I don’t think it’s possible to separate this idea’s specific nature of appeal in the contemporary age from its modern roots as a latent fear in the West that there will come an inevitable day where the 500 years of genocide, settler-colonialism and imperialist butchery that they’ve commited will come back to roost. Most “peaceful” decolonialization movements in the 20th century were only permitted by the former Western colonial power because the new leaders at the top promised to turn the other cheek with regards to the collective trauma and destruction inflicted by the West.
India is the most notable example of this where the British promoted “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” Gandhi as the spiritual voice of the new Indian nation. There’s a self-serving calculus to why the West treats figures like Gandhi with such hyperbolic praise, even successfully shooing off pressures for assessing his anti-African racism during the brief 2020 moment of racial consciousness, where he’s one of the only post-colonial leaders the Western educational standard curriculum will ever cover in a positive light. He’s the poster boy of the West’s ideal attitude for what their formerly colonized should adopt.
The repressed collective retributive desires of the new South Asian nations in the post-colonial era, rather than disappearing, were then redirected from the target of Britain towards each other and their neighbours which has resulted in many conflicts since.
I always felt it was interesting from an intellectual sense how much that contemporary Western political philosophies and media loves to revisit the “retributive justice (“revenge”) is bad” trope. It wasn’t until I started learning about post-colonial movements - which ones succeed, which ones failed, who were the leaders feted by the West and which were the ones silenced (nearly always the communist groups) - that I begun to connect the dots. It’s no surprise that there was such an overreaction and fixation on the Oct 7th uprising by the West, when the oppressed ignored Gandhi and went for the eye, and why the West cared little for patient explanations of the history that led up to that moment.
This is not to say that the idea of “revenge is bad” should be inherently discredited, but the fixation upon this narrative as an article of faith and a philosophical mantra in the Western media, and collective consciousness in general, should be recognized. Its appropriation as a means to tautologically condemn (“revenge is bad because, well, revenge is bad”) any retributive justice character of decolonial movements is a way to invalidate and dismiss the history which led up to it through the inherent “ontological evil” nature of that retributive character itself. This process is both a historical and ongoing motif.
I don’t think it’s possible to separate this idea’s specific nature of appeal in the contemporary age from its modern roots as a latent fear in the West that there will come an inevitable day where the 500 years of genocide, settler-colonialism and imperialist butchery that they’ve commited will come back to roost. Most “peaceful” decolonialization movements in the 20th century were only permitted by the former Western colonial power because the new leaders at the top promised to turn the other cheek with regards to the collective trauma and destruction inflicted by the West.
India is the most notable example of this where the British promoted “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” Gandhi as the spiritual voice of the new Indian nation. There’s a self-serving calculus to why the West treats figures like Gandhi with such hyperbolic praise, even successfully shooing off pressures for assessing his anti-African racism during the brief 2020 moment of racial consciousness, where he’s one of the only post-colonial leaders the Western educational standard curriculum will ever cover in a positive light. He’s the poster boy of the West’s ideal attitude for what their formerly colonized should adopt.
The repressed collective retributive desires of the new South Asian nations in the post-colonial era, rather than disappearing, were then redirected from the target of Britain towards each other and their neighbours which has resulted in many conflicts since.
I always felt it was interesting from an intellectual sense how much that contemporary Western political philosophies and media loves to revisit the “retributive justice (“revenge”) is bad” trope. It wasn’t until I started learning about post-colonial movements - which ones succeed, which ones failed, who were the leaders feted by the West and which were the ones silenced (nearly always the communist groups) - that I begun to connect the dots. It’s no surprise that there was such an overreaction and fixation on the Oct 7th uprising by the West, when the oppressed ignored Gandhi and went for the eye, and why the West cared little for patient explanations of the history that led up to that moment.
This is not to say that the idea of “revenge is bad” should be inherently discredited, but the fixation upon this narrative as an article of faith and a philosophical mantra in the Western media, and collective consciousness in general, should be recognized. Its appropriation as a means to tautologically condemn (“revenge is bad because, well, revenge is bad”) any retributive justice character of decolonial movements is a way to invalidate and dismiss the history which led up to it through the inherent “ontological evil” nature of that retributive character itself. This process is both a historical and ongoing motif.
Banger of a post