Fuck the law: decolonizing nomophilitis with the discourse of love

ABSTRACT

This papyrus questions the assumption that global cultures and especially Indigenous peoples are to be civilized and modernized by being subjected to the rule of European law, Euro Reschtaat, under racist, patriarchal imperialism as a result of centuries of dehumanizing conquest, genocide, slavery, apartheid and colonization. Giannacopoulos raised similar questions about how feasible it is to expect that the love of the law, nomophilia, would be the answer to the institutionalized racism-sexism-classism that Indigenous peoples and poor refugees face under settler colonialism? This papyrus raises the additional question of whether young people around the world are crazy for giving the middle finger salute to the empire of law or whether defiant Hip Hop artists may be expressing understandable decolonization discourse against legal imperialism without criminologists and legal scholars being aware.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonization
• law
• love
• racism
• sexism
• exploitation

Introduction: flipping the bird

The papyrus reviews arguments that seek to fortify the fortress of the empire of law in jurisprudence and finds them wanting due to the exclusion of the discourse of love from legal discourse and also due to the limitation of the discourse of love, when attempted, at the level of liberal individualism. The papyrus concludes that decolonization-centricity in legal discourse will involve the extension of the ethic of love to the institutions of the state and to research methodologies to such an extent that any law made or enforced and any methodology or economy devoid of love at the heart or centre of it would be deemed to be fatally flawed and deserves to be erased through abolitionism or decolonization. Imperialist reason deserves to be allowed to wither away in order for humanity to thrive through the discourse of love which Gandhi said is like the law of gravity – it works even if you are ignorant of it and even if you do not believe in it – though love should not be like gravity that pulls everything down irrespective of age or dissent, lest it becomes abusive self-love, in my view.

The middle finger is one way that artists speak truth to power. Robin Williams gave the finger to the camera during his 2018 World Cup opening ceremony performance in Russia while President Vladimir Putin and a Saudi Arabian prince watched from the stands, making some commentators wonder if he would get into trouble with Russian officials like members of the Russian punk band, Pussy Riots. In 2012, the Indian-British artist, M.I.A., gave the middle finger salute during the Super Bowl half-time entertainment by Madonna and she was sued by the NFL for $16 million but they settled out of court after she claimed that it was a spiritual gesture in honour of the Indian goddess after which she was named.

Kiss My Black Ass or simply Kiss My Ass is sometimes spoken to accompany the upward thrust of the middle finger. By stressing the loving praxis of kissing as a defiant gesture and sometimes following this with the middle finger salute which is also not too far from the victory sign with two middle fingers, the rebellious youth appear to be communicating the contrarian thought that revolutionaries are lovers, as Che Guevara said, and not haters of justice. When Tupac or Dead Prez defiantly cried, ‘Fuck the Law’, they admit that they were breaking the law in the lyrical narratives but they did not care if they got arrested because they knew that the law did not give a fuck about them. The NFL players refusing to stand for the National Anthem know that there was no law against kneeling during the anthem to protest against police brutality but they were being insulted by the president of the country who called them sons of bitches and said that maybe they should not be in the country after the owners of the NFL teams made up a rule to allow those protesting to stay in the locker room; otherwise their team would be fined if they did not stand for the anthem. Some say that they hope that the fines will go to #BlackLivesMatter but the players won the right to free expression eventually.

A Google images search will show millions of the sign, ‘Fuck The Law’, scrawled on walls all over the world by graffiti artists. Sometimes they rhyme it with ‘Smoke a Draw’. Sometimes it is ‘Fuck da Police’, the anthem of N.W.A. for which they were raided on stage in Detroit and arrested by cops who had earlier read them the riot act, demanding that they must not dare to sing that song but they did and their fans loved it. The lyrics deal with the daily experience of African Americans being subjected to police brutality even when they were not armed and even while they were not breaking any law in the US where there is a right to bear arms in the constitution, second only to the right to freedom of expression as the First Amendment to the constitution.

In the case of Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971) the US Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Paul Robert Cohen who wore a T-Shirt to court with the caption, ‘Fuck the Draft’, as a free speech, not the disturbance of the peace found by the lower court. However, the same Supreme Court upheld the conviction of David O’Brien for publicly tearing up his draft card to the fury of a crowd that attacked him in Boston (US v. O’Brien). Free speech is no licence but universities in the US tend to defend the academic freedom of right-wing speakers to air offensive racial views as if hate speech was free speech whereas the same universities conduct sexual harassment training to prevent gendered expressions that are not regarded as free speech for good reasons.

