Colonial violence exceeds economic rationalization because it runs on symbolic myths of savagery

Evidence

Taussig is insistent that ‘behind the search for profits, the need to control labor, the need to assuage frustration, and so on, lie intricately construed long-standing cultural logics of meaning – structures of feeling – whose bases lie in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism.’ We have to move through the electrodes and the mutilated human body, and the experience of torture, in order to confront ‘the hallucination of the military’ (referring to Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner without a Name)90– in other words, to confront what the savagery is all about. … Uncovering tremendous violence, what Casement’s report conveyed most of all through all the facts and witness accounts was the ordinariness of the violence. People passed the time by hunting Indians. The torture was too excessive to be explained as simply economically rationalized. Taussig suggests that such terror entailed a trade in mythologies. The narratives of terror that abounded tell us something about the terror itself – they were stories of the savagery of the jungle and the savagery of its inhabitants. The ‘wild Indians’ could reflect back to the colonizers their reality as civilized and business-like only if they were controlled through acts of savagery. Savages, mythically endowed with great strength, had to be put down. Torture took on a life of its own in this environment, passing from individual acts to an organized culture and mode of life. … ‘Fascist poetics succeed where liberal rationalism self-destructs,’ he warns, unless we confront the emotions generated by terror. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 189 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Taussig suggests that such terror entailed a trade in mythologies. The narratives of terror that abounded tell us something about the terror itself – they were stories of the savagery of the jungle and the savagery of its inhabitants. The ‘wild Indians’ could reflect back to the colonizers their reality as civilized and business-like only if they were controlled through acts of savagery. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 189 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The occasion—superfluous wealth created by overaccumulation, which needed the mob’s help to find safe and profitable investment—set in motion a force that had always lain in the basic structure of bourgeois society, though it had been hidden by nobler traditions and by that blessed hypocrisy which La Rochefoucauld called the compliment vice pays to virtue. At the same time, completely unprincipled power politics could not be played until a mass of people was available who were free of all principles and so large numerically that they surpassed the ability of state and society to take care of them. The fact that this mob could be used only by imperialist politicians and inspired only by racial doctrines made it appear as though imperialism alone were able to settle the grave domestic, social, and economic problems of modern times. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 426 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial violence shifts from physical extermination to economic relations as its costs rise — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 339; Violence proved colonial superiority when technology failed to deliver wealth — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 411; Colonial mass terror ran on cultural mythology, not mere economic rationality — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 189 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial mass terror ran on cultural mythology, not mere economic rationality #corroborates (0.95) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 189
• Colonizers need mythic savagery to claim civilized identity. #corroborates (0.95) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 189
• Overaccumulated wealth activated a latent force that made the mob available to imperialism #complicates (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 426
• Frontier rabble violence was colonialism’s principal means of expansion #complicates (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 416