Colonial Cultural Conditioning Using Soft Power

Cultural Conditioning or as the British historians Niall Ferguson calls it, the use of Soft Power to control hearts and minds. Making the subjugated do what you want them to do and think how you want them to think. This concept came back to me while I was watching the 1939 movie Gunga Din. A story about the exploits of colonial Great Britain in India. Growing up in post-colonial Jamaica, as in most other colonial countries, meant we inherited the mind-set that White Great Britain was Right, good, benevolent and we the black, brown, indigenous people wrong, useless and worthless. This is what the British spent over 350 years beating into us as a means of control.

To relinquish control to the British, one must first accept the British concept and narrative about who we are as a people. That we are useless and worthless, uncivilized savages and without the British, without the Mother Country to save us from ourselves, we would be in a worst off. Where would we be without the Mother Country? The truth is, where would the Mother Country be without us the subjugated and the enslaved? Colonialism was never about our development. Colonialism was about British Development at our expense.

Farmers in India forced to grow opium instead of food crops. Millions starved to death for Britain's drugs trade.

I first watched the movie Gunga Din in the early 70s and I hated the East Indians for resisting and fighting the civilised white British and cheered on the white empire as it imposed its military might on the filthy savages. I felt the same way as a young child watching most British colonial propaganda movies from Tarzan to Zulu, they were some of my favorite genres as a boy. The Savage mud-coloured natives who needed the white man to protect them from themselves, to drag them into the age of fictional enlightenment.

These British colonial films wanted us to believe that they had a God given right to govern over what they called primitive native population, sub humans and a God given right to own native wealth resources. As a young boy in post-colonial Jamaica, I believed that they the British had that right and that they were a force for good.

The reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents genocide

As a boy I also hated Native American Indians in those old cowboy movies, they were the enemy, savages to be wiped out. Pesky redskin savages trying to kill good white people who just wanted to live. I was made to believe that those White people had a God giving right to native land. Playing Cowboys and Indians as a boy, I never wanted to be the Native Indians. That role was reserved to boys lower down on the pecking order, as a price for friendship and a chance to play. I found nothing wrong with John Wayne saying the only good Indian/Injun was a dead Indian. In fact, I thought it was a cool badass thing to say about savages whose life I clearly saw no value in. Such was the power of British colonialism on the minds of the colonized and subjugated.

So young, so stupid, so ignorant and naïve was I, but at that time in our history, we were subjugated to believe that we were the lucky ones for being enslaved and should thank the British for enslaving us and making us civilized. I was a product of my society, student of an education system created by the British, designed for conditioning, pacification and subjugation, to create obedient worker drones for the Empire.

As a young boy I was paid to go to the movies by my father. I had two older sisters with whom I was in constant conflict and war whenever I got bored. So, my father came up with the plan to give me money every Saturday morning to go to the 10 AM matinees to see the double or triple bill features. I remember going to the Matinees at The Carib and Regal to watch old colonial movies and listened as the entire audience erupted in cheers, clapping like crazy idiots when the white colonial forces turned up to slaughter the native savages. Africans in Africa, Indians in India and Arabs across the Middle East, Aborigines in Australia, in fact native populations in almost every country on the face of the planet, none was spared the military might, violence and savagery of White Europeans.

The forgotten concentration camps in South Africa where the British sent black people during the Boer War.

So good was the British colonial system at beating the self-worth out of us. So perfect was the brainwashing that we hated the various versions of ourselves and experiences being played out on the big screens and in real life. These movies create a certain narrative which influenced how we saw ourselves. We were told by the British that we were no-good. We were told by the British that we needed them to take care of us. We were told that if we wanted to be good, civilized human being then we needed to be less of who we are and more of who they say we are and who they wanted us to be.

The very idea that black people got a reputation of being lazy and don't want to work was created during slavery a period of savage brutality and force labour by a people who were dependent on slaves because they were lazy and did not want to work. It seems the white man was allergic to hard work and would drop like flies.

25 Dec 1831, Christmas Uprising, Jamaica: 60,000 enslaved Africans led by Samuel Sharpe resist British who responded by executing hundreds.

The British colonial system was not a system that helped in the development of human self-worth. That was the last thing the British wanted the people they ruled over to have. Because one minute you have self-worth and the next you start demanding freedom and equal rights. If we believed that everything about us is wrong, that we are useless and worthless and everything about them is right and we cannot live without them taking care of us, then we will relinquish all control to them. And thank them for the scraps from their table and count us lucky to get those scraps from our benevolent British Masters, Rulers and Colonial Overlords.

