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LoWa's avatar

Urgh, “great replacement” nonsense in so called “freedom” circles! Sometimes I think there is no hope for this kind of thinking except perhaps comedy, my fav skit being this one called Reverse Racism by Amer Rahman in the aptly titled “Fear of a Brown Planet” channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw_mRaIHb-M

Mishelle's avatar

Firstly, thanks for posting quotes repeatedly from Charles Mann's works, I've finally ordered 1491 after meaning to for a couple years now!

I studied French colonialism in West Africa at uni in the 90s and I wrote my Master's thesis specifically about Senegal. The intellectuals I read were openly critical, especially around education and the whitewashing of their history. "Nos ancestres, les Gaulois." was the opening sentence in every child's history textbook.

It works the same all over, except at that time I had no idea the same thing had happened to this country/continent centuries earlier, even though I studied history. We aren't meant to equate 'us' with the colonized, but rather the colonizer, which was easiest to achieve with the cowboys and indians Hollywood narrative. The barbaric natives, the unwashed, the uncivilized, well they needed 'us' they mostly welcomed us, except for those few outlying violent tribes. Total nonsense I now understand, but it only takes a couple of generations before the replaced history is all that anyone knows, because they've all been forced to learn and repeat it. We have been on record as some kind of colonized success story because already by the 1700s we were successfully dominated by the same militerized global force still looting and pillaging the resources of the world, now in 'our' name, having convinced the masses 'they' are us when in fact most likely we were the ones assimilated, not (just) the so-called savage tribes, ALL of us who weren't killed off, put into institutions or enslaved.

The whole color thing is definitely a red herring, because 'melting pot' was the norm always, not just once they started importing the swarthy types into the relatively recent whitewashing strategy that predated it. The 'Invisible hand' has been moving populations around, through wars, forced migrations, coercive control, at their whim for as long as they've been organized into militaries. Once I realized the actual military industrial complex has been running for at least 500 years, and that we are indeed an enslaved people, the world started making a lot more sense!

Thanks for sharing your convo and continuing in your due diligence, lordy how we need it! First the slaves must free their minds!

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