By David LaRue
More than stealing the land, colonization was about hijacking the mind. They didn’t just conquer people, they rewired them. That was and is the real psychological warfare - Convincing the oppressed that their suffering was order, that obedience was holy and freedom was chaos.
They used everything - religion, education and even language to program people, in the process, reprogramming their sense of self. They told colonized nations their Gods were devils, their languages were primitive and their traditions were backward.
Once you believe that, they don’t have to chain you. You’ll just police yourself. They created the civilized versus savage binary, so deep in the global psyche to the extent that even after independence, people still chase Western approval. That is the ‘genius’ of colonial psychology, as it does not end when the flag comes down, but when the mirror changes.
Religion was (still is) the most effective form of control. They did not introduce Christianity, they repackaged it.
They replaced the liberating parts with obedience, calling submission divine order. They turned the same book that said ‘let my people go’ into a handbook for staying in line. They further turned that same book that said “the violent taketh the Kingdom of God by force” into a pacifist handbook for promoting meekness.
They said ‘blessed are the meek’ all while enslaving the meek and inheriting the earth to boot. They said ‘obey your masters’ all while being the masters.
That is psychological warfare dressed up as morality, not faith. And then came the schools where they taught colonized people that all human history started with Europe and that everything was and is Europe.
They erased our history and rewrote resistance as rebellion, while also calling genocide progress. They did not have to burn every village, they just had to teach the children to see themselves as less.
And when those children then grew up and started leading, their already colonized mind became an organic impediment to their vision. You don’t need armies to keep control when you’ve already conquered identity.
And now comes globalization laced with the template of free market capitalism. But it is all the same game, just different packaging.
Debt traps, development loans, sanctions and the establishment media. They don’t have to occupy you anymore; just convince you that you’re free while they hold all the receipts. Frantz Fanon warned us about this - not because he was violent, but because he understood the violence of being told that your only value is in your proximity to the values of the oppressor.
Colonialism did not disappear, it just rebranded. They don’t need whips when they have WiFi, they don’t need chains when they control what you see, hear, learn and dream of becoming.
That is the war nobody sees, the one that makes oppression look like order; because once the mind believes the ‘master’ is moral, the body doesn’t even try to run.
Therein lies the real battle.
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