We never learnt from the past
Life was not better back then. Western nostalgia is a colonial and patriarchal sentimentality wrapped in ethnonationalist desires.
The good old days our society loves to reminisce about, were not good. They were actually bad for a good chunk of the population worldwide. When only bourgeois white men reaped the benefits of patriarchy, colonialism and LGBTIQ-phobia, it is time to question if old times were truly great or if today’s society just dislikes being held accountable.
It has always struck me as odd that people get so easily trapped into that “good old days” crap politicians love to wank over. Don’t people find it weird that the West keeps praising itself on its progressiveness yet can’t stop whining about wanting to roll us all backwards?
Better for whom ?
Reminiscing about the past as if life was truly heaven back in the days is a very white supremacist behaviour. Every time, I check on the previous decades, I actually am glad struggles were fought back then, because truth be told, unless you were a white christian man from a bourgeois class, life was pretty miserable for most of the people. World War I & II spearheaded two genocides on two groups of people who were not seen as white enough and/or Christians. Up until the 1970s, women were still under legal supervision of their fathers, brothers or husbands. Half of the world was still under strong colonial rule and barely seen as humans. LGBTIQ+ people were pathologised for simply existing, and the working class living conditions have only worsened (since the Industrial Revolution, at that!).
Not many people had a jolly life back in the day. If anything, life got slightly better as the years went by. So when politicians entice people with promises of bringing back the good old days, they are openly promising to hopefully roll back acquired human rights. They are promising to make bigotry acceptable again.
Facing the reality
Making bigotry trendy again, was truly something I had hoped to never deal with. As a child of immigrants who grew up in the West, I was told my entire life that the West is better because they are so ahead of everyone… civilisation is so advanced that -isms and -phobias are concepts of the past. After all, Westerners are supposedly the ones who brought the light into the darkness of the world (I wish I was kidding, but colonisation to this day is still described as bringing the light and civilisation/democracy to the global majority1). Having that in mind, I was really well brainwashed into believing that, indeed, the West is ahead of its time. They welcome refugees so openly, they build wells, and schools to the impoverished global majority countries, of course, racism is not a thing any more, if it was, they wouldn’t be this generous, RIGHT?
Bless me! My naivety was truly so innocent. I later found out that the West generosity was actually under false pretences and quite sinister motives. The West is still maintaining a colonial domination throughout the world and makes sure that the regions they fucked up, stay fucked up. So not only they can spoon-feed us white saviourism, but they can easily justify their presence and the pillaging of resources. The latter is the cause of so many people from the global majority to flee their birth countries and head West. After all, you are less likely to be killed by Western-made weapons in a Western country. When materialism is a lucrative asset, human lives are relayed in the back burner, so governments can collaborate with corporations and discuss multi-billion dollar deals for those collaborations to go about smoothly. Western entities will make sure to put in place puppet governments in countries of interests so they can bribe the elected officials, who will happily sell away what could have given stability and a hopeful future for their own citizens. You can ask the US, about puppet governments, they love that a tad too much! But in outline, a puppet government is the neocolonial way to keep a grip on (former-)colonised countries. No obvious colonial boots on the ground, only behind the scenes, pulling the strings, so policies go their way.
When you pay close attention, you realise that the West has never learnt from its past and never been willing to. From taking hundreds of years to admit to atrocities caused during the slave trade and colonialism, and even being hollow when doing so to shyly confessing decades later of murders of leaders wanting to gain full sovereignty for their country and citizens after independence, through the turning Nazi scientists into liberals to look up to, yes, this is Operation Paper-clip for you. As well as making Hitler’s Operations Chief of the High Command of the German Army, Adolf Heusinger, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, the West has made it clear, it does not care about bettering itself, if it means maintaining its power. Forget not, the reticence to accept that racism is still an issue to this day. Western countries unanimously voted down or abstained a United Nation (UN) draft resolution to claim colonialism, slavery and Nazism as “grave violations of international law”. This happened in 2022 and with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, it starts to make sense. After all, their legacy is genocide and theft. That is why they are so adamant to move backwards to a time in history where condemning their atrocities was not even a thought, as it was the norm.
Western countries hate that in today’s society, their barbarity is coming to bite them back fiercely! They spent centuries crafting an image of a civilised world, projecting onto the people they were brutalising their own barbarity. Seeing the façade crumbling down is a horrible wake-up call that empires don’t last forever. That someday karma may chase them and unveiled what this empire has always been: a bloodthirsty, savage empire that gets a kick at perpetuating the world’s misery because it is the only way it can survive. So they distract us by using their good old divide and rule. Because the people divided will always be defeated. They indoctrinate people to believe that western downfall is the result of a bunch of black and brown people, flocking to the countries to colonise them and tear them down to their barbarity. They want to replace the white race, they are a danger to western values, they say. So to save the civilised West, it is imperative to roll back all the rights already acquired and regress. Don’t you guys hear how dumb this sounds?
Examine the past to move forward
No matter how insane the call to jump decades backwards is, what this phenomenon shows is how deeply scared the West is to a potential blow back from the very people they have continuously dehumanised. Nobody wants to endure colonial violence. Certainly not the West. So it projects. The global majority wants to replace the white race? The West has made its missions for centuries to get rid of people of colour. The global majority is a danger to western values? The West has been a danger for the sovereignty of the global majority countries. The West is not a civilised entity, it never has been. You don’t get to call yourself civilised when all you know is bloody violence. Every accusation has been a confession on the West’s part. And it has been more obvious these past 9 months, with the West backing of yet another genocide. The difference is that now, many westerners are being disillusioned with the reality that the past has never been learnt, only slightly tweaked so the system of exploitation and exponential growth remains.
As I mentioned in my piece “Self-care is not helping us”, poverty and unbearable living conditions are a political choice that only benefits the oppressors. The same goes for refusing to learn from the past. It is a political choice for the only sake of the West to maintain its colonial power. We have never been in a postcolonial society. We are under a neocolonial order. A neocolonialism that is affecting us domestically too. Late-stage capitalism does not get to thrive without hurting everyone globally. Our politicians are pitting us against each other, so we don’t realise that they are the real enemies. Life was not better back then, it has bettered since then, and it still needs to get better. The West wants to walk backwards as a last resort to keep the empire standing.
The thing is: the empire has to fall. The empire will fall, we have no choice but to move forward. The more repressive and fascistic it gets, the more it sends the message that we are advancing in the right direction. We have each other. The situation will worsen before it ameliorates. But now more than ever, we need to push forward, we are smarter than this, we know our history, we know it was faulty and unacceptable. Let us not regress.
For the sake of humanity, let’s be sincerely progressive, let’s build good modern days!
Global majority is a term I used instead of developed country or Third World, two nomenclature defined by the West to justify its domination. Non-western countries represent the majority of the world, and they have been forcefully underdeveloped by the West for its own gain.
Yes, yes! From the language that’s being used by both right leaning and liberal politicians, to public figures getting on podiums to loudly and proudly declare to women that they only have value as wives and mothers, it is so clear that the west is desperately trying to cling on to regressive ideologies to maintain dominance. I’m thinking about that social dilemma documentary that confirmed all our fears that tech companies depended on the polarization of users as a business model and can’t help but to see their role in how an alarming amount of people in the west have embraced regressive politics
What a wonderful read. The empire will fall, and we get to decide what kind of future we want!