The word, fuck, is a bad word probably because prudish western morality tries to repress the sexual urge in order to control the tensions that Freud (2002) hypothesized to be at the core of western neurotic civilization. To him, the South Pacific indigenous word, taboo, was an accurate scientific term for the neurotic extreme measures that Aboriginal Australians and Africans take to avoid incest unlike normal Europeans who had no qualms about marrying their cousins in order to keep all the family wealth in the family. Freud pulled the Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, out of his hat and generalized it as a universal law of the unconscious longing by boys to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, the little young motherfuckers. To fuck is actually another word for making love and to condemn it as a bad word suggests that Freud may have had a point that the yearning for free expression of love was always repressed by the superego which acted as the alter ego of society in every civilization. No wonder Gandhi said that western civilization will be a good idea.

The universalization of European mores is part of the colonization process that begs for decolonization. Fanon (1963) took a shot at it by observing that he never observed the Oedipus complex in the Caribbean. This may be because of the hundreds of years during slavery when Europeans deliberately tried to crush the identity of enslaved fatherhood by the overseers and plantation owners who openly raped African women to make babies as properties to be enslaved and sold like chattel for profits. Toni Morrison dramatized this dilemma in Beloved where the father of the unborn child hid in the ceiling and quietly watched as the school teacher and the school children held down the enslaved pregnant woman and took her milk as if she was a cow. Had he said a word in protest, he could have been lynched or castrated. So, he fled from the plantation and the raped woman also escaped with her children to save them from being enslaved with the full support of the fucking rule of law. The school teacher tracked her down to claim the children as his property but she slit their throats rather than allow them to be taken back to slavery. She was saying, Fuck the Law to the Fugitive Slave Act, as she euthanized her beloved children.

Also questioning Freud was Herbert Marcuse who argued that a non-repressive civilization can be imagined contrary to the assumption by Freud that it was childish to even imagine that. The colonizers saw their repression of indigenous peoples as part of the civilizing process but the colonizers were relatively free from repression themselves. They styled themselves as the law-givers and they lived as though they were above the law. Even today, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (Reiman & Leighton, 2010), not because the poor are more crime-prone than the rich but because the rich have the resources to hire dream teams of lawyers to get them off even when they are caught red-handed while the poor plead guilty even to stuff that they did not do. Marcuse was suggesting that repression was never generalized to all in any civilization and so he was right in his optimism that a non-repressive civilization was possible when punitive law would have withered away to make way for the New Testament principles of communism: from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs, as the basis for administrative rules where there is no longer any need for any class-race-gender to oppress and exploit others.

Similarly, Foucault (1978) subjected the repression hypothesis to empirical tests and found it wanting but without reference to the repression of nine million, mostly women, who were killed as witches in medieval Europe. The depictions of lovemaking are both antiquitous and ubiquitous to the extent that the repression hypothesis must be rejected in favour of the null hypothesis. As far back as the Greek School of Athens, Plato (1951) did not blush when he organized a Symposium during which Socrates was represented with his friends as they feasted and discussed the idea of love or sex among homosexual or bisexual men with a preference for love between men and boys and with suggestions that women should be sent to a different room with their flutes to allow the men to indulge by themselves. Even when Socrates was credited with the wisdom that love can be defined as the appreciation of what is beautiful and what is true, the referent was always individual human beings showing sexual love according to the dictates of the gods. The Greek laws about love referred to when it was appropriate for a father to reject the love interests of a man in his sons but not about the duty of the state to make law and enforce them as if the people were beloved. The Greeks did not hesitate to sacrifice a daughter to their reprobate rapist gods for good luck in their war against Troy to forcibly return the runaway wife of one on their homeboys when a loving solution would have been to ask the woman whom she loved.

The holy books of many religions also include many verses that are close to pornography and sexual violence among men even while proclaiming the love of God for humanity. For instance, the men of Sodom and Gomorrah insisted that they wanted to ‘know’ the beautiful men who came to visit Lot. They refused when Lot gave them his two daughters to save his angelic visitors from being defiled (what a father he was). Later, Lot’s wife could not resist looking back at all those handsome hunks going up in smoke and she was instantly turned into a pillar of salty tears. Later, it was the daughters who were blamed for getting their old father drunk and ‘knowing’ him because they could not find any man around. Nasty stuff. Sex was far from being repressed though sex is not the same as love for true love is the love of the enemy as yourself, according to Jesus, who was probably drawing from the lessons he learned in ancient Egypt where he was educated to know that the sun that shines for you also shines for your enemies, for men and women, for blacks and whites, for rich and the poor, irrespective of religious sects or nationality.

