Racial self-security through others’ death generates its own counter-insecurity

Evidence

If one’s own survival is heightened by the reassuring spectacle of another’s death, as Achille Mbembe insightfully puts it in writing about “necropolitics,” then national survival is borne out by keeping death at bay, by ensuring that if there is to be death it is the death of those not one’s own. Israeli security and survival, in the limit case, have come to be hitched to the demise of those characterized as threatening them. Palestinian death and destruction (of property, institutions, security itself ) are evidence – insurance – of Israeli defiance of death. And perhaps vice versa. A cruel and ultimately self-defeating logic, one that is generalizable, revealed especially in its apparently racial production and rationalization. My killing those supposedly racially not like me secures the projection of my racial being; but in predicating my security on a foundation that motivates a counter-killing equally racially predicated, my security is coterminously and at the deepest level an insecurity. Security through the destruction of those not (like) me is tantamount to the insecurity and ultimately threat and fear of death of the self-denyingly secure. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 145

Categorization

• XREF: Directly tests the threatened-privilege reading purpose: here privilege/security is secured by inflicting death and thereby self-undermining — a paradoxical privilege-maintenance loop. — connects to: Racism operates as production of group vulnerability to premature death; Security purchased through racial destruction is inherently self-undermining — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 145; Security secured through another’s death is fundamentally insecurity (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle possibility: racial/security mobilization premised on preemptive destruction as inherently self-defeating across the Israel/Palestine case — a zero-sum logic that consumes its own foundation.

Broader Connections

• Security purchased through racial destruction is inherently self-undermining #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 145
• Security secured through another’s death is fundamentally insecurity #corroborates (0.95)
• Racism operates as production of group vulnerability to premature death #expands (0.85)
• Perceived outgroup power plus malice lets mass murder self-justify as self-defense #expands (0.85) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1587
• Any group defined as a racial object finds its identity mediated through death #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1837
• Violence against racial others functions to convince perpetrators of their own superiority #expands (0.80) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 144
• Racial self-sanctification operates as paranoid group self-defense against imagined impurities. #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1386