Coronel Tavington: Terror as a method of government

Colonel Tavington is the most feared British officer in The Patriot: he suppresses the rebellion of the American colonies with a calculated cruelty —executing prisoners, razing farms and, in his most infamous act, locking the inhabitants of a town inside a church and setting it ablaze with everyone inside—. He is not an uncontrolled sadist; he is a man who uses terror as a tool of government. For postcolonial criminology, Tavington embodies a truth the discipline underscores: that terror was not an excess of colonial domination, but one of its central methods.

// The theoryTerror as policy, not as excess

The postcolonial criminology of Fanon insists that colonial violence is not an accident or an occasional overflow, but the very structure of domination: a people is kept subjugated, against its will and on its own land, only through the permanent threat of force. Tavington understands this with professional lucidity: for a large population to accept the yoke of a foreign power, it must be taught that resistance is paid for with annihilation. His atrocities are not fits of rage; they are messages —exemplary punishments designed to terrorize the rest—. The theory thus dismantles the image of colonialism as a benevolent order sprinkled with isolated abuses: terror was the operating system, and officers like Tavington its engineers. Brutality did not betray colonial logic; it fulfilled it.

// The subjectThe ambitious man who exploits the empire

Tavington does not act out of ideological conviction or hatred of the colonists: he is driven by personal ambition —he seeks to rise, to win land, to advance in the imperial hierarchy—, and brutality is his shortcut. Postcolonial criminology reads him as a recurring type: the one who uses the colonial machine for his own benefit, carrying out its worst violence not because he believes in it, but because it suits him. This does not exculpate him —he is fully responsible for every atrocity—, but it illuminates how the colonial system recruited its executioners: it did not need fanatics, ambitious men willing to do whatever it took in exchange for a reward were enough. Tavington burns innocents not because he hates them, but because burning them brings him closer to what he wants. And that self-interested coldness is, in its own way, as chilling as fanaticism.

// The crackNeither "the villain of the action movie" nor an excuse for any revolt

The crack with Tavington is the framing of The Patriot: a film that uses British colonial terror to glorify the American cause, falling into its own hypocrisy —the same colonists the film presents as heroic victims were, many of them, slaveholders, and the new country they founded exercised its own brutal colonialism over indigenous peoples—. Postcolonial criminology does not hand out heroes and villains according to which side they are on: it denounces colonial terror wherever it comes from, including that of those who later present themselves as liberators. The opposite crack is to use Tavington's brutality to justify any violence of the resistance: the theory, following a Fanon read with nuance, explains the reaction of the oppressed without sanctifying it or ignoring that it too can breed new oppressions. Tavington's terror is a crime; and pointing it out does not require idealizing those who fought against him.

That the nation founded by fighting Tavington's terror would build its own greatness on the slavery and dispossession of other peoples is the irony postcolonial criminology never lets pass: yesterday's liberated is, all too often, tomorrow's colonizer.