In this moment of global horror, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that those belonging to the collective identity born of western colonialism around the world, known commonly as “white”, appear to be in a struggle, a painful struggle of self.
While the struggle is not new, the healing was never complete.
This struggle of self appears across many comments ranging from angry, petulant, despairing, disgusted and horrified.
More and more, a question unspoken is coming to the surface:
Who are we? Who am I?
If you:
belong to (whether or not by conscious choice) the colonising or colonial identity commonly referred to as “white”; or
strongly identify with the colonising or colonial identity and the western colonialism it is meant to support, accept and further; or
were born to, grew up and/or lived within western colonial or settler colonial countries; and
come from a family that supported, felt comfortable with and/or benefitted from the western-dominated global economic system,
discovering in what is now becoming a quick succession that your community, country and its closest allies (and proxies) were (in any way) deliberately or through callous negligence harming environments and entire peoples (in and outside your country), especially of the ordinary working class, will cause pain.
There is a lot of pain right now.
And many people, especially within or identifying with the colonial identity have little way of processing the pain they’re pushing against or struggling to contain.
It is painful to believe in the goodness of your:
country,
country leaders,
country industries,
country allies,
the systems and policies your countries control and lead,
self-defined community,
local heroes, and
in whatever way your racialised identity is connected to that,
only to come to discover goodness was not the sole, inherent quality of the systems you bought into or the people around you and those elected and admired by your family.
Goodness is one side of a much bigger story, a corner to a canvas that may you not have not seen before or you once believed was “understandable”, “the right decision” or “made sense”.
Goodness is only one side of who we all are.
Questioning your normal, even if you’d rather not will bring up pain.
The pain may not feel like a stab in the heart but rather a discomfort. A shock to your own system.
A slipping of the matrix veneer long enough to reveal a glimpse at something ugly that is hurtful, perhaps even frightening.
“Gaza has opened a worldview that I wasn’t aware of and a system that I wasn’t aware of.
I too can love my country and once have adored Nelson Mandela, now feeling a sense of shock, disgust or even anger at what I believe he did, should have done, actively lied about or lied about by deceptively hiding it from the voters knowledge.
Before demanding your plug into the matrix is made more secure, using words like “imperfect” to plaster over that which is uncomfortably painful to look at, offer yourself the compassion you would want to be given to someone you care for. A friend, a lover, a family member, a child.
Acknowledge that you’re fully human and have been in every moment and what you may be feeling is pain.
Because love betrayed is pain.
And seeing the way you, or, the people closest to you, or, those you trusted and admired have caused or are part of significant pain in the world is an incredibly painful yet courageous step to take.
You are being brave when you say, I thought this was normal and okay but now I am not so sure.
“We are wasting time,” pleads Greta, “by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us,” she says. “Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.”—Women Talking, a novel by Miriam Toews (2018).
Whatever externalised reactions, including yours and my own, it’s okay to acknowledge that pain is equally human for all involved in the discovery of full truth.
Passing around the pain of how we (countries, industries, collective peoples etc) may have architected and/or significantly contributed to the systemically induced pain of others dishonours the experience of being human.
Pain is an arrow, directing you to a wound.
The wound I believe is formed within a colonial identity, one not created within anyone’s lifetime but which is alive and well because the system of colonialism is alive and well, hiding within a global economic and geo-political system that was made everyone’s normal.
And that’s where the pain should direct you, at the system.
Not at how awful any particular people can be, because that’s a reflection on our species.
We should be focussing on how a global economic and geo-political system, led, architected and directed by those within or supportive of the colonising or colonial identity and at the highest levels of power have made a world suffer, both at a human level and ecologically, eventually affecting your own working class when neoliberalism was inserted into western colonialism or global capitalism.
As our famed and murdered black consciousness leader, Steve Biko once espoused, people should give themselves some space between who they are, want to be and the system of western colonialism that requires their support to succeed.
Within the the space of compassion for self, you can more easily find yourself standing within our truest identity: a human being equally human.
HUMAN BEINGS COMFORTABLY OR UNCOMFORTABLY LIVING WITH COLONIALISM AND IMPERIALISM
Before we delve into what I view as a identity disconnect, we must acknowledge equal humanity in South Africa and around the world.
For example, there are only human beings in South Africa.
Not monsters versus humans.
Not humans versus monsters.
Not pure good versus pure evil.
And that’s true around the world.
The biggest issue to solving issues is presuming that we are not equally human, even within the context of colonialist and imperialist structures being identified and discussed.
In South Africa, what you find is that we are just human beings equal in our humanity doing very human things.
Like everywhere in the world, all human beings in South Africa have an equal capacity for great goodness and an equal capacity for great evil.
While the systems in control of our lives and the collectively power-full should be seen and critiqued and challenged for the unreasonable power, self-absorption and largely western corporate control they wield, our equal humanity must be the starting point. To see our humanity as a balanced scale that can tilt more or less to one side on any given day or issue is important.
Our humanity is our teacher. Our humanity is our common thread.
And you need to see our equal humanity as South Africans before you debate the tactics and intentions of a people in Mzansi who:
may choose to act as treacherously loyal proxies for foreign colonial states (to be discussed in another post), or
sing struggle songs with the scary words, Kill the Boer,
a people who,
do not want to be western colonised and economically enslaved anymore by foreign countries, or
support western colonisation of South Africa and don’t want a song to be sung, using it as a reason to push back against socialist reforms,
all within the national context of inherited land injustice and western control.
You have to first see equal humanity, including within the colonial identity of white so that you can see ourselves in it and our capacity for great harm too.
Every human atrocity was always human.
Every human system of global mass exploitation was always human.
It is a reflection on us all.
It reflects back to us what it fully means to be human.
THE COLONISING/COLONIAL IDENTITY KNOWN AS WHITE
AN EQUAL HUMAN CAPACITY FOR GOODNESS
People are going to die, this was the sentiment of Dirk Jooste, a man born to and of Africa. South Africa in particular.
Dirk Jooste is also born to and racialised within a colonial identity known as white.
In 2023, he was interviewed by the Washington Post on his diagnosis for manganese poisoning.
Dirk worked for a manganese mine in South Africa that, like so many mines in Africa, more serves the financial interests of foreign elites and the ambitions of an upper-class and their foreign interests.
In our country, the upper class is overwhelmingly racialised white, although not exclusively white, and they are either in close connection to or from foreign western countries.
According to the interview, Dirk was shocked to find out that in merely doing his job—a job he said he enjoyed, which makes it more heart breaking—his brain had been damaged by the fine dust that travelled into every facial orifice, turning a fairly healthy South African worker into another statistic, a human being displaying Parkinson’s symptoms. We should note at this point that manganese poisoning has been known since the early 1900s.
Now, here’s an important bit:
Dirk Jooste is over sixty-years-old,
Dirk Jooste is born to an Afrikaner community, which may colloquially be referred to as Boers,
Dirk Jooste was born and raised South African and lived in the settler-colony of apartheid South Africa,
Dirk Jooste is in the ordinary workers class,
and so when Dirk says he is concerned that people will die, which people is he concerned for?
Is it the racialised white upper-class that are likely on the executive board of the mining company, whether they are African-born or foreigners?
No.
Is it the white-identifying upper-middle class, whether African-born or foreigners, that hold more comfortable management positions at the mine or any mine?
No.
Dirk was concerned for the people that had the strongest chance of being brain damaged like him.
His class.
The working class.
A working class that works in the mines across Africa and certainly in South Africa.
The working class Dirk was referring to is almost completely racialised black.
Dirk was worried that indigenous African people were going to die.
And yet, he represents the racialised “few” of his class, while his class brothers represent the racialised “many”.
