COLONIALISM is back, baby! And it's as greedy and inhumane as it ever was.
Never mind worrying about whether we are living in Munich 1936 or its satellites, try thinking Gujurat 1608, or a few years earlier in Java, or even earlier than that in the Malloccas, or earlier again in Offaly.
The basic idea is that a country with its combination of rich men and political rulers will spot a venture and potential to make money and they will form a narrative and invade, murder, pillage and own the land and resources. And then they call any objection to that illegal, because they make laws enabling the whole thing. Bish, bash., might is right, Bosh. Easy. Until it isn’t, but by then it is someone else’s problem. Well, the problem of the kids of the venturers who are by then the rulers and vested interests, and they own a polluted fresh water lake that is turning green and smelly.
But the bottom line is the bottom line and every humanitarian crisis will, in this 21st century, be considered an opportunity. Indeed the legacy of previous colonisation is the opportunity for this version. Oh, the bittersweet irony. Britain’s legacy in the Middle East should no longer be viewed through the lens of human rights abuses and potential accountability for the systemic genocidal murder of Palestinians. No, in this bright, shiny colonial world it needs to be viewed as the land being scorched for the Casinos in the Riviera.
Stop thinking about Spain’s destruction of full nations in Venezuela, or capitalism’s deliberate impoverishment of the country – think about the oil in the ground that could belong to the billionaires who haven’t enough already.
Stop watching the destruction of Ukraine for the umpteenth time in its history and the traumatisation of the people and start thinking of the minerals under the ground that Family Trump can put into their Trust funds. The goggles of democracy and self-determination are so boring when compared to these endless opportunities.
Of course there is only so much of this that mutual convenience and self-interest will tolerate. The checks and balances intended by international law are silenced and shadow bodies created as an attempt to assuage the performative consciences of those who wish to pretend that they are even slightly interested in their common man and woman. The invasion of Venezuela can be tolerated because the guys and gals there make us feel uncomfortable.
But then that gets turned on its head for those whose glory days of colony are over and their place in the world has become very very small when compared to the New Colonial Order who are threatening their borders in Ukraine and Greenland. And suddenly the partial approach to human rights and the quisling approach to abuse of power becomes exposed as futile. The ghosts of Moghul Emperors are laughing under the rubble of destroyed former orders at supine and pathetic Western European leaders.
The ideals of workers’, women’s, children’s and human rights are worth asserting and defending in this new colonial era with a ferocity never seen before. The order of nation states is being dismantled, and it is global citizenry that must stand up for the future. Before we all become the enslaved and before wretched and imperfect democratic norms become dreams of a distant past.
