Dear comrade,
The function of leadership is imagination. It thus follows that we cannot afford leaders with eye problems. We should be even less entertaining of those with dark political imaginings; more wary of those who are ‘high’ on “the people.” If you can’t think differently and insulate yourself from parochial and popular pressures, then you have no business holding power.
I wrote the meat of this column on the one year anniversary of Oct. 7, but it somehow got stuck in The Observer’s system. Maybe that was a sign. A lot of things have changed since then: Sinwar, who I wrote about, was killed; we now know who will be in the White House next year; the situation in the Middle East has only escalated. My original thoughts have thus remained unchanged.
In Gaza, both the perpetrators of untold suffering and their enablers are still unrepentant. They have also refused to abandon that self-righteous zero sum logic that has long characterized our politics. Someone joked with me that we do not need the “International Relations” requirement for political science since what we are witnessing is a lesson enough in the realism of it all. One side says it is fighting for an end to decades long Western-enabled apartheid, another survival in a hostile region hell bent on its annihilation. We ask again: how does one win a war where every marginal victory only multiplies the vitriol and fuels the impetus for further resistance and revenge? Haven’t folks read the history of colonialism?
What’s happening in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan reinforces the understanding that power still securely resides with elites. The conceptions of people like Netanyahu, Putin, (I put Sinwar here in the original piece), Khamenei, Burhan, Hemedti and Biden (and soon Trump) of their societies and their historic roles are thus critical to the trajectory of our world. Our status quo unfortunately only attests to an abiding lack of imagination in these cycles.
It is tempting to say things like history will prosecute them for being myopic and sacrificing the lives of thousands on the altar of political righteousness. But history has never prosecuted anyone. We must unapologetically reject this caste. Both here in America and elsewhere, we should strive to relieve them of their burdens. We deserve leaders who are not married to ideas like “never again” at any cost. That logic, if universalized to every group that was once at the receiving end of untold suffering and oppression, would not make for a world we would want to live in.
This is why my young brother Jack Docherty’s recent extolment of Trumpian nativism, on behalf of College Republicans, was surprising. Trump’s win will not stop us from addressing ourselves to the bankruptcy of such positions:
1. The utter disregard of history. America like Israel, for example, is not an eternal idea (yes, America is an idea) and that’s why it can and should be consistently contested. It is, to borrow from Benedict Anderson, an “imagined community” moreover with a deep scar of historical violence. Allusions to eternal “values” and “American tradition” as well as some national religious heritage must thus be treated as the illusions they are.
2. Such framings take for granted the question of power. It is obvious that if the people native to this land were able to form a constituency, arm themselves with a vindictive agenda and master comparable firepower, Jack would be writing either as a terrorist-revolutionary or a sorry invader. Think of black South Africans and Afrikaners, the Congolese and the Belgians etc. Just how far down the page of history do we want to scroll? Or should we read history in a manner that is politically convenient?
3. This rendition of the migration challenge is obscurantist. Migration, as hot a voting issue as many have made it appear, is of course the least of America’s problems. The scapegoating of immigrants as the source of all this country’s ills, a practice Jack terms “revolutionary,” is reminiscent of Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. It is purely a distraction and diversionary tactics from a captured state whose remedy is a soul-searching that both camps have so far failed to master. To illustrate, as we deport the “violent aliens” en masse, what is the strategy to handle the violent citizens? Or did the latter learn violence and substance abuse from the former?
This column is not about migration. We can have a more focussed discussion of legal and illegal migration in any context (because it is not a uniquely American problem and therefore not “existential”) later. However, the point is that we should not be inhibited by our failure to imagine what a world of increasing intercourse could look like in this age that Achille Mbembe calls one of “planetary entanglement”. The prelude to such a conversation should not be fear — which is also a child of our current crisis of imagination.
The reality is that bombs are flying in the Middle East and in Sudan. The death toll and suffering continues. I’ve faithfully watched the unfolding of an election from the debates, panels here on our campus as well as on TV. There’s no end to dogmatic and tired pronouncements that do not move the needle of history forward. In these forums, the ordering of the world and America’s role in it are taken as a given. That's why all Trump and Harris were fighting over was who could show greater support for the Israel state.
Laughable of course is what passes for “radical” or “revolutionary” politics in this country. The joke is only matched by those who pass for “Marxists” and “leftists.” The fact that such words are still incendiary and legitimate campaign platforms 70 years after McCarthyism is emblematic of this imagination crisis. When I first came to Notre Dame, I often wondered why we do not have a DSA chapter here — even if purely for ideological purposes. I guess we are not too keen on class suicide or maybe we lack the imagination.
We must interrogate ourselves and honestly question our politics. To imagine a new world necessitates a rejection of the shackles of history. We can learn (from) history, but we shouldn’t drown in it. History is always being written by the bold and brave. This process requires a mind trained in the art of imagination. Leaders must always see new frontiers of the possible. They must constantly reject old categories and create new ones even at the risk of self negation. When we rehash what these old people have been saying for years, we only prove we are young only in name.
Some Hamas apologists used Fanon to justify Oct. 7. It’s only befitting that we close with him. In the task of imagining ourselves, our social relations and our world anew, Fanon is quite instructive. He famously closed off his “Black Skins, White Masks” with the pronouncement: “O my body, Make of me always a man who questions.” A man who questions – who questions even Fanon himself. We must question the status quo. We must question the ordering of this world we are itching to inherit. Marx said something about “The tradition of all dead generations weigh[ing] like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” We must free ourselves from those ghouls of history. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon exhorted:
“Let us reconsider the question of mankind. Let us reconsider the question of cerebral reality and of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connections must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be re-humanized.”
Reconsider. Rethink. Rehumanize. Our world cannot move forward if we keep recycling the same ideas. It may help us advance personally but it will not secure the future of our children.
Political imagination starts with individuals. It starts with the “new man” Fanon asked us to create and/or the “new creature” of the Bible. The man freed from history — from “old things”. It is then scaled through movements and principled organizations. The principle here being that of creating a man-centered society — one that places life before and above everything. The world is ultimately the one we make. If the vehicles for this exercise don’t exist, we can imagine and create new ones. To hell with fear!
Olemo Gordon Brian is a senior at Notre Dame studying political economy. He is deeply interested in Africa's development and the emancipation of man. You can contact Olemo at bolemo@nd.edu.
