The New Zealand Massacre:

Modern Terrorism is

the Direct Progeny of Settler Colonialism

Written by Josefina Vazquez, Tarkpor Grupee and Alexander Lynn

Research support by Curdina Hill;

Copy edited by Tuá Nefer and Peter Mitchell

for Social Justice Education

Friday, March 15, 2019 a white nationalist/terrorist organization from Australia carried out a mass shooting upon two Mosques in New Zealand which has resulted so far in the death of 50 Muslims. The Western news media and Western governments have reacted in unison with horror, condemning the attack as being totally out of step with the values of Western democracies.

An examination of the manifesto — issued by the terrorists on Facebook prior to carrying out these murders — reveals something quite different from this universal disavowal coming from the leaders of the West.

The Manifesto The 74-page tract, which Western media describes as a “diatribe,” is rich in historical context. The authors insist that a return to the past — when Europe was conquering the globe, colonizing the nations and peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas was a golden era which must be restored. The manifesto reminds us all how it came to pass that the United States of America and other settler states came to power through genocide and slavery.

The manifesto actually anticipates part of the liberal historicity, claiming that “You [Muslims] can live in peace in your own lands, and may no harm come to you on the east side of the Bosphorus [this is in reference to the Bosphorus Strait which separates the so-called European part of Istanbul, Turkey from its so-called Asian part]. But if you [Muslims] attempt to live [in] European lands, anywhere west of the Bosphorus, we will kill you and drive you roaches from our lands…” This version, of course, omits the fact that Western imperialism, led by the settler states of Israel and the United States, has already overrun the Middle East militarily, and that Western corporations, led by ExxonMobil, today are in charge of the mineral resources of the region, and through this, the labor power of the region.

After calling for a return to the golden days of open annihilation of the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas, the manifesto comes back to the present, praising the U.S. President Donald Trump as one of their inspirations: Asked if they are Trump supporters, they responded, “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure.”

The authors say they were inspired by Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African American churchgoers, as well as Anders Behring Breivik, the white nationalist/terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. Another inspiration included was the 1930s British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.

The manifesto concludes: “It [white nationalist world domination] will come in one way and one way alone, not through existing governments. Not by the maneuvers of the lobbies and the parliaments and the congresses, it will come under the stress of necessity. It will come in a great wave of popularity, in a great awakening of the European soul.”

It is this statement which the liberal commentators and other Western spokespeople identify as the clear distinction between liberal democracies and the views of a few lunatics, fringe elements. But, closer examination reveals that the manifesto is merely advocating what has been at the center of the rise and maintenance of Western capitalism since its emergence as the dominant social system of the world.

The manifesto is a map for Western Civilization’s rise and fall. It shows the direct link between settler colonialism and terrorism.

The Ideology of Terrorism is White Supremacy

Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism which has endeavored to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers. European colonialism was the extension of European capitalism beyond the borders of Europe. European colonialism is the practice of European capital of the 16th to the 20th centuries overflowing its national boundaries and subsuming the peoples of Asia, African and the Americas into its empires. Indeed, the era of imperialist capitalism is characterized by the complete division of the world between the capitalist powers, and its re-division through war — World War I and World War II resulted in the catapulting of the United States to pre-eminent status. This victory is largely due to the accumulation of capital derived from 300 years of chattel slavery — a capital which was put to use to build the most devastating military juggernaut in the history of the world (Baptiste, 2014). The United States of America, a multinational settler state, is the preeminent settler state in the world.

Unlike other forms of colonialism, settler colonialism is distinguished from the military occupation and economic domination of the foreign imperial power by the fact that the ruling class is not strictly made up of the original invading nation. Of the five remaining settler states, the ruling class of the United States of America is the monopoly capitalist class, the dominant class of the dominant nation, White America. In the settler state of Israel the dominant nationality is the Ashkenazi Jews (the White Jews). In the settler state of Australia the ruling class is made up of a mix of settlers of European heritage. Today they constitute what they call “Australians,” as opposed to the “aborigines,” the indigenous population which was largely annihilated through the colonial project. In New Zealand, likewise: The European settlers, who formed themselves into the imperialist nation of New Zealand, sit on the necks of the indigenous Maori people who have been reduced to a fraction of their original population through genocidal slaughter.

