"Western Terror: Colonial Violence, Historical Memory, and the Decolonial Imperative"

 

"Western Terror: Colonial Violence, Historical Memory, and the Decolonial Imperative"

By Amany El-Sawy

A critical commentary of Nasser El-Salamouny’s “The Western Terror: A History of Blood and Fire”

Nasser El-Salamouny’s “The Western Terror: A History of Blood and Fire” offers an unflinching catalogue of European and American imperial violence in the Arab world and beyond. Its scope is unapologetically broad, moving from Napoleonic Egypt to the French nuclear tests in Algeria, from British repression in Palestine to U.S. military interventions in Asia and the Middle East. The cumulative effect is a historical indictment: colonialism is framed not as a series of discrete episodes, but as a continuous and adaptive structure of domination.

This narrative strategy resonates strongly with Frantz Fanon’s description of colonialism as “violence in its natural state” — not an aberration, but the organising principle of empire (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961). By juxtaposing massacres from disparate times and places, El-Salamouny dismantles the liberal myth of a “civilizing mission” and exposes its underlying logic of resource extraction, cultural erasure, and political subjugation.

Moreover, the article also functions as what Achille Mbembe terms a counter-memory — a historical narrative that actively resists the imperial archive and its silences (On the Postcolony, 2001). Western historiography often compartmentalises colonial violence, treating it as a regrettable by-product of otherwise “progressive” modernisation. El-Salamouny’s work collapses these compartments, inviting the reader to perceive the structural and moral continuities between the burning of Algerian villages in the 19th century, the aerial bombardment of Iraqi cities in the 21st, and the present-day impunity enjoyed by global powers.

This is not without its risks. The deliberate compression of time and geography, while rhetorically powerful, can flatten the historical specificity of each case. The French assimilationist project in North Africa, the British reliance on indirect rule, and U.S. Cold War military interventions were not interchangeable; each employed distinct legal, economic, and ideological mechanisms (Cooper & Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 1997). A fully decolonial historiography, as Walter Mignolo argues in The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011), requires attention to these differences to better understand how colonial logics persist in contemporary global governance.

The moral urgency of the piece is heightened by its explicit rejection of the idea that Western states hold themselves to the same standards they impose on others. Here, El-Salamouny joins a long lineage of anti-colonial intellectuals — from Aimé Césaire, who in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) accused Europe of moral bankruptcy, to Edward Said, whose Culture and Imperialism (1993) examined how cultural narratives legitimise imperial violence. The article’s assertion that international institutions are complicit in sustaining asymmetrical accountability recalls Mahmood Mamdani’s critique of the “politics of naming” in global conflicts (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 2004), whereby certain acts are labeled “terrorism” while others are sanitised as “interventions.”

Nevertheless, the text’s polemical tone, while effective in mobilising outrage, may limit its capacity to engage audiences outside the already-convinced. The undifferentiated use of “the West” risks obscuring the role of anti-imperialist movements within Western societies themselves — from French conscripts who refused to fight in Algeria, to U.S. veterans who exposed war crimes in Vietnam, to British intellectuals aligned with anti-colonial struggles. Acknowledging these fissures would not dilute the charge of systemic violence; rather, it would deepen the analytical frame and resist the binary of a timeless, monolithic “West” versus a perpetually victimised “Rest.”

Where El-Salamouny’s contribution is most potent is in the politics of historical memory. As Said reminds us, “Narratives are a form of power” (Culture and Imperialism, p. xiii). Forgetting serves the interests of the perpetrator, while remembering — especially remembering across geographies — can forge solidarities that transcend national boundaries. In this sense, the article is not only an account of past crimes but also a call for what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms an “epistemology of the South” (Epistemologies of the South, 2014), a framework that centres the knowledge, memory, and agency of those historically subjected to colonial power.

To conclude, the article should be read as an act of historical witnessing and political intervention. It aligns with the decolonial imperative to contest imperial narratives, connect the violences of the past to those of the present, and insist on accountability in the face of systemic impunity. Its value lies not in detached archival neutrality, but in its moral insistence that empires — whether draped in the flags of the 18th century or the 21st — remain accountable to the histories they would rather erase.

References

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. 1950.

Cooper, Frederick & Stoler, Ann Laura. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. University of California Press, 1997.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1961.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. Pantheon, 2004.

Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. University of California Press, 2001.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press, 2011.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge, 2014.