For purposes of this post, I will use America as an example, due to its being arguably the vastest colonial project we know, but also because I know a little bit about its history and culture.
What I say holds very much true for Israel as well, but I am sure it can be corroborated by the experiences of many other places.
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Have you ever noticed how large American founding papers loom not only in American politics and political consciousness, but also in American culture in general?
Have you ever seen a country where the national flag is so worshiped and widely displayed as part of everything, and where the national anthem is part of everyday life? Why is that?
Why do the American Constitution, the Federalist, the Declaration of Independence, the Mayflower Compact, or Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, matter so much? And, just as importantly, why does no native community on this planet have a similar set of founding papers? Why don’t they have Founding Fathers? Why do all those savages not have an appreciation for the beauty of an engineered myth?
Well, they actually don’t. Because native communities and native people never had to fabricate a collective identity. For natives, it is very simple and natural to know who they are. Their sense of collective self is absorbed from family and community, language and landscape. It flows and forms completely naturally.
Natives don’t need to be formally and repeatedly explained who they are, but colonizers always do. To use familiar philosophical language, I’d say that native identity is posteriori in nature, whereas colonizer identity is a prior.
Natives know who they are based on common, shared, commutative experience, expressed more in dress, music, food, and art than in dialectic arguments. Colonizers know who they are, if they ever do (and they don’t. they can’t), because they have been told such and such values represent them. See the difference?
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But this is only the beginning. Because if you organize a community around intellectual fabrications it may sound nice in founding papers, but in reality, your people will feel hollow. Engineered identity to identity is a picture of lunch to actual burger and fries.
You will need emotional content to fill the void. But where will you get it from? Oh, miraculously, providence provided your vacant lands with some natives you can hate for being the (again, serendipitously) the exact opposite of your fabricated sense of identity. Mission accomplished.
You will never see a community of people more filled with hatred as colonizers feel toward the people they colonized, and you will never see a culture as premised on the negation of other people as a colonizer culture.
That’s because colonizer cultures have no positive meaning of their own. Their only meaning is denial and negation of native values and characteristics, true of misrepresented.
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But this, too, is not enough. Because, for colonizers, eventually the very existence of a native community, with its natural, non-intellectual, but psychologically nourishing sense of collective self, becomes an unbearable phenomenon.
If you’re a colonizer, a native community mirrors back to you your own contradictions and vacantness, and just how unnatural and forced your culture is. So you have to kill it. You have to make native, indigenous identities extinct.
This is why America, which really is, at its core, little more than the marketing of marketing as essence, fights and hates native communities all around the world so much, This is why it was friends with Aparthid, and an immediate ally to Australia and Canada, and why it destroyed Hawaii’s indigenous identity.
This is also a major part of why America supports Israel so much. If your identity, your mission in life, is to replace native, indigenous identity with an intellectualized marketing simulation of it, this job cannot be partial, or its absurdity will be exposed. If you are America, if you are a colonizer superpower, you have to irradicate authenticity completely and forever.
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It is a whole different subject of its own, but this uncontrollable impulse to eradicate nativity and authenticity, also beautifully explains the corporatization of the economy, and the deliberate, meticulous destruction of small, mom-and-pop stores and businesses: everything that has real identity must be destroyed for colonialism to fulfill its mission.
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America’s renewed international aggression can be seen, per my theory, as a reflexive reaction to a perceived threat. A double one: first because Americans themselves have begun to tire and question their fabricated contradictory self (singing ‘democracy’ while invading half the planet), and, second, because native identities, the global south, which should have been gone by now, looks more energized than ever. And this scares made-up America to death.