West Losing Narrative Control After 500 Years Of Global Genocide | Prof. Aghogho Akpome

(Thank you, Pascal. The key is: this ain’t just about “Africa”.

It’s very much about Pine Ridge and Flint and Cuzco and Dien Bien Phu and dear Paris too.)

Some deeply interesting thoughts in this video, which help me to understand why I can never seem to let go of ‘politics’.

–“The Genocide” is nothing new at all. The current situation in Gaza is especially horrifying because it’s happening now, in a time when we can theoretically do something about it (and don’t)–but the same was true for our ancestors back in the day, living through the Little Big Horn or the Benin Massacre of the 1890s.

–Such genocides, happening in a context of colonialism, are not the exception but the Rule, as in “the international rules-based Order”.

We cluck and clutch about shitholes and thank our lucky stars that we were born ‘here’ instead of in one. But we never seem to get around to thinking about how the shitholes got to be shitholes, and how that shitification process has been so very central to the establishment and maintenance of our clean white Free way of life far away from what ‘we’ve’ done to the ‘other parts’ of the world. (Meaning at various times, Namibia or the so-called Dakota Territories.)

–Then and now, we all are involved in constructing and psychologically propping up Narratives which justify and try to explain away what ‘we’ do in the world, and how we can still see ourselves as the Good People in spite of atrocity being so necessary to building ourselves up into a so-called superpower.

–Then and now, ‘they’ are always savages, and we are always liberators bringing the Light of Civilization to lands without morality. When you hear the evil ones nattering about how there are no Palestinians, or about how none of them are human, but only animals, you are only hearing the updated version of ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’.

–It’s always a jungle out there, and it always needs to be made into a garden, by ‘pioneers’ and ‘settlers‘ and visionary tycoons who look at a waste of space and think: “ahhhh yes, someday this will be a productive banana (or coffee) plantation”. Someday western mining or ranching will make this place Productive, just as God intended.

–That Welfare Queen that you can’t help yapping about periodically, with her Cadillac and her fingernails and her processed hair? It is so very easy to forget that your grandmother enslaved her grandmother, that she is likely a product of a Grandpa Master literally raping a Grandma slave because in his beady eyes she was nothing but property.

… and so …

You are cordially and magnanimously invited to shut your trap about laziness and food stamps sucking up your precious tax dollars at a fraction of how those tax dollars are always spent, killing people and turning them into pieces of ground meat or empire machine, all over the globe, for the whole length of your life and the lives of your well-adjusted, healthy, happy children.

***

I don’t want to be a Settler.

I don’t want to live my life according to these fucked-up narratives of colonialism, or the underlying ones about what constitutes civility and Civilization, and,

thus, to the utmost of my limited abilities …

I just won’t.

And at the same time that I struggle to divorce myself from those stories, and make my personal way to the promised land of Helloutta the way …

I cannot remain blithely silent about what seem to me to be Self-Evident truths about the deeply ugly nature at the heart of Leading and Following alike in this culture and society.

I cannot use my own leisure to merely and only live life as a drowning of my sorrows in the drug of Celebration, without reflecting on the mechanisms by which you and I and grandma and grandpa stole that leisure from those hearts of darkness in the first place.

I’m not going to be celebrating the Pilgrims or the Founding Fathers, over this year’s turkey bird.

That failure might make me look a little sullen, but underneath the apparently morose gazes I’ll be fiercely trying to just figure out how to chart and embrace a really and truly better Way of Life

than this one
you choose every day
to embrace instead. No,

I ain’t gonna work
for Maggie’s pa no more
He puts his cigar
out in your face

just for kicks
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks
and the National Guard

stands around his door
Ain’t gonna work
for Maggie’s pa
no more No

Ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more
She talks to all the servants
about man and God and Law
Everybody say

She’s the brains behind pa.
She’s sixty-eight
but she says she’s twenty-four
I ain’t gonna work for
Maggie’s
ma
no
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