Political violence can install self-censoring avoidance of future commitment

Evidence

One can also, however, plausibly discuss such deconversions in terms of trauma itself, as the experience of violence and radical fear: thus, in Conversation in the Cathedral (so oddly prophetic of his own later apostasy from the Left), Vargas Llosa shows how the very experience of being burned by history (in this case being beaten up after a student demonstration, but in more serious cases torture itself) installs a crippling structure of self-censorship and a well-nigh Pavlovian avoidance of future political commitment (a kind of peculiar inversion of the canonical Fanonian liberatory act of violence). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 566

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses Fanon’s claim that revolutionary violence liberates — useful tension point for the reader’s thinking about violence and commitment. — connects to: Ducking political problems requires forgetting one ever chose to duck — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 621; Awareness of political futility functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 45; Deradicalization depends on abandoning stop-gap measures that keep former extremists trapped in the past — Amy Fisher-Smith, Charles R. Sullivan, John D. Macready, and Geoffrey Manzi, Identity Reconfiguration and the Core…, 670