Simone de Beauvoir (1952) predated Foucault with the observation that the oppression of women as The Second Sex was also ubiquitous and antiquitous but not because of psychophysiological differences as assumed by biologists nor due to the Freudian obsession with the incest taboo and the invention of Electra complex as the other side of the coin of the Oedipus. She said that historical materialism was more persuasive in the way that Engels outlined The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State but she remained critical of the way that Marxism-Leninism led to some kind of state religion whereby women were once again commanded to stay at home to breed and support the men rather than usher in the gendered equality of abilities and needs. What de Beauvoir ignored is that the picture she painted of disempowered women was typically European and not universal as Nkiru Nzegwu (2006) observed with reference to the right of women to inherit property in Africa; and as Ify Amadiume (2000) concluded with the observation that patriarchy was accessible to the male daughters of imperialism and female husbands in Africa. Oyeronke Oyewumi also observed that the disempowered woman was invented by patriarchal racist imperialism to keep white women under domination whereas Africans recognized generation as more important than gender by respecting and loving elders irrespective of gender.

Jean Baudrillard (1990) would agree that it is not sex that is liberated from repression because sex itself has been eclipsed by virtual reality under the postmodern condition. ‘Nothing today is less certain as sex’, he proclaimed. Of course, there could be transactional sex but no love at all. Even among married couples who copulate for reproduction, there might be no love lost while the technologies of reproduction make it possible for the couples to reproduce without sex or love being involved. This makes the sex-centricity of Freud very problematic. Apart from the fact that human beings do not automatically possess sex-consciousness from the womb and the additional fact that the interest in sex tends to decline with age, there are young adults and eunuchs who deliberately choose celibacy for religious or secular reasons. These large groups of humanity are no less human than the sex-crazed neurotics of Freud. Sex is important as a motivator of animal and even some plant drives, Freud was right, but sex is not more important than food, shelter, self-actualization, political power, religion, arts, peace, love and what have you? Freud was guilty of telling a single story, as Chimamanda Adichie would say.

The puzzle is that criminology has gone on for hundreds of years without sparing a thought for love as a central theme that should be recovered in the pursuit of justice. Hal Pepinsky (1991) pioneered research on Peacemaking Criminology as an alternative to war making. He argued that the policy orientation of war-making is a choice that individuals and states make, leading to more war and more violence rather than to justice. He concluded that if individuals and states also make the deliberate choice to seek peace, that would lead to more peace and more justice around the world. A counterintuitive proof of what he was saying is the attack against the US on 9/11. President George W. Bush decided instantly that he did not want to pursue war against the country from which 15 of the 19 hijackers came, Saudi Arabia. As a result, the US remained friends with the Saudis and no US troops died in that country while hundreds of thousands of Saudi lives were spared from collateral damage that could have followed a US invasion that could have been resisted by Islamic militants from around the world who were ready to defend their holiest land. At the same time, the US neoconservatives chose to make war against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed along with 5,000 US troops and many more wounded, not to mention one trillion dollars spent only to result in the destabilization of the whole of the Middle East with the establishment of the Islamic State with the support of the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization that provided training, arms, and aerial support in regime change attacks against Libya and Syria. This papyrus suggests that there is a need to go beyond peacemaking and start attempting lovemaking in legislation and law enforcement by, for example, pushing for penal abolitionism and sovereignty with love (Saleh-Hanna, 2015).

Criminology as lovemaking

Elsewhere, I recommended (Agozino, 2005) the Africana philosophy of nonviolence which has been articulated by Chinua Achebe (2012) with Igbo communal sculptures called Mbari, or clay models populated with characters from all over the world to represent tolerance and love in a genocidal country where ‘starvation was used as a legitimate weapon of war’ with the support of Britain and Russia, resulting in the death of 3.1 million people in Biafra (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2006). Desmond Tutu (2014) invoked the concept of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity to capture what Martin Luther King Jr. (2010) called the World House as a consistent reminder that punitive justice for enemies of society is a counter-productive way to seek justice when reparations and forgiveness might be more feasible routes to justice for all. The way that Moses was forgiven for killing law enforcement agents and still returned to ask the ruler to let his people go, caused many terroristic plagues to affect the people of Egypt before they were let go without punishment; is an illustration of the love of the enemy that people of African descent have displayed a lot. There is a story of Prince of Damascus who demanded independence from ancient Egypt and was invited to a feast by the Pharaoh. After the feast, he was told that he was free to go home and tell his people that they were free to rule themselves as they saw fit. The Othman Empire and the European empires had to wage bitter punitive wars against those who had the temerity to demand the restoration of independence by contrast and Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe (2006) suggests that the UK orchestrated the postcolonial genocide against the Igbo because they led the struggle for decolonization in West Africa.