And so when, for instance, an upper-middle class or upper-class South African (often from within the colonial identity or racialised white) or even a South African of the workers class attempts to label African brotherhood as a great impossibility, deeming it some far-fetched notion ruined by:
a so-called corrupt, criminal "black culture” (that is creatively imagined, wholly distorted and grotesquely hyper-focussed on the negative (like a PR smear campaign cooked up in a political or corporate boardroom)), or
both failing and undermined employment equity, or
failing and exploited black economic empowerment, or
crime (but only that which is committed by racialised not-white people), or
too much focus on race, or
not enough interracial friendships or romances that normalise how human we all are, or
not enough appreciation for biracial babies that prove race no longer matters, or
the (propagandistic) “Great Replacement” claim of there being an inherent danger in black people of Africa, outnumbering a lily-pure people, or
land (agrarian) reform, or
the complete unwillingness of racialised white and many brown people to fully identify with a colonial class struggle, or
the trouble-maker (the so-called ‘shit-stirrer’) Mr Julius Malema, that is “putting all these ‘bad’ ideas into their ‘black’ heads”,
this is simply not the whole and real truth.
It completely discounts the racialised white women of the workers class who have been and are sitting on job pages on Facebook posting religious prayer quotes or blessings for a predominantly “not-white” base who, like them, are unemployed, desperate, scared and crushed economically, living within a neoliberal capitalist system that no one of 1994 Parliamentary fame (both black and white (even brown)) ever explained to them before the 1994 vote.
These explanations discount the flames of working class brotherhood, true African brotherhood in a Dirk Jooste.
AN EQUAL HUMAN CAPACITY FOR EVIL
In September 2024, a South African racialised white famer, Christoffel Stomen, is said to have driven a vehicle with a towing trailer into and over a six-year-old child, breaking both of his little legs and inflicting other severe injuries on the child barely out of preschool.
The offence deserving of what could have been murder?
According to witnesses, Mr Stoman had accused the racialised black six-year-old of stealing an orange from his farm.
A fruit.
One (only one) fruit from farm grounds was in the hands of a graduating pre-schooler and that deserved a car and trailer to the head, chest, arms and legs.
Like the courtroom scene of the movie, A Time to Kill, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a six-year-old racialised white child. Yes, you guessed it, let’s pretend the child run over on purpose by an adult South African farmer was actually human.
Maybe we think all little boys are demons on earth rather than equally innocent and deserving of protection, so let’s go with a stereotypical symbol of innocence, purity and vulnerability.
I want you to imagine a six-year-old girl, pale skinned, pink-lipped, blue-eyed with platinum-blonde hair. A rose bud from the colonial/colonising identity, white.
Can we see her yet?
A little girl in a puff-sleeved, floral dress to the knees, a pink ribbon tied in her hair like an Alice Band.
Happy now, South Africa? She’s obviously human, yes? We can all see she’s human.
Certainly human enough to be worth protecting:
She has no penis (so obviously she’s completely innocent unlike “those people”),
she has no melanin-enriched skin (so obviously she’s not an animal or a moving object unlike “those people”),
In the times we live, she’s clearly 100% human because she shows no visible sign of being Muslim or heaven forbid, Palestinian (so obviously, she’s not a “terrorist”), and
she bears no visible sign of poverty (How many of the working class are tying ribbons in their kid’s hair everyday? You got to put food on the table).
Okay, we good? She’s white, she’s female. she’s not a Muslim Palestinian and she’s not poor. Feel at our most comfortable, yet?
Right, okay, so let’s imagine innocence is walking along a dusty road. It is hot. She’s a bit bored.
She sees an orange on the ground inside a fence and she picks it up. She imagines sinking her teeth in the fleshy inside. She imagines the tang of liquid gushing from the flesh and dripping down her chin. Yum.
Then, I want you to imagine a man, burly and tall. Even worse, he is not a hu-man at all.
He has blue-black skin, full lips and textured spongy hair that covers his scalp like a swimming cap.
He is…yes, you guessed it…a black man.
Even worse than worse, he has a taqiyah (a Muslim skull cap) on his head. He is a demon worshipping monstrosity.
And this grown black, Muslim man is in a car with a trailer speeding toward the sweet, little girl. He’s shouting at her. His brow is furrowed. His face quivers.
And his full dark lips peel away to show the grinding teeth of a man enraged.
The girl sees the angry man and she’s afraid. He is big and powerful and he’s driving a car. Her little legs couldn’t run fast enough to get away from him even if she tried. She doesn’t understand why he is so angry and she doesn’t understand why he’s speeding toward her.
Then, the black man-like beast rams into the little white cherub and drives over her.
I want you to imagine her screams and then I want you to imagine her blood.
She was holding a fruit from his farm.
The man’s family call the little white girl a thief. A criminal like the rest of her kind.
Nothing but a little, disgusting monkey.
What could he have possibly done differently?
The little white girl is a terrorist.
Two men. Both racialised “white”/within a colonising identity. Both men are South African.
Both men represent our equal human capacity for goodness and evil.
This is what it means to be human, irrespective of class, colour, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, language, religion or non-religion and indigeneity.
This is humanity.
We are people moving through earthly experiences determined to either push or pull, bend or break but equal in our humanity at all times.
And as we move forward through the horrors of actual genocide, wars and economic mass murder, I hope in our hearts somehow we can keep this in mind.
“I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation.
Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a 40-minute drive, now a 12-hour or impassible journey.
In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed — the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement).
The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border.
I think it is maybe official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here — recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections.
You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up.
And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t.
If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours — do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained?
I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed — just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it is.
I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could.
I think Uncle Craig would.
I think probably Grandma would.
I think I would…
“I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it.
This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world.
This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world.
This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me.
This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: ‘This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.’
God Bless you, Rachel. Born of a western colonial country, within a colonial identity but your sense of equal humanity moved you.
Indifference (even on a spectrum) to injustice, systemic evils and humanity need not be the winner within us.
It is a choice.
A painful choice.
It is a choice to see, hear, question ourselves and our sense of normality first.
It is a choice to move away from western colonialism toward honouring equal humanity, even in the midst of great uncertainty.
"Westerners are in a psychologically abusive relationship with the [western colonial] empire.
Our minds are hammered with propaganda indoctrination from as soon as we are old enough to start learning about our world to ensure our compliance with the power structures that rule over us.
It happens in school.
It happens with the mass media.
It happens with the Silicon Valley platforms we look to for information.
And it gets confusing.
All the information about our world and our place in it is distorted by mass scale psychological manipulation for the benefit of the powerful.
It is hard for someone who's been raised in such an environment to navigate their own mind out of its indoctrination.
It's hard to know the truth.
But in Gaza, the empire is telling us the truth.
It’s exposing itself and all its naked loathsomeness.
Our rulers murder children.
Our rulers sponsored genocide and ethnic cleansing.
As I have said before I think there are two big wounds in South Africa:
Irrespective of exceptions, amongst the colonised groups and their descendants, those racialised "not white", black in particular, distressed, uncomfortable, raging moments are infused with a few core questions:
Irrespective of exceptions, amongst the colonising/colonial identity, those racialised within the “white” community, every uncomfortable, distressed and raging moment is infused, I believe, with a few core questions:
One is grappling with:
deep generational hurt,
increasing and suppressed trauma and disgust, and
ravaged trust.
The other is grappling with:
a deep generational conflict of self,
a spectrum of normalised indifference (i.e. a disconnection from shared humanity),
a struggle to define andfind a true sense of belonging, and
a fear of material loss (at whatever current expense to indigenous and all “not white” people).
Both wounds are deeply painful, even if not consciously felt.
Both I strongly suspect are in pain.
Exploding pagers in Iran in 2024
“If the racist ‘white’ person, I don’t mean the person examining his consciousness, does not understand that he or she is also a ‘race’, it’s also constructed, it’s also made.
And it also has some kind of serviceability.
But when you take it away. I take your ‘race’ away and there you are all strung out.
And all you got is your little self. What is that?
What are you without racism [or western colonialism]?
