The Nature of Violence vs the Violence of Nature

Hamas invaded Israel recently. It wasn’t pretty. It sparked the usual debates, the usual diatribe - whose land is whose, who is the crueler, who the more just. These are boring conversations, much like snorkelling in a muddy river.

What was more interesting to me, was the discussions over the nature of violence, vitalism, and decolonisation, and the nature of violence itself.

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Many compare Israel to South Africa, and indeed there are many parallels, which have not escaped us, on either side of the colour line. Even the most hard-bitten Israeli nationalist should be able to see the parallels at the descriptive level, even if the moral implications are impossible to swallow.

And as it turns out, most black South Africans on twitter are on the side of Palestine, thoroughly enjoying the parade of raped and mutilated corpses, and most South African minorities are clapping for the aerial bombing raids, scorning the human-shield practices. This has been the way since the old apartheid days.

But whether one has moral qualms about certain actions or not, the discourse is mostly silly posturing - it isn’t our fight. At the objective level, it matters to Jews, because they need a place to call home to feel secure in the long term. It matters to Muslims, because of the sacred sites and to the Palestinians because they too need a home. They are both locked in.

I somewhat favour Israel, personally, but they ought to be ready to admit that creating and preserving their homeland has, and always will, require violence and dispossession. They must also be willing to accept that Palestinian insurrections are a part of the cost, and how they choose to deal with this problem is a matter for the balance of forces they are faced with.

Unfortunately, some conflicts are necessary, and existential. And what makes them existential are rather simply an absence of clear territorial distinction, an absence of clear ethnic commonality, and an absence of common collective values and interests. This has been remarked on since time immemorial.

This puts Northern Ireland, Rwanda & Burundi, the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Israel/Palestine, Kashmir, and soon the entire West, in the same category. When and how to act as a party to these disputes is an eternal problem, often decided by factors outside of conscious control.

What neither side appears to have managed to internalise is a factual recognition of the nature of this violence. I will not get into the history of this conflict, because it is dull and convoluted. But my image of the nature of the conflict is relatively clear - for Israel, the only way to secure long term peace and security is to attain full control of the whole Mandate of Palestine uncontested. For the Palestinians, the same.

Each has a goal implied by real political circumstance (indicated in explicit policy by Hamas) of eradicating the other from the contested territory. For Hamas, this can be demonstrated by simply reading their own charter and public comments. For Israel, it is simply observable that it could never survive political integration with the Palestinian territories, because they would be outnumbered by people who want them dead (hence no one-state solution); it is equally observable that no Knesset coalition could politically survive removing their own people from the occupied territories on the West Bank, nor abandoning them to an Arab-nationalist authority (no two-state solution).

For Russia and Ukraine, a similar logic applies - Russia has a right to prevent American encroachement, Ukraine has a right to defend themselves from Russian invasion. Moralising about which side are bigger nazis in either conflict seems rather stupid to me.

Israel and Palestine are locked into a slow-burning existential conflict, from which neither can back down until all is over and the victor is declared for all time.

With mass immigration, many on the right have realised that there will be a need for some ugliness, and perhaps a great deal of violence to re-establish a secure future for Western nations in the wake of mass immigration; left too late, one risks a situation like the Ivorian Civil War. There may still be time to solve the problem without slaughter, but that window is narrowing, and everybody knows it very well.

And this problem mirrors that of decolonisation, a subject and a discourse with which I am unfortunately rather familiar. Decolonisation involves mass ethnic cleansing, and almost everyone who is acquainted with the literature is well aware of this. The dissident right have a similar view of the US-imperial immigration policy imposed on its Western satrapies since their conquest at the end of WWII.

Many of these right-wing posters on twitter have recently encountered the strange suicidal hypnosis of the left in a form they were completely unfamiliar with. While most would imagine the left as mere hypocrites, many are capable of taking the suicidal consequences of the ideas they espouse to their logical conclusion, in a way that is deeply unsettling:

But I encountered this for the first time at the University of Cape Town, at the height of the Rhodes/FeesMustFall movement in 2015, and when one engages in patient but blunt conversation with people, you will eventually winkle out their true opinions on the values they hold. Invariably, black students of the movement would either endorse genocide or attribute it to an unstoppable force of nature beyond their control, and some white students, most of them girls, could be induced to endorse the same, with a few managing to deny that it could ever “happen here”, therefore making such calls to genocide socially acceptable.