1090 Kenyans were hanged by Britain for opposing colonial rule which stripped the most fertile land from them & was given to white settlers.

A lot of Jamaicans opposed independence, opposed the fight for equal rights and universal adult suffrage simply because they believed in the superiority of the British and they believed that everything about us as black people was wrong. My own black grandmother, bless her and love her loads, was against independence and black empowerment. My grandmother was a royalist, a monarchist and loved her white English queen. Growing up our house was littered with Royal memorabilia. The picture of the Queen on the walls and on the plates in the cabinets. The favorite pastime was collecting various Royal memorabilia, anything with a British Flags, Royal insignias and pictures of the royal family, they were all over my house growing up. My Grandmother regarded everything white to be right and superior and black people inferior and not to be trusted. She also had a special dislike for people from the parish of St. Thomas. My Grandmother saw black people through the eyes of the white colonial class, she was a product of her society and the perfect example of British foreign policy. We had lots of debates, she and I, but she was too far gone.

Plundering most of the world and building Britain off the back of it. With an obligatory whine about immigration. #BritishValues

Anything too Black not too Good!

I do not know the origin of the terminology "anything too black not too good" but I can imagine it being said first on the plantation as the whip cuts across the slaves back. After which Jamaicans adopted it and run with it. That is conditioned behaviour created after over 350 years of Britain beating the self-worth out of us and beating us into submission.

We are more than a Blasted Beach, WE ARE A COUNTRY.
For me it was not until the 1970s, the period of my enlightenment characterized by the movement of social development and the fight for egalitarianism, that I started developing more self-worth and started seeing the world differently. Declaring that we are more than a blasted beach, God damn it, we are a country! We are valid people, equal to all, second to none and should be proud of who we are. It was a period of social re-engineering trying to reverse over 350 years of colonial brainwashing in the shortest possible time. At the time of Semi-Independence 80% of the Jamaicans population was functionally illiterate. It was not easy to move the literacy rate to 90% by 1980, providing free education and healthcare to the population. Embarking on social development programmes of Housing and providing rural areas with water and electricity.

I love history, always have and adopted to it very early in school. But it was not until college when I was introduce to my West Indian history professor that I really became captivated by it. The British version of West Indian history was rubbish, it was yet another use of soft power to control hearts and minds. It was not real history but British Propaganda design to make themselves look benevolent.

If all you know is the British version of West Indian or Colonial history then you do not know West Indian or Colonial history.

Way back when, my History professor walked into the classroom on day one and said: “If all you know about History Comes from British sources then you do not know history”. He went on to explain that much of British version of history was fictional, made up but there was a method to their madness. It was designed to propagate British superiority based on the messiah “gift to the world” complex.

Many people used the historian and archaeologist George Reisner’s work and writings as the law on African society for many decades but his writings were flawed and based on pure racist hate. Everything about George Reisner conclusions and many other European and American Historian’s conclusion were dead wrong because they could not get over the race of the people they were studying. Their ego of white superiority was threatened with every findings and every discovery and in the end they just lied.

"Until the story of the hunt is told by the lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."

We no longer live in an age where people accept the official version of events, nor in a society where the descendants of the colonisers are the sole authors of the story. We must counter the historians who have sold us, and continue to propagate, a glorious version of the imperial past.

Murdering Fuzzy Wuzzies with Glee

I now know that the natives were not the savages but defenders and that the invaders were the real uncivilized savages while proclaiming how civilized they were. I now know that the natives were only fighting for their very survival, for their freedom and culture, their very lives and that the invaders only wanted to murder and enslave them while taking their wealth resources. So wicked and disgusting were their hearts.

Why is it that throughout history, it is always the people who declared themselves to be the most civilized, who always carry out the most savage brutality on the people they declare uncivilized.

These days Even though I know how these old colonial movies will end. I know the British will slaughter and enslave the native population but now I cheer when the native people rise up kill the European invaders and now see these movies as tragedies. A documentation of the wicked and evil act that one set of human beings inflicted on another set of human beings out of greed. What was once Soft Power used to condition hearts and minds now serves as documentation to the greatest evil that ever spread across the planet like a plague. It is now Soft Power but with an opposite effect conditioning hearts and minds to see them for what they are and to fight oppression.