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Home Front and neo-colonialism

Today, many are wondering whether we are witnessing the majority of Western society, becoming subject to a context comparable to that of colonial law. Despite the obvious need to make nuances, in order not to come to say ‘my day is worse than your night’, there is in this questioning an ethical request that deserves to be addressed. To explain this comparison, people who talk about it frequently refer to a parallel based on the power of international corporations.
These, in Europe today as in the past and still in Africa, lobby governments to promote the introduction of social laws, prioritising their products and profits. As is frequent in Third World nations, such corporations exert their influence on the political class of the targeted countries, to get their populations accustomed to regimes of consumption, and forced discipline, which frequently encroach on their constitutional freedoms, under the guise of “national emergency”. Indeed, this kind of scenario is typical, for those who have suffered colonial segregation. However, this pattern is not an occurrence, it is established according to a model. It is possible to confirm that sadly by experience, Africans are one step ahead in grasping the subject.
Apartheid South Africa was not there to be a unique case.
Colonization anywhere is a social experiment made on others, which is brought back, and whose lessons become applied, at home. That is why, in our time more than ever, talking about colonization is necessary. Not as some would have us believe, to bring up an old subject that no longer concerns anyone, but because by studying colonization, we learn about excesses of governance, how we can recognize the classic strategies of the establishment of tyrannies, and also know how to refrain from insensitive amalgams which reduce, by their comparison, the suffering of the other.
The world has seen worse. Slavery and the Holocaust are not usable to inflate our modern ego with victimized speeches. However, it is correct to come to the obvious conclusion, that those who established and participated in the adventure of the colonies, eventually treat their own compatriots with the brutality learned in the colonized spaces.
How could it be otherwise? The naïve who think that these people have human virtues that suddenly appear when they are in another landscape, deceive themselves deeply. Living in Argentina did not change the German Nazis into humanitarians. On the contrary, they openly organized mass torture and persecution there. Wherever colonial ideology or its justification is found, there is a thought of differentiating, categorizing, and oppressing. This is done strictly for profit, but with ethnic, religious, or cultural pretexts such as “democracy” under the prism of consumerism.
Between the genocide of the Hereros of Namibia, and the German concentration camps of the Second World War, there was only one step, tragically that of importing a technique of mass elimination of human beings.
The glaring question for those who have suffered the inhuman outrages of the genocides of colonization is, how can we not only forget, but also give back the reins to a class that expresses neither remorse nor truly credible regrets, since I t continues to cynically exploit the natural and human resources of their former colonies? In short, how is it possible to imagine that they will behave differently at home? The bewildered, who look for the exit and no longer find their way in the labyrinth of responsibilities, are often those who believed that the fire from the neighbor’s house would certainly not reach their doors. Africans, on the other hand, have never taken their eyes off the racial mass killers. Even when they come dressed in the suits and ties of commercial corporations management.
Africans are not afraid, they have faith. They know that the whip, the rifle, or the nuclear weapon, ultimately become for those who use them to dominate others, self-directed suicide tools. The fall of the Roman Empire, with all its stature, offers us an eloquent example of the decay of a civilization, cannibalized from within by its obsession with conquest.
The prophet Isaiah says «.. One people will no longer raise a weapon against another, and man will study war no more… ».
Brains who have thought and made too much war, end up seeing war everywhere. They respond to their own problems with brutality. Applying battlefield methods in civilian life is a mistake that leaves traumatic wounds in the history of a nation.
Hillel our Sage said: “Mai deAlakh Sani, lir’outakh al taabid. What is detestable to you, do not do it to your neighbor.” All questions are legitimate about freedom and oppression. In our subject, these questions prove that it has become impossible to grasp and solve social problems within Europe, without addressing the methodologies used during colonization. Because colonization is a social scheme intended to be reproduced.
For thinkers who are not afraid to connect the dots, and who have understood that planetary interdependence is a reality, it is clear that it is by cleaning up and correcting the vestiges of their colonial past, that the peoples of the West will be able to guarantee their own freedoms, so that the same injustices are not repeated at home. To have imposed it elsewhere, can become to have allowed it at home. With human beings, we should not be surprised.

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