Are you any good? Still strong? Still like yourself?…
Loss of trust, conflict of self are equally hard to bear, irrespective of whether the latter involves an everyday numbness to the wound that is masked by:
a capitalist-driven self-focus or hyper individualism and its resultant obsession with individual material comfort;
an ego-driven pride of selective remembrance, and
a shocking indifference to architected and steered injustice,
an indifference defined by a widespread commitment to washing your hands of all responsibility.
CAPITALISM: THE ABSORPTION INTO SELF AND PERSONAL COMFORT AT WHAT EXPENSE TO NATIONAL JUSTICE AND HEALING?
Contrary to foreign media and South Africa’s Afriforum and Solidarity manne flying all over the place to create a narrative I believe that aims to serve their wealth interests and comforts back home (for goodness sake), all born and raised South Africans, racialised black, white and brown were deeply wounded by direct and neo-colonial western control, even if one group were made wealthy, class comfortable and/or emotionally comfortable with the crimes committed that propped or props up their wealth and/or comfort.
Most South Africans born to Africa for generations are not conscious of these open wounds including, I suspect, our African self-focussed brothers in Afriforum.
Within a capitalist system epitomised by pyramid-style inequity, all South Africans walk around with personas that are disconnected from what's really happening underneath our African skin.
And that’s the beauty of neo-liberalised capitalism post-1994, everyone committed to it can pretend “it’s just me, my life and my comforts” floating within a bubble inside a country and continent you can dip in and out of at your convenience.
We ride bikes and jog.
We do Sunday yoga sessions.
We buy boutique teas and exotic coffee flavours.
We play in the local band or start a hip hop career.
We have sex, dress ourselves up like works of mannequin art, go to coffee shops, the gym; we draw and paint.
We travel, get our nails done, garden and try new cooking recipes.
If you’re working class, you survive (even though collectively you shouldn’t have to) and try to keep your kids alive too.
We don't have to reflect as South Africans on our woundedness and witness the battle within until triggered by the things that remind us we were never free of the country and continent's pain, we just got really good at building capitalist, consumer-driven walls around it, both internal and external, surrounding ourselves with like-minded friends of our particular class, ready to meditate before Sunday breakfast as a quick fix to dance around the work which goes into:
collective lived freedom,
true African liberation, sovereignty and collective economic enrichment, and
honouring equal humanity and the justice owed to an indigenous people that were forced into a working class category.
Take a moment. Think about what that must feel like. To feel "normal" in one moment and suddenly or steadily not normal.
B wound> Look at this indignity, this injustice, I can't trust them.
W wound> I can't be myself, I can't be, if being myself is even me. Who am I in this country? We’re doing the right thing in this country, right? We are not “the bad guys”, we can’t be. Who am I expected to be?
Think about all the pain roiling inside our spirit.
Don't dismiss it. Don't look away.
These moments of discomfort may be a window into truth, full and ugly truth that so many rainbow painted fans would rather look away from because it makes the wounds easier to ignore and forget.
It makes it easier to continue with the self-deception that the biggest wound exists within “the other” and not within myself.
Healing isn’t flying over the storm or dipping your toes into the pool.
The conflict of self is I suspect the colonial/white identity’s greatest wound in South Africa.
Back home, who am I really is a question few ask out loud because it’s more comfortable not to, it is more comfortable to pretend we are now about 60 million individuals bumping into each other post-1994 rather than a racialised peoples in this country and every other. It’s more comfortable to believe those racialisations don’t matter… except when it does, when it affects your idea of self and your comforts.
The colonial class war rages first in the spirit of all South Africans. No matter how many black friends or white friends you have, the largely working class colonised and their descendants and the largely class comfortable colonisers and their descendants were always going to reach this point.
They were always going to be forced to face their wounds and the economic (and political) structures, globally and domestically, that reinforce them.
And you see the wound of:
Aren’t we the Chosen People?
We have to be because then who are we really?
I would then have to ask, how could we do that to them?
And what will any change mean for my future?
You see the wound of a colonial identity over and over again.
It comes up in South Africa in so many ways, across so many interactions. This need to align a colonial/colonising identity with your inherent equal humanity, but it never fits, the two can’t align.
Because the colonial identity is predicated on anindifference (and in its extreme, an outright contempt) for the equal humanity of those not “Chosen”:
And this misalignment between:
the equal humanityof those racialised white normalised over centuries of colonialism (which colonialism is still very much alive and well); and
their generational sense of collective self as a colonising group,
comes up in many instances, especially amongst the most economically or politically powerful members of the racialised group who do not realise they’re exposing the collective colonial wound through the generational indoctrination that created it, which ideology many still enthusiastically buy into and unashamedly propagate:
A two-pronged ideology serving colonialism across Africa (and the world),
Ideas underpinning the strategy of colonialism, i.e. “the colonising identity must or should be in ‘control of the blacks’” of Africa, Australia, north and south America, Palestine etc;
Example of the Colonial Identity wound in Indonesia - Exposure of the colonialism ideology that colonial powers should “be in control of the blacks” indigenous to the land.
Ideas justifying the colonialism during and after land grabs, i.e. “the colonising identity are more than ‘the blacks’” of Africa, Australia, north and south America, Palestine etc:
Western colonialism’s supporters and beneficiaries are:
more innocent,
more hard working,
more intelligent,
more deserving of power and wealth, opportunities, leadership,
more worthy of protection, and of course,
always more human.
Example of the Colonial Identity wound in South Africa - Exposure of the Western Colonialism ideology that justifies western colonial control with the “we are (were) more than you” idea.
COLONIALISM ABROAD TRIGGERS THE COLONIAL IDENTITY WOUND BACK HOME
Recently however, you see this colonial identity wound in the reactions of those from and within the colonial or colonising identity as they make sense of a foreign colonial state’s carpet bombing, deliberate snipering, abuse, rape, torture and deliberate starvation of the ordinary, largely working class and colonised in Palestine.
And in order to keep their own generational wound at bay, it seems as though many have to:
ignore,
minimise, or
justify,
the colonisation or unreasonable entitlement to someone else’s land that is undergoing and underpins the criticised state’s well-funded existence.
Here yet again, the conflict of self, a deep, deep wound is abound.
And it either shows up as belligerent contempt or deflection and/or as an expression of self-deception, by falsifying information or, more often, clinging to dishonesty by omission (a “Look here and ignore the stuff over there”).
South Africans within the global colonising or colonial identity, whether such identity was consciously chosen or not, appear to be struggling with who they are, even if confidently dismissing the struggle.
This is a big struggle, a huge wound.
To me, they are struggling with a concept of self and its relationship with their inherent equal humanity.
The wound surfaces as questions around what it means to be this “white” collective self, squared up against great systemic atrocities or historic or present omissions surrounding western control, human or environmental harm and once again, an unreasonable entitlement to someone else’s land.
The wound unhealed can be a driver for choices, policies, actions and chosen inactions of those within the colonial identity.
The wound unhealed can be a force of destruction and self-destruction.
In these recent moments, you can almost see the wound’s core questions surfacing from the depths of a sacred space that has been ignored: Aren’t we the Chosen People, Who am I really? I would then have to ask, How could we do this to them? But what will any change mean for my future?
Confusion, instant dismissal or a knee-jerk search for a “positive” normality (no matter how unhealthy for their spirit), anger, compartmentalising, fear and wilful blind support.
The wound I believe exists in all people within the colonial identity, irrespective of class, gender, religion or non-religion, language, political leanings or nationality.
We are all born equally human, shaped by the systems made normal to us over generations.
Interestingly, the biggest defenders of the colonial identity wound, some of whom may be on their way to attempt a plan of colonising secession in South Africa, are often more triggered by other racialised white people that are processing their own woundedness, furthering the idea (truth) that the not “Chosen” are just people like them.
“I was talking to a professor, a friend of mine, from the US. And after hearing about your case [Maura Finkelstein], and he’s Jewish as well, you might have to look over your shoulder a little bit extra simply because you’re Jewish.
