Colonial violence is narrated by its perpetrators as righteous discipline, not cruelty

Evidence

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously - and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 12 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial subjects were framed as only understanding force, justifying legal violence; Colonial emergency violence was framed as moral education of the colonized; Colonial violence stood inside the law, not outside it — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 411 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial emergency law institutionalized violence as moral instruction rather than aberration. #corroborates (0.93) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 50
• Colonization is fundamentally violence and plunder, not a civilizing mission #complicates (0.78) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 12