At this late, late stage in white colonialism’s lifecycle, you could be tempted to ask: when is it enough? Shouldn’t the greed be quenched already? Shouldn’t the domination impulses be satisfied already? Thinking like a normal person, you’d probably consider things like that. You probably may have once or twice in this genocide thought that precisely.

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But if we do entertain such naive thoughts occasionally, it’s only because we haven’t yet realized how absolutist,  or totalitarian, colonialism really is.

I mean: why couldn’t Israel be satisfied with just pre-1967 borders? Or why couldn’t European settlers in the Americas take just half the continent, and leave some to the natives? Or, more in the present, why does the US have to have 800 military bases around the world, and why does it have to meddle so intensely and inconsistently in the affairs of every country on the face of this earth?

Why does it seem white, European colonialism, knows no bounds? Why does it always, always have to expand, and pushes to expand even when it appears to be dominating virtually every aspect of human life everywhere? Where does this crazy insatiability, this urge to own and control all of it come from?

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As always, I am looking for explanations in the psychological, or, more correctly, the psychopolitical realm.  We have here a political universe that appears incapable of containing itself; that must invade, meddle, bomb, scheme, steal.

Because colonizers are people, and because people have an innate and always-present capacity for morality,  and because people always need to feel both protected and moral, we can assume that white colonizer expansionism is related to the need to be protected and moral.

Yet while you could claim, in some bizarre world, that invading every piece of land and enslaving every human in the world is supposed to make you safe (if you kill and subjugate everyone you will be safe, except from the many, many psychopaths you have cultivated at home), such an endeavor could never make you feel moral.

A colonizer always has guilt: it is inevitable. Some shame and some guilt are inseparable from hurting people, except maybe among the true sociopaths.

But if nobody knows that you’ve done something wrong, have you really done something wrong? If you’re in a position to kill anybody who was witness to your crime,  shame and guilt are not your problems anymore; your problems, in this case, become operational, or logistical.

Once they have dehumanized the rest of humanity, white European colonizers have only one solution to their problem, and that is the existence of remaining native communities, who bear witness to the crimes of colonialism (if white people in South Africa annihilated all black people there, Israel’s and America’s genocide in Gaza would have faced no legal challenge).

To feel moral, the colonizer must destroy all native life, everywhere.

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But this is not all. It is not only their knowledge of the colonizer’s crime that drives them crazy. It is their innocent existence. The fact that natives, no matter where on earth, have a simple understanding of morality and justice. They prefer their land over profit, and their dignity over fame. They do not see the ancestral homeland as real estate, but as a source of their innermost vitality, and honor.

Natives have compassion and believe in proportionate punishment, and forgiveness: they are never expansionists. They are not cynical: they treat their rules with great respect and gravitas. To a native, it is not a game of monopoly: it is life, and its dignity must be preserved. This does not mean that all understanding of justice among native is right and perfect and that native communities could never use reform. This means that the serious and holistic approach to life among natives, compared to the always double consciousness of the colonizer, makes their existence a constant insult.

When you have no dignity, people with dignity become your greatest fear: you cannot tolerate their presence. Think about it: for a slaver of a land grabber, is there a greater insult than the humble peasant, looking to inherit their small plot to their offspring? A native mother breastfeeding her baby in quiet, is she not the biggest tormentor of the colonizer? Of course she is. Her natural, simple, morally easy existence makes his calculations and shamed conscience look so shameful. So dirty. He has to destroy her.

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Children are our living manifestations of innocence, of a life free from scheming, of an inability to deceive. How beautifully transparent children are: whatever they feel, you see it immediately. it is out there.

It is no coincidence, then, that children in Gaza have become such a prime target in this genocide. They represent the pinnacle of innocence: childhood in its purest human form, untainted by adulthood or by domination and expansionism. Colonizers can’t bare their existence. They have to destroy them.

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The crazy, inconceivable crime, or everlasting series of horrendous crimes, that is white European colonialism, is incapable of doing anything else at this late, metastasized state it’s in. The only way forward it imagines it has is the total erasure of innocence from every square inch of soil on this planet.

If they can make everyone cynical, consumers, traders, subjects, and users, they will have won, at least in their minds. They don’t care that in pursuing this antihuman they are bound to live humanity without its foremost guarantees of sanity, and that is innocence and a unified consciousness that is both wholly present and connected to its environment and part of a bigger universal oneness.

The quest to destroy all native life on earth, all authenticity, all honesty,  all spontaneity,  is the real cause of this late colonialist attacks that we’ve been seeing. It is the only thing colonizers believe can save them from the paranoia, haunted conscience, and homelessness they always feel.

They have no idea how wrong they are, and have no clue how tormented their souls is, or how twisted their worldview.

But for our sanity as a species, for us to have any future that offers any normalcy whatsoever, the colonizers must not win. We must fight to retain our innocence as a species. We must fight to protect native children and native childhood.

When I found this image for this post, I started tearing up immediately. I had never known what this picture meant before this genocide. What it truly, emotionally means: what the innocent people of this tribe must have felt. But now I know. You can read more about the context of this image here.