You mentioned the fact that your Jewish identity helped you stay under the radar and get tenure in the first place, I wonder if you think that was a major factor in getting the guns turned on you and getting you kicked out.
From what we know of the siege mentality, Daniel Bar-Tal has written about it in Israel, it’s the ideology in which the entire world hates Jewish people just because they are Jewish and that’s why they oppose the Israeli government’s policies.
So to someone who really believes that, it’s a wonderful way of blocking out arguments against the Israeli government because you can just explain that away as just racism and hatred, that’s why they’re doing it. It doesn’t have any link at all to what’s actually happening.
But when you have that mentality and you have to somehow explain why there are so many Jewish people, especially in the US young Jewish people, who are opposing the Israeli government that causes a lot of cognitive dissonance.
And why be triggered by those within the colonial identity that question their comfort with “white” economic control over Africa, or other parts of the world or any western imperialism?
Because it shines a closer-to-home spotlight on what you may not want to face as being true.
“This is the hopeful part, because I believe somewhere in our base, maybe even our lizard brain, there is a part of us that says this is wrong, this is wrong,” Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates, author of The Message.
It is more triggering to those comfortable and supportive of colonialism to see people who fall within the colonial identity standing up against or criticising it.
It is also poses a greater risk to maintaining western control of Africa and other lands of the indigenous peoples if the people within the colonial identity choose to stop supporting the structures and people that maintain or further western control.
The entire system of western control of someone else’s land, resources, seas, skies and harbours would be at risk of collapse if those of the colonial white identity said,
Not in my name.
Not any longer.
Not what resonates with my values and my vision for a better future.
And it is this risk of collapse coupled with the triggering of the colonial wound that sees vociferous responses to criticisms. The battle to determine “who are we?” is very much underway:
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (in an almost blind rage):
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (within the context of any triggered emotions):
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (by ignoring the indifference to equal humanity required of western colonialism, which existed long before 2023):
A classic “Look here, ignore what’s over there” deflection to avoid considering the core questions surfacing from within the conscious or unconscious colonial identity wound.
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (by not ignoring the indifference to equal humanity required of western colonialism, which existed long before 2023):
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (in Germany):
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (in Germany):
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (by accepting indifference to equal humanity and therefore collective punishment):
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (by not accepting indifference to equal humanity and therefore collective punishment):
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (by participating in unfair colonial control):
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (in your response to colonial control):
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (at a time of mass colonial collective punishment and destruction):
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (at a time of mass colonial collective punishment and destruction):
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (in your actions and at whatever cost to your integrity):
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (in your actions and in line with your sense of integrity):
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (however it was imposed on you at a global level):
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (however it was imposed on you at a global level):
Equal humanity - Defending the colonial identity wound (by targeting anyone that triggers the wound):
Equal humanity - Processing the colonial identity wound (by absorbing the trigger and staying curious and questioning):
Here yet again, we are equally human.
The true battle is within a colonial/colonising identity that is either:
adamant to ignore, project or protect the internal disconnect with their equal humanity; or
attack those that confront the wound or process it in South Africa and around the world:
Everywhere you look in the context of our current horrific carnage and blistering western government and corporate:
the battle we are witnessing lies within the collective colonial “white” self.
The battle lies within the core questions: Who are we? Who am I? What have we done or allowed to be done? What will any change mean for me?
And these questions circulate again and again as more and more horror is made public:
Journalists killed, including those targeted.
Discriminate killing of children through indiscriminate bombardment and drone
The lack of western coverage and independent, official verification of starvation by design that sees children being starved to death
The lack of western government action against the colonial state using bombardments continuously, despite the ICJ ruling to do all they can to prevent harm on civilians. Zero pulling of trade deals and arms support during this time.
Deliberate silence and apathy for abuse of power
Dishonest by omission claims against states suffering from western colonial control of and attacks against their economies for socialist economic systems
The disproportionate use of bombs used in what was meant to be a hostage rescue mission and battle with colonialism resistance group Hamas
The western complicity with gruesome mass murder of unarmed and barely housed civilians
The ignored, minimised and/or quickly justified cost of indiscriminate bombardment on unarmed civilians in homes, hospitals, tents etc
The ignored, minimised and/or quickly justified displacement of people to areas where they are bombed and drone fired indiscriminately
The presumption that bombing a foreign country is appropriate behaviour when there is a conflict, especially within the context of global western contravention of international law requiring them to stop genocidal actions
The authoritarian denial of freedom of speech, which comes too conveniently at a time when Yemeni people are being bombarded by western countries for acting against genocidal warfare, which actions are in keeping with international conventions
The conflict of self reigns, where rather than merely good people do bad things, people who have been unaware of western colonialism or passionately avoided collectively confronting western colonialism and the identity of disconnection that it required them to adopt are having to face the disconnect within the group and at a time of great global trauma (indirectly experienced by everyone who has seen too much to return to “normal”).
“Against this backdrop, The Australian’s Stephen Rice piece portraying Sydney lawyers—Justin Carroll and Yianni van Gelder—as purveyors of vile antisemitism based on leaked WhatsApp messages.
But Rice’s piece fails to make a critical distinction: opposition to Zionism and Israel’s criminal behaviour isn’t the same as antisemitism.
The careless conflation of the two represents a dangerous and deliberate strategy to silence critics and shield a state from legitimate condemnation.
His framing of the case underscores how far the term “antisemitism” has drifted from its original and urgent meaning. Once a descriptor for violent bigotry and hatred directed at Jewish people, it’s now increasingly hijacked as a political weapon—to stifle dissent, punish anyone who criticises Zionist ideology, and distract from Israel’s documented atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond.
If individuals engage in slurs, Holocaust denial, or crude stereotypes, those comments should be condemned.
But that’s not the same as raising legitimate and historically supported critiques of the modern Zionist project—a nationalist, settler-colonial ideology entrenched in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and perpetuated through apartheid policies and military aggression.”—Antisemitism Claims Mask Political Agenda, 11 Apr 2025, George Hazim.
We all stand at some point in a journey of facing ourselves fully.
For the colonial identity and those within it, this mirror is being placed across an entire racialised people:
the economic and political systems, policies, actions and practices they were and are comfortable with,
the elected leaders and corporate sector that represented or represent them,
the efforts made to maintain a comfortable normality (where colonialism and imperialism remains “necessary”, “exaggerations”, “misunderstandings” or “propaganda”,
focussing in-country attention on:
selective local issues,
selective local discomforts,
selective local inequities, and
local pleasures.
“At the BBC, there were reporters that were angry about the internal dynamics where they saw the internal bias.
In April 2024, the Intercept ran a story about a leaked New York Times memo, that guided reporters on what language they are allowed and not allowed to use.
These are the type of situations if they were any other situation, we would call it censorship.
So the idea that we have a free press is attached very much to the idea that we have a democracy and we don’t really have a democracy, we have something that much more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. That’s why the state and corporations, and how they are tied together, is really important to understand.
What do I mean by that? What journalism is in its most basic form is not to report, this is what this guy says and this is what that guy says. It’s to report the truth. You’re supposed to report what is true.
When you say, ‘Israel says they were targeting Hamas, Palestinian authorities say 100 children died’, okay, get at the truth. What is happening? That is the problem with how our [western] media has tried to approach the problem.
They take this, ‘we are trying to be neutral role’ but that’s not really neutrality. if you’re not using the word, genocide…ever, that’s not neutrality, that’s a very specific side you’re taking. If you’re not using the word, occupation. If you’re not using the word, massacre, you are taking a very specific side.
I’ve seen these headlines that start to question international law as soon as Israel starts doing something: ‘What are the laws on starvation?’ These are actual [news] headlines. ‘Israel bombs Iranian embassy, is that illegal?’ These are the type of headlines you see.
And that’s why so many within the colonial/colonising identity andthose identifying with it, including and especially the upper-middle-to-upper-class, in this moment of what should be national and unified shock and outrage have chosen colonialism and its enforcers and beneficiaries over ordinary people.
