Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Decolonization I 25
intelligentsia-likewise anathema for today's populist
right wing. But to transmute into fascism, a folk idea such
as Landauer portrayed would have to augment its integral
sense of connection to place and community with racial exceptionalism,
supremacism, and xenophobia, and moreover
to lure its nation back around to the cult of the state, to be
embodied in its virile leader, its military strength, and the
order and discipline through which its people were taught
to find honor in serving it-all of which Landauer detested.
In the 1930s, anticolonial activists drew explicit parallels
between the fascism on the rise within Europe and the
imperialism that had long been exercised outside Europe's
borders. Both used the same authoritarian methods of supremacy,
racializing a population in order to classify it as
outside and below the paragon of the human. Elaborate
hierarchies of being were necessary to justify systematically
excluding groups from full status as rational agents, thereby
protecting the principles ofliberalism or Christianity
from being forced into revealing their apparent contradiction
with the imperial enterprise. Racialist logic provided
the final, crucial ingredient in the toxic assemblage of
capitalism plus state; without racism, the imperial project
would have been insupportable according to the logic of
the empires' own domestic populations. But the dehumanization
could remain far away, unobjectionable until
carried out on internal populations.
If colonization-to be dehumanized and forcibly incorporated
into a global cycle of accumulation, by subjection to
a parasitic regime of surplus extraction under the control of
a hypertrophied state mechanism unmistakably external to