The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
One of the tragic errors of our present age is the misguided belief that we live in the era of discoveries and inventions.
If truth be told, our age is the true age of the old and the tired truths. Nothing is new in world history and politics, we are simply experiencing repetitions of the old past that came earlier as tragedy and presently revisits us as a true farce that Karl Marx observed.
What the historical dispensation and political regime of Donald Trump has popularised as fake news and alternative facts is really nothing new but good old propaganda and falsification of history for political expediency and historical opportunism.
Absolutely nothing is post-truth about the present world system, we are simply living through the age of technologised propaganda and enhanced manufacture of political consent. As early as 1949, George Orwell published his classic, Nineteen Eighty Four, a novel that narrativised how states and political regimes in the world daily change history and manipulate truths to suit their political agendas.
What is meant by mediation in reference to how the media process and circulate information has come to mean the way in which the information industries have perfected the arts and sciences of doctoring the truth and manipulating history.
Manipulating the truth and twisting historical facts to justify evil and suit the ends of power has become the true science of modern politics.
Disillusioned by a civilisation that he so belonged to and believed in, Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant pleaded with Europe for the “public use of reason” in search of “perpetual peace” in the world.
Kant described Europe as a society that was trapped in a state of natural war and that urgently needed to mature to a state of peace that was guided by political morality. In the reasoning of Immanuel Kant, the love for money, availability of superior weapons, immoral political thinking and bad friends led European peoples and states to circumstances that naturalised brutish violence and war.
Kant was not the only European or Western thinker to condemn Europe for naturalising violence and normalising war. Besides the few European and American philosophers who condemned western violence and warlike nature, Africans, Latin Americans and Asians were to experience and observe the evil of Europe in historical progressions of slavery, colonialism and imperialism that Empire was to visit upon them. Conveniently and artfully, the name of the anti-Christ that Euro-America gave to communism in the 20th century it has given the same label to Islam in the 21st century, while its own evil is given other names and explained in other terms.
Terror by another Name
They have been called conspiracy theorists and enemies of the Western civilisation those scholars and journalists that have observed that the first terrorism was actually in the way the Euro-American Empire enslaved and colonised its others.
To argue that such evil systems as apartheid in South Africa and Zionism in Palestine are actually systems of terror is to lend oneself to judgements as a conspiracy theorist and a lunatic leftist fundamentalist. Terror is not terror unless it is committed by certain peoples that have naturally been marked as terrorists even before they have committed terrorist acts.
Stephen Craig Paddock is a 64-year-old white Christian American man who killed 59 people and injured 527 others on 1 October in the Las Vegas part of the United States of America. The gentleman booked himself into the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay Hotel a good three days before the attack.
On the chosen Sunday night he pointed two guns from two different windows of his room into a crowd of 22 000 country music lovers and revellers across the road and he discharged death. The real estate investor, trained accountant and infamous gambler about town was a regular man who lived a rather uneventful life until the day he became a mass murderer responsible for probably the worst gun attack in the history of the United States of America. Ordinarily what Paddock did would be called terrorism, the use of violence to terrify the public and to send a political or social message to enemies. Led by Donald Trump himself and magnified by the Euro-American global media, the world is frantically looking for another name to describe the actions of Stephen Paddock. Paddock has been called sick, Trump himself called him evil. No one has called him a terrorist.
Terrorists are supposed to be Asian or African and they are not Christians by religious faith. The violence of white Christian men is called by another name and not terrorism. White Christian murderers are either seek or, like Stephen Paddock “lone wolf” evil men that are not representative of any community. Stephen Paddock’s family members have been publicly quoted expressing their shock and disgust at what one of their own has done, his actions are described as atypical and unlike the good white Christian that he has always been.
In other words, it is a political habit of the Euro-American system to blame its terrorism on deranged individuals or give it another name, and justify it as a just war or humanitarian military intervention. The violence of Asians, Muslims and Africans is called terrorism and religious fundamentalism and is blamed on a collective of people that are described as primitive and naturally evil and given to acts of barbarism. The war crimes, crimes against humanity and terrorism of such Western leaders as George Bush and Tony Blair are blamed on their bad characters and not on the evil societies and systems that produced them.
Structural and Systemic Violence
Terrorism has over centuries become a political language and social system. It has achieved the status of a political paradigm of violence and war. A world historical structure and economic system has emerged that believes in and enacts the elimination of those that are candidates for hate and that are considered enemies.
In his argument for “perpetual peace” Immanuel Kant pleaded for a kind of politics in the world where even an enemy can be trusted to fight but still preserve opportunities for future peace. Political assassinations, massacres and genocides were described by Kant as political evils that endangered perpetual peace and made chances of future peace non-existent. Euro-America, in greed and delusions of military might and economic superiority turned violence and the elimination of enemies into the oxygen of history. Thanks to the Euro-American Empire, violence and war have become the driver of world history and world history has become a history of wars. Terrorism as a form of violence and war has become a historical structure and a political system in the entire world.
The first step towards war is the description of opponents and enemies as evil. Those that are different in culture and religion and that pursue an alternative economic system, that do not endorse capitalism are mediated and represented as the anti-Christ and the enemies of civilisation, candidates for annihilation. When violence has become structural and systemic it becomes a political religion that individuals and organisations can deploy anytime in pursuit of political and social goals. World politics as practiced by states, parties and individuals has become infected with terror and war.
Terrorism and the war against it have all become embroiled in the practice of terror and mass murder of those that have been named as enemies.
Individuals such as Stephen Paddock, organisations such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levan, the Islamic State of Syria and others are no longer the disease of the world but the symptoms of a diseased world that has naturalised war. In varying but still toxic levels, terror exists as a structural and political system in world political organisations.
In its philosophical gesture against war and against violence decoloniality inherits the legacy of liberation theologians and philosophers of liberation throughout the centuries that have confronted Empire and defended political morality and moral politics. The present political languages of human rights, democracy, development and civilisation are just propaganda that is used to mask the global structural and systemic political propensity to war in the world. To fight for freedom and for humanity today is to fight cultures and systems of political violence wherever they are found.
-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria, South Africa: [email protected]
