Paint It White: Insurrectionary Fascist Violence Amid The Failures of Settler Colonialism

The paper means to use a comparative case study of insurrectionary fascist movements in the United States of America, South Africa, and Algeria to explore the class politics of settlers and their change from system loyalty to rebellion using the means of armed political violence and terror. The paper seeks to explore the dialectical struggle between the politics of whiteness which granted a privileged status to these settlers and its counteraction in the anti-colonial politics of Black Consciousness that sought to upend these settlers from a native homeland. The paper means to employ a combination of Marxist thought on class alignments and ruptures between bourgeois forces alongside an employment of thought from the Black Radical Tradition which looks towards an understanding of fascism as a phenomenon of white Europe. The paper shall use this theoretical outlook to explore the view that settlers turn to fascism and the political violence espoused by the ideology, in order to keep their class and race privileges when settler colonialist bourgeois democracy fails. The paper shall turn to J. Sakai’s analysis of fascism to understand it as not necessarily an anti-capitalist ideology but an anti-bourgeois one that seeks to violently realign class structures in the settler state. Through using examples of fascist settler groups and their actions against both the bourgeois democratic state and the anti-colonial resistance groups in the territory, an examination shall occur on the nature of fascist violence and its post-war prominence in the most violently organised territories of settler primary accumulation. The paper shall argue that fascist political violence is manifested to a great extent and flourishes in the domain of settlerism where the psychological wages of whiteness are used to pay even the lowest class ranked settler who participates in colonial violence against the racialized Other. Fascism’s ability to grab the political will of settler citizens and turn them towards political violence against the state that supposedly represents them means to be analysed by looking towards the crisis of settler colonialism both past and present. The paper proposes that the violence seemingly necessary in the minds of settlers to keep their territory and privileges, finds its limits in the internal contradictions of the bourgeois liberal state and thus can only be fully employed against the organised force of the revolutionary colonised masses through a switch to fascism. Fascist tactics and goals against the state shall be a point of analysis to explore these arguments. A theoretical point shall also be made about settlers psychological connections to land using religion and race to explore the class politics of fascism and its appeal to settler wishes. The counter violence of the colonised shall also be brought up in order to gain a complete view of competing forms of political violence in the domain of class war that is settler colonialism.