They have chosen the comparativelypower-full within the global economic and geopolitical system over the power-less:
“I think they lie when they say, white men can’t dance. John [Steenhuisen, leader of the Democratic Alliance] has been dancing around the question here. He’s not been answering the question. Let me show you how to answer a question.
Number one, there is no genocide happening there [in Palestine].
Number two, if I am the President of this country [of South Africa] and let’s say Lesotho comes here and they take hostages and they take children.
I will bomb Lesotho.
And if they want peace, they must return the children. Nothing tells you about peace.
And if I am the President, I will stop that case of the ICJ[the International Court of Justice case pleading for the application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip], simply because the honourable Minister pursues Israel yet yesterday twenty-two people were shot here in Mitchells Plain, more than in Ramallah in Palestine.
Mr McKenzie’s arguments are irrational in several ways:
First, South Africa is not and has not for the thirty years of our democratic existence pursued a colonialism project to take control of Lesotho’s land, disempower the inhabitants of Lesotho (found on the land) of their title to the land and their rightful control of the region’s economy.
Second, South Africa is not arresting and imprisoning Lesotho inhabitants (including children) for years (many without charge), and we do not have a system of military control over Lesotho land and her people’s movements.
Third, South Africa is not receiving financial, geopolitical, intelligence and weaponry support from other African countries (in support of a colonialism project) to continue pursuing our land grabs, helping us to squash any accountability at the highest levels of international accountability arenas.
Fourth, if South Africa were to bomb a country that kidnapped South Africans (in this imagined case, in order to exchange them for the release of many unfairly imprisoned (and tortured) women and children) then South Africa would also be liable for investigation into war criminality and depending on the severity of our actions, we too may be guilty of genocide.
Fifth, the argument of “what about this…or what about that…” (in Mr McKenzie’s case a reference to crime in-house) is a crude and callous tactic to deflect from international crimes being committed, which by virtue of being a signatory to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide South Africa (like all countries in the world) is obliged to actively prevent from continuing.
Not pursuing the ICJ case, at the very least, would be in contravention of our duties under the Contravention that we signed and said we would adhere to.
If Mr McKenzie was so concerned about criminality at home, why is he comfortable with the idea of South Africa supporting or colluding with criminality abroad?
What Mr McKenzie should be calling out, which he chooses not to, is South Africa’s complicity and collusion with western colonialism, violent ethnic cleansing to further that colonialism and now a genocide to reach it’s end goal in the region:
“In 1979, a U.S. surveillance satellite detected a mysterious double flash over the South Atlantic—a suspected nuclear test jointly conducted by South Africa and Israel. While denied, declassified documents suggest deep nuclear cooperation. South Africa enriched uranium at Pelindaba; Israel supplied weapons design.
The two shared not just ideology but infrastructure, operating in what was effectively a strategic alliance of outcasts.
This nuclear pact included uranium shipments, joint missile tests, and, according to sources like Sasha Polakow-Suransky, even discussion of Israeli warhead sales.
The Vela Incident over the South Atlantic may well have been the culmination of this arrangement. As recently as 1986, when Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu leaked details about the Dimona reactor, further indirect evidence of South African collaboration emerged.
In 2024, this legacy took a new form. The same Richards Bay port that once shipped uranium oxide now shipped coal, bound for Israeli plants like Orot Rabin and Rutenberg—powering the software, servers, and satellite systems used in one of the most destructive campaigns in Gaza’s history.
This is not irony. It is historical recursion…
Pretoria moved aggressively on the diplomatic front—recalling ambassadors, filing legal briefs, declaring Israel’s actions genocidal. South Africa rebranded itself as the conscience of the Global South, drawing parallels between Gaza and apartheid-era townships.
But behind the scenes, no emergency trade halt was issued. No export controls. Not even a symbolic moratorium.
This wasn’t an oversight. It was calculated duality.
The ANC needed Gaza for electoral credibility, but it needed coal for fiscal stability. The party’s post-liberation mythos required moral outrage; its survival demanded quiet extraction. The performance in The Hague was for the world. The fuel contracts were for Glencore, ARM, and the donors who bankroll ANC politics.
It can’t be that South Africa serves western colonialism abroad with all its imperial violence to keep it in place and then turns to the neo-colonised of South Africa and Africa, specifically those indigenous to African land, and says, western economic subordination of Africa is because of “them” and not because of “us”.
Our Marikana miners were murdered and living well below the life of dignity expected of miners in western countries, because of “them” and not because” of “our” collusion and complicity.
In the midst of what should be outrage against colonialism being real and active, many of our African countrymen have chosen their colonial identity over equal humanity.
They have as a minimum chosen virtue signalling over pushing for principle-based foreign and domestic economic policies.
Because that’s the unhealed hole in our souls that so many are either unaware of or have avoided, covering it up with old ideologies of either:
western colonialism’s we are more than them, or
capitalism’s self-absorption or what’s in it for me (us) needs to take precedence (at any cost to my (our) integrity of self).
However it transpires and for whatever reason, the wound’s hold on our souls reveal its effect on our being.
We are choosing to remain seated on a spectrum of indifference and moral bankruptcy.
The targeted murder of journalist, Hossam Shabat
Defending the Colonial identity wound - Type A (Overt Coloniser):
Aren’t we the Chosen Ones?
Of course. When you’re Chosen, you are gods on earth.
Nothing you do (such as colonialism, neo-colonialism or imperialism) or don’t do is really wrong. It can’t be.
You can make mistakes, sure, errors in judgement but gods are never wrong.
Anyone who doubts a Chosen People’s elevated and sanctified greater humanity is a hater and should be treated as an enemy because what we do, at whatever cost, is the right thing to do.
We have to be because then who are we really?
No, no, no, we are the Chosen. History present and past is what we believe it should be, what we believe it should focus on.
“These people” who criticise or complain about it are doe-eyed extremists from within or outsiders jealous of our greatness. “These people” hate us, they are anti “us” for being the Chosen people of the world.
I would then have to ask, how could we do that to them?
There’s no need, we are the Chosen people and when you’re the Chosen, you do what is righteous, if not just or pleasant or legal.
It’s not a question of fault, that’s for mere mortals to debate. The impact of gods’ work is not personal.
Ultimately, eventually, the mere mortals will benefit from our choices, despite the harm they endure. This is actually in their future best interests. They don’t understand this, how could they?
Actually, it’s them who should do more to reach our level of godliness. They are the ones who do wrong, not us.
And what will any real change mean for my future?
Total destruction. We must contest and fight the haters of our superior humanity. The lowly humanity are unworthy of a truly changed society or economic structures.
Only a god can rule the world appropriately.
OR
Defending the Colonial identity wound - Type B (Covert Coloniser hiding behind Sympathy and/or Benevolence):
Aren’t we the Chosen Ones?
Of course. When you’re Chosen, you are gods on earth.
Nothing you do (such as colonialism, neo-colonialism or imperialism) or don’t do is really wrong. It can’t be.
You can make mistakes, sure, errors in judgement but gods are never wrong.
Anyone who doubts a Chosen People’s elevated and sanctified greater humanity is a hater and should be treated as an enemy because what we do, at whatever cost, is the right thing to do.
We have to be because then who are we really?
No, no, no, we are the Chosen. History present and past is what we believe it should be, what we believe it should focus on insofar as there may be any consequences for it.
“These people” who criticise or complain about it are doe-eyed extremists from within or outsiders jealous of our greatness. “These people” hate us, they are anti “us” for being the Chosen people of the world.
I would then have to ask, how could we do that to them?
We should be concerned if us gods take it too far.
As gods on earth, our role should be sympathetic to the lesser beings, the mere mortals of the world. They can’t help the fact that they’re uncomfortable with our role as the Chosen gods of the world.
