is not in the Dutch nature to discriminate. Verdonk imagines a nation characterized by unwavering goodness, a kind of völkische idea of an essentialized people characteristic for populist ideology.
In legal terms apologies are less of an issue. The present Dutch government and city councils are the legal successors of historical governments. This is why many apologies have been made by sitting governments on behalf of their predecessors. Think, for instance of Willy Brandt’s famous ‘Warsaw genuflection’, a gesture of both commemoration and apology in the context of the 1943 uprising in the Wasaw Ghetto (which at the time only 41 per cent of West Germans approved of).
Abortive rituals?
Nevertheless, Trouillot argues that apologies should be seen as ‘abortive rituals’: ‘collective apologies are meant not to succeed – not because of the possible hypocrisy of some of the actors but because their very conditions of emergence deny the possibility of a transformation’ (Trouillot 2000, 185). I’m not sure I agree with Trouillot that apologies are necessarily ‘abortive’. I do recognize the danger of essentializing collectives, and indeed, the slavery debate in places like the Netherlands does generate presumably clear cut identities of blackness and whiteness, victim and perpetrator, oppressor and oppressed. Looked at ethnographically, the picture becomes much more complex. Relations between African Surinamese and Ghanaians, for example, can sometimes be as tense, if not more, as those between African Surinamese and white Dutch; African Surinamese in Suriname think and feel differently about slavery compared to African Surinamese in the Netherlands; political outlook can be more important than racial-ethnic identification as black or white, and so on.
However, as an anthropologist I do not want to dismiss the power of rituals so easily. Trouillot argued that collective apologies are rituals that have a demonstrative and a transformative dimension. The goal of a ritual in general is to transform a person or collective from one state to another. Rituals of collective apology, according to Trouillot, fail to achieve such a transformation because these rituals rely not on transformation but on durable identities. My sense is that Trouillot was too quick to dismiss apologies purely based on their structural premises. It remains interesting to ask how such rituals may work in practice.
Collective rituals, to speak with Benedict Anderson, are also a space to imagine oneself. Collectives, one might say, do not exist outside of, or prior to these rituals, but they emerge out of these rituals in the first place. This means that collective rituals also present opportunities to imagine a collective subject in a new way. This is precisely what has been happening around the issue of slavery in places like the Netherlands in the past two decades.
Image 2: Winti priestess Marian Markelo pouring libation to the ancestors at the National Slavery Memorial, 2010. Photo by the author
Two examples may show this. The first is from the year 2006. During the Algemene Beschouwingen, a parliamentary debate about the government’s plans for the coming period, then Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, a Christian Democrat, said in reply to the critique by Femke Halsema, then a member of the oppositionof the GreenLeft: ‘I don’t know why you are being so negative and annoying about this. … Let’s be happy together! Let’s be optimistic! Let us say: Once more, The Netherlands can do it! This VOC-mentality, looking past borders, dynamism! Right?!’ By ‘VOC mentality’ he referred to what he perceived as the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit as embodied in the Verenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (United East India Company), a mindset that supposedly had made The Netherlands a great economic and political power in the world. Like Verdonk, he cherished Dutch colonialism.
Although Mark Rutte, from a liberal party that has similarly been proud of Dutch imperial history, has long argued that you that you cannot hold people in the present responsible for what happened in the past, he now imagines the nation differently. In his apology speech, he said: ‘We, living in the here and now, can only recognize and condemn slavery in the clearest terms as a crime against humanity. … And we in the Netherlands must face our share in that past. … [The national archives are] the place for national examination of conscience.’ It was a rare moment of vision for this Prime Minister – a liberal to the bone – who has notoriously claimed that those who want vision should visit a doctor.
So, have these apologies been transformative? There are many who did not think so, especially because after years of rejection and hesitation, they came very suddenly, without consultation of societal partners, and deliberately on a date without any ritual significance in any of the countries involved. Nevertheless, many agree that it was a moment in which the Prime Minister showed unexpected statesmanship. In spite of considerable societal backlash, he chose to imagine the Netherlands differently, turning away from the classic nationalist narrative of a glorious imperial past to a certain humility, mindfulness, and care. It remains to be seen whether the cabinet will not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk, but it is possible that an important step has been made in the process of re-imagining the Netherlands.
Markus Balkenhol is a social anthropologist at the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam. He specializes on colonialism, race, citizenship, cultural heritage and religion. His 2021 book Tracing Slavery: The Politics of Atlantic Memory in the Netherlands is published by Berghahn Books.
References
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2000. “Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era.” Interventions 2 (2): 171–86.
Cite as: Balkenhol, Markus 2023 “Apologizing for slavery: notes on a Dutch surprise” Focaalblog 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/06/28/markus-balkenhol-apologizing-for-slavery-notes-on-a-dutch-surprise/
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