STOP THE GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE
STOP TO ALL WARS AND GENOCIDES
Coloniality is the ghost that organises the racial capitalist cisheterosexualist ableism patriarchal system. Feminisms brought the reflection that it was necessary to put on the lilac glasses in order to begin to see the world in a different way than the established one, and to construct other realities. Decoloniality promotes the urgent need for us to become aware of how the violent machinery of coloniality operates in order to dismantle it. Thus, taking the metaphor of feminisms, it is urgent that we put on the decolonial glasses to become aware and take action and make the ghost disappear by bringing it to the foreground so we can deal with it with awareness.
It is urgent because the globe is boiling. Yes, it is boiling and getting hotter and hotter. The embers were already ignited many centuries ago in Europe when orthodox Christianity won against other Christian and spiritual branches, and broke away from the earth-aligned worldview. With this victory, polarisation was inherently created: between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Those people who did not respect orthodoxy, who did not respect the straight path, and thus the right doxa, became the enemies, heathens, heretics, witches, wicked, sinners, sodomites, false Christians, etc. Thus drawing an “us” and an “other,” which the further away from the centre, the more other, the more enemy, and the more punished or exterminated. This otherness would be perfected with the devices of power of the European ego conquistus, of the “I conquer, therefore I am” that Enrique Dussel taught us, which would lead to a hegemonic us, and different others, more enemy, more inferior, the further away from the hegemonic centre. An ego conquistus also towards the earth that has justified its ecocide.
Christianity put the ego conquistus strategy to the test with the expulsion, in different waves, of Jews, Muslims, Mudejars, converts and gypsies from the Iberian Peninsula. These Jews, Muslims, Mudejars and converts were people who lived in the Peninsula, and I take the liberty to use the word indigenous, to say that they were indigenous to the territory, indigenous people expelled by Christianity, becoming in the diaspora, in today’s terms, refugees and migrants in the host countries. This ego conquistus strategy would also happen with the occupation and genocide of the indigenous people of the “Canary Islands”.
It is this concentration, expulsion, and death of certain types of indigenous people, read as others, that feeds the founding myth of coloniality and future nation states. European Christianity, in its eagerness to create a religious and blood dogma, does not conceive of the possibility of there being among its ranks, in its communities, pluriverse people who can coexist. It is unthinkable and unheard of. The Christian theological mentality of the straight path will eventually establish itself as a social, mental, and economic class structure and control.
The process that began in that foundational myth of coloniality, and that would cycle and escalate the conflict with its different episodes of conquests and expulsions, I see as a group process. Process Work understands a group process as a space in which the different parts of the process can be consciously explored and facilitated. By saying this, I am saying that the colonial process in which we are immersed is a group process, without consciousness.
The group process in which we are immersed, has been cycling through different episodes of conquests and expulsions. Here I will name just a few, leaving out the Law on Foreigners or the Schengen area, which are also part of this process: the genocide and epistemicide of Abya Yala with the great leap across the Atlantic in search of the Indies by Columbus, who mistakenly encountered Abya Yala; coloniality in Asia, in Africa and the slave trade. We see how it continued to cycle with the creation of fictitious states in colonised territories, and would continue to cycle, among other conflicts and genocides, with the Second World War.
I stop with the Second World War to point out that Nazism and fascism are nothing more than the boomerang effect of white supremacism, as Aimé Cesaire tells us in his Discourse on Colonialism. The process continued to cycle after the genocide perpetuated by the Nazis on Jews, gypsies, “disabled” people, sexual dissidents, (etc) with the granting by the UN of a territory, which replicated the colonial policies of the nation-state: I am referring to the state of Israel on Palestinian land. That territory granted by the UN was obviously not within Europe, of course not, just as it was not thought that perhaps the Jewish people did not need that “other” territory, if white Europe did the job it was supposed to do: dismantle the racist colonial foundational myth. It did not, and in part, racism and guilt itself, created another camouflaged expulsion of the Jewish people from Europe: the state of Israel.
It is a group process in which we keep cycling, and in which we are in constant altered states whether that of freezing, of denial, of rendering invisible, of guilt: a mirror of the white Christian European: process of what Robin DiAngelo names using a state-oriented term “fragility” and a trauma, which as we have began many centuries ago. We continue to cycle because Europe does not want to assume its responsibility. Instead of stopping and becoming aware, Europe continues to stoke the fire, when what it ought to be doing is to take responsibility and dismantle coloniality.
I want to stop cycling, I want to take responsibility:
– I Sol, bastard of this misnamed Western civilisation, as a multiracial migrant person, living in Barcelona – in a Barcelona that eliminated its Jewish quarter in 1424 because it was considered that there were no more Jews after the assault of 1391 – living in Islamic Madinat Barxiluna until its expulsion, living in the territory of the Catholic Kings and their genocidal policies, living in the territory of the Empire, I can pick up my white part and say:
We have created a worldview based on the hegemonic power of whiteness in which we are allowed to define, hierarchise, inferiorise, separate, hate, concentrate, expel, kill, define which lives are worthwhile, and which are not. We have created fictitious countries or nation states, we have stolen from the land for the comfort of a few, we continue to steal from the land and other territories, generating wars for the benefit of the few. We have created a worldview in which we can steal from nature without asking permission, we can torture and kill the earth because that is how we feel; we feel legitimate to do so for the comfort of a few.
The earth boils because once we ignited the embers, we have not taken care to extinguish them. On the contrary, we have stoked them and we continue to stoke them even more: sending arms to Israel and other conflicts, remaining neutral, being afraid, being guilty, freezing, looking the other way, not saying Enough.
Enough to the violence of coloniality, enough to its mentality, enough to white supremacism, enough.
Stop the Genocide in Palestine. Stop all genocides!
Sol Abejón Olivera,
Decolonial historian, graduate in Process Work and artist. Author of:
Pecadoras. Genealogía de la cultura del castigo y las prisiones de mujeres.