Maybe Murder and Humiliation is the Whole Point

We habitually think that greed and some general mental underdevelopment motivated colonialism and capitalism throughout the centuries. We may be wrong

1852 woodcut of the Gnadenhutten massacre

The first thing we need to know about history is who is telling us about it (the same applies to any media story, but that’s for another post). And we have been told our history, almost exclusively, by colonizer cultures.

British, German, and American historians have shaped the perception of history throughout much of the world in the last couple of centuries, and even in the present day, deep into postcolonial trends in thinking and speaking about history, most of the storytelling of history is crafted within the confines of Western institutions. Those elite schools are often referred to as threshold-terrorist, Marxist-leninist-maoist radical left cocoons; still, lo and behold, they manage to strictly enforce genocide compliance throughout their departments in every Western education system in existence.

If anything, and especially when compliance with them is enforced across an entire civilization, genocides provide excellent opportunities to stop being political idiots. As per this fine tradition, I’d like to seize this moment to not stop at mocking the fake rebelliousness of prestigious Western institutions but go on to raise a broader, much more important question. That question is: do we have our story straight as concerns the motivation behind European colonizers destroying an innumerable number of native communities throughout the Americas, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and a hundred other places?

What made a well-defined group of people decide their main calling in life is to turn the life of the rest of the planet, basically, into hell on earth?

-

The people who taught us history gave us a few reasons for this centuries-long rampage of murder, enslavement, rape, destruction, and what has been an actual apocalypse for so many civilizations that died and ended when white people arrived on their shores.

Protestants were persecuted in Britain (oh, my heart); they discovered gold; they didn’t know better; they became racially radicalized by time and circumstances; it was a different era; those are the kinds of things used to explain the unquenchable colonial obsession with blood and suffering of native people. Explaining the crusades was even more hilarious, with actual romanticism, adventurism, and wanderlust attributed to people who went on a murder campaign in Europe, and mainly in the Middle East, that lasted centuries.

So I want to challenge this acceptable narrative by calling upon your common sense. Does this array of explanations satisfy you? Do you believe simple greed makes people burn entire civilizations to the ground? I mean, when we accept this explanation, aren’t we normalizing it by putting greed on a pedestal as the queen of attractions and motivations in the human psyche? Because this (namely the fake criticism that only reasserts its object) could explain why colonizer cultures push these explanations.

Knowing life as you do, does this ring true? Would you murder 100 children for 100 million dollars? Would most people that you know choose that? I highly doubt it.

I don’t doubt that greed is a powerful factor in shaping the landscape of social and political interactions and experiences; I’m just questioning whether it is the strongest, or exclusive one. In my experience, for the great majority of people, greed is not a big enough temptation. Power over other people - now that’s where people lose balance almost without exception.

-

I want to suggest to you a different perspective. Consider it. What I think is: it may be very possible (and intuitively I feel strongly that this is the case) that the greatest temptation in colonialism, as in capitalism, is not the expected profit, but the sadistic joy of crushing people in a system that does not punish but rewards such behavior.

Legitimate murder, subjugation, and humiliation are the main thrill. The gold coins only come second. This, I’m sure, was the most addictive element of slavery well: not the profits made by a slave labor force, but the sadistic joy of owning them and being their master and practical god.

As human creatures, our greatest source of comfort, joy, approval, fear, pain, and reward is not objects and symbols: it is other people. Whatever we do, say, and choose, is always in relation to other people (this is why everything is political). So the explanation for any behavior always lies in the question: what kind of interaction with other people does this behavior enable, express, or seek to normalize?

And if you look at the world like this, you may also see the monstrous anomaly of colonialism as I suggest here. If you look at history like this, you will find it very reasonable that murder, humiliation, and devastation were not by-products of colonizers trying to get richer: they were the main objects.

Just as we cannot claim that what Israel and its Western backers are doing in Gaza is purely for profit - what profit do most Zionists and white, ‘Judeo-Christian‘ supremacists get from this? - we need to look at the history of colonialism differently. We need to allow ourselves to take into account the possibility that the vision that guides colonizer powers is not a fantastical bottom line, but the search for new people and communities that it is ok to kill and destroy. That is the rush. That is the trip.

With this perspective in mind, when you look at what white European colonizers have been doing to an inconceivable number of native and Indigenous communities, it just makes a lot more (fittingly blood-chilling and nightmarish ) sense. They are addicted to the suffering and death of other, native people. Destruction is their ultimate purpose in life (look at what Zionism has been doing to Palestinians, and you’ll need very little further evidence).

Colonialism is not about profit. It is about the legitimate mass murder, destruction, and humiliation of other people. It has no higher purpose or motivation. Sadism is the point.

-

When Western institutions blur our minds with nonsensical theories and explanations for things, including colonialism, they are not only colonizing our consciousness; they are deriving sadistic pleasure from it.