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” (Huntington, 1993)

Terrorism born of Settler Colonialism Terrorism is a form of war. It is characterized by the wanton targeting of non-combatants for the purpose of demoralizing the nation under attack. This form of war was used by European colonialism to conquer the nations and peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. This form of militarism has been the principal form of war utilized by the United States of America in its permanent war against the peoples of the world, from Korea to Indonesia, to Puerto Rico, to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Vietnam, Colombia, Grenada, the People’s Republic of the Congo, the Sudan, Somalia, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and now Syria. There has been no year since World War II in which the United States of America has not been at war against some poor, hapless nation somewhere on the globe. The principal form this permanent war has taken has been terrorism (Amin, 2004).

Fascism is a form of capitalist rule which is distinguished by the absence of capitalist democracy. Liberalism, in other words, capitalist democracy, has been the principal form of the rule of capital for the last 250 years in the United States, Europe and Japan, for the dominant nations inside each of these countries. Conversely, for the peoples colonized inside the multinational state called the United States of America, for examples, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Nation Peoples of North America, Hawaiians, Chicanos, and other nations and peoples inside its territorial borders, outright military dictatorship — fascist rule — has been our lot. In their colonial rule over the nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, these same countries have utilized military dictatorship — open fascist forms — to maintain an atmosphere conducive to extracting profits from the human and natural resources of these conquered territories and oppressed peoples. Settler colonialism utilizes terrorism as a form of war, and it utilizes fascism — outright military dictatorship — as a political form to maintain its rule. Capitalist rule cannot persevere without either of these forms, and these forms are used interchangeably in service to the specific, in-the-moment needs of the rule of capital.

Chickens are coming home to roost for settler states, as the manifesto connects Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The manifesto directly praises Trump and Trumpism and the continuation of the road of Western imperialism to maintain the enslavement of all other peoples of the world.

The only settler state not mentioned in this white supremacist manifesto was Israel. The people of the world, however, are very aware of Israel’s rightful place next to the most anti-human regimes in the world. As far back as 1975, in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on November 10th of that year, the people of the world “determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” (United Nations).

The History of Settler Colonialism

White supremacy — white nationalism — is the birth child of Europe’s “age of exploration.” Europe’s age of inhumanity left no stones unturned, no umbilical cord intact and no ancestral land whole. Everything in this world view is a commodity. There has been no indigenous land sacred from destruction, motivated by Western values. King Leopold II of Belgium slaughtered 10 million Africans in the Congo while Europe provided him all needed tools to mask his genocide (O’Ceallaigh, 2010). Europe’s hunger for resources is not limited to People of Color but also to the planet itself. An organized systematic terrorism — coupled with religion — unleashed an apocalypse of uninterrupted violence over the last half millennium.

In American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present (McKenna and Pratt, 2015) the following has been observed: “It is also apparent that the shared history of the hemisphere is one framed by the dual tragedies of genocide and slavery, both of which are part of the legacy of the European invasions of the past 500 years. Indigenous people north and south were displaced, died of disease, and were killed by Christian Europeans through slavery, rape, and war. In 1491, about 145 million people lived in the western hemisphere. By 1691, the population of indigenous Americans had declined by 90–95 percent, or by around 130 million people.”

The indigenous inhabitants of the sub-continent today called Australia were conquered by means of unbridled military debauchery. The “pacifism” espoused by the current Prime Minister of New Zealand was not utilized in the occupation of the Maori people. Media pundits are horrified at the modern offspring of settler colonialism in the form of the recent terrorist organization from Australia — while they suffer from extreme historical amnesia.

White nationalism is a product of imperialist capitalism: the evil offspring of Eurocentric belief (Mamers, 2007; Amin, 1989). White nationalism is an ideological international movement with the sole intent of restoring and augmenting the control of White American and European capital over every aspect of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Caribbean, the Americas and Middle East.

