Venezuela, Greenland, Anywhereland, You take your pick!
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We had thought colonial grabbing of land was a way of the past. It has been discounted and disparaged and condemned many times in the past 100 years. Museums all over the Western world now feel compelled to return artifacts of cultural heritage to the peoples they have been plundered from. In the past 20 years or more there has been a reckoning of the dark colonial past of the United States, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, and Spain.
When I was a boy in Germany, grocery stores were called “Kolonial-warenhandlung,” or ‘trading post of colonial goods.’ The concept went back to the time when single bodega-kind stores started to offer the amazing new variety of food from overseas colonies: sugar, coffee, tea, spices, rice and tobacco. It all represented the spoils of Germany’s brutal land grab in Africa at the end of the 19th century: Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Namibia, Cameroon and parts of Nigeria, Chad, CAR, and Togo, Ghana.
As I said, we had always thought, during our lifetime, that colonial grabbing of land was a way of the past. Not so. The elevation of a single, thoroughly amoral criminal to power has opened a return to chauvinist postures, to Bismarck’s Realpolitics. The US government, now represented mainly by the orange man and former Fox News staff appointed by him, boldly speaks ‘I want this, I want that,’ in the manner of a four-year old, who has not yet conceived of the need to harmonize the needs of all.
Lately that orange man speaks about intending to ignore all international law, all contracts, covenants, agreements and compacts as he feels bound in his actions by his morals alone – which, as we all know, do not exist.
Heaven help us all!
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