The principle of forgiveness has been explored by Derrida to see if it is rooted in the Abrahamic religions of the book but he found that each of the Abrahamic religions always emphasized that there were things that were unforgivable that they were not prepared to forgive. It was in his beloved African cultural background that Derrida found abundant evidence of the forgiveness of the unforgivable (Agozino, 2018b; Derrida, 2001). He illustrated this with the case of apartheid South Africa and the attempt of Africans to seek Truth and Reconciliation rather than punitive justice (Mandela, 1994; Cohen, 2001). Africans also went through 400 years of slavery but without seeking revenge or punishment for the crimes against humanity. On the contrary, the people of African descent have demonstrated enormous love for their oppressors by naming their children after their enemies, teaching their children the languages of the oppressors, dressing like them, lightening their skin and straightening their hair, working for the man, shopping in the shops and eating in the restaurants of the bosses, and worshiping the image of the oppressor as the image of God. Of course, this strange kind of love and troubles traditions of Blues music is not exclusive to people of African descent but is generalizable to the poor who tend to aspire to rise to join the oppressors instead of ending oppression as Freire found among the illiterate peasants in Brazil who dreamed of becoming oppressive landlords; and as can be seen in the hyper white supremacy of poor white trash and neo-Nazi scum (Bauman, 1989) or among poor women who aspire to marry rich men to join the bourgeoisie to exploit the working class. It may not be exactly love, it may be more like the envy that Fanon (1963) diagnosed among the colonized who dream only of taking the place of the occupier, contrary to the discourse of decolonization. Bishop Michael Curry was exaggerating at the wedding of Megan and Harry when he said that love is all that you need: you also need decolonization and reparative justice.

It is assumed that centuries of hunting Africans as prey, of dominating the working class and of oppressing women may have normalized oppression and exploitation to the extent that the poor aspire to become rich oppressors. The same cannot be said about women and indigenous people who cannot become men or Europeans convincingly despite the technologies of transsexuality by which some men also seek to become women and vice versa or the signifying monkey strategies of passing as white among some of the colonized indigenous people just as some white anthropologists go native and some rich kids choose to dress in ripped jeans. What Freud meant by penis envy was probably that he wished that he had a bigger one; since women do not envy that in men.

True love in policy discourse comes from the acknowledgement that a lot of injustice has been done to people of African descent, Indigenous peoples, poor women and poor workers by the colonialist systems of racism-sexism-classism. Love praxis involves the compassionate search for reparative justice in recognition of the enduring legacies of centuries-old oppressive practices. The interconnectivity, self-similarity, recursiveness, fractional dimensions, infinity, and non-lineal geometry of humanity and nature call for such reparative justice to go beyond the human species and include the exploited nature that could only be ruined at the expense of humanity as a part of nature. The struggle for reparative justice is not engaged in only by special interest groups who are directly affected by systems of oppression. Part of what makes us human beings is that we are humane enough to care for other animal species that cannot advocate for themselves but also for all oppressed nationalities among humanity itself. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. That is why Rastafari proclaim one love for all, not just for some, because love is lovely and war is doubly ugly, as Daddy U-Roy put it.

The ethic of love was missing from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with which Max Weber attempted to debunk the emphasis of Marx on the economic foundation of a loving society. To Weber, capitalism emerged first in protestant societies because of the unique gospel that money is not the root of all evils and that wealth is one way to demonstrate divine blessings here on earth. What Weber missed most of all was that it was not the protestant ethic that produced capitalism but the enslavement of millions of Africans for hundreds of years by greedy Europeans who also committed genocide against indigenous people to seize and occupy their land for private profit (Ezeonu, 2018). Marx (1954) wondered how such violent conquerors could have the straight faces to call themselves Christians when they all but ignored the gospel of Love preached by Christ. Marx, Du Bois, Lenin, CLR James (1938), Eric Williams, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, and Kwame Nkrumah were unanimous in identifying the oppressive exploitation of indigenous people as the source of the wealth that smothers European ruling classes.