In their “exploration,” Spain’s military eliminated 90% of the native population of the Americas (Science of the Times, 2019). They did this in concert with the English. This participation of “Great” Britain is evidenced by examining the present day populations of Latin America, the USA and Canada. That said, the most disastrous record of the Spaniards’ outright bloodthirsty annihilation of the Indigenous population of the now island countries known as Haiti and Dominican Republic (formerly known as Hispaniola) rests in the figure of over 90% of the Taino people taken off of the planet (2019).

The ideology supporting European terrorism is rooted in the belief of racial superiority. The genocide committed against the Aborigines in Australia was followed in 1943 by the British apocalyptic campaign committed against the Bengali of India (Ghosh, 2013). The Churchill regime forced the peasants to give up their rice to feed the British army. This decision and policy starved at least 2–4 million Indians (2013).

A fervent imperialist, Churchill knew that India — known as the “Crown Jewel” of “Great” Britain’s colonial empire — was fighting for national independence. His hatred for the Indian people was acted out in this final declaration made in a War Cabinet meeting, referring to this famine created by military occupation: “[The famine was the Indians’ fault because they] breed like rabbits…. I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion” (2013). This militarily created famine in India was the epitome of European global terrorism.

In Kenya, the terrorism of the British Empire was on full display again. After the British defeat in the Anglo-Boer War, the colonists moved to Kenya and seized the most fertile lands of the Kikuyu Nation. In response, the Kikuyu organized a national land reclamation movement. Fully eight years after the Jewish Holocaust, the British Empire reacted to this uprising by placing the entire Kikuyu Nation in concentration camps (BBC News, 2011).

The British suppression of the Kikuyu Mau Mau uprising is a signature expression of the systematic organized violence perpetrated by the West against the Indigenous world. Four decades after the Mau Mau uprising, the birth rate of Kikuyu women dropped by 25% as compared to nations that collaborated with the British (BBC News, 2011).

The Mau Mau were put in camps where they were subject to severe torture, malnutrition, beatings (BBC News, 2011)

In the case of Algeria, the settler culture produced a violence that distorted the colonist sense of reality. In its stature as the second-biggest European imperialist state, France added Algeria to its list of colonized countries. For Algeria, the torturous state of violence lasted from 1830 until independence, after 8 years of national revolutionary war resulted in the French withdrawal in 1962.

The Algerian War of National Liberation (1954–1962) displayed the panoply of French atrocities. Algerian historians place the death toll at 1.5 million Algerian victims (Renkveren, 2016). Torture and terrorism were engraved in the colonial culture of French imperialistic laws, under-girding France’s inhumane institutions. The French spent at least 4 billion dollars per year to maintain rule over a people who had voted 98.02% for national independence.

A closer look at two settler states, New Zealand and Australia, reveals that a distance of 1,056 miles (the shortest distance from one another) separates them. What connects them is that they are two links in the five-link chain of settler colonialism. They are sister settler states.

New Zealand: 5 million population

White Settlers…………..68%…3,400,000

Māori Natives……………15%…….750,000

Asians………………………11%…….550,000

Pacific Islanders………….6%……300,000

Australia: 25 million population

White Settlers…………..80%..20,000,000

Asians……………………..14.4%..3,600,000

Africans……………………..1.6%…..400,000

Aborigines………………….4%…..1,000,000

The source for the above figures regarding Australia is the Australian settler government itself (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018). In other words, this liberal democracy wants to have its cake and eat it too: On one hand, “We are proud of our diversity…” On the other hand, we proudly admit that we annihilated millions of native people to realize the grotesque disparity of 20 million European settlers to one million natives!

New Zealand nationalities as per the 2013 census:

Blue: European; Blue/Red: Mixed European-Māori; Red: Māori; Green: Asian; Purple: Pacific; Caramel: “Other”; Brown: “Mixed” (excluding european and Maori).

White supremacy historically has been the basis of settler colonialism. More recently in Palestine, we witness how settler colonialism remains the primary basis for the existence of Zionist rule and its support by Western democracies.

When it is understood that the white supremacist chauvinism of the USA, UK, France, Germany, New Zealand and Australia, as their common perpetration of, destruction and oppression of countries in the global south is uncovered, it becomes clearer that the type of “freedom” espoused by the Australian terrorist group, which carried out this attack in New Zealand, is meat and potatoes of Western civilization and the rule of monopoly capital and the white nations over the world.

