Kheiriddin: The ‘decolonization’ movement will condemn us to the brutality of our past
2023/10/14 Leave a comment
Valid commentary on the limits of “settler colonial” and decolonization language. Assume NDP MPP Jama is not going to leave Canada despite being “a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system.”
While history is always being reviewed and revised, that it is different from being erased, as we have to know the past in order to bring about a better present and future:
After 24 hours of outrage, Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama has apologized.
On Tuesday, Jama posted on Twitter that she was “reflecting on my role as a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system, and I ask that all politicians do the same. #FreePalastine (sic).” This was followed by a lengthy statement in which she condemned Israel, where, she said, “For 75 years, violence and retaliation rooted in settler colonialism have taken the lives of far too many innocent people.”
This earned her a rebuke — but not a demand for resignation — from NDP Leader Marit Stiles. Jama now says that she understands “the pain that many Jewish and Israeli Canadians, including my own constituents, must be feeling.” But as of Thursday morning, her original post remains up, and Jama remains in caucus.
Jama’s statement illustrates the absurd lengths to which the “decolonization” movement has been taken. Today, the word “decolonization” has lost all meaning. It has become a trope for overthrowing whatever order someone finds offensive.
Decolonize Palestine of Jews. Decolonize Canada of white people. Decolonize language of words that might cause offence. Decolonize the math curriculum of Eurocentric “ways of knowing.” Never mind that much of modern mathematics was developed by Arabic mathematicians — history doesn’t matter, only dogma does.
But history does matter. And in modern times, a lot of it is revisionist. It fails to note that many of the colonized people of today were once colonizers themselves, and vice versa. Jews may be considered settlers in Israel by some people in 2023, but they were subject to thousands of years of oppression there, including by the Roman Empire, the Crusaders and the Ottoman Empire.
As a result, the Jewish people became scattered throughout the world, and had no haven to flee to when Adolf Hitler dragged six million to the gas chambers, before finally being allowed to return to their ancestral homeland.
In North America, the descendants of Irish Catholics would be considered “settlers” by Indigenous people. But Catholics in Ireland were displaced by British and Scottish settlers in the 1600s, setting off centuries of conflict, the partition of Ireland and Northern Ireland and the Troubles, which claimed over 3,500 lives at the end of the last century.
In Canada, Quebec francophones would also be considered “settlers” today, despite themselves having been conquered by the British at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and spending 200 years seeking to become “maître chez nous” (masters in our own house), mostly but not exclusively by political means.
Canada’s First Nations were also both conquered and conquerors. Over the past 500 years, Indigenous people were systematically colonized by Europeans, who moved into their territories, waged war on them and eradicated their traditional way of life through the reserve system, the pass system, residential schools and other means.
But before the Europeans arrived, Indigenous nations made war on each other, engaging in both guerrilla tactics and sophisticated battles. The Haida Nation routinely conducted slave raids down the West Coast. The Iroquois Confederacy warred with the Huron-Wendat. War was as much a part of Indigenous societies as it was in other parts of the world.
Today, few people talk of these things: Indigenous peoples are portrayed as harmonious and peace-loving, while non-Indigenous people are seen as aggressive and violent. But we should talk about them, and in light of what’s happened in Israel, maybe we finally will.
Human history is a miserable river of blood, and all our ancestors bathed in it. We will never erase the sins of the past. All we can do now is move forward and decide what we will and will not tolerate today and in the future.
We can choose to stand for the principles of human rights and dignity. We can stand for equality of races and sexes. We can stand for the rule of law and democracy. We can say never again will we force children into slavery, or “re-education,” or murder them in their beds.
These concepts, it should be noted, are not “colonial.” As African political philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò writes in his brilliant work, “Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously”: “The problem is that many of our decolonizers too easily conflate modernity and westernization.”
For example, he rejects the argument that capitalism is colonial and discusses how colonialism actually blocked the economic aspirations of millions of Africans. Táíwò does not reject things such as western legal systems and the scientific method simply because they were not derived from African thought. He argues that to do so implies that colonized people have no agency and cannot decide for themselves what path to follow.
The colonization lens has become a trap that pits group against group, nation against nation. It ignores the common principles that led to the recognition after the Holocaust that war was not “a continuation of politics by other means,” as Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, but something to be avoided. If we’re ever going to put a stop to the cycle of violence, we must first stop dividing ourselves into “colonizers” and “colonized” and recognize that we are all just one thing: human beings condemned to sharing space with each other.
Terrorism, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas last weekend, doesn’t make the world a better place. It won’t create an independent Palestine. It won’t lead to progress of any kind, for anyone. All it does is drag us back to the brutal past from which humanity has striven for centuries to escape.
Multicultural Meanderings 