Ahmed Diaa Dardir: The threshold of fire
The white gunman and the ‘rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag-burners’
Ahmed Diaa Dardir // RP 2.11 (December 2021)
On 25 August 2020, seventeen-year-old (white) Kyle Rittenhouse shot three antiracist protesters in the US state of Wisconsin, killing two and seriously injuring the third. Equally shocking was the impunity with which the shooting was carried out. Rittenhouse was protected by the police from the angry crowd eager to enact street justice against their assailant; he was then given a bottle of water and released. It was only the next day that Rittenhouse, convinced he was not guilty of murder, handed himself in to the authorities of a different state. His claim that he opened fire ‘to protect business and people’ (in this order) gained currency among many in the US. Whereas the right-wing hailed him as a hero, mainstream liberals accepted the moral relativism and two sidedness of the situation, especially as the image of the gun-wielding Rittenhouse (among other white supremacist armed militias, euphemised as vigilantes) was constructed against the image of a rioting, sabotaging and arsonist mob as a threat to ‘business and people’.
ABC News, for example, presented the incident as a
matter of debate. Providing the assailant with a justified motive (he ‘joined
several other armed people in the streets of Kenosha, where businesses had been
vandalized and buildings burned following a police shooting that left … a Black
man paralyzed’), it presented the two sides of the ‘debate’ as equally valid
while disproportionately privileging the pro-shooting narrative, at least in
terms of length:
To some, Rittenhouse is a domestic terrorist whose very presence with a rifle incited the protesters. But to others – who have become frustrated with demonstrations and unrest across the country – he’s seen as a hero who took up arms to protect people who were left unprotected. ‘Kyle is an innocent boy who justifiably exercised his fundamental right of self-defense. In doing so, he likely saved his own life and possibly the lives of others’, said Lin Wood, a prominent Atlanta attorney who is now part of a team representing Rittenhouse.
The incident is a microcosm of the larger confrontation. The recent uprising was incited by the targeted killing of African Americans by police forces, parastate militias and property-owning white citizens ‘standing their ground’. The Black Lives Matter movement, the black and/or multi-ethnic dissident crowd, the left, Antifa or the protesters more broadly appear on the other hand as bearing incendiary and licentious forms of fire that burn property, indiscriminately threaten people, act as a vehicle and/or cover-up for looting and may go as far as desecrating the white man’s most sacred symbol: the US flag. They are, in the words of former US President Donald Trump, ‘rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag-burners’. Even when no shooting is involved the dichotomy is still present, as right-wing groups organise armed rallies, whereas antiracism protests are depicted as engaging in various forms of riot, vandalism and incendiarism.
Two types of fire thus
emerge and set the parameters for this confrontation. One is regimented in
firearms, wielded by institutions and militias that are predominantly white and
targeted against protesters and African Americans, thus metonymising the white
man, his right to bear arms, his state and its/their military and paramilitary
organisations, his prerogative to ‘protect’ and ultimately exert his mastery,
through fire, over other members of the population. The second is incendiary
fire, the random fire of arsonists, looters and rioters, the metonym for the
incendiary crowd and its chaotic and destructive rebellion. The hierarchised
typology that privileges aimed and ostensibly precise gunfire over licentious
arson, produces a hierarchisation of its bearers, placing the white man’s
others at the threshold of fire and civilisation.
The following account situates this hierarchisation within the colonial history of typifying fire. Since the nineteenth century, fire has operated as a civilisational threshold in Western political thought. Imagined as man’s first invention and operating within an epistemic regime of evolutionism, the ability to ignite, wield, control and use fire separates humans from other creatures. The differential typology of fire nevertheless goes further. At the threshold of fire stand subhuman forms that are stuck between animality and humanity, namely primitive savages, children (or in some representations, adolescents) and women (the study of the relationship between fire and femininity, between incendiarism and hysteria, requires a different archive and a different set of tools, and will therefore not form part of this essay).
Stuck at the threshold of fire, these
subhuman forms were able to ignite and wield fire, and in some cases wield
lesser forms of fire power, but lacked mastery and restraint. This typology
will translate later into the opposition between, on the one side, the
self-detonating body of the misfiring terrorist, and on the other, the precise,
targeted, laser-guided, smart and tactical weaponry of the white man and his
superpower. For reasons of space, before we return to the contemporary US in
conclusion, my analysis will home in on a set of archival and literary
representations of emblematic colonial encounters around fire while drawing
parallels with counterrevolution/counterinsurgency in Europe and the US.
Fire, revolution
and the primitive
In 1882, during the
British invasion of Egypt and after three days of British bombardment, fire
spread through many neighbourhoods of the city of Alexandria. It was
unthinkable, however, for the British press as well as many Arab news outlets,
that the conflagration had been caused by British gunfire. On
the contrary, the fire had to have been the work of indigenous incendiaries.
Perhaps for the British media the double meaning of the term made it suitable
for denoting incendiarism qua arson and incendiarism qua subversive political
activities. This
incendiarism and arson, furthermore, could not have served any strategic
purpose according to the prevalent representations of the event, which either
depicted the indigenous rebels as an amorphous crowd emitting noise and
spreading chaos and fire, or
their leaders as pyromaniacs who ordered the arson and
showed nothing but satisfaction when receiving news of the burning down of
their city....
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-threshold-of-fire
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