Sovereignty can extinguish a million lives for luxurious trivialities without rational justification

Evidence

It may not be a detail, or without irony, that much of the fray over Algerian land, and the consequent campaign against the waqf, had to do with coveting chunks of Algerian territory for cultivating vineyards for the production of the much-beloved French wines, an intoxicant prohibited by sharʿi precepts. As genocides will become relevant for us later, it is no detail that by 1962, close to a million Algerians lost their lives to French colonialism, most having been unarmed civilians, including a large proportion of women and children. Sovereignty, I have been insisting, commands the right over life and death, even for the sake of a luxurious triviality. Indeed, sovereignty does not have to operate by reasons, at least not ones normally associated with common standards of rationality or ethics. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 246

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that sovereignty’s life-and-death power needs no rationality — that killing a million people for wine vineyards is a legitimate expression of sovereign caprice — resists easy absorption and reframes how colonialism operated.
• ADDENDUM: Redolent of the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s sovereignty-over-life theme, extending it from ritual sacrifice to colonial mass death.
• XREF: Connects to Parable of the Sower’s theme of sovereign power over life and death without ethical constraint.