Bishop Michael Curry was superficial in his much beloved sermon at the wedding of Duke Harry and Duchess Megan – love is not the only way because without justice, love degenerates to a bad crush or infatuation. Men often claim to love the women that they hurt and women would swear that they love the children they abuse. Alice Miller analysed pedagogy as an oppressive Eurocentric tradition that is based on the oppression of children ‘for their own good’. Love without decolonization is like law without justice, it is more like peace as pacification that is guided by the imperialist reason of might as right. Maynard Keynes captured this at the height of the project of colonization when the great depression threatened the rising luxury of the leisure class in Europe and many economists called for thrift and austerity measures at the national level. Keynes objected and prescribed profligacy in national projects funding to create jobs by relying on the huge surpluses expropriated from the colonized. He told Europeans to pretend that fair was foul and foul was fair because fairness did not work in the favour of imperialist countries while foul means of colonial exploitation was the end that justified the means. Unknown to Keynes and his devotees was that such a rapacious gangster philosophy was sure to plunge Europe into another imperialist tribal war at the cost of 60 million lives only a few years after his proclamation that fair was foul and foul was fair as Du Bois (1945) warned.

The decolonization paradigm in criminology

The legal philosopher, Zenon Bankowski (1996), has wondered what it would look like if people truly lived their lives in love and in law simultaneously, autonomously and heteronomously. The hypothetical case of Stephen who faced the dilemma of obeying the draft to go to war for his beloved country even if he was against the war or to refuse the draft has already been solved by democracies that abolished the draft and relied on forcing the poor to ‘autonomously’ volunteer for military service while the social democracies that retain the draft have no risk of going to war (Zinn, 2003). Similarly, the fable of Bankowski about arguing with the ATM and begging it to give him some money when his account had no balance or his dilemma about how to avoid beggars in Edinburgh are problems solved by talking to the bank manager to arrange an overdraft and by the welfare state by providing the dole to eliminate Dickensian poor houses. Bankowski is also mistaken in stating that Jesus preached that you should love your neighbour; the Christian test of love is the love of the enemy the way the Good Samaritan helped the wounded stranger. Bankowski erred by thinking that marriage is routinized and lacked the passion of love whereas the loving marriages just take different forms in a long-term relationship in spite of the troubles that come and go and the daily chores (Mead & Metraux, 1974). Surprisingly, given that Bankowski started with the story of his Polish parents being admitted to Edinburgh university to avoid the Nazi occupation of their country, he did not extend his theory of love and law to colonization and decolonization; but he was right to say that we are not slaves of law.

With emphasis on revolutionary pressures in the law, Roberto Unger (1976) differed from Bankowski by defining love in law as the ‘solidarity’ that goes beyond respect or admiration for intimate neighbours or tribal community, to share the concerns of strangers. This is especially the case under an empire where the rule of law is compromised by concentrating the three arms of government in the emperor who was nevertheless lacking in absolute authority due to the competing forces of custom and sacred laws proclaimed by ‘revolutionary prophecy’. Without discussing decolonization directly, Unger concluded that in modern society, the autonomy of individuals has revolutionary implications because the bureaucracy cannot impose absolute authority over all the people all the time. Unger used the revolutionary socialist Peoples Republic of China to illustrate the view that the destruction of the ancient regime and the expropriation of the means of production may empower the people but the bureaucratic rules may hinder them at least until the objective of the withering away of the state is attained under communism to effectively resolve Bankowski’s dilemma of how to love beggars, libraries, and cash machines.

Somewhat like Bankowski, John Rawls (1971) offered an atomistic picture of loving families that socialize their children to become loving people who value morality enough to grow up and show love to their loving parents. This is consistent with the assumption of Rawls that justice emerges from a veil of ignorance when children would have to be taught a sense of right and wrong by all knowing parents. If that is the case, according to Rawls, injustice could only be blamed on those who love injustice in the form of the pursuit of power and domination without affection for their fellow humanity. The solution to injustice would mean the training of children to adhere to moral standards before they become adults who obsess about power and domination.

