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Kolonialismus [11.10.2012]

"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." (Samuel Huntington, 1996)

Colonised and coloniser, empire's poison infects us all

Over the gates of Auschwitz were the words "Work Makes You Free". Over the gates of the Solovetsky camp in Lenin's gulag: "Through Labour – Freedom!". Over the gates of the Ngenya detention camp, run by the British in Kenya: "Labour and Freedom". Dehumanisation appears to follow an almost inexorable course.
Last week three elderly Kenyans established the right to sue the British government for the torture that they suffered – castration, beating and rape – in the Kikuyu detention camps it ran in the 1950s.

The government's secret archive, revealed this April, shows that the attorney general, the colonial governor and the colonial secretary knew what was happening. The governor ensured that the perpetrators had legal immunity: including the British officers reported to him for roasting prisoners to death. In public the colonial secretary lied and kept lying.

Little distinguishes the British imperial project from any other. In all cases the purpose of empire was loot, land and labour. When people resisted (as some of the Kikuyu did during the Mau Mau rebellion), the response everywhere was the same: extreme and indiscriminate brutality, hidden from public view by distance and official lies. …

Colonised and coloniser, empire's poison infects us all (M. Monbiot, guardian)

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Ergänzende Links:
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native (P. Wolfe)
'Ethnocracy': The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine (O. Yftachel)