This visual intervention breaks the delusion of today’s narrative. Thank you Raoul Peck for this. Howard Zinn will be gleaming and applaud your piece de resistance. I have been waiting for this documentary my whole life. As an African and an American immigrant, this is the truth that lies in the underbelly of “today”, which has been covered up by the veneer of ” Western-European distortion” soaked in intentional revision masquerading as “true history”. I watched the documentary with pain and joy as this “truth” to be out. The delusion filled with hubris, apathy and ignorance I have seen in European/White Americans is very disconcerting. Simply, they do not know “history”. The vapid idea that Europeans “discover lands outside of Europe” aims to wash away the true native inhabitants. History should only start from a European view, everything else is “insignificant or a blank slate” is their propaganda. This has warped White/European minds into a thick bubble of delusion of “white superiority”. As Raoul pointed out, white colonizers ludicrously substituted military superiority for “biological, religious and civilizational superiority”. Some of them created an amoral, nuanced and vacuous path by suggesting those past actions were “justified” and needed for human progress a.k.a Social Darwinism through romanticizing the past. But who’s progress? Not Africans, enslaved Africans nor Native Americans. Acts of savagery and dehumanization inflicted on Native inhabitants is justified because they are supposedly inferior. But who is the true savage in this picture? They became what they did, but such self-reflection cannot be reached. They carried the “Bible, gun and an iconographic flag” from the Christian Crusades, Africa, Native America till today’s imperialism. My great great great great great great grand aunt was KIDNAPPED from my mother’s village by British slave traders and British colonial soldiers but her story lives on. Till today, we (Africans, Jews, Palestinians, Native Americans and Aborigines) are still dealing with the consequences of apartheid, colonization, slavery and genocide. Also fact that the whites, political conservatives to the far-right still delves into such regressive and social Darwinist perspectives. We don’t want any violent revenge. We want “singular truth, reparations (when needed), economic restructuring, deconstruction of racial hierarchy, dignity, self-autonomy, national sovereignty and reckoning” to prevent another such vicious undertaking. “Today are the consequences of yesterday” but Europeans never attributed such idiom to slavery, genocide, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, apartheid, imperialism and colonization except for their Euro-centric-based knowledge and industrialization (which is always independent of time from their apathetic bubble).
Africa had a civilization, history, culture, academia and politics prior to colonization but Europeans vilified such knowledge and history as “savage, inferior or inconsequential”. Theocracies, monarchies, federalism, technologies, communal banking, democracies, republicanism and confederacies existed prior to colonialism in Africa. Africa’s current state of affairs and underdevelopment is tied to colonialism, imperialism, anti-communism hysteria, economic exploitation, IMF austerity measures, and coup initiated, financed and/or aided by westerners in the name of “Western interests “.This means “forced” cheap raw materials exports protected by IMF, World Bank and WTO and importation of finished goods from western nations. Domestic industrialization in Africa will always be thwarted. True history always matters. As we say in Igbo land, “A fly that has no counselor follows the corpse to the grave”. True history has to be told and reflected upon, or else, death knocks at the door for all humanity.
💡Cosmic Frame>>>∞ and beyond💡 