Colonialism: The Rape of Minds and Nations

In 1972, the popular musical act War, wrote the following,

“Don’t you know that it’s true, that for me and for you, the

world is a ghetto.” The song reached number seven on the

Billboard charts. The lyrics resonated with the people. The irony

of the band’s name should not go unnoticed. Less than a hundred

years before the nations of Europe viewed the world as their

ghetto. In their quest for more resources, land, and wealth, they

simply raped the minds and nations of those they viewed as

inferior. In Niccolo Machiavelli’s book The Prince, he wrote, “The

end justifies the means.” It appears European nations followed

that creed by using whatever means necessary, including military

force,1 to extract everything they could from less powerful

nations. Europe colonized wherever they could and made the world

their ghetto.

European nations used the guise of paternalistic benevolence

as their justification for colonizing these nations. Nations in

Africa, Asia, South America, and the South Pacific all fell under

the rule of Mother Europe. Countries like Great Britain, France,

1 This explains the irony of the name of the band War.

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and others rationalized that since these nations were not using

the natural resources contained within their borders that they

would help themselves to whatever resources the land could offer.

This occurred under the façade of building schools, roads,

railroads, hospitals, and other public amenities. Amie Cesaire

described the plight of colonized Africans and Asians,

The proof is that at present it is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them; that it is the African who is asking for ports and roads, and colonialist Europe which is niggardly on this score; that it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back.2

However, the only reason the colonizers undertook the building of

these nation’s infrastructures was to more efficiently extract

their natural resources. After the Europeans removed what they

wanted, the host nations, now raped of their natural wealth and

resources, were left in worse condition than they were before the

arrival of Mother Europe. The colonizers left ghetto-like

conditions in their wake.

Prior to the actual colonization of a nation, like any

predator, the stronger nation must lull the weaker nation into a

2 Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 46.

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false sense of security. European powers portrayed themselves as

saviors, promising these countries a better way of life, with

more wealth, comfort, and industrialization. In reality, the

colonizers were not any better than the pedophile offering candy

to a child in exchange for a ride to school. The strength of the

colonizers was their ability to understand the ideology of

winning the hearts and minds of those they were colonizing with

false promises.3 The paternalistic ideology of the colonizers was

their rationalization and justification for raping the minds and

nations of the underdeveloped nations of the world.

Rationalization and justification are simply ways of self-

fornicating. Some scholars argue that by the Europeans colonizing

these perceived lesser nations they contributed to the beginning

of their own demise.

Scholars such as Aime Cesaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism

and Niall Ferguson, in his work The War of the World: Twentieth Century

Conflict and the Descent of the West, would agree that European

colonialism started the decline of European empire and the west.

Both would argue that colonization has hardened the colonizers

3 Perhaps President Lyndon Johnson borrowed their playbook by using the same terminology when justifying the presence of the United States in Vietnam.

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and blinded them to the reality of what they are doing to the

colonized. Colonizers objectify and dehumanize those they are

colonizing. That dehumanization served as rationalization and

justification for the rape and pillage of the minds and nations

of those colonized. It is easier to stomach the mistreatment of

one group by another when the strong views the weak as sub-human.

An example of the European mindset is the manner in which the

British viewed the Indians and Burmese. George Orwell provides

vivid examples of the treatment of the Burmese in his book

Burmese Days. In America, Native Americans and Black Americans can

speak to the harsh realities of being viewed as culturally,

spiritually, intellectually, and morally inferior. In Europe,

Germans vilified Jews and labeled them as sub-human. Europe and

the west began their own decline by colonizing nations who did

not possess the same military strength by first raping their

minds and then their nation.

Cesaire states, “colonization=”thingification.”4 This is how

the colonizers de-civilize the colonized. As stated above, by

perceiving the colonized as completely inferior the colonizers

4 Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42.

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are able to rationalize the manner in which they treat the

societies that they have colonized. They drain these societies of

their essence, trample their cultures, undermine their

institutions, confiscate their lands, smash their religions,

destroy their artistic creations, and wipe out any possibility of

being extraordinary.5 In short, the colonizer embarks on a quest

of cultural annihilation. In a cultural sense, annihilation is to

regard as of no consequence the culture of a non-dominate group

and to forcibly destroy their ability to live in compatibility

and coherence with original views.6 European nations sought

either to destroy the natural way of the societies they colonized

cultural annihilation, or to assimilate these societies into the

bosom of the mother country and turn the colony into a miniature

replica of the colonizer. Neither choice serves the best interest

of the colonized and in the end does not uplift the colonized

nation.

