Colonialism is hardly a thing of the past – it’s alive and vibrant as ever . . . from the Middle East to Western Europe to the United States to India and God knows where else. And it can be profitable as hell, at least for the right industries.
Be afraid. Be very afraid!
This is true especially if you belong to a wealthy, heavily armed nation – because your enemies are everywhere, clustering at your borders or, even worse, daring to claim possession of their ancestral land and inconveniencing your possession of it.
In an interview at Democracy Now, Anthony Lowenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, referred to the phenomenon as a “global Palestine.” That is to say, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and its current bombing of Lebanon – possibly the beginning of a devastating war in the Middle East – is just the most egregious example of the planet’s evolving colonialism in the present moment.
And as Lowenstein points out, the global link is both political and financial (not to mention racial). It doesn’t always morph into war, but violence and loss of life are always present in various ways.
Consider the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of surveillance towers have been installed over the last two decades, giving invaluable assistance to border patrol agents. As a Guardian story points out: “All along, officials have claimed the new technology would deter migration and help migrant safety, yet nearly 10,000 migrants have died crossing the border in the last 25 years, and the deaths are increasing.”
This is because migrants, fleeing hell in their homeland, are forced to take longer and more dangerous routes to the U.S. border, often with lethal consequences. Still, those who are in true danger, at least according to the “border protectors” – such as, for instance, surveillance-tower construction company Anduril – are the Americans. Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, for instance, said the company’s goal is to “radically transform the defense capabilities of the United States” via AI.
In other words, this is war. Rather than a global effort to address the causes of all the emigration occurring across the planet, the wealthy countries – the ones that have inherited the rewards of colonial conquest – are choosing to “protect” themselves from it. As Pedro Rios of the American Friends Service Committee has put it, according to the Guardian, “the framing of migration by media and politicians in war-like terms – such as ‘surge’ or ‘invasion’ – drives more investment in border security.”
You know: Be afraid. Be very afraid. And of course, if the ones who are surveilled and/or occupied dare to fight back, they’re called terrorists.
Moving across the Atlantic, I note that the European Union has to deal with its own version of the “global Palestine” – immigrants fleeing their homelands across the Mediterranean, often in horrifically unsafe boats that wind up capsizing. More than 3,000 emigrants drowned last year alone, trying to reach the EU. And in the last decade, over 30,000 are simply missing.
Another Guardian story reports on a significantly contributing factor to these high numbers. It notes: “The EU doesn’t have a coordinated search-and-rescue operation but, according to international maritime law, any coastal state aware of a boat in distress has a duty to intervene. However, this often doesn’t happen and NGOs trying to fill this gap receive little support – only additional obstacles.”
These obstacles include strict regulations on the rescue boats, such as forcing them to dock at ports inconveniently distant from where they operate, forcing them to travel thousands of unnecessary miles and waste enormous amounts of money simply paying for the fuel to do so. In other words, there’s no coordinated public-private effort to save emigrants’ lives, but rather a public attitude that amounts to “let them drown.”
As an SOS Humanity report put it, rescue vessels wasted 374 days in 2023 making unnecessarily long docking journeys. According to the report: “This is not a coincidence, but a political tactic.”
And then, in a different section of Planet Earth, Hafsa Kanjwal writes in Middle East Eye about the disconcerting link India has with Israel in regard to Hindu-majority India’s relationship with the predominantly Muslim region of Kashmir. Right-wing pundits, Kanjwal notes, are known to call for “the Israeli model to be implemented in Kashmir” – which basically means replacing the Muslims.
She writes: “To be sure, Kashmir and Palestine are not identical, nor are any other two global regions. But their struggles share a common source: British colonization.”
The link is between the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a national home for the Jewish people on Palestinian lands, and the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, in which the British sold the Kashmir territory to a Hindu warlord, which resulted in severe suppression of the Muslim-majority population.
“The ‘births’ of India and Israel also meant the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through the Nakba and Kashmiris through the Jammu massacre.”
And, with the rise of India’s Hindu nationalism, “long gone is the benevolent discourse of inclusion; this ideology explicitly calls for demographic change and the building of Hindu settlements in Kashmir.”
This is called us v. them. It’s a world in which only some lives matter, which winds up meaning that no lives matter. It’s the definition of hell and it’s the militarized world, I fear, that we are continuing to create for ourselves. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments, is available here: https://linktr.ee/bobkoehler
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