Thread by @radicaltheory

achille mbembe:

“in fact, everything leads back to borders—these dead spaces of nonconnection which deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet, the only one we have, that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition.”

“but perhaps, to be completely exact, we should speak not of borders but instead of ‘borderization.’ what, then, is this ‘borderization,’ if not the process by which world powers permanently transform certain spaces into impassable places for certain classes of populations?”

“what is it about, if not the conscious multiplication of spaces of loss and mourning, where the lives of a multitude of people judged to be undesirable come to be shattered?”

“what is it, if not a way of waging war against enemies whose means of existence and survival we have previously destroyed—with the use of uranium warheads and banned weapons like white phosphorus; with high-altitude bombardment of basic[…]”

“infrastructures; with a cocktail of cancerous chemical substances deposited in the soil, which fill the air; the toxic dust in the ruins of towns razed to the ground; the pollution from burning hydrocarbons?”

and what should we say of the bombs? in the last quarter of the twentieth century, are there any types of bomb to which civilian populations have not been subjected? conventional blind bombs, reconverted with central inertial systems in the tail; cruise missiles with inbuilt[…]”

“infrared head-hunting systems; e-bombs destined to paralyze the enemy’s electronic nerve centers; bombs that explode in towns, emitting rays of energy like lightning bolts; other e-bombs that, while not deadly, instead burn their victims and raise the temperature of their skin”

“thermobaric bombs that release walls of fire, absorbing all the oxygen from surrounding spaces, which kill with shockwaves, asphyxiating nearly everything that breathes; cluster bombs that devastate civilian populations as they break up in the air, dispersing mini-munitions[…]”

“designed to explode upon contact over vast areas; a plethora of bombs, absurd demonstrations of untold destructive power—in short, ecocide. under such conditions, no wonder that those who are able, that those survivors of a living hell, take flight and seek refuge[…]”

“in any corner of the world where their lives might be spared.
this kind of war of attrition, methodically calculated and programmed and implemented with new methods, is a war against the very ideas of mobility, circulation, and speed, while the age we live in is precisely one”

“of velocity, acceleration, and increasing abstraction and algorithms. moreover, the targets of this kind of warfare are not by any means singular bodies but rather great swaths of humanity adjudged worthless and superfluous, whose every organ must be specifically incapacitated”

“in a way that affects generations to come—eyes, noses, mouths, ears, tongues, skin, bones, lungs, intestines, blood, hands, legs, all these maimed people, paralytics and survivors, all these pulmonary diseases like pneumoconiosis, all these traces of uranium on their hair[…]”

“the thousands of cases of cancer, abortions, fetal malformations, birth defects, ruptured thoraxes, dysfunctions of the nervous system—all bear witness to a terrible devastation. all of the above, it is worth repeating, belong to the current practice of remote borderization—“

“carried out from afar, in the name of freedom and security. this battle, waged against certain undesirables, reducing them to mounds of human flesh, is rolled out on a global scale. it is on the verge of defining the times in which we live.”

“often this battle either precedes, accompanies, or completes the campaigns that take place among us or at our doors—namely the tracking of those bodies that made the mistake of moving. movement, incidentally, is the very essence of human bodies[…]”

“but these bodies are assumed to have illegally broken into certain spaces and places where they should never have been—places that they now pollute by their presence alone and from which they must be expelled.”