The truth is that the colonizers had no interest in raising

the standard of living of the colonized. It was a facade—a lie

used to ingratiate themselves into the good graces of the people

5 Ibid., 43. 6 Pamela Steinle, Notes on Acculturation and American Character.

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they were manipulating. This is the rape of the mind. Propaganda

used to gain access to the resources—the rape of the nation, or

an avenue used to deliver a political or religious agenda. In

reality, propaganda is a blatant or subtle way to influence or

control the thinking of others—“a mind fuck.” Orwell reflects in

Burmese Days, through the character Flory,

Why, of course, the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them. I suppose it’s a natural lie enough. But it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can’t imagine. There’s aneverlasting sense of being a sneak, a liar that torments us and drives us to justify ourselves night and day. It’s at the bottom of half our beastliness to the natives. We Anglo-Indians could be almost bearable ifwe’d only admit that we’re thieves and go thieving without any humbug.7

Cesaire would agree with Orwell’s Flory that this mindset is a

result of the dehumanization of the colonized by a desensitized

group of colonizers. The supposedly civilized colonizers

exhibited decidedly barbaric ideologies and actions.

In reality, the dehumanization of the colonized borders on

barbarism. European nations have long held the belief that it was

their duty to bring Christianity to the less “spiritually

enlightened” peoples of the world. The British landed in North

America to extract resources and to spread Christianity, while

simultaneously hindering the Spanish from spreading Catholicism.

7 George Orwell, Burmese Days (New York: Harvest Books, 1934), 39.

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This “City on the Hill” mentality permeated European thought for

centuries. Their belief that indigenous people have “no religion”

stems from ignorance of different cultures. That belief in and of

itself is barbaric, archaic, paternalistic, and self-serving.

This ideology filtered down into the mindset of the everyday

European and they swallowed this line of reasoning and believed

it was their duty to spiritually civilize the world. This

thinking enabled Europeans to view themselves as culturally and

spiritually superior. The result was the dehumanization and

objectification of the colonized and the desensitization of the

average European to the plight of the colonized. Perhaps this

desensitization of the everyday European based on their colonial

roots enabled them to ignore the genocide of the Jewish people by

the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler.

Anti-Semitism began in Germany well before the Nazis took

control of the nation. In this case, it is possible that reverse

mind raping occurred. Instead of using propaganda to rape the

minds of the Jews, the German regimes raped the minds of other

Germans and the rest of Europe, to poison their minds against the

Jews, so when the whole-scale extermination of these people took

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place, many a blind eye turned to the genocide executed by the

Nazis. Dating back to 1912, during the Wilhelmine era, Heinrich

Class, one of the extreme anti-Semites wrote, under a pseudonym,

a book entitled, If I Were the Kaiser. In this work, he outlined a

remarkably ominous list of recommendations to restrict the

economic opportunities of Jews:8

1. Germany’s borders should be closed to further Jewish immigration.2. Jews resident in Germany who did not have German citizenship should

be ‘immediately and ruthlessly’ expelled.3. Jews with German citizenship, including converts to Christianity and

the offspring of mixed marriages, should be given the legal status offoreigners.

4. Jews should be excluded from all public office.5. Jews should not be permitted to serve in the army or navy.6. Jews should be disenfranchised.7. Jews should be excluded from the teaching and legal profession and

from the direction of theaters.8. Jewish journalists should be permitted to work only for newspapers

explicitly identified as ‘Jewish.’9. Jews should not be permitted to run banks.10. Jews should not be allowed to own agricultural land or mortgages

on agricultural land.11. Jews should pay double the taxes levied on Germans ‘as

compensation for the protection they enjoy as ethnic aliens.’9

This example serves as evidence that colonization not only

occurred abroad but also within the borders of individual

nations. In this case, the colonization of the minds of the

German people took place as a reaction to the fear of the

8 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin, 2006), 34.

