One problem with this narrative is that it conveniently leaves out a number of totalitarian regimes across the world, which not only cannot be meaningfully grouped with the “great totalitarianisms”, but which flourished with the full support of western democratic states: Pinochet’s Chile, Pahlavi’s Iran, Suharto’s Indonesia, Batista’s Cuba, Mobutu’s Congo/Zaire, all these atrocious regimes fade out of a picture painted in the stark contrast of “Democracy versus Totalitarianism”, peripheral events of little significance in the great conflict, plain accidents of history. [...]
The fact that the 2009 resolution omits individual mentions of a number of twentieth century totalitarian regimes in Europe – such as those in Spain, Portugal and Greece – but finds it pertinent to specifically reference the Ukrainian famine and the Srebrenica massacre, is telling in this respect, as is the fact that the precursors of these resolutions were spearheaded by former Eastern Block countries.[2] Still, the problem with Liberal Democracy as a timeless foe of Totalitarianism is much deeper than the questions raised by the realignment of global alliances in the beginning of the twenty-first century. [...]
The quintessential ancestral moment of the concentration camp is to be found in the quintessentially experimental democracy: the United States step up their “removal policies” of Native Americans after the 1830s, and establish a number of “reservations” in the following decades. It is undoubtedly significant that the oldest liberal democracy is territorially consolidated not just through genocide, but through genocide that is organised along a classification procedure, a spatial plan, a topological management. Concentration camps are refined in a colonialist/imperialist context through their use by the Spanish in Cuba, the US in the Philippines, and especially the British in the Second Boer War. But it is in Europe that the concentration camp will acquire its definitional character as a place of selection, as the locality where the redefinition of inside and outside reaches its terminal point. It is embraced especially by the German Social-Democrats, who use it to intern refugees after World War I, but also communists and socialists after the Spartacist Uprising of 1919.
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