Sometimes, it is in their lesser nature to be disobedient, belligerent…savage.
I am uncomfortable with indiscriminate violence to control or punish these lesser beings.
Yes, punishment is necessary to discipline the mere mortals, bring them in line with gods’ will demanding their submission but we gods should not be excessive.
We must help the mortal beings understand that our control and the will to ensure such control remains in place is not wrong but benevolent.
We want them to be happy and succeed as we decide on the land we claim as gods on earth.
We are not their enemy. We are their greatest supporters. We gods care for all creatures, including the lesser-thans.
It is their disobedience to our godly will that must be stopped in its tracks, brought to its knees. Disobedience to our colonialism is disgusting, putrid, an offence to our godly sensibilities.
And everyone knows, the gods sensibilities and safety is more important than colonialism’s legitimacy, its harm or the extent of generational safety of the colonised.
And what will any real change mean for my future?
Total destruction. We must contest and fight the haters who seek real change, who dare question our superior humanity. The lowly humanity are unworthy of a changed society or economic structures.
Only a god can rule the world appropriately.
OR
Defending the Colonial identity wound - Type C (Self-focussed, Fear-based Supporter):
Aren’t we the Chosen Ones?
I don’t think so. I don’t feel that my family or personal values and sense of integrity align with this idea of being inherently super-human and therefore:
more entitled to do, have or say anything,
am without fault, or
undeserving of equal accountability.
We have to be because then who are we really?
A human being like everyone else in my species, capable of great goodness and great evil at the same time.
People, just people.
I would then have to ask, how could we do that to them?
I am anxious around that question, perhaps feelings of grief come up but if we are equally human, equal in our capacity for good and evil then we were always capable of doing terrible things. However, we are also capable of doing and thinking loving, redemptive and kind things too. We are all capable of change.
Humans can learn to be and do better, making right what we have done wrong to each other and the planet.
We can fix the mess.
And what will any change mean for my future?
I feel very anxious around this question. I hear people from within my identity group, the people I more listen to and trust, saying change will bring about our total destruction. Changed economic and societal structures will be our downfall, an Armageddon to everything I knew, know and am comfortable with.
We will be ruined.
I am afraid now. I am frightened.
I will be ruined. My life will be over. My children. My neighbourhood.
The world, my world is going to be wiped off the face of the map. We will be paupers. We will be the lesser beings as we made them to be for so long.
No, I cannot stand this fear. Only a god can rule the world appropriately.
Yes, only we can be Chosen.
It’s not ideal. It’s not right, I know. But I have to choose me, us, whatever. I have to, I have so little to lose as it is. I have to support the fight against change.
We gods must win or die.
That’s the only choice we have.
We must dominate to survive. Western control and Imperialism or death. I’m unsupportive of the harm caused but I have to choose the former.
My silent or active support does not make me unsympathetic, just pragmatic.
It us and our domination or them and their desires.
I choose us.
Processing the Colonial identity wound:
Aren’t we the Chosen Ones?
I don’t think so. I don’t feel that my family or personal values and sense of integrity align with this idea of being inherently super-human and therefore:
more entitled to do, have or say anything,
am without fault, or
undeserving of equal accountability.
What I am doing, or seeing, or hearing of is more than a series of mistakes. It feels wrong to me. I cannot brush that aside. It does not sit well with me.
We have to be because then who are we really?
A human being like everyone else in my species, capable of great goodness and great evil at the same time.
People, just people.
I would then have to ask, how could we do that to them?
I am anxious around that question, perhaps feelings of grief come up but if we are equally human, equal in our capacity for good and evil then we were always capable of doing terrible things. However, we are also capable of doing and thinking loving, redemptive and kind things too. We are all capable of change.
Humans can learn to be and do better, making right what we have done wrong to each other and the planet.
We can fix the mess. We can face the ugliness and come out the other side humbled, open and more human, more connected to our fellow humanity.
And what will any change mean for my future?
This question brings up fear. What if we are destroyed? What if domination is what we need to survive? Dominate or die. Dominate or die…
But wait, maybe this is my colonising identity taking hold. If destruction is a real possibility than a better world can be an equally real possibility too.
Maybe something good, beyond what I am capable of imagining right now is actually possible without my holding colonising control of this country and/or the world. Maybe something requiring my openness and understanding. Maybe the future is not only about me, certainly not in comparison to the people we harmed that may have wisdom conflicting and superseding my own.
I want to be more curious and questioning than pessimistic and blankly reactive.
I want to live in a world that reflects my personal values rather than live in one that solely focusses on keeping me comfortable and my fears at bay at some great cost to the planet and its people. There’s got to be a better way and I want to be part of that.
I don’t want to live in fear of losing economic (and political) domination in the world or at home, seeing it as some cataclysmic event.
I want to be truly free. I want to feel it everywhere I go.
“The unofficial motto of Zionism is, a land without a people for a people without a land. And that’s a lie on both sides of that equation.
When you talk about a people without a land, the implication is that the Jewish people were this landless, nationless entity roaming around the world, which was never true. Jewish people had lands. They were French, German, Italian, British, American, Moroccan, Iraqi. Jews belonged to the countries in which they lived.
The idea that they are a people without a land is an antisemitic idea.
This idea that Jews don’t belong in Europe and need to be expelled to somewhere else was originally a Protestant, Christian antisemitic idea to help Europe get rid of its Jewish population. Later, it was adopted by Jewish Zionists. So that part [of the motto] is false.
But of course, a land without a people referring to Palestine was equally false because the Palestinians were there. And Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the so-called revisionist movement—a stream of Zionism that is still represented by Netanyahu and the Likud Party today—all the early Zionist leaders, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion, Theodor Herzl recognised that Palestine had an indigenous people, an indigenous Arab, Muslim, Christian and a small number of indigenous Jews as well. And this indigenous people would have no reason to roll over and accept being invaded and colonised by a colonial Jewish movement.
And we have to remember that the Zionists referred to themselves as colonialists…colonising Palestine in the name of European so-called civilisation,” Ali Abunimah, author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine.
Processing the colonial or colonising identity wound would take some honest self-reflection and a compassion for self that does not run from the sight of harm (and its implications for your concept of self) but rather runs toward full truth and a curiosity about the world. A process that will require community, support and a space for acknowledging the identity’s ingrained fear of “what then happens to me without colonialism…”:
“There is something I am trying to do or work on individually…what I have found, when we feel the type of burnout that says, I can’t engage anymore, it is a reminder to me that there’s something playing on us that returns us back to the ‘individual’.
The ways in which we are invited back in to this individualised: I am doing this by myself, I feel lonely, I feel disconnected, I feel alienated is precisely how structures of oppression work.
That burnout comes from trying to solve a structural problem on an individual basis.
Can we let the impulse [to not see anymore] guide us into a reflective process that returns us to the structural analysis.
‘I don’t want to see dead babies’. Okay, what is the mechanism at play here?
Now, not everyone who holds the wound is, I believe, defending it purely to feel comfortably normal in the midst of a quite obvious misalignment with their equal humanity.
Class and class ambitions do play a role as they always have. Sometimes too, you have to follow the dotted, dollar line…
“Primo Levi [Holocaust survivor and author] was not content with this straight forward tale or narrative of victimhood. He was in Auschwitz, managed to survive it just barely, made his escape, went back to Italy…He could have kept talking about that experience and how that experience commits him to the eternal defence of the state of Israel. He did not do that. Because as he gets older he is writing and he’s concerned with the question of complicity. Complicity in systems of violence and dispossession…
He concludes that that collaborator actually exists in all of us. And that we are also too concerned with our survival, too concerned to protect ourselves and in many cases too concerned with social advancement, some kind of social status.
So, we don’t actually take the risks we are supposed to take. We retreat into a herd mentality and go along with other people are doing…
This is the conclusion also of people that have examined the behaviour of Nazis in the second World War.
