'The Decolonial Imperative...' By Moshumee Dewoo

Published 03 February 2025 in News

The Helsinki Notebooks

The Decolonial Imperative: Confronting Fascism, Colonialism, and the Geopolitics of Selective Outrage By Moshumee Dewoo

The Helsinki Notebooks - Global Dispatches Against Fascism and the Far Right

The University of Helsinki - Faculty of Social Sciences - Academic Disciplines - Political History

Posted 03 February 2025


The Decolonial Imperative: Confronting Fascism, Colonialism, and the Geopolitics of Selective Outrage

If there is one thing that dear Donny, the Godsent Trumpet in the flesh Himself, has managed to accomplish, which we can all agree on, it is that he has Made (the topic of) Fascism Famous Again (MFFA! Sure, it does not roll on the tongue with the snappy cadence of MAGA, but it gets the job done). He has dragged the slithering SSnake of promises of purity and glory, built on the blood and bones of “enemies,” right into our daily conversations. Now, I do not like this snake. I am not a fan of snakes in general. But I believe it is good that we are all talking about it – because in a world teetering on the edge of identity-driven conflict, where the knight of ideological purity, the purist creep,[i] is threatening to fracture societies further, difficult conversations – uncomfortable conversations – are more necessary than ever. They may not save the world, but they might at least slow its descent into a dark, dark spiral of irreparable division and despair (and goodness knows, we need to slow this descent). So, to have fascism wriggle its way to our (and therefore my) daily conversations is, to me, nothing short of…chef’s kiss. No salutes here (of any variety – Bellamy, Roman, or Terran). I leave those to the Musks, Macrons, and Kirks of the world (to explain away). And I offer a simple “Merci, Donny!”  

For, as the Western world tears itself apart, “MAGA idiots and their supporters” on one side, and “Slaver Democrats and their loyalists” on the other, and a good portion of the whole Western bunch buzzing in the madness of it all – (understandably) outraged, writhing with existential pain, panicked, petrified, paralysed, with an equally good portion of their conversations (also understandably) running along how dangerous fascism is, how destructive it has been, and that “never again” should it be left to hurt anyone –, I sit at my desk, gently brushing down my mouse through headlines drenched in dread, and I grimace that all this frenzy gives me the perfect opportunity to say this: “It’s loud, but is it deep?” If I were content to echo, I might temper myself. Perhaps, I would offer some encouragement: “You’ve beaten fascism before. You’ll beat it again.” But not today. Today, I double down. I bury the fanfare without fuss. I shrug. I treat myself to a dallaspulla. Of course, I expect protests. “What vile nonchalance,” you might cry. “What sociopathic indifference!!!” How could a scholar of political resistance and liberation struggles, someone fully aware of the dangers of fascism, respond to those crying out against it with such cold, dismissive disdain?   

Allow me to explain.   

This is not indifference to the dangers of fascism. It is also not dismissal of those who face its brutality. Rather, it is a contestation of the lens through which the West chooses to address fascism. It is part of an essential critique of the Western understanding and therefore response to fascism. Here, consider the brutal campaign of extermination that Germany carried out in German Southwest Africa, now Namibia, between 1904 and 1908, or genocidal barbarism that saw German colonial forces systematically annihilate over 80,000 Herero and Nama people (this is 75% of Herero people, and 50% of Nama people)[ii] through a combination of concentration camps, mass executions, forced labour, starvation, and medical experimentation. While the Namibian genocide is eerily familiar to the later horrors of the Holocaust, the German response to the former stands in stark contrast to its reckoning with the latter (we note that the latter remains not only the best possible response but the only one that could ever suffice).

In 2021, Germany issues its first (and only, while also muted) apology for its crimes in Namibia, accompanied by a pittance of financial aid, development assistance (not reparations), aimed at silencing the Herero and Nama people’s demands for justice rather than meet them with the seriousness they deserve. The Herero and Nama genocide continues as a footnote in German and thus Western consciousness, consigned to historical oblivion. “Move on,” the victims are told. “It happened so long ago! Why can’t you just move on?” They must follow the pace. They must move on. Because the West tends to move on from its African victims, each part of it running a game of “whataboutery” or “whataboutism,” each of Africa’s Western butchers pointing at another: “But why do you insist on dragging this up? After all, other empires were much worse than ours.”[iii] This adds to: “Something similar happens in Britain – usually people suggest that the French or the Belgians were worse than we were.”[iv] So, the West’s African victims must move on too. And the deeper truth is that its African victims are not considered victims. It does not hold them human to begin with – under “the commanding terms of the dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing project of African persons.”[v] This is the foundation it rests on.[vi]  

Back to the point of this being an essential critique of the Western understanding and therefore response to fascism: The German response to the Namibian genocide makes it clear that, far from the moral high ground it claims to occupy, Western outrage against fascism (although understandable, deserved, and necessary, and well-intentioned and expressed by truly wonderful people) might be more of a hollow, superficial performance of moral indignation than a proactive move toward dismantling fascism altogether (this does not count the rare few in the West who are actively trying at it). Because, while it condemns fascism, it does not confront the very system that enables it in the first place – colonialism: “We don’t engage with colonialism, like the German genocide of the Herero and Nama people, because we already deal with the Holocaust…”[vii] We see this in how selective this outrage is. How it has a geography. How it is carefully reserved for European and American victims of fascism who fit neatly into the colonial project of defining humanness – and thus human suffering –, previously running on the spirit of the “civilising mission” and now thriving behind the blinders of geopolitical interest, the preservation of imperial legacies, and a deeply ingrained sense of racial superiority and “completeness,”[viii] all of which rest upon and reinforce the colonial hierarchy of humanness that runs latitudinally across Western ideology to bind the world together in a grotesque web of inequality.[ix]

So, let this be clear: The current Western outrage against fascism fully deserves this critique. Because it is insufficient. Because it does not address the deeper system that enables fascism. Because it is a fevered cry for self-preservation that, paradoxically, grows from and reinforces the very system that enables fascism instead. Because it is rooted in ideologies of racial supremacy and dehumanisation honed during centuries of colonialism. Because it is about who gets to claim suffering. Because it is about who is permitted a stake in the human condition. Because it is, by extension, about who is consigned to historical oblivion.[x] And because herein also lies an opportunity: If the West is to truly confront fascism, it must recognise that this is inseparable from colonialism, and therefore, to be rid of fascism, it must dismantle colonialism.

The question, then, is not just how loudly the West condemns fascism, but how deeply it is willing to dismantle colonialism.

Anything less is hollow, complicity.

By Moshumee Dewoo

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