Powerlessness Corrupts

W hen Lord Acton wrote his deathless phrase, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” to his friend Bishop Creighton, he was referring to the corruption not just of officeholders but of the people around them — the historians and intellectuals who were tempted by what he called the “heresy” that “the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

Like bacon in the knuckles of a dog handler, power reliably brings intellectuals to heel. Intellectuals often have the arrogance that comes with learning or a lifetime of being praised as clever but usually lack the discipline and will to build real enterprises of their own. They are attracted to it and seek positions in the court to influence its exercise. They imagine their whines and yelps vaguely coax some of the responses from their masters.

Real power also sometimes cultivates in minds a superstition that something dark or diabolic is at work in its exercise. Powerholders are partly deified by intellectuals for wielding or controlling this darkness.

But the same is largely true of powerlessness, which also corrupts both those who experience it and those intellectuals who imagine themselves defending the powerless.

The conflict in Israel and Gaza shows this corruption in obvious form. The atheist thinker Sam Harris got at it instantly in demonstrating through a thought experiment how silly it would be if Israelis adopted the Palestinian practice of using women and children as human shields. Hamas fighters would gladly annihilate the women and children, gleeful at their foolish good luck. In this conflict, only the IDF — subject to public opinion in Israel and globally — is deterred by the use of human shields.

Our intellectuals can be as easily seduced and corrupted by perceived powerlessness as by power. Where power conjures superstitious awe at the demoniacal, powerlessness conjures superstitious sentimentality. The intellectual falls for the heresy of angelism — the absolute innocence of the powerlessness and their lack of agency.

An angel is never unjustly violent, only redemptively so. Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial theorist par excellence, is not without insight. But he, and especially his intellectual disciples, infantilize the colonial subject in the same way they say the colonizer does. The colonial subject is recruited into his own subjugation. The fact of his loss of political sovereignty is blended into contempt for his native culture and its myths, which are identified with barbarism. He colonizes himself, and willingly hands over his own agency. But then in the theory’s working out, it is precisely this powerlessness and lack of agency that licenses the liberatory violence that will birth the postcolonial man who finally has a chance at a self-conception and human action unpolluted by his oppressor. From Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth:

Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying — which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free. . . .

This is why people and institutions in the West instantly forgot the sheer barbarism and depravity of Hamas’s attack on Israel less than two weeks ago. The instant Israel started retaliating, the half-remembered vocabulary of just-war theory was dusted off, and the pictures of Gazan streets were held up as the final and exhaustive evidence about indiscriminate or collective punishment. The whole moral enterprise of war was ready to be examined because only the Jews are taken as fully human subjects responsible for their actions.

The whole intellectual class of the West completely forgot the need to pursue justice against Hamas by punishing or dismantling the organization that planned and carried out the attack, that harbored the criminals, and that still holds scores of Israeli hostages. George Bush once denounced the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for minority students. In international affairs, we have something more like a depraved Monopoly card passed to Hamas: Rape and Pillage and Get Out of Jail Free.

This isn’t the first time, either. In 2006, then-Pope Benedict gave an academic speech in Regensburg, Germany, on the relationship of faith and reason, a lecture with a profound and prophetical diagnosis of the age we live in. One section of the speech quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor disparaging Islam. Riots erupted across the Islamic world. A nun was gunned down by Islamists. Who was blamed? The pope.

The whole cult around powerlessness is built on a lie. It is the reflexive Hamas apologists, the “intifada”-shouting college students who treat Palestinian terrorists as something other than what they are: human beings, subject to the normal moral laws, and laws of war.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this piece misattributed to Fanon a preface to his book written by Sartre.