While most all cultures across the planet have bred dominators and war-mongers who have conquered other regions of their homelands and far beyond, there has been one tribe that has been particularly brutal, self-interested and barbaric, beating out the rest by far.
Guess who it is?
The European, white male.
A touch of british history
It has been the British in particular historically who have shown such intestinal fortitude that this quote about them has become infamous:
The sun never sets on the British Empire said 1st Earl George MacCartney.
A rejoinder was offered by an Indian Nationalist commentator, Shashi Tharoor, that is not as well-known but not less relevant who said: “…because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark”.
At the height of the British Empire in 1922-23, it subjugated over 485,000,000 people-- on every continent--occupying a full quarter of the world. During its heyday, it was the largest Empire among all in human history.
A few of many colonial empires
The Greek, Roman and Ottoman Empires each had their day of battle, bloodshed and conquest, as did the Chinese, Japanese, Mongolians, French, the Aztecs and so many others-- so unwinds human history, fraught with desires for domination and unbridled greed, hostility, vengeance, economic and political manipulation undergirded often by religious zealotry and ideology.
The Mongolians had Genghis Khan’s troops who fought their way through Asia and points west to Eastern Europe, and the Jews came from Egypt fighting their way into what was called The Promised Land displacing Canaanites, many other tribes and later the Palestinians.
Different African tribes subjugated neighboring tribes and sold those captured into slavery to the white man for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade but even prior to that, traded among themselves, such as among by the Kingdoms of Axum, Mali and Nubia to name just a few.
Desecration of indigenous cultures on turtle island
Native American tribes fought others and subjugated their adversaries as well. The Mayans and Inca in South America did battle and sought to conquer others and expand their Empires as well.
But Native Americans of “Turtle Island” also suffered massively at the hands of the British, French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish to untold degree. Blankets were purposely infected with disease that the Native Peoples had no defense against, and though they were called “savages” by the Europeans, their wives were raped and their land and buffalo were stolen by the “civilized” European.
The indigenous children were ripped from their families and forced into “residential schools” where they couldn’t speak their language and their culture was eviscerated from their being. In short, these children were completely traumatized by the white man from Europe with his teachings of Christianity, which were supposed to be teachings about love, not conquest. You would never know it by the heinous acts committed by these Christian marauders.
Yet, human history is largely a history of war, violence and battle, domination and conquest, enslaving the captured, raping their women and stealing their land in the name of religious, ideological superiority. The irony couldn’t be more extreme.
A touch of beauty & hope in the midst of global chaos
Needless to say, and most thankfully, human history also consists of extraordinary cultural, technological, artistic and sociological achievement. Vast civilizations with awesome sophistication, finesse and refinement have been developed as have many advancements in intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual capacity.
Most human beings have an innate appreciation of beauty, sentiment, art, Nature, movement, diversity in taste, fashion, story and music which has given rise to a rich texture of a multi-cultural heritage we embody.
The beauty of these milestones in the fulfillment of the finer parts of human potential are stellar in so many ways, which makes this darker side of our nature all the sadder because humans can be so extraordinary when they are not pillaging and plundering one another.
Extolling the virtues of humankind while looking at the exploitation of other countries, people and of Mother Nature Herself is nothing short of heartbreaking. Among which, there are probably no worse offenders, despite most every country’s contribution at least in part, as said before, than of Britain and its offspring, the United States.
These two empires have orchestrated divide and conquer scenarios, coup d’états including of Democratically-elected Presidents and exploitation of people without parallel, all over the world.
Collusion among profiteers: Profit trumps morality yet again & the jews are left homeless
One of the worst time periods in world history, the Holocaust, was aided and abetted by a series of leading U.S. companies all of which is public knowledge. Ford, Coca-Cola and IBM. Add to that, Dow Chemical and Chase Bank, Woolworth, MGM and Kodak, some of America’s “finest”, were only a few of the offenders.
When the war ended, Jews and others were left stranded in concentration camps and across Europe, homeless and penniless, with nowhere to go. The U.S. would not give entrée for the longest time and few countries would open their doors. The child Holocaust survivor, Jewish Studies scholar and esteemed author Elie Wiesel wrote extensively about the attitudes toward Jews during and after WWII.
Many Jews fled Europe and flooded into Palestine in the 1930’s in the hope of establishing a Jewish State. A wee little problem however: there were nearly a million Palestinians who happened to be living in this very same region for centuries. It is called the Nakba.
Jews then, just as the Europeans did to the indigenous people of Turtle Island hundreds of years before, in 1948 attacked and drove the Palestinians out of their homeland. The U.N. resolutions put into place to allow each party its own state were repeatedly violated, actually, by both sides, then abandoned.
The issues in Palestine-Israel are more complex because both Jews and Arabs have been living in these lands off and on for thousands of years, not infrequently side by side as neighbors and friends, sometimes as relatives. But when one starts driving the other out and one lays exclusive claim to the land, there will be profound consequences, some of which they and the world have experienced for decades and are experiencing right now.