The blood bath which was the result for the native populations of both countries was ugly. It cannot bear the light of day for those of weak temperament. But, shed light on it we must, because as Thich Nhat Hanh has insisted to us all in the following adjuration:

We are under the influence of previous generations of our ancestors and society. At the same time we hold within us the seeds of future generations. We have to live in a way that liberates both the ancestors and the future generations who are inside of us. Joy, peace, freedom and harmony are not individual matters. If we do not liberate our ancestors, we will be in bondage all our lives, and we will transmit that to our children and grandchildren. Now is the time for liberation.(Thich Nhat Hanh, pp36–37)

These two multinational states — New Zealand and Australia — remain committed to their colonial settler histories. This is proven by their military pacts with Israel and the United States in suppressing and conquering the peoples of the Middle East. The countries of New Zealand and Australia, led by the White nations who dominate those countries, cooperate in the decimating of the native populations within the Middle East. Both enlisted their troops in the prosecution of the Gulf War, and in the ensuing invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars have resulted in the deaths of thousands of their ground troops and millions of the native populations within the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. This is the same country in which the Cheneys, the Bushes, ExxonMobil, Lockheed Martin and Halliburton have made billions of dollars from their oil rip offs, from other stolen resources, from their arms deals, and from their stealing of invaluable historical artifacts. Each of these taken by themselves are acts of genocide as defined by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (International Committee of the Red Cross, 2010). Taken together they constitute an apocalypse, a holocaust for the peoples of the world.

United States The United States was created by the invasion of Europeans, the kidnapping, annihilation of, and enslavement of millions Africans (mostly from West Africa), and the genocide against the scores of Native Nations and Peoples of North America. Since then, as was the case with European nations, the capital of White America (the oppressor nation) overflowed its national boundaries: The result is the military invasion of, subsequent takeover of, and economic domination of the following what-U.S.-law-calls “territories” (note: in identical fashion as with monikers such as “minorities,” “territories” have no human quality — “minorities” are a quantitative measure, and “territories” are geographic designations):

• American Samoa — Territory since 1900;
• Guam — Territory since 1899, acquired at the end of the Spanish American War. Guam is the home of Naval Base Guam and Anderson Air Force Base;
• Northern Mariana Islands –the Northern Mariana Islands were part of the Spanish Empire until 1899 and part of the German Empire from 1899 to 1919. They were administered by Japan as a League of Nations mandate until the islands were conquered by the United States during World War II;
• Puerto Rico — colony since 1898; Puerto Rico conquered by USA through the illegally instigated Spanish-American War. Special Committee on Decolonization Approved United Nations Text, June 20, 2016. “Puerto Rico continues to be a colony of the United States Congress.”
• “U.S. Virgin Islands” — Purchased (!!) by the U.S. from Denmark in 1917 and organized under the Revised Organic Act of the Virgin Islands in 1954, U.S. citizenship was granted in 1927. The main islands are Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix — named after the Christian saints who ordained the slaughter of the Indigenous peoples on these islands.

The Zionist State Zionism is a nationally-specific form of white supremacy. This is the reason why the other colonial settler nations, and in addition the other former colonial powers of Europe and Japan, under-gird the atrocities committed by the illegal state of Israel, such which contain the identical characteristics of the terrorist attack in New Zealand.

Apartheid South Africa The South African white settler regime was the most recent to be taken down by a mass people’s revolution, supported by peace and justice loving people the world over. It is worth noting, as we chronicle the history of settler colonialism, that this apartheid regime was initiated and bolstered by the identical forces which gave birth to and today maintain the other five settler regimes: True to its imperialist trademark, in 1899, New Zealand sent troops to South Africa to fight on behalf of England. By 1907, the settler colonialists claimed Independence. This was the foundation stone of the emergent apartheid fascist rule over the peoples of South Africa.

After participating in WWI, New Zealand troops landed in Gallipoli, Turkey in 1915, and with Australia formed ANZUC, Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, so as to support Churchill’s brainchild of controlling the sea from Europe to Russia. Even with the support of British and French troops the plan failed.

