How Settler Colonialism Results in an Underdeveloped Sense of Reality (and ability to respond to it)

Chickens come to roost for the practitioners of imperialist fantastical realism

“Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.”

Soren Kierkegaard

In 2020 in what would be the first year of the still ongoing pandemic I posed a question as the countries most materially able to respond to the COVID-19 crisis elected to cloak themselves in denial and make globally coordinated efforts to combat this shared crisis impossible - sacrificing public health and the care for the most vulnerable for the sake of the economy and in doing so doomed both. Then, as now, I felt it an ominous foreshadowing of coordinated climate efforts and other global crises that required coordinated international cooperation rather than naked self interest.

Do Settlers have underdeveloped senses of reality?

As we watch the climate catastrophe become undeniable and these nations turn inward I wonder what makes a group of people act so barbarically that they are willing to destroy their only homes rather than live more like the people they found living on the lands they stubbornly occupy and exploit. The economy is such a vague construct and the world order as we know it is derived from the legacies of slavery an settler colonialism. I would be embarrassed to know my culture was being a virus 🦠 to the planet and violently robbing others of their land and resources.

It strikes me as madness to destroy a planet to accumulate paper wealth and numbers on spreadsheets and leave the kids you’ve supposedly done it for a scorched earth. I’ve long stopped expecting the west to act with humanity towards the global south but its entertaining to see the leaders act as if they’re in control when it’s obvious to anyone looking that the emperors aren’t wearing any clothes.

It seems like the tendency to want to tame land and people makes one have a belief that one can act without consequence even at scale. It’s nice to watch the West eat some humble pie sometimes, even if it means we’re all hurt by it. That has always been the externality to their whims and ambition, it’s the consequences to themselves that are new and those are a long time coming.

Five years later, Covid is still spreads unbridled throughout populations and across borders, mutating and disabling those afflicted without state intervention or acknowledgement. Societies still struggle economically from unbridled amongst the population and the economy has not been spared for all the indifference amounting to social murder.

It is clear that the same hubris that fuels the ability to forge societies on the graves of the displaced and later deny it, has left these societies uniquely immune to being grounded in reality. Acknowledgement of reality that contradicts settler colonial narratives could result in ostracism and exile. Denial has become muscle memory, a tool to ignore the experiences of others whose suffering predicated the existence of these imagined societies. The ability to deny history, humanity of others, pain and injustice has rendered these societies completely in equipped to face hard truths or mount credible responses where the legitimacy of their societies is called into question.

The progress of the developing world in arresting the pandemic in its early days was quickly eclipsed by the systemic apathy of the developed world with which they were economically tied. These countries watched the economic sacrifices willingly made to protect their vulnerable leave them ever more dependent on flows of people, capital and goods from rich countries, whose citizens travelled uncaringly to their shores, unwilling to follow local health regulations and resisting even the slightest attempts at vector control.

The solutions became the terms of debate and the rational world watched as masks, vaccines and hygiene were either commodified for the generation of maximum profit to the sane countries that wanted them or vociferously rejected by extremists in richer countries, unused to restrictions on their freedom to maim and disable others for the maintenance of their normal as defined by the ability to consume without constraint.

Five years ago, even as denial of the pandemic or denial of its implications reached Orwellian levels, never could I have fathomed that my thesis would be so thoroughly confirmed by the reaction to the October 7th uprising and the subsequent decimation of the Gaza strip.

Like the elderly and infirm during the pandemic, Palestinians were denied their humanity and some lives were clearly delineated as sacred while the world watched in horror at the performative and gratuitous violence exacted upon the civilian Palestinian population that conveyed the warning to other colonized people that their lives were expendable and cheap. Nuance and empathy were casualties of the conflict with Western and Israeli intellectuals unwilling to ascribe humanity to their adversaries or give acknowledgement to the legitimacy of their struggle or the sustained provocation over decades by the Israeli occupation.

The Global South looked on in horror to realize that even the lessons of World War II, supposedly the only conflict informing Western notions of injustice and human rights, had been twisted to perpetuate colonial expansion and brutality. Human rights and multilateral organizations were warped into tools to emphasize the inequality of humanity between ethnicities and neutered to the point of inertia and distorted to the level of farce.

Just as the developing world was set to depend on the shared values enshrined within the Geneva Convention and embodied by multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, the Western Countries in consensus signaled that these constructions were dispensable insofar as they impeded colonial plunder and primitive accumulation as brutal as during the Columbian Exchange 500 years before. Palestinians were made an international example, their rebellion put down as brutally and sadistically as the 1950s British in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion, their consciences left unpricked by their role as liberators against the Nazi Regime a few short years before.

This tenuous relationship with reality in the face of livestreamed evidence may have been par for the course under far right rule, but was jarring emanating from the supposed adults in the room, the embodiments of liberal democracy.

Now faced with the glaring truth that their supposedly civilized societies were funding and giving rhetorical cover for a genocide committed brazenly and opening by a Colonial outpost so emboldened it felt no need to disguise its barbarism.

The media and message makers could not properly engage with the moral injury of state sanctioned ethnic cleansing it denied nor understand the growing disillusion of liberalism to address material questions it did not acknowledge and was once again shocked to find that the newly emboldened and the nakedly fascist Trump was elected, now that the liberal order was unmasked as a pacifying sham.

Now the settler colonial belief in the ability to deny reality is plain to see as its chief mascots in Israel, America and Europe regularly peddle lies and censor truth, consistently denying problems whose solutions would contradict their own interests which never intersect with those of the most vulnerable in their populaces or the planet.

Reality has asserted itself, as always, and history will make its own judgements on the unifying values of the Western Civilizational project and its real legacy on this planet. As the pirates of late-stage fossil capitalism loot their own states just as the ecological crisis reaches maturity, many are finally having to face the stark reality of their societies for the first time while the means to arrest the wholesale unravelling of their societies is stripped from them. Bird flu ravages livestock and biodiversity globally unabated by castrated regulatory apparatuses. Even the Montreal Protocol has been eroded, the ozone layer depleted by private space enterprise.

Mass protest that never emerged when the plunder was exacted on those in the planetary sacrifice zones - those Fanon referred to as the Earth’s wretched - has now been made impossible by the militarization used to subjugate them. It is a cruel wake up call for those who for so long were convinced by their own mythos and hubris that they were the sole shapers of reality that they forgot to stay rooted to it.