Mother’s Day got me thinking how it is no accident that the Arabic and Latin based languages refer to the nation as a she, and depict it in maternal terms such as the “motherland” and “mother country”, due to the very obvious association with birth, origins and blood ties. But their there is also a psychosocial explanation for this: even as adults, individuals continue to need the same love, security, rootedness (often symbolized by kissing the ground of one’s nation), sense of belonging and identity they obtained from their mothers, so they often turn to the nation to fulfill those needs.
When we view the concept of nation in this context, it becomes easy to understand what the loss of Palestine, Iraq and now Syria, means to Arabs. The Empire isn’t merely oppressing our land and people, but is separating us from other motherland, uprooting us from our identities, destroying our heritage as the cradle of civilization and effacing our past, present and future.
With this in mind, today, we not only wish a happy Mother’s Day to all the brave, struggling mothers of our region, but we wish a happy Mother[land]’s Day to our beloved Syria, Palestine and Iraq. We will never stop turning to them for love and identity for they are our roots.
An illuminating article on the new and far more insidious cognitive imperialism by resisting scholar, June Terpstra:
The main focus of new resistance movements must be that of human cognition. The people of the USA, Europe and Israel do not see themselves as the oppressors, the occupiers, the killers and the torturers. They have convinced themselves of their superiority in all things. The moral education system they have deconstructed forms a cognitive structure which views greed and aggression for “democracy” as the norm. My assertions here will make most Americans, Europeans, and Israeli’s uncomfortable, because most do not “feel” like the “bad guys” in fact, they think they are the “good guys”. Whereas in the past cultural imperialism and white supremacy was asserted through blatantly racist acts and colonial political policies using liberal Enlightenment ideas about the “equality of man” there is now a weeding out of notions of national superiority based on so called democratic economic standards that are even more complex and more firmly entrenched than old style European imperialism. The moral import of this dominant cultural notion of the human person is clear. Children in the USA, Europe and Israel across race, gender and class learn concepts about love, equality, and the Golden Rule while simultaneously being trained in the importance of killing and torturing so called terrorists and “liberating” countries lead by so called dictators in the name of “national security”. Equality now is reserved for those members of the USA, Israel and Europe who obey their masters and those who question this set of lies experience isolation and accusations of being unpatriotic and “domestic terrorists”.
Full article here
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One of imperialism’s most widely used tactics today is to ridicule, infantilize, and dismiss charges of imperialism as being so reductionist, oversimplistic, doctrinaire, passé, or conspiratorial, that we shy away from using such terms in our political discourse. For what could be more intellectually imperializing than to relegate what are esssentially social scientific concepts like colonialism, imperialism and class struggle to the realm of ideology, values and norms? By de-scientizing concepts that are no less measurable than “democracy”, “human rights” and “economic development”, Empire de-normalizes this discourse and disarms us of our intellectual armour. And that is how minds are colonized and information wars won.
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