It is clear that traditionally, the government of New Zealand supports white supremacist colonial settler world domination. Having a white supremacist group attack two mosques in New Zealand solely followed the blueprint of its own historical white supremacist government. The irony of the speech made by the Prime Minister induces righteous outrage.

Their Story: the Liberal Daddy and Mommy Speak

Making the case for capitalist democracy The duplicity of the Prime Minister of New Zealand in her response to the horrors of such a terrorist attack becomes an outrageous insult to the peoples of the Middle East. This is especially significant in light of her country’s contributing armed forces during the Gulf War, for the later invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its full support of the illegal state of Israel.

Paul Spoonley, a professor at New Zealand’s Massey University, said that the far-right has “been building for some time but it’s still quite a minor part of the political spectrum in New Zealand.” Indeed, capitalist democracy consists of the New Zealand White nation sitting on the necks of its captive native peoples without the need for this “extreme violence.” After all, 90% of these peoples have already been wiped out. These “extremists” will continue to play the “minor” role of making it appear that the present regime is “peace loving” and “committed to diversity.” This is the kind of “diversity” the White nation favors: total domination. If the peoples rise up, the White nation always has the options of fascism and terror. In such moments, the histories of these liberals shows that the “minor part” will have to turn into a “major part.”

Speaking to Britain’s Sky News, this same pundit of liberalism pointed out: “Somehow we thought we were exempt from it but that innocence has been completely blown away today.” Hmmmm, to which “innocence” is he referring? Could it be that “innocence” born of the covering up of hundreds of years of the slaughter of the native peoples of your country by your nation? To the charge of genocide, do you plead “innocent”? Gee, what a surprise!

“We’ve changed” The story cannot be told without the aid of liberal historicity: How can centuries of genocide and slavery which are the story of settler colonialism be separated from the recent ideology espoused in the 74 page manifesto? Where are they different? The only difference is in the wording: Settler colonialists annihilated our peoples as part of their “manifest destiny” to “help us,” and to rid the world of mongrel peoples. “Mongrel peoples,” such as Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, needed to be “settled,” “civilized,” tamed and groomed to a life of servitude to massa.

This was the past explanation. What is their present explanation for their past of settler colonialism? Today, “We are a diverse people…” (New Zealand Prime Minister). “We are a nation with 146 different ethnicities.” Follow the story of settler colonialism: the indigenous peoples had no history and were without culture and civilization. Now we are afforded “inclusion” into the White nation, and we are allowed to be “ethnicities…,” “minorities,” and “racial subgroups.” We have no nations of our own.

How does this differ from the terrorist narrative? Only in this: Liberal settler colonialists love “their diversity,” as they have subsumed us into their civilization and nations. The terrorists fear that inside this White nation we are moving too far beyond our original status as slaves, coulees and servants. Have we moved beyond this status? No, the wealth of the “motherland” — imperialist metropoles like the US, and Western Europe — allows a small middle class among the former colonial subjects to give the impression that “we” are “diverse,” and we are “prospering” beyond our original status of permanent servitude. The liberal narrative poses capitalist democracy as the protector of the “diverse” hordes as against the intolerance and exclusivity of the outright white supremacists.

In which ways is settler colonialism not white supremacist? Let us count the ways — one, in its pretty formulation by which they claim to love us.

“Now we are diverse” Speaking of the “ideology which gave rise to this terrorism,” the Prime Minister of New Zealand maintained that it is utterly in opposition to the values of her country.

Australian Prime Minister: “We had no information about these people in advance.” Why? Because they are White — the most egregious terrorist people on the planet.

“Now we are peaceful” New Zealand Prime Minister: “There is no place in New Zealand for such acts of extreme violence…” What do you call the act of going from your country with your warships, invading other peoples all over the world, annihilating the large majority of the population and enslaving the rest, if not “acts of extreme violence”? The manifesto refers directly to this system of extreme violence as the source of this latest act, and advocates for its continuity, as against the liberal covering over of this heritage.

“Now you are ‘minorities,’ ‘ethnicities,’ ‘racial subgroups,’ and we are nations and countries.”

