Colonial emergency violence was framed as moral education of the colonized

Evidence

Race perpetually tested the limits of universal law and the exception resolved this tension by providing two different regimes of law under one banner. … Nasser Hussain provides an example of the logic of the jurisprudence of emergency as authority and morality in his analysis of the Amritsar massacre in nineteenth-century British India. Relying on the authority of martial law, the British General Dyer ordered his troops to fire into a crowd of Indians until 379 lay dead and thousands injured. Despite the best efforts of the Home Office to depict Dyer’s actions as those of a madman driven to excesses, Dyer himself explained his behaviour as duty – the duty to teach the natives a lesson or, in his words, ‘to produce a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view.’ The killing would have gone on, Dyer asserted, until the lesson was learnt. Only the lack of bullets stopped it. Dyer, Hussain comments, ‘unabashedly links the performativity of violence to the project of moral education,’ understanding completely that martial law’s purpose was none other than the reconstitution of the authority of the state and the inscription of obedience on the bodies of the colonized. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 50 (#expands, via linked claim)

Dyer himself explained his behaviour as duty – the duty to teach the natives a lesson or, in his words, ‘to produce a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view.’ The killing would have gone on, Dyer asserted, until the lesson was learnt. Only the lack of bullets stopped it. Dyer, Hussain comments, ‘unabashedly links the performativity of violence to the project of moral education,’ understanding completely that martial law’s purpose was none other than the reconstitution of the authority of the state and the inscription of obedience on the bodies of the colonized. Through emergency, colonial law provided for its own failure, a practice born out of the need to set up a political system that both maintained the rule of law and was able to respond to the exigencies of the colonial situation, one that was rife with ‘dissent’ and ‘disobedience.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 50 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The colonizer’s civilizing narrative turned lethal exploitation into an ethical obligation — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 248; Colonial ‘civilizing mission’ was itself the savagery it projected.; Colonial subjects were framed as only understanding force, justifying legal violence (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial martial law used mass violence as moral education of the colonized #expands (0.98) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 50
• Colonial emergency law institutionalized violence as moral instruction rather than aberration. #expands (0.95) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 50
• Colonial sentiment discipline targeted colonizers themselves, not only the colonized #complicates (0.71)
• Totalizing explanations of colonial violence fail when reduced to single causes #complicates (0.70) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 402