A Revolution

Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot;
I know of no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

In the acclaimed Discours sur la servitude volontaire (1548), Étienne de la Boétie begins by asking the motivating question:

I struggled with this question when I was at home in Zimbabwe this past summer, witnessing how conditions seemed to worsen with each passing day. After a protracted discussion with friends on how one is to understand the apparent willingness of people to take on so much suffering when change could be within their grasp, I came to a similar conclusion that La Boétie came to:

However, this conclusion was hardly satisfactory. I remembered vivid scenes from the Soweto Uprising (click on the image to view the video)

A mere attempt to make Afrikaans the language of instruction in schools unleashed a wrath, driven by schoolchildren, which re-sparked a revolution and galvanized the whole world to the injustices in South Africa. It still puzzled me why, in Zimbabwe and other countries, the indignity of political repression compounded by hunger in the midst of plenty could not breed the same heroic discontent instead of the indifference.

Repressing a Revolution

I was forced to return to the themes from the summer when I followed reports on a protest march organized by the labor movement in Zimbabwe early last month. Many commentators contend that, subject to the state of affairs being actually as bad as reported in the local independent and international media, what Zimbabwe still lacks is an inspiring vanguard to lead a successful mass action. Others say that citizens have been cowed by the repressive apparatus that the government has set up and shown little hesitation to use. However, these explanations are inadequate. In Soweto, the fact that the schoolchildren faced an equally brutal repressive apparatus and yet spontaneously started an uprising which did not seem to have a clear leadership both belie the real value of a “revolutionary vanguard�? to bring success to a mass movement.

Examples abound in the past year in other (superficially) democratic African states. The following video contains raw footage of Ethiopia's November (2005) Massacre

The recurring theme in all these videos is how easy repressive violence seems to be for the aggressors. Commenting on this phenomenon in his Discours , La Boétie writes:

[…] but the dictator sees men about him wooing and begging his favor, and doing much more than he tells them to do. Such men must not only obey orders; they must anticipate his wishes; to satisfy him they must foresee his desires; they must wear themselves out, torment themselves, kill themselves with work in his interest, and accept his pleasure as their own, neglecting their preferences for his, distorting their character and corrupting their nature; they must pay heed to his words, to his intonation, to his gestures, and to his glance. Let them have no eye, nor foot, nor hand that is not alert to respond to his wishes or to seek out his thoughts.

The same sentiments are echoed by Hannah Arendt[1] in her highly controversial though insightful book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964). Her reflections on the "banality of evil" and, in particular, the willingness of the agents of repressive regimes (Nazi Germany in this case) to unflinchingly carry out gross acts of barbarism, are summarized by Michel Wieviorka[2] who writes of her view:

In this perspective of obedience to authority and submission to authority, the executioner is neither subject nor, less still, engaged in a logic of hypersubjectivation. He is defined by passivity, by indifference to his own gestures, and is reduced to being the agent of bureaucratic instructions. Here we are dealing with a desubjectivated or non-subjectivated person who is a link in a chain in victimization which reminds one of a system without actors apart from the leader or leaders. The executioner does his duty, as Eichmann said repeatedly during his trial. Arendt says he is not stupid, he is unaware, ‘and it is uniquely his unawareness which makes of him one of the major criminals of his time’ (1964: 314).

As Guy Fawkes’ failure to bring about change through a violent act of “terrorism�? and his execution 400 years ago is commemorated, I invite you to join us on this discussion forum to share your thoughts on violence, revolutionary change and repression and your responses to these videos.

[1] Arendt, Hannah. (1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking.

[2] Wieviorka, Michel. (2003) ‘Violence and the Subject’, Thesis Eleven 73: 42–50.