GenZedong

The expulsion of a group, any group, from the category of human beings is extremely dangerous. Below are some passages from Losurdo's book, War and Revolution. Although I did gather the passages and quickly made this comment, I think it might resonate with some of you.

"At times of acute conflict, we witness a kind of mutual excommunication from civilization (this is the essence of the process of de-specification). The friend/enemy dichotomy tends to coincide with the civilization/ barbarism dichotomy. However, the two forms of de-specification are not equivalent. One of them establishes a politico-moral distance between the self and the enemy, while the other establishes a distance more charged with naturalistic elements, because it identifies the enemy as foreigner and barbarian or, with reference predominantly to revolutionary leaders, as a lunatic, who is likewise alien to a community within which conflict arises not because of internal contradictions, but because of an external pathogenic or ethnic cause. The first type of de-specification refers to a form of conduct which, by definition, is particular and mutable. Going beyond conduct, the second ends up referring to characteristics that tend to assume a naturalistic fixity."

"The ideology developed to legitimize and celebrate ventures against the barbarians also ends up materializing in the capitalist metropolis. [...] In other words, during serious conflicts between members of the civilized community, forms of war traditionally employed against barbarians tend to emerge within it as well."

But the definition of race/barbarians can be vague. For example,

"Between 1907 and 1915, thirteen US states enacted laws for compulsory sterilization, covering, according to Indiana’s legislation (the first state to move in this direction), ‘habitual delinquents, idiots, imbeciles and rapists’. There were those who proposed extending such legislation to ‘vagabonds’ (for the most part members of an ‘inferior race’)."

However, we on the left usually react to such racialization with moral condemnation.

"We register a paradox. At the very moment when de-specification on a naturalistic basis is indignantly rejected, moral sentiment can result in a different type of de-specification, with the expulsion from the moral (and human) community of a social stratum (in this instance, slave-owners)."

And,

"The most radical representatives of American abolitionism seem to argue in similar fashion. [Condemning] the institution of slavery as a ‘combination of death and hell’, and having branded the US Constitution as a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell’. [...] Reconstructed via the rejection of racial prejudice, the unity of the human race is once again undermined by moral or politico-moral sentiment or fanaticism."

Yet,

"In the USA, the ancien régime presented itself in a highly peculiar form. The residues of censitary discrimination were not of much significance. More important was the fact that the aristocracy of class was configured here as an aristocracy of race."

Finally, there's the last part of this passage, which I think serves as a prescient warning:

"Tocqueville identified the French and, in particular, the Jacobins as the carriers of ‘a virus of a new and unknown kind’, which allegedly underlay the incessant French revolutionary cycle. Having condemned ressentiment as the motive behind rebellion against the power exercised by the masters and the successful, Nietzsche pointed to the Jews as ‘the people of ressentiment par excellence’. Finally, Hitler prided himself on having finally discovered the source of the disease and the revolutionary infection. It was Jews and Bolsheviks, who were regularly equated, in part on account of the Jewish origin of a significant number of leaders of the Russian revolutionary movement. The process of ethnicization of the revolutionary virus can assume very different forms. But what remains constant is the danger of slippage from the psychopathological paradigm, which refers to mental illness, to the naturalistic paradigm, which refers to the inferior or degenerate ethnicity and race."

Perhaps the moral condemnation of the West, and since white people have presented themselves as naturally superior for such a long period of time, can at the same time be a rejection of the Western population as part of the "real" human race by those they have oppressed. It sounds like a reversal of white supremacists' own self-perceived superiority. This strand of thought admits that a certain kind of white people were born without a way out of said group, but judges them negatively and attributes to the group only bad, eternal qualities.