END THE TORTURE OF PALESTINIAN PRISONERS BY ISRAELI OCCUPATION.
Their deaths are kept silent. #BDS

Our Story: Resistance to Imperialism

While we chronicle (above) the oppressors’ version of history, it is more important that we tell our story of uninterrupted resistance to, and fight against white settler colonialism, capitalism and imperialism.

The Liberation Movements The first Indigenous Nation to rebel against the colonizer’s invasion was the Taino. Hatuey organized a Taino rebellion to fight the foreign destroyers and to defend Indigenous culture. Hatuey was burnt alive for refusing to convert to the colonizer’s religion. His last words, “If the colonizers go to Heaven, I prefer to be in Hell,” are a clarion call of resistance for all oppressed peoples.

Indigenous peoples have been fighting against the invasion and takeover by Western imperialism since the first Pilgrim landed on Plymouth Rock. At the peak of the onslaught, during the late 19th century through the entire 20th century when the maniacal scramble to acquire and reacquire foreign territories was at its peak, the peoples waged unrelenting wars of national liberation, for independence and socialism (Amin, 1980, p28). Who can forget the 30-year war of national liberation waged by the Chinese people in their hundreds of millions, which resulted in independence from British, US and Japanese colonialism? It also led to the creation of a socialist state. That the People’s Republic of China is today a state capitalist regime cannot obliterate this history of struggle for righteousness and freedom of the Chinese people, one-quarter of humanity.

All over Asia, Africa and Latin America the peoples have waged these wars of national liberation. Again, most of them resulted in the people’s gaining formal independence; some of them took this one step further and created socialist societies: Cuba and Vietnam are two examples in which the peoples outright defeated the U.S. maniacal colossus, and decided on their own road to freedom from capitalist exploitation.

Indigenism, Womanism and Socialism

Europe’s systematic international terrorism is married to Christianity. Europe’s fear of the Indigenous World is real, and there is nowhere in our history where their systematic organized violence has not been met with our fight to bring humanity beyond such a state of dissolution. Global social phenomena are shifting and the Indigenous world is firm: to save humanity, the environment and our children, the Indigenous World is acting. In Australia, Aborigines advocated for restitution to address the “Stolen Generations Reparation Scheme” (Ruddock, 2019). The Stolen Generations were Aboriginal children kidnapped from their families to be Christianized, trained as domestic workers, trained through corporal punishment and denial of their Aboriginal languages.

In Canada, the Assembly of First Nations has forced the Canadian government to pay reparations for systematic violence, sexual abuse, and cultural genocide. “This is a holistic way to deal with this terrible, tragic legacy of our shared past,” according to the First Nations press release. The First Nations is empowered to dictate terms to the Canadian national government due to this acknowledgement: “The Canadian government has suggested that reparations be based on recommendations outlined in a November report by the Assembly of First Nations” (Morrison, William, 2019).

Concomitantly, the Herero people of Namibia continue to navigate the international court systems. The outcome of the Herero legal fight will set international norms for historical human rights violations during Europe’s conquest of the Indigenous world (Cultural Survival, 2019). The Herero people of Namibia were once colonized by Germany (German South West Africa). Germany first experimented on the Herero people — the first genocide of the 20th century. The Herero fight for reclamation is targeting German genocidal crimes, German banks, along with various corporate crimes. Each of these Indigenous cases are laying an international framework to counter 500 years of European global terrorism.

The term, “crimes against humanity” was coined by Roxbury resident and African American explorer, George Washington Williams (2019). Williams, a former slave was horrified at the systematic violence, so he committed his life to fighting against the Congo Free State and Belgium terrorism.

The women’s movements have been fighting militarism, misogyny and terrorism at an unprecedented pace. Women all over the world are uniting under the flag of Womanism, a spiritual disposition which denies that their goals are to be “equal” with rich White men by joining their military, by joining the boards of directors of their monopolist corporations, and by becoming bosses and perpetrators alongside these rich White men (Lynn & Vasquez, 2016).