Causes of today’s wars which could lead to WWIII & nuclear Armageddon
If you look at the two largest, most potentially explosive wars taking place right now in the world-Ukraine-Russia and now Israel-Palestine, and trace the more contemporary causes to these, you are going to come up with naming the United States.
MIT Professor Emeritus, internationally-renowned linguist and political scholar and activist, Noam Chomsky called “the United States the greatest terrorist organization in the world”.
Yet it wears “the smiley face’” of being the advocate for Democracy. Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of evidence of that through the decades but rather, to the contrary.
Of course, the U.S. doesn’t see itself as a terrorist nation at all but rather as “the perennial good guy” in a world of self-interested vipers antagonistic to Democracy. Remarkable!
Dr. Freud was right—projection really is a true phenomenon. One of America’s leading Ivy League schools, Princeton University, issued a document many years ago stating that the U.S. does not meet the criteria sufficient to be called a Democracy. Irony atop irony.
If you look at just the 20th century, you will see that the U.S. has instigated some near 100 coup d’états across the world. Thankfully in our history, there are occasional periods of relative peace. Cultural, intellectual, technological, artistic, spiritual, economic and romantic flourishing occurred during both times of war and peace, vitalizing people and giving hope during the darkest of times.
The white man from Europe has been the colonizer of the world. It took a man of the character of Mahatma Gandhi to break the yoke of British colonialism in India through civil disobedience and non-violence practiced as a discipline over time.
The evil face of colonialism
After the Indian conquest, the British moved further east to do all it could to get the Chinese addicted to opium so they could conquer this vast nation too. The operating principles are obviously “More is better.” And “If it’s there, it must belong to the Royal Crown”.
If the corner drug dealer was found selling or giving opium to a kid down the block, he’d be in prison. But not the British, not the European or American male. International law or even common morality doesn’t seem to be applied to them, guilty as they may be.
Crazily, the British reputation at the time wasn’t even tainted by committing such heinous, egregious acts. It was just regarded by them and the Euro-American as “business-as-usual”.
The British ruled most of Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, the Middle East, India, wherever you look, the British were there, exploiting the resources, marching in their soldiers, killing the locals, raping their women and claiming whatever and whoever they wanted as their own. Those who consider themselves most civilized too often act like the most barbaric. King Charles was in Kenya just recently and despite the horrors the British caused in that country, just couldn’t bring himself to apologize to these people who were generationally traumatized by and many have never recovered from decades of British domination. These are not just historical facts. The arrogance continues today. Colonialism has been so problematic for so many millions of people world-wide and continues to be that untold number of books and films have been made about it, exposing it for the crime against humanity that it is.
Superior attitudes lead to inferior results
The main problem at base is its supremacist attitude and mindset. There is an inherent, peculiar assumption that the white European is somehow superior to all other humans and cultures on the planet. It is remarkable that after so much destruction left in their wake that this purview, into the 21st century, could actually persist, but remarkably, it does.
It must be said that the attitude “we are the best and highest expression of the human race” has actually been found historically in several places across the globe, not just in Europe though they seemed to have perfected it.
The ancient Chinese felt that China was the center of the Universe, let alone the planet. Thousands of years of dynastic rule expressed this sentiment as well as its attitude toward ‘outsiders’, anyone who was not Chinese.
The Japanese traditionally felt the same way. “Land of the Rising Sun” literally means that it is the “source of the sun”. Early Japanese culture was modeled on the Chinese in virtually all respects, including its superior attitude toward all other peoples.
The Jews call themselves “The Chosen People”. This is an enigmatic phrase that some people claim to understand the meaning of and others humbly smile and admit uncertainty. Chosen to be or do exactly what?
The colonial mindset is not of the historical past by any means but continues with ferocity into today. It has expanded its reach. It bobs and weaves from tanks on a country’s border to entering corporate boardrooms.
Food is chemicalized, processed and largely poisoned in different ways as sometimes is water. Controlling food and water, as well as electrical power sources these days, is to control and subjugate a people, just a different means of colonial subjugation. Now its subjects are not just of color but all colors qualify.
I often say that slavery never really ended, but just became both subtler and colorblind. Now we’re all included!
Add to this surveillance technology and AI. Colonial attitudes of “we dominate you” grossly or subtly, externally or toward the intimate recesses of one’s own mind or body, the dominance remains intact and growing in its reach, just going these days by different names.
Micro-chips are one example of many of the farther reaches of this kind of technology. These are always presented as ‘good for you’, because Big Brother is always looking out for us, right?
Corporatism controlling technology is today’s colonialism
Surveillance and a bought-off media are an affront to Democracy, liberty and freedom which are the pillars on which the U.S. and Democratic nations around the world are predicated.
Surveillance Capitalism and Surveillance Capitalism in America both make clear how Democracy and freedom are compromised and sacrificed at the feet of corporate control.
The grandfather of AI himself, Geoffrey Hinton expresses deep concerns, even regrets at the potential threats to our species with the upsurge of AI in our society. This is how far corporate-owned-and-controlled technologies have already gotten near out of hand and continue, on another level, to express the mindset of colonialism in a modern guise.
In light of these, George Orwell’s admonitions are starting to look like child’s play.
