The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Who else but that excited philosopher and psychoanalyst, Slavoj Zizek, can make the wild argument that in actuality Mahatma Gandhi committed more violence in the world than Adolf Hitler.
How in the world of the living can the saintly Ghandi have sinned more than the luciferic perpetrator of the holocaust. It is an outlandish argument that can easily be expelled from the family of reasonable thoughts and be dismissed from the comity of important ideas even. I argue here that behind the sheer insanity of the argument lies an important observation and one on which the world can rely. For all its craziness that borders on true lunacy, the argument is as important as is it is old and enduring.
In many different ways, liberation theologians of the long Sixteenth Century who confronted Empire and resisted the enslavement and colonisation of natives of the Global South were making this argument.
The likes of Bartolome de Las Casas, the “Protector of the Indians” and Filipe Guaman Poma De Ayala, did not only denounce the conquest of native Americans but also pointed out that those that were being defeated and dominated were equal citizens of the planet whose souls were contracted to the Creator of the Universe.
The decoloniality and philosophy of liberation of today still buries its roots and derives its oxygen from the courage and wisdom of ancient liberation theologians and humanists that risked their lives and challenged conquerors and Empire builders on behalf of humanity.
The wisdom and courage of choosing peace and humility where war has been turned into common sense entails the powerful violence that Slavoj Zizek commends Mahatma Gandhi for. Martin Luther King Junior called it “moral force” in that it is the courage and power to confront war with truth and aggressive peace.
A peaceable, ethical and truthful approach to politics and justice in a war-drunk place is a form of violence in that it is a force that wants to cause rupture and radical change for the better in a troubled and troubling world such as ours that is led by the Euro-American Empire.
Coming after the disastrous and war-crazed presidency of George Bush Junior in the USA, Barack Obama gave the entire world a reason for optimism when he popularised as a slogan the maxim and aphorism of the “audacity of hope.” In the true violence of Mahatma Gandhi and other non-violent politicians and humanists real politics and ethical leadership under the sun is that which derives its spirit and bases its vision and agenda in the preservation of human life and the peace and order of the world.
Peace and hope are themselves violent and radical when they are audacious enough to confront a violent world. The unarmed prophets and pacifist philosophers that have called for radical peace in the midst of war have met violent deaths in the most because their gospel and wisdom in its forceful truth are themselves a kind of moral force and ethical violence.
As political messiahs, the unarmed prophets and philosophers of liberation, have severally been crucified in a world where peace is criminalised and war is profitable.
A universe of war
From Heraclitus of Ephesus in the ancient world to Carl Von Clausewitz and presently Henry Kissinger, some of the most admired heroes of the mind in the western world are minds of war and prophets of conquest and human destruction, for cash or for cause. It is for that reason that the leading philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel of Argentina described the present Euro-American world order as an order and system of war, a cold one for those who make the war and a hot one for those who fight the war and those who suffer from it.
For the same reason, it is one of the baptismal truths and arguments of decoloniality that the present world is in this condition of disrepair and misery for the majority because of a consuming political paradigm of war that has been made into a ruling idea of the world. Politically and historically, the logic of Europe and that of America in the present world is in truth a logic of war.
Thinkers of the Global South such as Yash Tandon have expanded the decolonial understanding of war to include not only military wars but also economic and social wars. Tandon has forcefully argued that Euro-American economic and trade policies and regulations in the world are a catastrophic war upon the developing world.
The many poor countries and populations of the Global South are conquered, dominated and exploited to death by use of world economic and trade regulations that effectively favour the enslavers and colonisers in the West.
The much lauded technologisation and modernisation of the world under capitalism is not in so many words a globalisation of poverty and death where powerful minorities eat on behalf the powerless minorities of the world.
The distribution and circulation of life giving resources is done in the war-like and violent capitalist logic where many die so that few can live. In such a world as this, the manufacture, selling and buying of weapons of war has become such a big global industry and wars themselves a huge opportunity for trade and commerce.
The production of capitalist economic ideas that perpetuate the criminal status quo has become another thriving industry, the production of weapons of mass destruction is effectively accompanied by the production of ideological weapons of mass deception and control.
Fake news, propaganda and alternative facts that have flourished under the Donald Trump-led Euro-American Empire are not divorced from the proliferation of killer drones and nuclear bombs.
In this kind of world, human life has been cheapened and human beings have been turned into objects and things, raw materials and by-products of history in a violent military and capitalist world.
The world order and system that mete out this violence do not only use hard power to do so but also deploys soft power in the form of gestures of aid, philanthropy and donations which when carefully looked at are nothing more than another form of violence and domination of the rest by the West.
Domination and control of the Global South by the Global North through the use of aid and donations is still domination and a large arm of coloniality.
Why decoloniality?
In this world system and world order violence becomes naturalised and therefore normalised. It is a world that cries out for revolutions and radical change.
Empire because of its power and violence, even if it wishes, is incapable of being revolutionary. Dominators, oppressors and exploiters of others cannot, even by a miracle, become revolutionary. Revolution is the opportunity and province of the oppressed who have the power, in their being oppressed, to free themselves and also free the oppressors that are jailed in their own world of being evil dominators and exploiters.
Decoloniality is therefore a true philosophy of liberation in that it rejects fundamentalism, it opposes the idea that once the oppressed are free they can use their freedom and power to oppress the former oppressor and practice revenge.
Emanating from the ruminations of ancient liberation theologians and present philosophers of liberation is what Enrique Dussel is circulating as the “politics of liberation” and “ethics of liberation” that understand politics to be the art of liberation and re-humanisation of both the oppressors and the oppressed of this world.
Decoloniality rejects the idea of one world and one people, where the powerful want everyone under their power to be like them, to tow their line and obey their regulation. Decoloniality, in the wise words of Arturo Escobar, demands a pluriversal world in which other worlds are possible, where there is no one fundamental political truth but many truths that exist in exchange and creative friction.
The decolonial world is a world of radical peaceful violence where coexistence and co-habitation in space and in land are aggressively and morally protected from the infectious paradigm of war that seems to have effectively overtaken the whole world in the present.
Never before has the necessity of violent peace and aggressive morality been needed in world politics. World War III is not a future risk but a painful reality for the victims of the present world order and system of coloniality that is disguised as modernity.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria: [email protected]
