78 Million Dead: The Colonial System We Refuse to Name
The Pattern Integrity of Syntropic World includes zero exploitation, zero colonisation, and zero extraction to extinction, plus integrity is the essence, go back to source, apply the principles of Universe, starting with synergy, and speak, in the first instance, against the Little Atrocities. (I am a long-term fan of Hannah Arendt’s work and her study of the evil of the holocaust. It was her work that inspired my work on Little Atrocities.)
My question is always, what is the Source? What created this situation in what the colonising Empire calls The Middle East? To answer that is to go back far, far. Around the 1600s, when capitalism was born, at least, but even before that. (George Monbiot’s book, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, speaks of the origin of capitalism.) To try to understand the whole is always the discipline in Syntropic World. It is to apply the Principle of Synergy. This includes the history of Zionism, the horrendous partitioning of what we call the Middle East so the West continues to gain resources and wealth, the world wars and the complicity of the West in the holocaust, the effects of that, the Nakba and on and on. I refuse to forget the over 12 million Indians Britain starved to death. The millions of Africans who died at the hands of their colonisers. The wiping out of entire cultures in the Americas. The erasure of language, people and culture, including upon the lands I live. Up to 6 million women burned at the stake for being…women. Women who heal, care, and use herbs. An estimated 78 million people were killed through the brute force of colonisation and its twin, capitalism. The true number will never be known. How easily we forget these horror stories. I refuse to edify one terrible event as worth remembering while we forget the litany of terrible events, for when we do this, we are feeding the very monster that created this horror. A monster that needs superiority to live.
I refuse to forget that Iran was a flourishing, stable democracy until the USA decided it did not like the elected leader and had him removed. Iran is now, because of the USA. But let us make Iran the bad guys, ignoring the context that set the stage. Repeat this same pattern in so many countries. Chile, Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic of Congo (Patrice Lumumba), and many other places in Africa. The deliberate impoverishment and crippling of countries as the West bloats with the spoils.
And then these same decimated countries clawing their way to any form of existence, and more often than not, being labelled as terrorists, as if the brute of Western Imperialism had nothing to do with their creation. Neglecting to name the Frankenstein.
Capitalism and colonisation are deeply interlinked. I am an offshoot of white colonisation. My life is a privilege because I am a white coloniser. This makes me incredibly sad and at the same time increases my responsibility to act against any arising form of colonisation – physical, digital, or legal. And colonisation is alive and well and thriving. It has to be for capitalism to thrive. Almost 100% of us are being colonised right now, our private data scraped into the coffers of the plutocrats. It might feel innocuous. Tell that to the people being taken off the streets by ICE.
I am aghast at the support of my country and others for what is happening in not just Gaza, but the West Bank. It sickens me that settler colonialism is so sanctioned by the USA that the speaker of the House paid a visit this week to a seized enclave, then feasted with the occupiers on the land recently seized.
This does not mean I support Hamas. Yet Hamas, like Israel, like everything, happens in context. In a set of conditions that are created by a something. What is that something? That is my inquiry and work. The system that creates it. And calling out when anyone on the ground violates other life, including our Earth.
Any form of colonisation, be that physical, digital or emotional/spiritual, is something I abhor.
I stand for all human dignity. All life is sacred. And that the original sin, if there is one, is that any group of people or individual, for whatever reason, is superior to another, has more rights than another.
No matter the religion, the ethnicity, or the financial wealth. The claim of superiority is the claim of dehumanisation. My humanity, my rights are more deserved than yours. I will stand against this belief in every moment, no matter who holds it.
Hamas, Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Daniella Weiss, Zionists, fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Hindus, fundamentalist Islamists, Donald Trump, Putin, I see no evidence that they want a Syntropic World. Domination, superiority, ethno-nationalism, misogyny, cruelty, violence. I will speak against these until my last breath.
I follow and read many esteemed Jewish authors and activists, as I do many authors from many contexts who speak in reverence to all life. Anthony Loewenstein, Naomi Klein, Gideon Levy, Gabor and Aaron Mate, the newspaper Haaretz, and many others who discuss and write about Judaism without fundamentalism or rights over others.
In every culture, in every group, there are those who stand with integrity and all-life dignity and those who do not. We do not make the whole wrong for the actions of some. Yet standing in silence as your brothers and sisters enjoy dehumanising cruelty is as egregious an act as pulling the trigger.
Or as Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
You can call me what you like, you can throw accusations against me for being anti this race or that – I know who I am, I know my heart. The word anti-semitism has lost its true meaning now that it has been co-opted by members of the Jewish diaspora to conflate anti-Zionism, anti-what the state of Israel is doing, with anti-Jewish people. I stand with the Jewish people, as long as they stand with the rights of all other people, and see their existence as no more rightful than anyone else’s existence.
Israel has the right to exist, as does Palestine. If Israel seeks to exist and eliminate Palestine, I do not support that. Not one or the other. Not one over the other. Not one ruling, dominating and policing the other. Not one terrorising the other.
When Hamas is held to account, it can only be when Israel is held to account. Both are perpetrators of evil. Citizens of both places have sanctioned evil in their silence, often one Little Atrocity at a time. Haaretz this week published a poll showing that 79% of Israelis have no issue with what is happening in Gaza – with the starvation and total destruction of life. This is very difficult to read.
In the final accounting, in my final accounting, the Western capitalistic, colonising, dominating structures must be held to account most of all. We, the Western capitalistic colonising we, arm genocide, cheer apartheid, and manipulate and bully the ‘lesser’ so we can extract the maximum profit and power. That, to me, is the true Source of the evil that enables it all, and it is towards something that is not this Molochian beast that I dedicate my life.