Womanism the world-over has been exposing the manifest connection between the scourge of modern terrorism, on one hand, with its origins in settler colonialism. After all, has it not been, as Womanism teaches us, that most of the nations and peoples conquered by the West were horizontal social structures, most of them matrilineal, woman-centric and matriarchal when Predator arrived? (Manuelita, 2006) In other words, before the European invasion these cultures were absent of class exploitation. They were specifically absent of patriarchy, male supremacy and the misogyny which today plagues dying Western civilization. Womanism teaches us that in most of its invasions, the settler colonists introduced male supremacy to our peoples. Womanism is teaching the people of the world that the fight against settler colonialism is simultaneously the fight against male supremacy (Amaduemi, 1995).

Indeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer-scholar Toni Morrison, acting out of this mounting Womanist resistance has observed the following with regard to the connection between today’s acts of terrorism, and their mother, settler colonialism:

“… Who or what is an American? From what I gather from those who have studied the history of genocide — its definition and application — there seems to be a pattern. Nation-states, governments seeking legitimacy and identity, seem able and determined to shape themselves by the destruction of a collective ‘other.’ When European nations were in thrall to royal consolidation, they were able to act out this slaughter in other countries — African, South American, Asian. Australia and the United States, self-declared republics, required the annihilation of all indigenous peoples if not the usurpation of their land to create their new, democratic state. The fall of communism created a bouquet of new or reinvented nations who measured their statehood by “cleansing” communities. Whether the targets were of different religions, races, cultures — whatever — reasons were found first to demonize then to expel or murder them. For an assumed safety, hegemony, or pure land grabs, foreigners were constructed as the sum total of the putative nation’s ills. If these scholars are right, we will see more and more illogical waves of war — designed for the grasp of control by the leaders of such states. Laws cannot stop them, nor can any god. Interventions merely provoke” (Morrison, Toni, 2018).

The peoples are unleashing righteous freedom struggles all over the world. Just this past week, Palestinians in besieged Gaza found themselves unable to gather for their 51st Great March of Return after suffering 100 bombing strikes from the illegal Zionist state of Israel.

Meanwhile, activists are bringing to international attention the corporate media’s most recent manipulation of seeking pity for the 28-year old white terrorist in New Zealand. “There is absolutely no chance a newspaper would splash a childhood photo of an Islamist terrorist who murdered 49 Christians in a church, presenting such as an ‘angelic boy.’ Displacing focus from the victims, the western media cries, ‘Oh, how could such a sweet White boy become a terrorist?’”

Today, in the United States of America, the part of the population which engages electoral politics has placed into office an unprecedented amount of women, socialists, Muslim women and Native American women representatives in Congress. Among them, Muslim Sister and House of Representatives member Ilhan Omar recently explained: “We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was…. And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

Yes, we need not listen to the polished explanations of the Western liberal. We must look inward to find the unity we have with our ancestors, the heartbeat of liberation that ties each of us together. The following adjuration by Palestinian poet Samih Al Qasem (1939–2014) represents our hopes for a bright future:

You may take the last strip of my land,
Feed my youth to your prison cells.
You may plunder my heritage.
You may burn my books, my poems,
Or feed my flesh to your dogs.
You may spread a web of terror
On the roofs of my village.
You may deprive me of my mother’s kisses.
You may curse my people.
You may distort my history.
You may deprive my children of a smile
You may fool the world with a borrowed face.
You may build walls of hatred around me.
But O enemy of the sun
I shall not desist
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist.
(Translated from Arabic)

References

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Amin, Samir. (1989). Eurocentrism. Monthly Review Press.

Amin. (2004). The liberal virus: Permanent war and the Americanization of the world. Monthly Review Press.

Amin. (2018). Modern imperialism, monopoly finance capital, and Marx’s law of value. Monthly Review Press.

Amin. (1980). Class and nation: Historically and in the current crisis. Monthly Review Press.

Aufderheide, Arthur C., Conrado Rodríguez-Martín and Odin Langsjoen (1998). The Cambridge encyclopedia of human paleopathology. Cambridge University Press. p.205. ISBN 0–521–55203–6

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2018). “Australia’s population to reach 25 million.” https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs%40.nsf/mediareleasesbyCatalogue/C3315F52F6219DE9CA2582E1001BC66A?OpenDocument

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