After watching The Birth of Israel last night, some dots have connected about the reasons behind violent cultural conflicts and wars that never end. There seems to be a common denominator...colonization, or the illegal confiscation of someone elses territory. Only its legal, because the people who are in power create treaties and then pretend that they are legal contracts, only the contracts are one-sided and never fair for both sides. When I was studying the Maya and all the wars they fought toward the end of the Classic Period, it was a different problem. And they often used the Maya Ballgame to settle disputes too...something we should think about. For the most part, their growing communities and expansion eventually created wars between cities over boundaries and territories that eventually over-lapped. I think this kind of territorial spread conflict is normal, even animals go through this. But forced occupation and colonization of another land is a whole different story. You can go back in time and see all of the empires that used brute force to push uncooperative people off their land and tax the rest as slaves of the empire. The Mongolian Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire. I know there are more, but these four make the point clearly enough. These groups didnt start conflicts because the boundaries between cultures became too crowded, no...that is not how the spread of a greedy empire works. These groups confiscate land at gun-point, they take over any local government and place their own people in charge, they take control of everything once they arrive and stick a flag in the ground, claiming it as their own. Flags have lost their appeal to me because of their historical symbolic (and manipulative) use in this type of claim to ownership. Flags are just a piece of fabric, they should not have the mind-grip over people that they do. I am sure that the Native Americans were slightly amused when Christopher Columbus stuck his flag pole in the sand and proclaimed the new territory for the Queen. Little did they know that the Spaniards worshipped their flag and were willing to die for it, and it meant something to them the the natives did not understand. I understand that in times past, the population was smaller and the idea of colonization might have sounded like a great idea, especially to those who wanted to get out of Europe and claim their free piece of land. But where was the sense of compassion for those who already lived in these territories? It doesnt seem to exist, not in those who have something to gain from territorial confiscation. People who move into the new area that their government has secured, using war and brute force, dont want to think about those things...so they turn a blind eye and look the other way. Someone has to make colonization illegal, forever. We cannot continue to go around taking things that dont belong to us. And we have to stop allowing colonization to be the mechanism that empires use to spread their poison. We need to stop signing our kids up for the military when it is being used for occupation and colonization, and truly go back to being defensive instead of offensive. Colonization is never for the people, it is a way for the elite to create more slaves...and the people who go there to live become just as much of a slave as the unfortunate souls who already called the new colony home. The problem? We dont have a court system that has not been tainted with colony money. We dont have a system of fairness that takes into consideration those who already live in an area that has been targeted for colonization. We dont get chills up our spine when we think about colonization. We have never been the ones colonized, we were the benefactors, not the victims. Karma is going to be a real problem if we dont stop doing this to villagers and communities that have no armies, no defense, no say-so in the way things turn out.
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 13:05:27 +0000
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