Even with the upswing of innovations in “control and surveillance technology”, there’s an interesting counterpoint, which is that more and more people distrust government and the major global corporations than ever before, acting in unison through demonstrating, massive letter-writing/calling campaigns, investigative reporting, litigation and boycotting.
How can a nation that doesn’t meet the criteria of being a Democracy defend Democracy?
How can a Democracy feed dictators and autocrats weapons and billions of dollars for them to then kill poor men, women and children in Yemen or Gaza and dare say that “this is for the good”?
There are others that are not of this Euro-American stock who have caused profound harm to people and planet for sure, but if we were to have some objective measure, I think we’d see that the European, hence American white man is far in the lead in a race no one would want to win.
Many are just turning their back on mainstream society, seeing right through its increasingly thin veneer of civility and just directing their attention to the beauty of self-selecting communities flourishing in the depths of Mother Nature, selecting the best and leaving the rest.
Just as in the film Network, one can hear people screaming out their windows, literally and metaphorically I am angry as hell, and I won’t take it anymore! people are “moving on” from this form of both gross and subtle bondage. The frills of modern life no longer hold the charm and appeal they used to even though advertisers so wish that they would.
Consumerism and materialism are being discovered to be too empty a lifestyle for an increasing number of thinking, caring people. They are simply finding that they are less interested in things and more interested in meaning.
Dear friend and colleague, environmentalist, social and media activist and scholar, Duane Elgin, founded a movement back in the 1970’s called Voluntary Simplicity, which invited people to look at consumerist tendencies and to reflect on just “how much” of anything do we need, and how much do “things” contribute to happiness.
George Carlin took this theme to comical heights in his routine on “stuff”, decrying the ridiculousness of our buying houses just to “store our stuff”.
Technology does not breed emotional intelligence or maturity
Even though technological breakthroughs have taken us into a world in which some think is “ever so advanced” we see really how emotionally arrested too many of our political leaders and captains of industry really are, using these breakthroughs just as further means to control the population so to increase their ever-expanding bottom lines. Buddhist Psychology has a poignant phrase for such undeveloped characters and calls them hungry ghosts. They seem unable to ever sate their appetite. More is always better even if they are going to bust. What is educated, advanced, moral or civil about that? A great line in the Monty Python movie, the leaning of life exemplifies this pathological phenomenon. A monstrously obese, pathetic character, Mr. Creosote, has finished an ungodly-sized meal and asked by the waiter, “Would you care for a wafer-thin mint sir?” The character accepts, and then most grotesquely, literally explodes.
The indigenous people have always known how to responsibly live with mother nature
It’s especially ironic because the more time that passes, the more we see that it has been the indigenous people all along, all over the world, that have been speaking wisdom and engaged in lifestyles that by and large, do not harm each other and honor the planet, the exact opposite of what the white man has done.
In Europe and North America, those same white men who have desecrated so much of our planet and have massacred tens of millions of men, women and children and continue to do so due to their arrogance, impunity, pathological attitude of superiority and greed, and who are literally bringing the eco-system to the verge of collapse.
It is usually done, so ironically, in the name of defending freedom, liberty and Democracy, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fairness, among us, there are many generous, kind and wonderful people but they don’t tend to be political leaders or the captains of industry, with of course, a few notable exceptions.
I am not at all chastising the entire white population, not at all, but I am pointing to the top 5-10% of corporate decision-makers at the WEF and the like, that are responsible for most of the current colonialism and destruction.
Despite pathological politicians, hope is in the air
Thankfully, the majority of people everywhere recognize the commonality of their sacred membership in the human species and celebrate the diversity we bring to the table for an utterly varied, hot and spicy, sweet and sour, fresh and fermented, totally delicious family dinner.
Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists Sikhs, Hindus and Taoists live side-by-side, break bread together, live cooperatively in their villages, and don’t typically partake of the foolishness of the political class who are still fiendishly working to divide and conquer so to shore up their petty if powerful positions.
Would Colonists Benefit from Colonics?
The intent of this article is to call this profound, historical colonialist abuse out in no uncertain terms in the interest of the colonist stopping his manic madness, engaging in self-reflection, confession and remorse in respect to these long-term, debilitating, life-destructive, heinous actions that this mindset has generated for centuries and to call for an immediate “cease-fire” across the world for the good of all people and for Mother Nature Herself.
Before the eco-system of the planet collapses completely along with the human soul, this call to action is to shape and define a new path for humanity as a family to move together toward an evolved and blessed future.
All this is possible when self-reflection and the heart and mind are united and coherent, “thinking as one”.
Structures Collapsing All Around Us for the Good
Another way to view the current collapse of institutions occurring all around us is that the old structures and paradigms do need to collapse to make room for the new, ones that are based on compassion and love instead of crime and punishment, beyond an eye for an eye.
What is happening now may have to happen for our species and many others to survive because the old ways are not sustainable but simply just too destructive. Many have spoken this idea since the Industrial Revolution.
Our survival pivots on our creativity to establish regenerative systems that support our species as part of the larger eco-system, empowering it to flourish once again.
This survival pivots on the human species taking its rightful place in Nature, not more, not less, but in its right proportion. As Goldilocks said, "just right".