Untwisting Reality

Cultural Genocide: A Key Task After a Coup

• By Poetry X
• 9 September, 2015
• No Comments

After over 500 years after the European invasion of America, the genocide  has no stopped – not only the genocide of the natives, but also the genocide of our culture.  When we loose our roots we loose our connection with each other and it is easier to divide us. Basically this is why right wing politicians tend to defund cultural events and public education. In this way conservative elites achieve what we can call dissociation of identity.

One of the major crimes against black people is understood to be the enslavement they suffered for hundreds of years, otherwise called “slavery.” However, as inhuman as enslavement is, that was not the worst crime. The real tragedy against black people was the cultural genocide against them. Black people, decedents from the enslaved, were striped down from their language, their religion, their history and from their own identity. This act of cultural genocide was not done by chance, otherwise why the dominating elite imposed their last names on black people who supposedly belonged to them?

This act killing our identity keeps being applied nowadays. In this regard we must know during the US invasion of Iraq back in 2003, at the time when one part of the army was dedicated to protect the oil fields in Kirkuk, other portion of the army, in Bagdad, was destroying 200 thousand ancient objects that dated over 5 thousand years from the Nation Museum of Iraq. Iraq is the cradle of the human civilization and people from the Middle East know their identity based on the cultures from that part of the world. It is not a coincidence that the extremist militia ISIS has destroyed the ancient legacy from cities such as Nimrud, Mosul, Hasaka, Dur-Sharrukin, Palmyra, among the main ones.

One of the main missions in Latin America has been the imposition of the hegemonic culture. For example, there is not snow in most of Latin countries, but Latin people like to depict Christmas with snow imagery. That’s just one of the components that no many people notice.

Monuments are just one part of having an identity. During the dictatorships imposed by the US, the armies take the task, no just killing “dangerous” people, but killing their legacy too. In Argentina for example, on February 27 1977 the military junta destroyed at least 90 thousand books from the Eudeva editorial. But, the worst moment was on June 26th 1980 when the dictatorship burned a million of a half books just in Sarandi Buenos Aires [TeleSur].

In most recent events, one of the main missions in of the Venezuelan elite after a US supported coup, is to erase any legacy from Hugo Chavez [La Iguana]. It is the same move that the right wing took 200 hundred years ago after Simon Bolivar died. in Venezuela and Spain, Bolivar statues were destroyed to try to erase any trace from his legacy.