Friday, September 24, 2010

Become self-colonizing


Ward Churchill, a fierce opponent to European colonization of the Americas, contends that, for Europe to colonize the Americas, it had to colonize and de-tribalize Europe:

…In order for Europe to do what it has done to us—in fact, for Europe to become “Europe” at all—it first had to do the same thing to all of you. In other words, to become a colonizing culture, Europe had to first colonize itself. To the extent that this is true, I find it fair to say that if our struggle must be explicitly anticolonial…yours must be even more so. You have, after all, been colonized for far longer than we, and therefore much more completely. In fact, your colonization has by now been consolidated to such an extent that….you no longer even see yourselves as having been colonized. The result is that you’ve become self-colonizing, conditioned to be so self-identified with your own oppression that you’ve lost your ability to see it for what it is, much less to resist it in any coherent way.

A link t hi website http://www.wardchurchill.net/