“Did you invest in Israel, not just West Bank “settlements”, and US, UK, Germany, Italy, and European arms industry and banks?,” future historians might ask us who will have lived through these troubling times, when all had gone quiet on the Jewish Supremacy front.
Dear TRANSCEND Members, Supporters and Friends,
TMS today brings you a collection of news updates and researched items, touching on both what Angela Davis calls “the moral litmus test of our time” - the continuing genocidal land-grab in Palestine at large, specifically the Take-aways by the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy - and other items of historical and contemporary significance, for instance, the major contributing historical force of slave trade and slavery in the rise of what is referred to as “the West” or “Western Civilization”.
The ancient Greek who would not identify themselves as “Westerners”, much less “Europeans” or “Christians”, did not see themselves “a civilisation”. As many a scholars of antiquity have pointed out words like “civilisation” “Europe” or “the West” are relatively new coinages whose inventions parallel with the emergence of definitionally mass-murderous (that is, variously genocidal) White Christian Supremacist colonialism and the subsequent phenomenon of Western European industrialisation. Colonialism is a fancy academic term for much simpler acts: the old Europe’s organised crimes. The crimes were aimed ultimately at large scale theft, land grab, loot, cheap or, preferably free labour, glazed with the justificatory, inter-connected languages of the Gospel, Race (skin really), Rationality, Culture, Law and Technology (primitive vs scientific).
Perpetrating societies - not just slave-trading rogue but royal regimes in Lisbon, London, Madrid, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, etc. - typically view the Triangular Slave Trade and Slavery as a thing of the distant past, some retrospectively horrific crimes perpetrated by certain bad and greedy Europeans and their nations centuries before.
“We weren’t even born then!”
A dark past, long atoned by Europe (and the West) by spreading the Light of the Enlightenment, the Gospel which the Enlightenment sought to explain rationally (until it couldn’t!), “helping” billions of poor Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans with “development aid”, “poverty alleviation”, “humanitarian assistance”, and you get the drift.
Anyone who raises the foundational significance of such crimes in the emergence of powerful and wealthy Western nations will likely meet a blank stare, as if you were a bitter soul, weighed down by the weight of history & incapable of moving on to the finer worthier topics of humanitarian internationalism (of a paternalistic and charitable kind) under different rubrics of Conservativism, Liberalism and neo-Liberalism.
In very concrete way, one can state, empirically, that the West or Western Civilization is an excruciatingly long phenomenon. It has resulted from the royally blessed policies of slave trade and slavery that began with the accidental “discovery” of the New World in the late 15th century & continues on as 21st century organised crimes worldwide.
Israel’s pursuit of its ever-expansive land grab, population destruction, trade deals, and (attempted) militaristic subjugation of its neighbours has all the hallmarks of the Western Civilization as we know it.
Recently, during his debate with the conservative (and Euro-Supremacist) British talk show host Piers Morgan, the renowned New Historian of Israel, Professor Emeritus Avi Shlaim at St Antony’s College, Oxford, summarised the root cause of the conflict in Palestine thus: “Piers, for your listeners, Britain stole Palestine (of 90% Arab Palestinians) and gave it to Zionists (settler colonising type of Jews).”
And he proceeded to make the case that “today’s genocide in Palestine resulted from the Balfour Declaration of 1917.”
Indeed. News cycles come and go. But history continues to haunt us all. News has intellectual value, only when it is “consumed” with a historical perspective.
How did we get here?
Zarni
TMS Editorial Team
Have fun searching who’s who of the 13,000 British gentlemen (and ladies) here.
What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?
A critique that anticipated the political currents of contemporary America.
Politics Race Capitalism Justice Racial Capitalism
Capitalism and Slavery revisited: the legacy of Eric Williams
Read Ann Garrison’s report from Africa here.
Read the above essay here.
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