How Does the World Change?

Who is changing the world? And to whose interest?

Those super powers who own God, absolute truths, nuclear weapons, money, and media? Or millions of women, men, and children who demonstrate in the streets against those powers and their super God, super military religious economic information weapons?

The history of this world is written, shaped, mapped, and remapped by the savage brutal ruling groups who win the war, who colonize, recolonize and neocolonize under different human beautiful words like democracy, civilization, modernism, and humanitarianism.

We live in a jungle where you can invade another country and kill their people then nobody punishes you or considers you a war criminal just because you are the president of the United States of America, or one of its intimate allies such as Israel, or Britain, or other.

What are the significant anniversaries? They told us it is Galileo’s telescope (1609), Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the Cuban Revolution (1959), the collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe (1989), the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989).

They told us that the year 1989 is a crucial year in world history. Europe saw the fall of a wall. In China, a tank stopped for a man. In the United States, Bush senior became president. The end of the Cold War heralded a new era. States disappeared, new areas of conflict arose. What impact have these crucial changes had on us?

When I read these words I feel I do not relate to these very important crucial changes, they may be relevant to an American or European writer, or a writer from China, but not for me, a writer from Egypt, or from Africa, or from what they call The Middle East.

Middle to who? We were given the map and the name of The Middle East by the Old British Colonizers. Egypt was middle east relative to London, India was the far east relative to the same British rulers. This false colonial language continues till today, under the Neo Colonizers.

But the old map is changing according to the changing interests of different dominating groups or countries.

In the old map there was a country called Palestine. Now it is called Israel. The Palestinian nation was killed, those who survived the massacres since 1948 became refugees, immigrants, dispersed all over the world. The Palestinian Holocaust and sufferings are ignored by those who write history and map or change the world. History glorifies the Israeli Holocaust and their sufferings by the Nazis. History is not real history. History of our world has been ignoring the struggles of the colonized people (not only the Palestinians) since the beginning of the Slave Patriarchal Class System, some thousand years ago.

They consider the year 1989 crucial in world history? Because Europe saw the fall of a wall. You consider the history of Europe the history of the world.

A wall fell in Berlin but what about other walls erected to enslave and colonize other nations? What about the wall in our region? For example, the wall separating the Palestinian people from their land and homes? The erection of such walls are not crucial events to be remembered by world history, because some people do not count, they do not own nuclear weapons or big money. One American or Israeli soldier is more valuable than thousands of Iraqi or Palestinian or Afghani or African people.

Israel is the only country which owns nuclear weapons in our region, it can eradicate some nations in our region such as Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and others who do not own equal nuclear armies. The President of the USA, Barak Obama, declared in his speeches that USA and Israel are one country, he ignored the fact that Israel is a colonial project working for the interests of neocolonial powers in USA and Europe and is established on Palestinian blood and land.

They said that in China a tank stopped for a man, and you consider this a crucial world event. But what about more crucial events in our region where tanks are killing people everyday? Is the life of one man in China more crucial than the life of thousands in our countries? The so-called Third World?

Third relative to who?

Can we call a war criminal First World?

In US and European academia many people say we are living in the Postcolonial era. This language does not reflect our reality because we live in the Neocolonial era, not the Postcolonial.

How can colonial and neo colonial languages distort our vision in addition to the distortion of the reality of the world.

What are the crucial changes in our world that have impact on us?

My reply is: This depends where you are in the world and what you believe.

Divide and Rule is the basic principle of colonialism and exploitation. You cannot dominate people except by dividing them.

Identity and Religion are postmodern words repeated all the time in the last three decades to divide us, to invade our minds, our lands, our material and moral resources.

Our role as writers is to demystify these words in language and in literature.

There is no pure identity. Pure identity means Racism.

All of us are mixed blood, mixed identities and the more mixed we are the better, the more human, the more fair and just.

We have to celebrate our common human identity and not our inherited so-called identity differences.