Thus, Rawls appears to be following the psychological model offered by Freud – the problem lies in the heads of the people and if only educators and parents could shrink those heads, the people will be more loving and justice would prevail. This formulation does not recognize adequately the institutional structures that maintain injustice in such a way that psychoanalysis would not be able to deconstruct imperialism without clear historically-specific materialist struggles to deepen democratization by ending the systems of racism-sexism-classism and homophobia. It is true that socialization has something to do with the levels of consciousness but it is mistaken to see socialization as child-rearing or pedagogy given that socialization is a life-long process that is orchestrated by the state, by religious and educational institutions and by employers and peers but not exclusively by parents in the holy family and certainly not by stealing Indigenous children to be ‘upraised’ by white-supremacist colonizers.

The theory of justice by Rawls (1971) may be flawed but at least he appears to be aware of the fact that without affection, justice would be unjust conquest and domination by the powerful over the weak. Ronald Dworkin unapologetically pictured the law as an emperor with decrees of dos and don’ts that must be obeyed by the subjects. Such a view suggests that the empire or imperialism is a good social system that works to maintain order in a chaotic world. Such a picture is not strange because it is the image that imperialism has of itself – the white man’s burden of civilizing the savages of the Philippines, as Rudyard Kipling put it, prompting Mark Twain to offer a cynical prayer for the victory of the genocidal imperialist army in foreign wars. If anything, the history of decolonization proves that the only good thing about colonization or empire was when it was ended, according to Walter Rodney. It is true that, as a result of neocolonialism, there are people who yearn to return to the good old days of colonialism and when given the choice, people in Puerto Rico, Falklands, Northern Ireland, Martinique, French Guiana, Scotland, and Gibraltar vote to remain the territories of their colonizers. The nominally independent Francophone countries sign up to remain in monetary and military unions with their former colonizers just as Anglophone countries apply to join the Commonwealth and embrace the repressive legislations from the colonial era long after the colonizers had abolished them in their own jurisdictions. Part of the reasons for the yearning to return to classical colonialism is because progressive intellectuals have not convincingly articulated a viable alternative to neocolonialism and imperialism or what Stuart Hall identified as authoritarian populism.

I stumbled on the decolonization paradigm while doing my doctoral research on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System (Agozino, 1997). I discovered that contrary to the preoccupation of criminology and jurisprudence with the punishment of individual offenders, Black women have historically been targeted for repressive social control even when there was no doubt that they were not suspected offenders. From the epochs of slavery onwards, the women who were proximate to suspected black men were subjected to punitive societal reactions as if they were guilty by association under the assumptions of collective responsibility. I did not find a similar targeting of Black men who were proximate to suspected Black women and I did not find similar cases of White women being victimized for stuff that White men were suspected as committing, except in the unique cases of Irish women under the special history of the troubles when the Irish Republican Army was engaged in open warfare with the British Army. I concluded that the concept of punishment was imperialist in the sense that it was trying to colonize the concept of victimization and rearticulating it as belonging to the expanding empire of punishment, similar to the colonization of the lifeworld by monetary power, according to Habermas who failed to articulate the logical struggles for decolonization. I called on revolutionary scholars to recognize this victimization for what it was and challenge the imperialist state to offer reparative justice to the affected women. One such reparative justice could be in the form of the legalization of drugs which were the main reasons why the vast majority of Black women were incarcerated in the UK. If it was the case that White women were being banged up in Africa and in the Caribbean for drugs offences at the rate that Black women were imprisoned in Europe and North America or the rates at which Indigenous women were being criminalized under settler colonialism for possessing substances much safer than legal tobacco and alcohol, those drugs would not be illegal for another second. Yet, it is not only black women who suffer from the hysterical war on drugs, large numbers of poor Whites are also seeing their lives destroyed by the imperialist state of nomophilitis intent on neurotic domination at huge costs to tax payers (Agozino, 2018; Alexander, 2010). After killing more than 300,000 people in the war on drugs, Mexico is finally considering legalizing all drugs in line with US voters initiatives to legalize marijuana and in line with harm reduction in Portugal and The Netherlands, while The Philippines continues to kill thousands of people suspected of possessing drugs. I hope that voters in New Zealand will overwhelmingly say Yes to the legalization referendum in 2020. African countries should also end the imperialist war on drugs which remains the excuse for the execution of lots of Africans in South East Asia while no Asian has ever been executed in Africa.

