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A total and final destruction of innocence

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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.

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Colonizers’ fake identities

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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.
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Colonizer Homelessness

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A colonizer is always angry, because a colonizer is always guilty.
A colonizer is always violent, because a colonizer is always afraid.

A colonizer is always angry and afraid because a colonizer is never home.

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Lately I started getting words for it, this Colonizer Homelessness, the fact that colonizers look and feel like aliens to natives not only because they don’t belong, but because the colonizers themselves feel the same way.

Think about it: wherever a colonizer goes, whatever they see, smell, or taste, it is never theirs, or completely natural for them.

Not part of their upbringing, not part of their story. Not part of who they are. It is not organic to them, but engineered; their whole existence is.

Whatever sustains and nourishes the native, threatens the colonizer and reflects their strangeness: the food, the music, the landscape, the flora and fauna. the sounds and smells, everything.

Whatever comes naturally to the native is a great effort for the colonizer: they don’t understand the codes, and never will. They can’t be still.

A colonizer is not an immigrant, a tourist, or a guest, they have to find meaning for their stay. It must be a higher purpose, a higher calling, or else what can explain both their presence not home, and the violent means they always need to maintain it?

We are not designed to inflict pain and injury for comfort. We need a story to put us in a positive light.

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So much of the Western world’s anxiety, I think, is just a colonizer’s latent, repressed homelessness. Because colonialism is not just taking other people’s home, it is also, and forever, being without one yourself.