On Violence

Okay so I already broke my promise/pledge to write once a week on this blog about my musings over classes this semester. Then again, I was too busy last week reading about what was going on in Egypt to take time to write a blog post about it. Had I, in fact, written last week it would have been about the connections between the Egyptian uprising and a book I was reading for Post-colonialism called "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson. The connection was in the phenomenon of a group of disparate and disconnected people becoming a community through shared access and contribution to mass media. The book was talking about the advent of print capitalism in the early formations of language vernaculars and nationhood in Europe. And I'm already getting ahead of myself.... perhaps I'll keep it for a later post this semester.

THIS week, we talked primarily about Frantz Fannon and his seminal work on French colonial Algeria, "The Wretched of the Earth." It's interesting not only from a theoretical, political, or development perspective but also from that of a literary perspective. His writing style is quite unique as an interesting combination of structured argumentation and a stream-of-consciousness sort of voice. His basic premise, at least in the first half of the book, is on the devastating violence that comes as a part of colonial regimes, offering the French occupation of Algeria as an example. He describes the coercive effects of violence through both the colonization and decolonization process, the latter being perpetuated by the colonized as a result of having been a victim of it for so long at the hands of the colonizer. And we're not just talking about physical violence either. A significant component of colonial and postcolonial violence is non-physical - what you could consider "humanistic violence" in that the colonized is not treated with basic human decency, is essentially de-humanized by the rhetoric and treatment at the hands of the colonizers. My main concern, however, is not with the nature of this violence. The parting question of the class, one we unfortunately only had 10 minutes to discuss as a group, was the necessity and nature of reparation. What responsibility does the colonizer have to offer reparation, compensation, remuneration for the impact they have made on the colonized? This obviously assumes that the colonizer has, in fact, left a mark on the societies they have colonized. There's no question in that. There's also no value judgment as to the positive or negative nature of that colonial footprint. Colonial rhetoric, and development rhetoric which carries a colonial legacy, would say that these former colonies gained something quite significant, which is that they are now "more developed" as a result of being colonized. Does that atone for all of the wrong-doings, unnecessary death and destruction, and residual conflict-ridden political and cultural systems that remain in many former colonies? And if it doesn't, then what does? Historically speaking, the idea of offering remuneration for wrong-doings is set in the context of war for the most part. The idea that a country had somehow "done wrong" to another country (or countries) and was therefore responsible for atoning those wrongs through monetary and other types of resources was born mostly of the 1st and 2nd world wars. This was after our world political system had reached an age and maturity where countries could be held responsible for actions in the way one man might do so to another. Now in the age of decolonization, we can come to hold one country accountable for their wrong-doings to other countries which they had formerly colonized. But can you truly monetize, quantify, or calculate the impact that a colonizer had on the de-colonized? To do so would automatically entail value judgements on the nature of progress of a nation. It would also fail to take into consideration the compounding effects of the developmental path the de-colonized country has taken since the point of departure. The impact that the colonizer had on the de-colonized is irreversible and often regrettable, but it has made the de-colonized who they are today and there is absolutely no possible way to compare that against whatever it is they might have been in order to judge the extent of damage for which the colonizer should henceforth offer retribution. Much like our own situation in the US, while not a story of colonization or decolonization, Black America is what it is today as a result of an irreversible historical event. Should we acknowledge that people were disenfranchised, taken advantage, dehumanized, exploited, and all other things terrible and wrong during the process? Yes, absolutely. But to pretend that there is some quantifiable way to offer compensation for what has taken place since the first African was brought to American shores is not only fantastical, it's insulting. And so goes the argument for atonement of the colonial legacy.

Unfortunately, a common argument and underlying rationale for the providing of funds to developing countries by various Western institutions is that we owe it to them as a result of our negligence and malfeasance during the last 200+ years of world history. While history is hard to ignore, there must be better, more compassionate, more humanistic reasons to invest in the betterment of other nations. It is this point exactly,and the extent to which it intersects with the questions posed in this post, which is at the crux of the philosophy of my field, that of "international development."