The Palestinians around the world calling for the genocide of all Jews has been met with little criticism or resistance from those within their ethnic group, and not much from black South Africans, who largely endorse the Gazan invasion of southern Israel, and condemn the military response.

It’s all fantasy and posturing.

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The distinction between what is necessary and what is emotionally satisfying is where the rubber hits the road, and it is easy to indulge one’s wrath from a position of comfort or in the heat of the moment.

The dissident right were disappointing - engaging in moralistic pearl-clutching at the actions of Hamas as if this isn’t the eternal way of war, after years posting about emulating a violent bronze age conqueror’s mindset. Sure, there has always been a higher ethos of chivalric conduct to which the civilised aspire, but it is a code honoured more in the breach. Reading Thucydides (or for that matter, any history of conquest) should disabuse one of any unvarnished romance.

The truth is that this is as natural a violent act as any territorial dispute between ethnic groups, as the depressing cleansing of Armenians from Karabakh displayed only a few weeks ago.

Natural urges often carry people to bloodlust, but even then, they are so bound by the primal calculations of bodily vulnerability, that in the tempest of that hormonal flux, they still do not explode and kill until a large number of their own kind, similarly energised, present themselves for combat with the same target.

Like young chimpanzees patrolling territorial borders, Ulster men parading through Catholic neighbourhoods, or EFF thugs marching on white highs schools, the preparatory excercises for confrontation test the consciousness of vulnerability.

It is only through organisation or derangement that this instinct to self-preservation can be overridden, and so those who wish to kill excercise great efforts at steering the thinking of leaders and influential people in the direction of homicide.

But these people who resort to intellectual means for valorising violence forget something - the knives are not always out, nor can they afford to be - many months, even years can go by without a major flare-up, even in the hottest zones of territorial contest. Animals in the wild, and political communities in society do not simply attack at any moment. There is a constant testing of boundaries, managing of peace and war, escalation and de-escalation - conflict is costly, and to be avoided unless necessary.

The best illustration of this blindness to the limiting factor of self-preservation is Franz Fanon. Fanon has now become a trending topic on twitter, over this very issue. He is seldom criticised, and much lauded by the left, who have taken it up in great number to explain to the public that Hamas marching in and slaughtering women, children and pensioners, and parading the stripped and raped corpses of young girls is decolonial praxis.

There are many who deny this, or try to push back to maintain their respectability, but it stands in black and white that decolonisation is ultimately about killing, and I have written about how decolonial intellectuals use Fanon’s ideas before on this blog.

From The Wretched of the Earth:

The only real critique I have ever seen from a leftist is that of BK Jha, an Indian marxist: https://sci-hub.ee/10.2307/41855881…

But I think there are aspects of this that hold true.

Nature, in man and nature-beyond-man, is violent. Law excercises itself by violence, as any libertarian will tell you, and Olof Wikström and Donald Black’s investigations into ordinary criminal violence show a link between all forms of violence - Clausewitz’s theory writ small - that we are violent in order to assert a pattern of behaviour we see as right.

And by dragging others into our views on the matter, organised violence *does* consolidate political communities, even and especially in genocide. It binds all in complicity. As Phillip Gourevitch put it after covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, “genocide, after all, is a community-building activity.”

Besides, conclusive defeat tends to have a pacifying effect on one's enemy, and an incomplete victory leads only to repeated flare-ups until separate and secure resources and territorial control are unambiguously settled.

I think Fanon's own writings offer a good clue here, for what a diseased and stupid exercise of violence can be - his psychiatric notes provide a few clear examples of people who have engaged in terrorism or racial vengeance, only for it to torment them. Killings motivated by resentment and revenge fester long after the act, and continue to mutilate the soul long afterwards (from BK Jha’s essay):

But an unambiguous act of self-defence does not cause this festering guilt, nor does the use of a calculated and pragmatically limited deterrent. Murder motivated by pure greed and sadism seldom causes guilt or remorse, but they become monsters who cannot be accepted into society - avatars of Cain who feel no guilt, but must always bear shame.

