Alter-Nomad: On Totalitarianism

Imperialism and totalitarianism are what happens when confinement is not enough anymore. It’s the story of Moses freeing his people, but also how Native Americans were butchered to leave room for the settlers. The armies of the most powerful European nations take over new territories under the pretense to “educate the savages” and to “bring civilization”. Colonization is an attempt at regularizing people from a different culture: “Dogs incessantly run the steppes looking for wolves to turn into dogs”. Colonies also provide a way to get rid of undesired populations. It’s the story of the colonization of Australia where armies and marginals were sent to take over the First People: “slaughter the nomads if they resist and put the sedentaries to work if they survive”.

Dennis Hopper illustrates it perfectly in his cult movie “Easy Rider”: two nomad bikers wandering throughout the USA. Their spiritual journey brutally comes to an end when they get murdered by a personification of xenophobic America. At a bigger scale, antiglobalism - refusing all forms of globalization - is closing the borders, generating xenophobia and fear of the nomad-migrant. This kind of inward-looking attitude is precisely what leads to totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism consists in getting rid of nomadic populations through institutions of surveillance and death.

To Marx, nomadism is a primitive society which led to capitalism. Bolshevism applied this concept by sedentarizing the Kazakh population using collectivization and territorial appropriation. Opponents are monitored by a political police, prosecuted, and isolated in political prisons (gulags).

Nazism used marking to watch over nomadic populations - Jews, Roma, or any other marginal excluded from society - to finally commit genocides. Every case of totalitarianism ends up with a prohibition of free flow by the closure of the borders.

What about democracy? We denounce totalitarian regimes. It’s part of our republican values. From a young age, we study the atrocities resulting from such regimens. Yet we still do not talk enough about our indifference towards the First People that we pushed to sedentarization, their territories arranged and industrialized to our benefits: we let those people disappear. Among them, historical nomads carrying a knowledge whose value is immeasurable. Whether it is through wars (Tuaregs), deforestation (Awá from Amazonia) or forced sedentarization (Australian aboriginal or Native Americans), we are responsible and it is our duty to do something about it.

But concealment is still a thing: for the last five millenniums, “we write History, but we always write it from a sedentary point of view, and in the name of a state apparatus. History never understood nomadism”. The work of the nomads, which shaped humankind, truly suffered an appropriation by the sedentaries.