I challenge those legal theorists who philosophize about love and law to add their voices to the chorus of reggae musicians who have been at the fore-front of the campaign to Legalize It and demand that the imperialist states should provide huge grants to the criminalized to enable them to participate in the rising legal marijuana industries just as huge grants are awarded to rural White male farmers. Similarly, I challenge the postcolonial and neocolonial locations to reject the colonial repressive fetishes such as the death penalty, the prohibition of abortion and the criminalization of same-sex relations and sex work; all of which were imposed by European colonizers who have since abolished them in their own jurisdictions while the former colonized locations cling on to them as if their lives depended on them. Reiman and Leighton (2010) support abolitionism by pointing out that prohibition has failed but that the huge cost of failure makes it a pyrrhic defeat. They point out that the prohibitionists are not necessarily evil but may be misguided by a belief that they were taking tough decisions to improve public safety. The fact remains that prohibition does not work whereas education allows responsible adults to choose what to consume in the comfort of their homes without harming anyone else while the public health and education systems would be there to reduce the harm of addiction.

The decolonization ethic in public policy would disrupt the call to arms against poor people of other countries or other ethnicities. If all the poor people collectively say Fuck the Law of War, there is no way the one percent of war mongering chicken hawks could sustain militarism at the wasteful scale that is the case under imperialism. However, it would be foolhardy to start opposing war after it has been declared as Lenin warned. Criminologists and legal scholars should contribute their thoughts and activism to the search for a demilitarized world where the armed forces would be replaced by medical corps, environmental activists, agricultural gangs and home or utility construction teams around the world. Arms are made for hugging and not for fighting and killing. In the case of African countries where imperialism entrenched genocidal armies of conquest and occupation, there is even a more convincing need to abolish militarism and erase the colonial boundaries to allow the loving people to freely travel across Africa and show their love to fellow Africans without the hindrance of colonial boundaries.

Moreover, imagine that it was Europeans who have been drowning in their thousands every year trying to cross the Mediterranean to access fortress Africa for better lives and opportunities. That was always the case for thousands of years when Africa was the cradle of civilization and Europeans came as undocumented immigrants or returnees, having originated in Africa earlier. Europeans would have been calling for a safe ferry service to be put in place to transport their people across the Aegean Sea. Legal scholars should add their voices to the call by Giannacopoulos (2011) and by myself to go beyond the love of the law, nomophilia, and bring in the law of love to welcome immigrants and offer asylums to all who seek it in a troubled world. Simply mentioning in the constitution that the indigenous people now have a right to their land titles if such titles have not been extinguished by the colonizers, falls far short in the expectation that a loving government would decolonize the shameful overincarceration of indigenous people and the detention of refugees without trial. Giannacopoulos calls for the reparative payment of the sovereign debts owed to the Indigenous peoples and this cannot be done by simply advocating for the adoption of the hypocritical cries of fraternity, equality and liberty that the slave-holding French republic chanted to the pleasure of liberals like Braithwaite (1996) who advocate self-regulation for corporations but not for Indigenous nations under settler-colonialism. What the Fuck did President Donald Trump mean when he told graduates at the Naval Academy in May 2018 that there is nothing that America cannot do, that America tamed a whole continent and that America has no apologies to anyone? Fuck the Law that seeks to regulate crimes against humanity?

Decolonization also goes beyond policy scholar-activism to embrace methodological innovations that challenge the positivism and empiricism of imperialist thought. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) has outlined the principles that could help us to decolonize our methodologies especially when it comes to research that concerns Indigenous peoples for whom research is a dirty word. Bagele Chilisa (2012) has also developed similar principles for Indigenous Research Methodologies that challenge Eurocentrism. Similar methodological innovations have been going on in Africana Studies with emphasis on critical, centred scholar-activism. I have added to this paradigm the principle that we should not be tricked into disowning objectivity by claiming that we are only committed to social justice as many progressive scholars have done. Instead, we should always aim for what I call committed objectivity because that is the best standard for any researcher, not just for Indigenous researchers for race-class-gender oppression is a threat to all (Agozino, 1997, 2003; Crenshaw, 1989; Gabbidon, 2010; Hall, 1980, 2016; Kitossa, 2012; Oriola, 2006, 2012).

Conclusions

The decolonization paradigm is gaining currency in the social sciences with support from many scholars of European descent. Bonaventura dos Santos (2014) has drawn from the World Social Forum movement and called on scholars to learn from Epistemologies from the South to develop strategies for preventing ‘epistemicide’ in scholarship. It is important to note that what is at stake is real genocide and not just epistemicide. With the final solution, no one would worry about the epistemic contributions from the South. Thomas Kuhn (1962) was generalizing the Eurocentric genocidal tradition when he outlined The Structures of Scientific Revolution. According to this imperialist epistemology that is adopted uncritically even by Indigenous scholars, one paradigm is hegemonic at any one point until a counter-thesis emerges to contest the hegemony. The two paradigms struggle and are replaced by a new synthesis that combines what is best in both the thesis and the anti-thesis. Such a natural science model of dialectics is not suitable in the social sciences where a multiplicity of paradigms populate the fields of study and hardly any of them has ever been subjected to epistemicide despite withering criticism.