What makes Fanon uniquely wrong is that the whole nature of decolonisation has almost universally imbued its inheritors with a insatiable burning resentment, and the violence has sealed it with a pact of blood. Every man is transformed into one of Fanons's psychiatric case studies.

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It is hard to let go of one’s attachments and to admit that violence is part of nature, and nature-in-man. Joseph de Maistre illustrated the first point on Nature rather beautifully, that violence is an ineradicable part of the order of things:

“In the whole vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom. As soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom, you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die, and how many are killed. But from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A power of violence at once hidden and palpable … has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. Thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself. He kills to adorn himself, he kills in order to attack, and he kills in order to defend himself. He kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself. He kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him.

From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound ... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses ... And who in all of this will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man ... So it is accomplished ... the first law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”

But there is a missing element is the limiting factor of self-preservation. Harder still to realise that it has a proper form, to which morality often attempts to conform, a form which limits its application, and defines the difference between achieving ends by any means necessary, and by any means available.

Whether individual or collective, it is not served by seeking violence without end, or for its own sake, or for even the sake of revenge, but to use it only to the extent necessary to preserve oneself/ves, whether in the short term or the long.

While greedy violence can be limited by deterrents, the self-preserving impulse can only be truly perverted by revenge - when Achilles defeated Hector, his lust for vengeance was not sated until he could find pity, and his desire for retribution cost the lives of his men, and his own soul, and deepened his own anguish. A lesser warrior would tear himself to pieces for no greater gain.

A kamikazi pilot may at the very least be able to say that his zeal carves a path for his brothers, but Achilles’s story was told precisely as a cautionary tale - his redemption comes in the form of pity, by allowing Priam to bury his son, to honour the dead, even if one knows one must kill them.

When one sees Palestinians dragging the corpses of Israel’s sons and daughters about, one sees the consequences of a fight that cannot be settled. We see it here in South Africa with the desacration of graves, renaming of monuments, salami-slicing of institutional quotas unto purification - the victory will never satisfy, because it was incomplete. One cannot go home from the front when the enemy still lives with you.

When the Palestinians video their excesses in combat, the footage serves a double aim - it humiliates the enemy by making them look weak and vulnerable, and it emboldens your own by making them look strong and victorious, impervious to moral sanction.

But no matter how long they drag the corpse of Hector behind their carts, they will find no peace until Troy is fallen and they can go home, or until they can draw a line in the sand and forget about what lies on the other side.

In the meantime, the monsters all parties make of themselves in these moments of excess, whether as self-hating white leftists, or resentful black nationalists, will poison their homes.

With apparently nothing to lose, revenge seems like an acceptance of sunken cost. But the loss of one’s children, however stoic the human-shield practitioners may attempt to make it, will never leave them.

Likewise, the refusal or failure to see an enemy for what it is, to pretend that one will not have to bleed today to breath tomorrow, is the clear result of habitual reliance on others to patrol the borders, and forgetting that the peaceful harmony of nature is an illusion concealing an overwhelming and collective murder.

None of this will ever go away - this is life.

And the truth of it is, war fought sanely accelerates the perfection of a society, not only technologically, but spiritually - the spilled blood that binds nations, from the post-war Western order and the Pax Mongolica to the dust-ups between football firms, permanently dyes the soul in the patterns in which it was spilled.

Men find meaning in war, even if they are not fighting, because every aspect of social life is galvanised with the spirit of existential struggle, from the mailman and the street sweeper to the sappers and the infantry front line - one common purpose.

If your fight is just, your society will know it, consciously or unconsciously, and the honourable or dishonourable nature of your means will shape you for generations to come.

Young men seeking escape from a crowded and chaotic society with little opportunity founded colonies in America which have maintained a certain mixture of arrogant pleasure-seeking and genuine adventurous wonder. Even England carried the seed of this spirit through the Saxon and Danish conquerors who begat them.

A virtuous conqueror will bind his conquests to a higher vision, his opposite will bind his comrades to his morbid fixation on the corpse of his enemy.

Nations founded on nothing more than vengeance and resentment have seen no such glories. When Hector’s corpse was run ragged, what great achievements did these shadows of Achilles achieve, who could not be done when their enemy was dead?

Haiti, Zimbabwe and Algeria will never taste the stars, and likely, neither will Palestine or Azania.