On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared earlier than the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – the annual Alpine gathering of the worldwide elite – to declare that now’s “not a time for brand new imperialism or new colonialism”.
This, in fact, was a reference to the present ambitions of Macron’s counterpart in the USA, Donald Trump, who, along with lately kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to grab the Panama Canal, has made a great deal of noise about taking on the self-governing Danish territory of Greenland.
Trump himself took to the rostrum in Davos on Wednesday for a usually rambling speech, throughout which he alternately babbled about windmills, snidely complimented Macron on his “stunning” reflective sun shades, and declared that he wouldn’t “use pressure” within the acquisition of Greenland – which he additionally unintentionally known as Iceland.
Certainly, Trump’s designs on the island have gotten Europe’s panties in a bunch, and the European Parliament has introduced its unequivocal condemnation of “the statements made by the Trump administration concerning Greenland, which represent a blatant problem to worldwide legislation, to the rules of the United Nations Constitution and to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a NATO ally”.
Following Macron’s intervention at Davos, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that European leaders had “lined up” in opposition to the “new colonialism” denounced by the French chief.
Now, it goes with out saying that the categorically demented Trump ought to under no circumstances be inspired in his predatory worldwide endeavours. Nevertheless it bears declaring that, in relation to colonialism and imperialism, Europe is hardly one to speak.
Let’s begin with France, which continues to rule a dozen territories scattered throughout the globe – lots of them marketed as unique vacation locations – together with the Guadeloupe islands within the Caribbean Sea and the archipelago of Mayotte within the Indian Ocean.
Whereas these territories have formally moved past lowly colonial standing to bona fide departments of the French Republic and thereby a part of the European Union, France can’t appear to shake the outdated patronising imperial mindset and attendant superiority complicated.
When in December 2024, residents of cyclone-ravaged Mayotte – France’s poorest abroad territory – criticised the ineffective authorities response to the catastrophe, Macron charmingly snapped: “If it wasn’t for France, you’d be in manner deeper s***, 10,000 instances extra.”
How’s that for some “new colonialism”?
As for the tried-and-true “outdated” colonialism, France has a very appalling observe file on that entrance, as effectively. Recall the case of Algeria, the place some 1.5 million Algerians had been killed through the 1954-62 struggle for independence from French rule.
Though Macron beforehand acknowledged that French colonisation of the North African nation was a “crime towards humanity” that was characterised by rampant torture and different brutality, he has consistently refused to supply a proper French apology.
Nevertheless it’s not simply France. Loads of different European powers who’re instantly towards colonialism additionally possess impressively savage legacies worldwide.
Certainly, from Africa to Asia to the Center East and past, it’s troublesome to seek out a lot as a speck of land that has not been affected in a roundabout way or different by previous centuries of European plunder, enslavement, mass killing, and related atrocities.
The Spaniards decimated Indigenous populations throughout the Americas, Britain wreaked imperial havoc wherever it presumably might, and King Leopold II of Belgium presided over the deaths of 10 million or so Congolese beginning in 1885, when he established the “Congo Free State” as his personal private property.
In 2022, Belgian King Philippe supplied his “deepest regrets” for the abuses that transpired through the colonial period however withheld an official apology. As one article on the event of the non-apology famous, life within the Congo Free State was such that “villages that missed rubber assortment quotas had been notoriously made to offer severed palms as a substitute”.
Over in Ethiopia, in the meantime, British historian Ian Campbell estimates that 19-20 p.c of the Ethiopian inhabitants of Addis Ababa was worn out over a mere three days through the Italian army occupation of East Africa in 1937.
The listing of European atrocities goes on.
This isn’t, in fact, meant as a suggestion that Trump ought to due to this fact have free rein to commit no matter crimes or plunder he pleases. It’s merely a pleasant reminder which you can’t be selectively against colonialism. (Greenland, by the best way, was a full-out colony of Denmark till not so way back.)
Talking of colonial atrocities, Europe has not, over the course of greater than two years of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, managed to be sufficiently up in arms over the mass slaughter, preferring to go the route of superficial criticism and de facto complicity.
Because the killing continues underneath the guise of a US-brokered ceasefire, Gaza is now, per the Trumpian imaginative and prescient, set to be administered by a so-called “Board of Peace” chaired by – who else? – Trump himself.
Additionally taking part on the board shall be Israeli prime minister and genocidaire extraordinaire Benjamin Netanyahu, which little doubt heralds a “new colonialism” of probably the most sinister selection.
Sadly for the world, nonetheless, blood-soaked hypocrisy is nothing new.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
