Models: Christo-colonialism & Ethno-supremacy (Part 1)

NB: Due to the amount of content covered and to improve readability, this essay has been broken up into three parts and will be released as such.

Intro

While the Wachowskis intended the Matrix to be an allegory for trans gender existence, we believe that the Matrix pulled on a thread, that unintentionally ran so much deeper.

Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

As stated in our previous post, we postulate that the Coloniality of Morality should equally be considered when analyzing the effects of colonization. Because a major effect - if not the most important effect - of cultural imperialism, is the spread and indoctrination of the imperial’s culture, cultural values and even - and perhaps especially - the underlying epistemic and logical systems. More than the colonial frameworks themselves, it is the cultural effects and how they consequently shaped the world through hierarchal structure, that are the effects that we observe today.

To that purpose, we would like to propose two novel models to analyze and reframe how we perceive and analyze the world and its epistemology, and as a tool to further distill and synthesize the root-causes for global inequality.

The models

One of the challenges that we encountered, was that a lot of the existing frameworks that try to deconstruct injustice seemed to not only be rooted in coloniality, but also in some cases perpetuated (and perhaps even refurbish) the same inequalities by using the same colonial epistemological systems.

The problem with the current state of the world, as we see it, is not that colonialism is over, because it isn’t.

It’s that the colonial system never stopped and that the world is very much in denial about it and its enduring effects.

However, as a means to an end, as decoloniality teaches us that the effects of colonialism persist beyond its active phase, we would argue that the challenges are of a foundational or more specifically epistemological nature, compounded by centuries, or actually millennia, of recolonization.

This is why we postulate the following:

• As the current dominant global sociocultural system (in all aspects) is built on and can be extended back to early Christianity/Abrahamic faiths, it can best be described as Christo-colonial.
• Inherent to the Christo-colonial system is its epistemology, leading to not only its dominance in concrete values, but through its epistemics, the prevalence of the internalization of its valuing systems.
• Once we synthesize the Christo-colonial system and its oppressive system through the lens of kyriarchy, we can refactor its oppressive systems down to the base concept of ethno-supremacism as a method of analysis that is rooted in mutual universalism.

Or perhaps in simpler words:

• Christo-colonialism describes how the cultural aspects of (initially) the Roman Empire/Europe and later the US - through colonialism, neocolonialism, New Imperialism, and current EU/US imperialism - has not only spread, but how it has influenced/forced the way that we view the world; imprinting its mindset of what/who has value onto the world and how it continues to indoctrinate the world.
• We argue that this has gone so far, that any and all analyses - including this one - cannot be seen outside of the Christo-colonial mindset. To truly challenge injustice, we would need to accept that (practically) everyone has internalized the Christo-colonial mindset to such a degree, that (practically) all of us apply its valuing structures, including its fallacies, intuitively. That the ways of thinking are so fundamentally rooted in millennia of sociocultural indoctrination, that there are very few people who have experienced life beyond of it, in some shape or form.
• We also argue that as the Christo-colonial mindset has spread throughout so deeply the modern world, if we break down the components of its supremacist nature in an intersectional/anti-kyriarchal manner, we will arrive at a model that is situational and rooted in intersectionality, and one that can better explain why we see counter-intuitive patterns that perpetuate traditional power dynamics in non-traditional ways. I.e. why do marginalized peoples perpetuate oppressor behaviour. Our proposed model of ethno-supremacy describes how people align themselves with Christo-colonial in-groups beyond single or static attributes.

The Pudding

We will further review the origins of each aspect of Ethno-supremacy in the next part about Christo-colonialism

However, as they tend to depend on each other and cannot be viewed in isolation, let us first do a higher level introduction of both.

Christo-colonialism is the entire system of ideology, thought, and a morals/ethics as integrated, developed, and then spread across the globe through all the dominating realms in existence, as an extension of the Roman Empire, its adoption of Christianity, and all of its spiritual successors.

Christo-colonialism is a complete moral construct that derives its power from exploiting historical/biological binaries, building in-groups (saved), excommunicating undesirable elements into out-groups (sinners/damned), feeding into persecution complex by the out-groups it created, placing focus on suffering, and emphasizing salvation through real, perceived or spiritual self-flagellation and forced participation, and its extreme rejection of anything that challenges its supremacy. It has thus created a system that seeks submission and compliance to its full moral system, as exhibited through all systems of power, including its educational systems, and validation is given through the level of submission and compliance to its inherently binary structures.

Ethno-supremacy can consequently be applied to evaluate how much a person intersectionally aligns with the Christo-colonial system.

Noting that Ethno-supremacy is situational and non-linear, we can then identify some of the criteria.

These are some of the aspects of supremacy that we have identified:

• Abledness supremacy
• Age supremacy
• Class supremacy
• Educational supremacy
• Financial supremacy
• Gender supremacy
• Health supremacy
• Housing status supremacy
• Intellectual supremacy
• Moral supremacy
• Racial supremacy
• Religious supremacy
• Sectarian supremacy
• Sexuality supremacy
• Otherwise-ethnic supremacy

Note: We feel it is important to point out and specifically state that this list is non-exhaustive, because we do acknowledge our own knowledge horizon. We simply do not know what we do not know and as part of these posts, we feel that it is extremely important to point this out. To assume that we know everything or present this list as anything but non-exhaustive, would merely perpetuate colonial supremacy.

Though we acknowledge that other Abrahamic beliefs have similar binary moral frameworks, we posit that ethno-supremacy is specifically rooted in the way that Christianity (and more specifically Protestantism), has embraced polarization of the binary as spread through nearly two thousand years of Christian cultural imperialism.

In the next parts, we will provide our arguments for Christo-colonialism and Ethno-supremacy.