Hermann Bellinghausen: Israel: Colonialism in the Making

Q

I love my cats very much and, yes If I had dogs, it would be the same, but I don't understand the new white, anti-speciesist, perhaps vegan humanism that doesn't blink an eye in supporting, even tacitly, the annihilation of Palestine at full speed under a starvation regime under the treads of immense tanks. It's hard to imagine that one day they'll look covered in weeds and rusted like the Soviet tanks in Afghanistan. Today they smell of victory, as the psychopathic Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, incomparable to Robert Duvall, said of napalm in Apocalypse Now.

This well-meaning humanism sees no contradiction in openly supporting Israel, trapped in its box of "return the hostages now so there can be peace." They don't want to hear about buzzwords like genocide, famine, war crimes, or odious categories like Nazi-Zionism, warmongering, and colonialism. While the rights of bulls and donkeys advance, the basic rights of millions of human beings around the world are retreating—cannon fodder, collateral damage in the accounts of those who run the party.

Myths aside, it's more of the same. It's been going on for five centuries. The territorial and commercial advancement of a few nations, acting as empires, has determined life, death, and suffering for the wretched of the Earth, as Frantz Fanon once said. What we see in Gaza today is nothing compared to the monumental crimes perpetrated with complete impunity by Great Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and later Belgium, Russia, and Germany. The difference is that Gaza is on the news.

The creation and destruction of maps has been an imperial attribute, but the main one has been, and is, an inexcusable, irrational, and inhuman racism. The conviction that the white man is superior and that his rights (ambitions, revenge, and whims) come first. Racism is the master key to colonialism. It has been with it from the beginning and tends to worsen, even if it sometimes disguises itself as tolerance. In fact, we are witnessing the end of a virtuous cycle in favor of human rights, which began with the discovery of the Holocaust and the millions of deaths caused by Germany in European nations.

The rights of women and minorities found new legal channels. Nazi criminals were punished exemplarily. Modernity established the United Nations. Treaties of partition, containment, and peace were signed. The last overseas colonies were liberated. As usual, white nations emerged victorious, now with dominant participation from the United States and the well-being of nations forged through genocide, such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand; they failed in South Africa.

Following Sven Lindqvist (Exterminate All the Savages, 1998), we find that annihilating populations is the hallmark of colonialism. In loaded-dice invasions, whites taught the "others" how to kill from a distance. This superiority, more than any other attribute, explains the history of capitalism. What England did in North America, Asia, the "dark continent," and Oceania amounts to several Gazas. The same Portugal did in Africa and Brazil. The Maghreb was ravaged by France, and even Germany had its taste of murderous glory in present-day Namibia. Always with the support of its subjects, and on its side God, "race," and might.

Famous for its grotesqueness is the case of Belgium and its king, Leopold II, brother of Charlotte of Brabant, once the Habsburg Empress of Mexico and later a madman and a prisoner of war. In a few decades, as a personal enterprise, he remotely committed so many brutal crimes, purely out of greed, that even Europe became uncomfortable. Personal master of the Congo, endorsed and praised by empires (a club that young Belgium finally joined), he unleashed the devil in the heart of Africa, the heart of darkness of the Conradian paradigm and Coppola's reinvention.

That's why it's chilling that Trump mocks migrants by impersonating Kilgore: "Charlie don't surf." Colonial thinking, rooted since the Renaissance, was tarnished by Darwin's theories on evolution and the systematic construction of racism based on the beliefs of Robert Knox (1850) to endorse the usurpation of territories at the expense of defective and inferior humans. Nature "chooses" the best endowed. The British and French crossed the line countless times without anyone noticing.

Enchanted by Knox, and with no transcontinental options, Hitler resorted to the pretext of "living space," like Israel today, to justify his expansion into his neighbors. This required degrading their humanity. Thus, the Wild West was tamed.

In the stench of death in the Congo, Brussels's prosperity was forged, yielding to this day, as the capital of Europe. The disabled, the Roma, and the Jews followed. The latter, incorporated into colonialism, inherited British rule in Palestine.

The invention of darkness is reincarnated in Israel, the new supremacist “exception,” under the impassive gaze of the West.