As a result, I am not suggesting that decolonization-centricity is the only way to conduct social science research or that all other paradigms should be subjected to epistemicide. To me, decolonization is not simply a metaphor because imperialism is not allegorical. The system of colonization remains in settler colonial societies but also in neocolonial locations under the domination of finance capital or imperialism. There would always be apologists for imperialism and they may defend their privileges by opposing the decolonization of the universities. We hope that as we battle against the injustice sustained around the world by imperialism, more young scholars will join the struggle against unfairness, oppression and exploitation in the real word and in universities (Smith, 1999). The imperialist logic that remains dominant in universities today does not hurt only Indigenous peoples, women and the poor – injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, as the estimated 60 million who died in the second imperialist world war; and the 600 thousand who died in the pro-slavery American civil war, go to show.

Part of the reasons why criminology has struggled in neocolonial countries and among indigenous people may be the complicity of the discipline in the project of imperialism as I pointed out in Counter-Colonial Criminology. In his preface to The New Criminology, Alvin Gouldner (1973) pointed out that there is a need to develop a liberation paradigm in criminology in order to make the discipline more attractive to critical scholars. In the absence of such a liberation paradigm, Gouldner was generous in recognizing Robert Merton, Charles W. Mills and Howard Becker as contributing directly or indirectly to the development of such a liberation paradigm that The New Criminology aspired to, though without critiquing imperialism. If Gouldner (1973) had looked beyond white male criminologists, he could not have had troubles in identifying W.E.B. Du Bois (1904, 1945) as laying the foundation for Liberation Sociology the way that Pfohl (2015), Feagin, Hernan, and Ducey (2014) and Pearce (1976) suggested. The emergence of Indigenous Criminology by Cunneen and Tauri (2016), Tauri and Deckert (2014), and Deckert (2014) shows that there will be no racist or sexist border controls and so criminologists of every colour would be welcome to join indigenous scholars in the struggle against colonial injustice with the aim of decolonizing the real world and decolonizing our theories, methodologies and activism as Harry Blagg (2008), Azikiwe (1960), Cabral (1979), Fanon (1963), Agozino (2003), Abu-Jamal and Vittoria (2018) and others have been harping. Screw imperialism.

Finally, a major lesson from this papyrus is that we should make efforts to found Love Studies as an original theoretical, research and policy area of discourse with emphasis on educating the public on the ethics of love for the self, the family, the community, and especially for the enemy. Throughout the world, there are military academies to teach young people how to kill lots of people with weapons of mass destruction but there is not a single school for the inculturation of the people in the One Love philosophy of Rastafari. The neglect of Love Studies is not due to the difficulty of the subject matter for even rocket science is taught in universities. The neglect of Love Studies is due to the fact that intellectuals have not devoted efforts to this area of discourse the way classical philosophers and religious traditions attempted. Let us build on past efforts to construct the beginning of Love Studies for the benefit of all.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Flinders University [International Visiting Fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Biko Agozino

Biko Agozino, PhD, is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA. He is the author of the following books – Essays on education and popular culture: Massliteracy, 2019, Cambridge Scholars Press; Critical, creative and centered scholar-activism: The fourth dimensionalism of Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo, 2016, FDP; ADAM: Africana drug-free alternative medicine, 2006; Counter-colonial criminology, 2003; Pan African issues in crime and justice (co-edited), 2004, republished by Routledge, 2018; Nigeria: Democratising a militarised civil society (co-authored) 2001; Theoretical and methodological issues in migration research (edited), 2000; and Black women and the criminal justice system, 1997, republished by Ashgate, 2018. Also Director-Producer-Editor of Reparative Justice, 30 minutes, colour, African Independent Television, Lagos, Nigeria, 2002; Director-Producer of CLR James: The Black Jacobins Sociology Series, 2008; Director-Producer, Shouters and the Control Freak Empire, Winner of the Best International Short Documentary, Columbia Gorge Film Festival, USA, 2011. He is Editor-In-Chief of the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, and Series Editor, Ashgate Publishers Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and Class Relations.