The front generation’s cult of violence inherited imperialism’s pseudoscientific laws of struggle

Evidence

Bakunin had already confessed, “I do not want to be I, I want to be We,” and Nechayev had preached the evangel of the “doomed man” with “no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, attachments, property, not even a name of his own.” The antihumanist, antiliberal, anti-individualist, and anticultural instincts of the front generation, their brilliant and witty praise of violence, power, and cruelty, was preceded by the awkward and pompous “scientific” proofs of the imperialist elite that a struggle of all against all is the law of the universe, that expansion is a psychological necessity before it is a political device, and that man has to behave by such universal laws. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 784

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the intellectual genealogy — imperialist ‘scientific’ racism preceding fascist violence — the exact lineage reader’s Islamophobia module traces into later colonial thinkers. — connects to: Past class violence persists as an objective situation inherited by later generations. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 560