Even though the formal structures of colonialism have crumbled, with a few notable exceptions, European colonial ideology continues to operate across the globe, resulting in limited, nationalistic conceptualizations of religion and politics. Religion, Modernity, and the Global Afterlives of Colonialism shows convincingly that not only has colonialism had a devastating impact on the colonized, but its reach has turned inward to erode the colonizer’s own social and political systems.
Since its inception, coloniality has woven an intimate relation between (what today we refer to as) “right-wing” genocidal practices and seemingly altruistic liberal discourses of inclusion. Here, I intend to discuss one influential trajectory that contributed to shaping the current context, but this is by no means the only one. In the seventeenth century, colonizing powers divided the world according to a tripartite system emerging from theological discourses. The first group was comprised of people with the “right religion,” namely European Christianity. Their mandate was to spread this truth across the world through the use of redemptive violence, which they posited as necessary to accumulate the epistemological and material resources required to bring this plan to fruition. The second group initially comprised Jews and Muslims and was described as having a “false religion.” These communities were portrayed as rival projects to the first group’s aims. They were seen as representatives of regressive traditions that were permanently plotting to destroy the advance of truth through open war or secret conspiracies that corrupted the body politic from within. It was precisely the alleged conspiracy, part of their supposed inability to fully overcome their impurified ancestry or blood, that made even those who submitted and were formally accepted (and/or forced) into the first group, to remain permanent subjects of mistrust, persecution, and genocide. The third group included people who were described as having “no religion,” and whose humanity was thus questioned because religion became, in Catholic and then Protestant contexts, constitutive of selfhood. This group, initially identified with “Blacks” and “Indians,” was forced to achieve an ever-elusive humanity by recognizing European superiority and becoming pawns in its project. Yet, neither courageous opposition nor aspirational submission would result in spiritual redemption or political liberation. Those who opposed “the truth” would most often be exterminated in “just wars.” And those who submitted or were forced to submit would die under the duress of labor/sexual pawnship, or as a “collateral damage” of these just wars.
It is precisely in the discourse about this last group that we see with clarity the connection between genocidal practices and liberal values. The altruistic dictum, “Convert—for your own good—or I will kill you,” highlights the monopoly of the path toward salvation (then, that path was Christianity, and in the next centuries civilization, development, and finally democracy). Not only were Europeans the exclusive owners of the “right path,” they were responsible for bringing others to salvation. Religious, cultural, economic, or political liberation—modern symbols of liberal values—would ultimately end in permanent control under the threat of genocide or in genocide itself. The particularity of modern racism is that it was constituted through the interaction between two forces: 1) Evolutionism (or forced inclusion) that operates when Europeans arrogate to themselves the ownership of the only “right path,” define this path as a condition for achieving humanity, and “altruistically” force everyone to follow it; and 2) dualism (or forced exclusion), which is at work when non-European populations, no matter how much they try to achieve the goal forced upon them, always remain suspect of not being Christian/civilized/developed/democratic enough and end their lives as terrorists, exhausted laborers, or as collateral victims in the advancement of the only truth. The altruism of modern liberation, then, is premised from a very early stage on a genocidal program.
The religious dictum from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “convert—for your own good—or I will kill you” lived on in subsequent translations: during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in a cultural key, “civilize—for your own good—or I will kill you,” and, in the (late-) nineteenth and twentieth, in an economic-social format, “develop—for your own good—or I will kill you.” Finally, the overtly political dimension was added in the (late) twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “democratize—for your own good—or I will kill you.” These were programs of forced inclusion (which “altruistically” saves, civilizes, develops, and finally democratizes non-Europeans) but were predicated on complete control of bodies and knowledges under the threat of—or under actual—genocide. Many resisted and were killed in scores. Others submitted (or were forced to submit) and died generating profit, from early modern accumulation to neoliberal capital expansion, for the centers of power and knowledge. But the promise of “liberation” did not, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno would posit within the North-Atlantic, dialectically “turn into barbarism.” It was a genocidal project from the outset, premised on the partnership between liberal inclusiveness and right-wing exclusiveness on a genocidal spectrum of coloniality.
(excerpted from chapter 1)