It is Christmas today for most places in the world. But it's also the end of year and a day mandated as a holiday in most countries with a significant Christian population. For those indigenous souls still struggling to breath under the yoke of domination by unjustice vampire cultures whose ultimate goal is the creation of a global empire culture at the expense of the multitude of diverses . Nothing can be more unsustainable than that.
Just as the growing of monoculture groups is deleterious to food sustainability, monoculture can potentially be even worse. Empiricism is a cultural misadventure with the ability of accelerating global crisis quicker than anything else I know. I am speaking here in the context of man's capacity to use technology to bring about mass extinction of whole world.
This is not the easiest story to share but it's the honest dose that brings about justice. After all, each cultural survival is the primary result of that culture. One culture can't and shouldn't sacrife itself solely for the sake of another culture. To ask of that is to engage in robbery with violence.
Here is the back story.
Europe was engaged in a similar battle over the sectarian struggle for domination by the many religious sect as far back as the founding of Christianity. That struggle has been everything else but peaceful. The best example to use an an illustration is a gnostic group that started in Languedoc,France known as the Cathars between 12th to 14th century. I obviously chose the group because amongst other interesting things, the adherents were vegetarians and created their own rules and culture. Secondly, the group's ideology had been influenced by Armenians. As fate would have it, the massacres of the Armenians in modern day Turkey 700 years later would give us the word genocide. The word was first coined in early 1920s to describe the mass killing of Armenians for political reasons.
The cathars were constructed to be a threat to the domination of the Catholic church. Like many other sects that existed then and before, there was bound to be a struggle for power. In the end, a final solution was hatched by pope. He ordered the massacre of all the people living in areas that were predominately Cathars. But things were not that easy.
There was a slight problem when those sent to carry out the orders paused for enquire how they would distinguish the Cathars from the Catholics living in those areas, considering that the Cathars were a very tolerant group. The pope was reported to have infamously ordered the killing of people and let God choose his own from the dead. What more can show the kind of cultural hubris and arrogance of an organization deemed to be the source and center of the sacred by billions?
Around the same time the Carthars were being massacred the Arabs had already estabished the enslavement of Africans as a trade but largely restricted to the costal regions of Africa. By the 13th and 14th centuries, Christians made inroads into the interior in search of wealth but also winning souls for their deity. Unlike Europe, the debate and consequent struggle did not last for long. At least not in any scale that necessitated the kind of massacre that marked the many sects that tried to live outside the controling influence of the pope. However the longterm acquiescence of my indigenous communities have very similar outcomes to those of the old gnostic sects.
African cultures have become subservient to the cultures of the empire builders. Oppression I always say is essentially a form of alienation. Economic oppression is the alienation from one's labour. Political oppression is the alienation from self-government. Cultural oppression is the alienation of one's culture. In that light, to call the end of year Christmas is great for those benefiting from empire-building but bad for everyone else.
Recognizing that on the part of those interested in correcting historical injustices is a good first step of halting the rollers that are keeping thier knees of the African and other indigenous culture. As it is, those cultures are not breathing. That is evident in the increased alienation amongst many African cultures. I am a witness of such incidents in my own culture.
The more these religions and political ideologies take root, the more alienated my people and country become. If accepting these cultural domination is the panacea of progress, my community stands as a stark proof to the contrary. Simple things that these people could do such as self-government and cultural vibrancy or on a roller coaster headed in opposite direction where almost all the community would chose to be headed. That explains neocolonialism and why my responsibility to those who have resisted this elienation is my own act of civil obedience to my indigenous sensibilities. Civic disobedience is for tomorrow. Today I stake my hopes in my indigenous heart. Tomorrow the same heart will examine the box my culture is in.