How much they were motivated not so much by antisemitism but by very simple things like:
And this go along to get along blood-soaked collusion and complicity is also everywhere you look. The western colonialism project is supported across the world because western colonialism (and the imperialism needed to keep it in place) is a worldwide phenomenon. Only through ground action and increasing desperation is this collusion being brought to the fore from within the colonial identity, commonly referred to as white:
Senate Democrats overwhelmingly reject restricting US arms sales to Israel, Jacob Crosse, 4 Apr 2025: “For the second time in the less than four months, the US Senate has resoundingly voted in support of continuing the genocide in Gaza by rejecting two resolutions aimed at blocking some $9 billion in weapons to the Israeli government. S.J Resolution 33, which failed 15-82, sought to block $2 billion worth of arms, including 35,000 MK 84 2,000-pound bombs and 4,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads. The I-2000 Penetrator warhead is used in the AGM-130 (Air to Ground) missile system, intended to destroy bunkers, deeply buried structures and other reinforced targets. S.J. Resolution 26 sought to block nearly $7 billion in arms, including thousands of smaller 500-pound bombs and JDAM kits used to turn unguided “dummy” bombs into “precision” munitions. This resolution also garnered only 15 votes in favour, with 83 opposed. Under conditions where President Donald Trump has promised to ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip and, with the Israeli government, oversee the forced displacement of the remaining 2.1 million residents, a majority of Democratic senators voted against putting minimal restrictions on US arms transfers to Israel. No Republicans voted in favour of either resolution.”
Brief summary of acts of complicity, Those reported have had and still have decision-making authority over the fact that Norway:
—holds ownership interests in a wide range of arms companies that supply military equipment to Israel;
—holds ownership interests in six of the ten largest arms companies in the world, which contribute to the most devastating attacks on civilians and infrastructure in Gaza;
—sells weapon components to the United States, which end up in Israel’s warfare – including parts for F-35 fighter jets;
—has ownership interests in a number of companies involved in Israel’s illegal occupation;
Especially concerning the three Labour Party leaders:
—they have for many years given moral support to Israel’s war crimes by providing unilateral support for Israel’s security needs
—they have, for just as many years, shown a corresponding lack of support for the Palestinians’ security needs, thereby providing political and diplomatic cover for, and obscuring, Israel’s crimes
Regarding the Prime Minister:
—he has obscured the truth and provided knowingly false information to the Norwegian public during a televised press conference on May 22, 2024, to the detriment of the Palestinians. This is documented in Attachment 5.”
“—In Spain, workers at the Port of Barcelona refused to transport weapons to Israel and demanded an immediate ceasefire. Workers at the aerospace company Airbus in Getafe, Spain, organized a march within their factory, displaying a banner: ‘Airbus workers stand in solidarity with Palestine, no to arms sales to Israel.’ Fourteen Spanish unions and 200 civil society organizations launched a campaign calling on their government to end the arms trade with Israel.
—And unionists from the Catalan Trade Unions Association protested Israel Chemical Limited-Iberia, a subsidiary of ICL Group, which provides Monsanto (now Bayer) with phosphates to produce white phosphorus for the U.S. military, which in turn supplies it to Israel. White phosphorus is a ghastly incendiary weapon that, when it comes in contact with oxygen, burns as hot as 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, causing severe burns and organ damage. Israel is accused of using it in civilian areas, in violation of international law.
—In Belgium, several transportation unions called on their members not to transport weapons by air, after some reported seeing shipments headed for Israel.
—In Italy, dockworkers at the northern Port of Genoa from the independent union Colletivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali, with community allies, on November 10 blockaded the movement of cargo onto a ship operated by the Israeli shipping line ZIM. The same ship then faced protests at the southern Port of Salerno.
—On November 30, dockworkers affiliated with the European Dockworkers Council took their first major coordinated action across ports in several countries.
—India’s 12 union federations, representing 100 million workers, are strongly opposing talks to send 100,000 construction workers to replace the Palestinian workers whose work permits Israel has canceled.”
The simple Methodology of Zionism, Andrew Brel, Apr 11, 2025: “(Helen) Mirren was 22 when she first visited Israel in 1967 after the Six Day War, not long after Israel murdered 34 American servicemen on the US Liberty. She volunteered on Kibbutz HaOn next to the Sea of Galilee. She hitchhiked around the country.
‘I witnessed things that were wrong,’ she said of her visit. ‘I saw Arabs being thrown out of their houses in Jerusalem. But it was just the extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground. It was an amazing time to be here… “I believe in Israel, in the existence of Israel, and I believe Israel has to go forward into the future, for the rest of eternity. I believe in Israel because of the Holocaust. I know there is a base, a foundation of deep, intelligence, thoughtfulness, commitment, poetry even in Israel that is very, very special, I think,’ said Mirren, 79, whose vote as a US Citizen in the 2024 Zionist election that brought Trump into the Commander of Genocide role, (COG) was assuredly in support of the US Governments ironclad commitment to the endless funding of Zionist genocide.
The question coming up is simple, Do we believe in humanity being equal in their humanity or does western colonial domination masked behind words such as:
“greatness,”
“conquest”
“rules-based order,”
“civilisation,”
“for national security,”
“free world,” and
“right to exist”, or the “right to defend itself,”
trump who we are as a species.
Are we ready to be human beings and redesign what it means to be human in an economic and political world?
“It is important to mine down to the core aspects of it and see the system as a total system that includes, obviously, structures of ownership in the media.
Basically we have monopoly capital that controls the majority of what everybody sees and hears.
The mindscape, not only of US citizenry but there's a cultural imperialism that's operative. It's also blasted all over the broader world.
These cultural industries also work hand-in-glove with the bourgeois State.
At certain levels there is distinctions between the private and public realm, but the way in which the US state operates, a large part of its intelligence services work in propaganda, that's their principle function...
The bourgeois State works hand-in-glove with these culture industries and with the internationalisation of these culture industries in order to pump out as much as possible an image of the United States that inverts reality...
The culture industry is a product of the bourgeois cultural apparatus, I simply mean the entire system of production, circulation and consumption of culture.
It is not individual newspapers, book publishers or universities, it is a systematic framework that is driven by the capitalist base because those are the funders.
It includes things like universities and the mainstream press, but it also includes the universities, the system of knowledge production that goes into universities, the think tanks, the NGO world for that matter.
All of it needs to be seen as a system that manages the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge.”—Comments by Gabriel Rockhill, US protests and Marxist critique of Žižek, Foucault, Arendt & Frankfurt School (w Gabriel Rockhill), May 2024, India and Global left.
While the colonial or colonising identity, commonly referred to as white, rages internally beside a scorched earth policy of global significance, western colonial control (and its support) abroad and in South Africa continues to be committed to a public relations strategy that honours little the severity of global economic and geopolitical mass murder, land grabs, land and economic control.
The biggest threat to colonialism is the questioning mind. The kind that asks:
Is this true?
Is this the whole truth?
Is the full picture being included?
Who is not being spoken to or included at the table of expert opinion and shared experience?
What makes lived experience or insight less valuable to consider?
How widespread is this?
For how long has this been going on?
Why was I not aware of this?
Who knew about this and chose to be silent about it? and
Does this align with my personal or family values?
Questioning the information we receive is a dangerous past time.
“I don’t think there is such a thing as media. It’s fiction. We have talking heads, pushing out CIA talking points. There is no media in the west,
We’ve seen what they’ve been saying through this genocide. We saw in the Iraq invasion, in Afghanistan, the whole war on terror…
I think we don’t appreciate the extent of which American capitalism and imperialism is totalitarian. It has so much control over our minds and the content we consume and what we hear and see,” Alon Mizrahi, Israeli technical and copy writer.
When information displayed contradicts with information received then the questioning begins both abroad and at home.
At the moment, western control is being minimised by a three-step public information strategy of:
Localism,
Hiding and minimising, and
Presuming greater credibility and criminality of only one side.
