Necropolitics, The NRA and the GOP

Necropolitics is a term coined by the Cameroon born, Sorbonne educated Doctor of History Joseph Achille Mbembe in his 2003 essay Necropolitics (or the politics of death) in which he sought to illustrate how primarily, but not exclusively, state actors use violence, death and the fear of death to subjugate and control marginalized communities in their own jurisdictions and colonized peoples without.

Using the examples of the Israeli segregation and subjugation of Palestine, colonialism and apartheid in Africa, and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Mbembe illuminates how sovereignty over the human body is enacted through the creation of “zones of death” where killing becomes the ultimate exercise of domination.

But one can easily see how Mbembe’s ideas can be translated to the American experience, whether the “zone of death” in question is the environs of Minneapolis in this century or or a cold, sparsely populated wind-swept South Dakota plain in the 19th.

Mbembe is a vastly important scholar and thinker, if lately controversial in light of his kicking the Israeli/Palestinian beehive, and his life and work are worthy of a lifetime of study, so I have provided the links above that one may pursue him to one’s own interest and contentment.

Perhaps more suited to my immediate purpose, illustrating how the NRA and the Republican Party, wittingly or not, seek to turn the entirety of this country in to one vast killing zone to their political advantage, I turn to a concise essay by Paris Marie Curie Fellow Antonio Pele in the online journal Critical Thinking entitled Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics

In the essay Pele provides an overview of Mbembe’s seminal work and its genesis in Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. I introduce Foucault as an another invitation to further study if you are so inclined, but he is not central to the point I wish to make here. Though his observation that…
…

”human masses are eliminated in the name of the protection and survival of a nation, a people and/or a class. Besides, he noted how racism has become the political tool that enables the biological division of the human species and the justification of the extermination of those considered inferior. Foucault insisted modern racism has developed with the “colonizing genocide”, so that the right to take life could be justified.”

would seem germaine to any discussion of contemporary America.

But perhaps for the purposes of my little essay I will highlight just the first three of seven concepts that Pele contends undergirds Mbembe’s thinking on Necropolitics.

1) State terror: The State persecutes, imprisons and eliminates certain populations so that political and social contestations can be neutralized. Those repressive tactics are operated not only by totalitarian regimes but also by contemporary liberal and illiberal countries.

2) The shared use of violence: In many cases, the State does not have and willingly shares the monopoly of violence with other private actors (i.e. militias, paramilitary), increasing the circulation and use of weapons in society. The latter is therefore divided between “those who are protected (because armed) from those who are not”.

3) The “link of enmity”: According to Mbembe, in a society where the possession and nonpossessions of weapons define one’s social value, all social bonds are destroyed. The link of enmity normalizes therefore the “idea that power can be acquired and exercised only at the price of another’s life”

As to point one all I wish to add is – “Boy I’ll say!”

On point two I will assert that this neatly explains the entire modern agenda of the NRA – “Increasing the circulation and use of weapons in society”, and, handily, their patron’s bottom line, should be their friggin motto, as well as their raison d’être – though currently no one is really protected and everyone is not.

Point three describes the GOP’s complicity in the mess we find ourselves in. Through their campaign ads featuring AR toting idiots and pistol packing Mamas they seek to sell the idea to the fearful gun fetishist voter that “the possession and nonpossessions of weapons define one’s social value” – their own and that of their base voters. And through their choice of coarse, bloviating and anti-social candidates, from Trump, to Cruz to MTG they create a “link of enmity” to insure that “all social bonds are destroyed.”

The NRA and the GOP have bonded together as one poisonous enterprise to create a hellscape of carnage and death in what was once only a deeply fractious and divided nation.

Perhaps America needs its own Mbembe to dissect how it happened.