9 Ibid., 34-5.

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economic success enjoyed by the Jews in Germany. The Jews, long

considered, ‘a people born to trade money and goods’10—knew

better than the Germans how to take advantage of the enlarged

free market.11 The above account by Class significantly portrays

the fearful and paranoid mindset of racial prejudice spawned from

the economic upswing enjoyed by the Jews in Germany at the time.

Instead of colonizing a foreign nation, the Germans turned their

greed inward towards the Jews and colonized an ethnic group

living, prospering, and contributing to the German economy.

The above photo shows the German SS escorting the Jews and their bags of moneyout of Germany.

Photo courtesy of Thebreman.org.

In reality, the Germans used Eugenics as their

rationalization and justification to rid themselves of the

10 Ibid., 35. 11 Ibid.

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“Jewish Problem.” Eugenics dehumanized the Jews and this enabled

the Germans to turn the public against them. There is no doubt

that religion and economics played the most significant roles in

the colonization of the Jewish people in Europe. The propaganda

of Eugenics supposedly based on science successfully colonized

the minds of the non-Jews in Europe.

Ferguson argued that European colonization began the decline

of the west. The callousness that resulted from the

objectification and dehumanization of a supposedly inferior

people by a perceived civilized class of people desensitized the

colonizers and turned them into a barbarous, selfish, wasteful,

and destructive machine that will eventually destroy itself from

within. World War II sped up that decline and left most of Europe

a bombed out ghetto that turned to another imperialist Western

Colonial power—the United States, to rebuild under the Marshall

Plan. Cesaire has even less hope for the ability of humankind to

right the ship and finally become an equal, classless society. He

reflects,

Because, after all, we must resign ourselves to the inevitable and say to ourselves, once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that is an implacable law that every decadent

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class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is universal law before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.12

This is the decline of the European colonialism and the west in

a nutshell, eloquently stated by Cesaire. The colonizers that

left the colonies in economic and political ruin dissolved from

within. The once mighty that left nations throughout Africa,

Asia, South America, and the South Pacific in shambles—ghettos,

now found themselves in political, economic, and social chaos

with their own ghettos to deal with.

In conclusion, the colonial ideology permeated European and

western thought for centuries. The economic greed of the so-

called civilized, industrialized nations caused the rape of these

perceived lesser-developed nations in a quest for natural

resources. The mental rape occurred prior to and during the

colonization process. Nations such as France in Indo-China, Great

Britain in India, Burma, and a litany of other colonies, Italy in

Africa, Germany in Africa and within its own borders, and even

Belgium and other smaller European nations colonized nations.

12 Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 64.

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Japan and the United States also took part in imperialistic land

and resource grabs, raping the minds and nations in China and the

Asian Pacific. The United States also colonized Native Americans

and Blacks within its borders. Reservations and ghettos are

simply colonies by another name. The result according to Cesaire

and Ferguson was the decline of Europe and the West dating back

to the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.

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This Colonial Pyramid shows the colonization of people within the UnitedStates.

Photograph courtesy of Peopleofcolororganize.com.

The decline of the west because of colonization began over

one hundred years ago but is still taking place. With the

economic doldrums crippling the United States and the world,

further dividing rich and poor, the eventual collapse of the west

is possibly eminent. China is poised to take the reigns as the

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next great super-power and empire. If drastic changes are not

made within the United States especially in areas of education,

employment, economy, and equity, the country is doomed to become

further divided and the middle-class and poor will become

colonies with the sole purpose of serving the rich. Maybe the

words sung by War in 1972. “Don’t you know that it’s true, that

for me and for you, the world is a ghetto,” will ring true and

the poor, the working class, and the middle-class will succumb to

the wealthy elite and become the colonized ghettos of America. It

is time that the middle-class realizes that they have more in

common with the working class and poor than they do with the

wealthy elite. If they do not, further division between rich and

poor will drive this nation into colonized class ghettos serving

the needs of the elite. When that takes place, the world will

most certainly be a ghetto. The rich colonizers will rape the

minds and resources of the poor, turning the world into a ghetto.

The nation and the world need to wake up and learn from the

1960s, rise up against the tyranny and colonization by the rich

and global corporations. If a revolution of thought does not

occur because of an apathetic populous, the people of the world

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living in middle-class standards and below will become the next

groups colonized.

Is this our future? Colonized by the wealthy elite.Photograph courtesy of Soverignindependant.com.

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