The New Colonialism; colonising our identity

By Dr Amal al-Malki

As we were riveted by the horrifying images of the recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon, we could not help but wonder how many children should die, and how much blood should be shed before people come to realise that it is all a part of the USA’s neo-colonialist policies in the Arab World.

This neo-colonialism is more difficult to recognise than older forms realised in the occupation of a sovereign land and the exploitation of its people. It now hinges on subtle and more deeply rooted psychological ties of dependence and protection between governments, making the oppressor look like the protector, transforming the natural impulse to resist into an impulse of silent retreat and acquiescence. How else can we explain the response of the Arab governments to the massacre in Lebanon?

That the United Nations did nothing to stop the massacre did not surprise people throughout the Arab world. The real surprise to them was the passive reaction of their governments, too preoccupied in their own internal affairs to speak out with one voice in defence of Lebanon. Where was so-called Arab unity when it was needed most? What had happened to us? And how can we explain the downfall of a civilisation that once upon a time was one of the greatest?

Colonialism in the form of nation-state has disappeared. But it has taken a new more sinister turn in the era of global empire, an era in which the US seeks to “exempt” its status as global dominator from the history of colonial rule.

In his article, US Imperialism: Global Dominance without Colonies, Donald Pease explores how the US has seen itself as a power “exempt” from the history of colonialism, a status it can claim only by misrepresenting its history to the whole world and even to its own people. To exempt itself from the history of colonial rule, the US has chosen to narrate its history by leaving out many inconvenient truths. As Pease writes: “Traces of US imperial history are likewise discernible in events- the dispossession of Native Americans’ lands, the importation of slave labor from Asia, the acquisition of territorial and informal colonies in Central and Latin America, East Asia, the Philippines, and the Caribbean that the narrative of US exceptionalism has selectively forgotten.”

Most Arab countries achieved independence from direct or indirect colonisation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, Arab nations have managed to win partial or full control over their politics, internal affairs, and economies.

Economies in the Arab world have stabilised in some nations, plummeted in others, and reached unimaginable heights in a few. However, this new age of independence could not dissolve the psychological remnants of the old colonialism. While Arab nations worked hard with their resources to build their economies, including some “work of art” cities, they did not manage to rebuild their identities as sovereign agents with the effectiveness with which they began to rebuild their cities.

They had overcome the image of the colonist in many outward manifestations of their culture, but not in their psyches. Like the psyche of their counterparts in Africa and Asia, the Arab psyche wrestles with its own sense of inferiority. In the struggle, Arabs sometimes opt for poor choices, such as capitulating to cultural forces that suppress their indigenous religious and cultural heritage; or retreating into identities that are centuries out of date and in denial of modernism. These unfortunate choices have kept the Arab world divided and their governments ineffective.

Worse still perhaps, divisions in the Arab psyche have made it easy for global powers to rewrite our noble history into contested territory, to turn us into off-stage observers of our own past, to let the West write an identity for us that we had never lived.

Rather than voicing our lives, we are narrowed into stereotypes voiced by others. With the re-emergence of such stereotypes comes the re-emergence of the tired binary oppositions that had defined the height of colonialism, oppositions we had hoped to leave behind long ago, such as that between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’, East and West, and peripheral and centre. Arabs are written into the margins of history. As the writers of The Empire Writes Back observe, “Marginality is the condition constructed by the posited relation to a privileged centre, an ‘Othering’ directed by the imperial authority.” Thus, in post-colonial times, “with no ‘centre’ the marginal becomes the formative constituent of reality”.

Such defacement of a people comes at a price. Oppression, humiliation, the death of unity, and the feeling of impotence sow the seeds of hatred and vengeance.

After both Gulf Wars, Arabs fought among themselves, resulting in rifts and the severing of diplomatic relations. The tensions and hatred fuelled nation against nation, fanaticism became stronger than ever, and with the heightened stress, wanton aggression was inevitable.

Strangely and tragically, the Arab nations had to look collectively to the US, the very power most implicated in their identity loss, for protection.

And aggression leads to more aggression. What happened after 9/11 is that only the Bush administration gets to define a “terrorist” and it somehow always happens to be an Arab or Muslim.

Misrepresentations of Arabs have always been common. But now they are not even discouraged and often not even noticed. Who can forget Bush’s statement when declaring the war against terrorism that embedded his new colonial philosophy? He said: “You are either with us or against us.” Countries have redefined their national identities when they were forced to redefine their policies in favour, or in fear, of the US and its allies.

The devastation to the people of Lebanon is a blow to an innocent nation as deep as one can imagine. I wish I could say that the Arab governments are not without blame, but that is not so. Their own divisions, their own inaction, leave them with culpability as well.

What has happened to Lebanon is a black mark on the entire civilised world. It is a disgrace to all humanity.

If Arab governments do not recognise that their colonial past is not behind them but still an ongoing project of psychological liberation, Lebanon will remain a symbol that can and will be repeated again and again. As long as Arabs retain a psyche of the oppressed, opting for choices that leave the Arab world divided and unpredictable, they will encourage the citizens of US and Britain to elect leaders who follow policies of the oppressor.

Many of the habits of the old colonialism have been broken. Unfortunately, the habits of master and slave identity inherited from the old colonialism have not been stamped out. It is time to confront these lingering habits directly and eliminate them once and for all.