This is a complicated post. This post is about the old colonial policy about divide and rule and how it impacted the world over centuries and continues to do so to this day. This post is about the fallout from the colonial masters, the tatters of cultures they left behind once they decided that multi-nationalism worked far better at creating and maintaining slave culture than actual colonialism. This post is also about cows smuggled inside tunnels. How are these two subject related? Read on.
Divide and conquer was a maxim a lot of Indians I knew spat out with a certain amount of indignation. It came with the realization that said Indians had only realized the British strategy far too late, after it had caused deep enough rifts between religions and classed in the subcontinent to the point that when it was given independence, three different countries had to be created.
Around the 90s, it became okay to joke in Indian films and comedies about the old policy that had helped maintain the British Raj. You’d see in a comedy of errors about neighbours one person turning a family against one another, only to have his/her scheme exposed towards the end.
The lasting effects of this policy, though, are far less than comical. After about ten or so years of hearing about the conflict in central Africa (the Congo-Zaire-Rwanda-Burundi-and-a-bunch-of-others conflict), I finally managed to find some able analysis on it avec Howard French. My observation of it as a Tutsi-Hutu conflict was just the thin outer layer. I won’t go through the many complexities of it, but will touch on the fact that the Belgians that colonized the region made sure that every two ethnic groups in any given area hated one another. Every few hundred kilometres there would be a two groups that used to live next to one another amicably until the Belgians told one that they were cool and the other that they were not.
Fast-forward to today and the conflict is still on. Moreover, every one of these wars seem to get broken down to this simple group-versus-group idea by the media. The Nigerian conflict is getting painted as one of south versus north, without really looking at the big oil factor. The Stimulator pointed at this factor and the enormity of its size in his last video. Also, a group of Nigerian journalists added their voices to this cry by threatening to boycott Exxon Mobil for the way it goes about business in their state of Akwa Ibom (sidenote: as much as I like using This Day for Nigeria news, I do detest that they have a piece about protesting oil companies that links to an ad that promises to help you make big bucks by investing in oil futures).
Turning back to the country where the British honed their policy to perfection, India was set as of late to explode as the ruling over genetically modified brinjal (known elsewhere as aubergine or eggplant) ended well for activists and everyone with more than half a brain that had been against releasing suspicious franken-brinjals into the market. What does the humble purple vegetable have to do with divide and rule? Well, the ruling party and it’s cronies were beginning to turn it into a state issue where those against it were painted as being disloyal. Things were getting to the point that certain party officials were hinting at splitting the country in half over the issue. Just kidding. But the victory does prove that India there can be activism that is not born out of an us-against-them mentality that was recently behind the anti-terror movements and anti-dalit purges.
Little victories like these help the other news land a little softer. Think of the recent battles in Yemen between the Saudi forces and Houthi rebels. The Saudis have been rendered to a point that they are ready to pounce the moment they hear the word “Shia.” And this was precisely that, with the US feeding them lines that Houthis were being supplied by Iran. It got to the point that certain tapes have come out in which Saudi officials torture Houthi fighters.
A similar situation in Israel-Palestine, where two ethnicities lived together rather well not too long ago (minus the presence of five Zionist terrorist groups, one of which later became one of Israel’s political parties). It’s come out that Israel has defrauded Palestinians working in the country out of about $2 billion in wages. Easy to do when you’ve gotten yourself to view a people as less than human.
It is oddly, something of what the government here in Canada got up to. A recent interview with Vancouver’s aboriginal activist Gord Hill told me that the Four First Nations hosting the Olympics are part of a band council system set up by the government to control the area. This sort of thing, of course, leaves any First Nations person who opposes the Olympics to seem like he/she is going against his/her group. Turns out anyway that now the Four First Host Nations are biting the Olympic hand, or threatening to anyway.
And Israel is still at it, closing off every few kilometres of space in the occupied territories from others, trying to create new divisions. Gaza and the West Bank are a world apart as it is, but areas within Gaza are being closed off from each other. Which is why, when freedom fighters create tunnels so big that they can smuggle cows to hungry families, it’s a little victory too.
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