Localism is an old favourite of western colonialism. As far back as the early-to-mid 1900s, colonisers were using a strategy of localism to normalise and minimise the western colonial control of African land.
The strategy is simple:
Take control of someone else’s land,
Move/force the people you found on the land further away from the land you consider valuable,
Create local governance structures for the displaced rightful titleholders of the land,
Maintain control over the land and the governance structure relating to the displaced land titleholders (their governance should be subordinate to western control), and
Keep the public’s focus on the governance and goings-on of the rightful titleholders, ignoring and thereby normalising the colonialism and its effects.
The point of localism is to always presume the legitimacy of western control (and any and all imperialism and domestic repression needed to keep such control in place).
Both overt and covert colonisers are well-attuned to this style of public relations.
Some examples:
Localising or narrowing the point of focus: Hamas, the terrorist group from Gaza, has kidnapped Israeli civilians
Points of discussion:
How, where and when was Hamas formed?
How many Palestinians supported and support Hamas?
How many Palestinians are Hamas?
Should we support kidnappers?
Is kidnapping not evil and degenerate behaviour? What is wrong with them?
Why do Palestinians continuously choose violent action?
How is Israel, a colonialism project (not to be described as such), supposed to be safe if they have to defend themselves against this criminal villainy all the time?
Why do Arabs, Muslims especially, hate Jews?
Why do Arabs, Muslims especially, hate western civilisation?
Why are Arabs, Muslims especially, violent terrorists?
Ignored or dismissed points of discussion:
What was and is the fundamental ideology underpinning the founding of Israel, propagated by its founders from Europe? Is this a legitimate and proper political ideology?
For example, can anyone apply a similar ideology around the world? Can German, Christian descendants from South Africa annex the land and homes of German Jews and Muslims in Germany based on their religious interpretations? If not, why not?
In what way and on what basis was Israel formed, for example, was it peaceful?
Why is the existence of Palestine, pre-Israel’s formation, still contested and dismissed by western countries and allies (and proxies)?
In what way was and on what basis was Israel maintained, for example, was it peaceful?
If a western colonialism project begins on your land and continues with international (largely western) support for the use of mass violence against you, can the people found on the land consider that as a declaration of war against them?
And what methods of defence would be acceptable if colonialism is considered a declaration of war against the families found on the land?
“Hamas are the ones that are willing to fight to make their point. But what I would say is and I mean this most sincerely, I hear people here say, all lives matter. And I hear people say, they cringe and recoil when they see the violence of the Israeli state in Gaza.
But I have to say, I don’t hear anybody who is willing to stand up and fight for the Palestinians.
I don’t hear anybody who is willing to put their political or economic credentials on the line to save Palestinian lives.
If you leave a vacuum where you’re not fighting for the Palestinians, yes, Hamas are going to fill that vacuum. Every single say of the week.
Localising or narrowing the point of focus: Palestinians and Israelis that stand for peace are protesting or calling out apartheid Israel
Points of discussion:
How are Palestinians from Gaza or West Bank treated like second or third-class citizens in Israel?
What laws or practices and processes give credence to the claim of apartheid?
How are Jewish Israeli’s benefitting from apartheid compared to Palestinians? What rights or practices favour their status?
How does this create or exacerbate the circumstances of poverty or division?
How are liberal Israelis fighting for peace for Gazans?
Ignored or dismissed points of discussion:
What was and is the fundamental ideology underpinning the founding of Israel, propagated by its founders from Europe? Is this a legitimate and proper political ideology?
For example, can anyone apply a similar ideology around the world? Can German, Christian descendants from South Africa annex the land and homes of German Jews and Muslims in Germany based on their religious interpretations? If not, why not?
In what way and on what basis was Israel formed, for example, was it peaceful?
Why is the existence of Palestine, pre-Israel’s formation, still contested and dismissed by western countries and allies (and proxies)?
In what way was and on what basis was Israel maintained, for example, was it peaceful?
If a western colonialism project begins on your land and continues with international (largely western) support for the use of mass violence against you, can the people found on the land consider that as a declaration of war against them?
And what methods of defence would be acceptable if colonialism is considered a declaration of war against the families found on the land?
What is ‘peace’ in a context of western colonialism? What does peace amount to? And at what cost to the families found on the land?
Hiding information and/or minimising the harm is a tactic of western colonialism but also of all parties attempting to:
wash their hands of full responsibility and avoid accountability; and
avoid the risk of losing support.
Current examples of minimising include:
the use of language such as saying, Palestinians died instead of being killed, murdered or targeted,
avoiding the naming of the perpetrator of the killings such as saying, Palestinians were killed in a missile attack…by whom? Did it just fall from the heavens?
limiting the responsible party to the army, saying for instance, The IDF ordered an airstrike on Gaza, rather than Israel ordered an airstrike on Gaza,
suggesting that the numbers of murdered unarmed people on the ground is justifiable in war where indiscriminate bombing, drone fire, coloniser settler violence is poured onto an area of civilians, and all because:
they are all human shields,
they are all would-be terrorists or terrorist supporters,
they are all not doing enough to stand up to Hamas and force the return of hostages.
A specific example of hiding information would be for instance:
A claim made by a liberal British journalist:
“We cannot call it a genocide because the ICJ has not yet declared that what is happening there is a ‘genocide’”
The claim on the surface appears correct, except it hides the following key information, to name a few:
the complete lack of official and independent third-party verification of claims made by the Israeli government that they were and are abiding by international laws, which includes independent and official verification that they were and are abiding by the instructions of the ICJ’s initial ruling,
political pressure placed on the ICJ by western governments and on other states since the start of the genocide case, which included unevidenced claims that South Africa’s elected government was funded by Iran and therefore needed to be punitively dealt by western governments;
the refusal of western governments to act in accordance with their obligations and duties as per the Genocide Convention, which prescribes that they too should actively stop the actions of the Israeli state;
the now six-month delay to the ICJ case in 2025 (after almost two years of indiscriminate bombardment and discriminate drone and coloniser settler violence against unarmed civilians), which includes the continuation of starvation by design in Palestine; or
the collusion and complicity of western governments in arming, providing intelligence, censoring social media platforms and minimising media coverage.
The liberal journalist’s claim is fraught with dishonesty by omissions, which as a journalist of a western colonial country such as the UK he seems comfortable with.
This is the notion that one side of a conflict has greater credibility because they’re a recognised (colonising) state while the other are just ordinary (and somehow more biased) people experiencing war.
If a state acts against a group of people, all coverage provided by the group of people cannot be trusted as much as the statements, claims and coverage provided by the warring state.
However, let’s be clear:
Independent and official verification of the state’s actions, chosen inactions, processes and practices has not been done from and since October 2023 and so western countries aredeliberatelypresuming greater credibility (and honesty) on the part of the colonising state in charge of the colonising project.
Also, the brandishing of Hamas as terrorist is a designation never applied to the criminality or terrorism of the state actor whose existence is underpinned by colonisation of land,
all harm before October 2023 is presumed to be less criminal than any harm committed by Hamas and Palestinians since October 2023,
all harm after October 2023 is presumed to be equal to or less criminal than any harm committed by Hamas and the Palestinians that support their resistance,
the entire system and state is presumed to be less criminal than Hamas and Palestinians, and
the power imbalance between the militarised and well-funded western colonialism project and the poorly-supported colonised is completely ignored, although Palestinians and Hamas are seen to be more likely or probably criminal compared to the state colonising (and allowed to colonise) their land for decades.
None of these tactics are aimed at true accountability for colonialism.
It is aimed at calming questioning western minds, those from within the colonial identity especially.
The appearance of accountability is more important than actual accountability, because true accountability would say:
When we all create the major circumstances giving rise to a context that breeds your pain, we don’t get to present information about your pain as being sourced only or largely by those "uncivilised”, not-white others found on the land.
You have to undergo a universal growing up and out of western colonialism and the imperialism used to keep it in place.
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