During the Pandemic, for the first time in my life, my entertainment/distraction/self-education began to come from watching tv series rather than reading books. I seem to have lost my ability to focus and concentrate on serious books.
Two series that I watched this week gave me a lot of time to consider the long tentacles of Colonialism in the world. Last night, I watched an Australian series called Stateless (netflix) which used the plot device of a mentally disabled Australian white woman getting caught up in a dragnet of illegal immigrants coming from Sri Lanka. She has purposely ditched her identification papers because she has escaped from the mental facility into which her parents had placed her and she doesn't want to be found and re-institutionalized. She has tried to use an identity she purloined from a German backpacker but the bureaucracy is fully tuned to these amateur attempts at identity scams and so she stays incarcerated. They don't know who she is and they dimly perceive that she isn't quite right in the head. Her companions in the detention center are refugees from Afghanistan, and parts of Indonesia.
On the roof of the detention center are two protestor/refugees who refused to come down. No one can speak their language because they speak Timor. There were such an array of refugees in this show from places I couldn't even picture on a map even though the names were familiar to me from the news. I had no idea where Sri Lanka might be located though obviously if a boat could get them to Australia, it must be near Australia.
So, of course, I googled a map and resolved a couple of other questions I had about countries from other shows I had watched. Another Australian tv series based on an American data/satellite station in Australia had a big plot line revolving around the Chinese increasingly claiming portions of what had been designated 'International' waters in the South China Sea. So I wondered, where is the South China Sea in relation to Australia?
When I really looked at the map I had found on google that showed everything from China to Australia to India, I found all kinds of places I had only the vaguest location for in my mind. I had learned about the partition between India and Pakistan from a wonderful documentary on Mahatma Ghandi and the struggle for India to become free from English control. Otherwise, I doubt I would have clearly known where Pakistan was.
So the two threads that tie so many of these topics together are Colonialism and Religion. The French and Dutch and Portuguese
colonized Indo-China, the English colonized India through trade , and the populated Australia with British colonists and prisoners and with all that came the suppression of the Indigenous people in all these lands. Along with the territorial struggles of their war wracked countries, there is the ongoing colonization of the world by the monotheistic religious.
Once I had the map, I saw where Sri Lanka was and so close to India, you could see how the Sri Lankans appeared both Indian and Arabic. As it turned out in the series, they actually spoke two different and not mutually understandable languages, Timor and Sinhalese.
In the news, not recently, but within the past few years, there had been many articles about the Chinese building artificial islands in the South China Sea in order to claim it. In fact lately there was another little stand-off between China and the United States over Chinese blocked sea routes and we sent some war ships there.
The night before I watched Stateless, I had watched a soapy kind of telenovela set in Morocco and with that title. Since I had visited Morocco, I was very interested in this series. The main plot revolved around a Spanish fort and a border campaign waged by the desert tribes against the Spanish military presence. Again, a historical event, a whole war about which I knew nothing, the Spanish-Moroccan War! Apparently there is no set block of time that covers this war since it went hot and cold in irregular spurts, but roughly, it covered the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century and was part of a movement to throw off colonial powers that grew into the Algerian Revolution which drove out the French and put in Muamar Ghadafi as dictator.
Suddenly I saw a mind map of the streams of refugees from the colonial conflicts that became the rivers of refugees in World War II and the oceans of refugees in our own time. We have refugees from all parts of Mexico, South and Central America, victims of the drug warlords. We have refugees from the Middle East, Syria, Lebanon. And all the European countries are flooded and foundering under the weight of the political storm created by the refugees from Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans.
What to do? Now that they are clamoring by the millions to get into European and Western nations, we have a massive dilemma.
A large proportion of the refugees, like the ones before them, are deeply desirous of a better way of life for their families and they are eager to assimilate, educate, and move up the ladder. A significant proportion, however, are forced to leave their homelands against their will, but hate the countries to which they have had to flee, to some extent because of religion. The more urgently patriarchal religions create refugees who are hysterical with rage and terror over the personal freedoms of Europeans especially women.
Sadly a long developed suspicion and fear about cultural expropriation has made a lot of the refugees with stronger religious ties, reluctant to assimilate into the cultures of their new countries. This makes enormous conflict between the refugees who don't want to assimilate and the host countries who don't want division in their social fabric. Religious and ethnic ghettos develop and breed extremists.
Just as expanding empires had no awareness or consideration for the damage they were inflicting on the cultures they crushed when they colonized someone else's land, they had no awareness of the damage they did to the environment of the lands they pillaged.
The fur trade drove the beaver almost into extinction and heaven only knows what effect the loss of that water diverting little animal did to the ecology of waters rivers streams and lakes. And the lumbering - the destruction of habitat, the loss of trees that clean the air. Even today, as I type, large swaths of the Amazon rain forest are being logged, burned and mined which is the destruction of the lungs of the planet. What will we breathe when the air is no longer made clean and safe by the trees? What will we drink when the water is all drained from the aquifers and despoiled in the rivers and lakes with pesticides, acid rain and run off from mining operations.
There are so many many problems facing us in the world today and I am stymied by the complexity of the issues. Whole regions cannot dump their populations into more stable countries. Refugees must assimilate in new lands. I sympathize with the refugees. Like me they are ordinary, unarmed, peaceful citizens held in the death grip of psychotic drug cartels and despotic rulers. What can they do but try to escape to somewhere better where their children can grow up and pursue education and careers and not become child soldiers, child brides, child slaves, child criminals and even worse, vulnerable orphans.
After all, my ancestors all fled from homelands torn apart by strife as in the regional civil wars in Germany during the unification, the colonization and expropriation of land by the British in Ireland and Scotland. These ancestors fled the dead end they faced and came to America, and here they all learned to speak English and get ahead.
Now the poor peasants fleeing drug wars come to America and end up being incarcerated in detention camps, separated from their families and with no reasonable solution to their plight.
Bad leaders have trapped us in the unending cycle of conquest, war, and environmental devastation. How can enough people become aware of this dire situation such that they can create the seismic cultural change that we need. We are evolving into one world but we can't stop squabbling long enough to make a creative and beneficial transition. We have made baby steps in the form of the EU, the United Nations and other large bodies created from this new amalgamation that are supposed to help us resolve our differences. We need more and better particularly in our own individual countries.
And religion has not done its part to make people more loving and cooperative. Instead as it becomes more dogmatic and tribal, it divides us even further and leaves no room for negotiation - the gods are jealous gods.
On top of all that, we now have a worldwide pandemic to deal with. No doubt we will learn something from it.
Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment