Thoughts V: Mental colonization by Mondar M. M. A. NOVO

The greatest colonization is the colonization of the mind. In the initial stages of colonization, the conquered people are enslaved and controlled with the force of arms. The weakness of this form of colonization is that the colonized people can rise up in revolution and send the colonizer packing, permanently. This colonization is transient. However, the colonizer has other weapons in his arsenal and these are used to colonize the minds of the conquered people, since colonization of the mind has more permanency.

There are various degrees of this mental colonization. Specialized education and exposure to carefully controlled media are used to partially colonize the minds of the people. This is not a thing of the past and is still done with greater vigor. The big guns for this colonization are the televisions, radios and newspapers and other forms of media – often this is called deculturization by people labeled as conservative.

Entertainment, News, TV, and radio programs are slanted to allow the people to form the “desired” opinions and the “desired” prejudices. Primarily, however, it is education that is controlled. The media adds to the colonization by controlled education.

Books and curricula are chosen more or less by the existing powers (corporate, government, and religious) reflecting their wishes. Students learn what the “powers” wish them to learn. The choice of material for the student from which the student learns is pre-selected. The material which will enable the student to go beyond the classroom are also controlled either by subtly discouraging the student from going too far from what is taught in the classroom or it is controlled directly by making certain types of material more available than others and some simply unavailable.

This affects the freedom of thought. Freedom of thought depends heavily on the diversity of knowledge and the control of education greatly curtails this freedom. Where the freedom of knowledge is controlled, freedom of thought is dead and thus freedom of speech becomes irrelevant. And democracy thus becomes a mere tool of the existing powers.

Effects of even this partial colonization can be seen in much of the world. It has grave cultural effects such as in India (subcontinental) where many people, however they shout out their nationalism, associate native male clothes with the “lower class” and western clothes with the “higher class”. Even on national days, such as the Language Martyrs’ Day in Bangladesh , wearing the Lungi is considered unseemly. Even eating with forks and knives is often considered more “civilized” than eating with the hand, which is the Indian tradition. Many do not stop to think that eating utensils and many other customs of the west developed out of what their environment demanded. For people in colder climates eating with the hand meant washing it, which is not comfortable in their climate and as such, there was a necessity to invent eating utensils. This also goes for shoes that enclose the whole foot. Those kind of shoes are not necessary and rather uncomfortably hot in warm weather but today, Indians and many other warm climate inhabitants use the shoes where more stringy sandal-shoes would suffice.

Much of India (subcontinental) is westernized – and this does not exclude Gandhi who wore Indian clothes but was an utter admirer and supporter of the British Raj. The attitude towards clothes and utensils represents the mindset of the still colonized Indians. Westernization (the culture of the colonizer) is seen as modern and more acceptable. Apparently, Macaulay was successful.

... The mentally colonized individual even looks for his heritage in the land of the colonizer. They feel pride in the colonizers’ history and glory. They hero-worship the very aggressors who parasitize their country like leeches as colonizers or in their most recent form – neo-colonialists. Still slaves just without chains!

... A very tiny section of the colonized, usually those who were affluent before the arrival of the colonialists or those who were servants of the colonizer deal with the colonialist to achieve pseudo-independence and gain power, just as Marx said. Through these “educated” natives, the colonialists practice neo-colonialism, in which the wealth of the colonized nation still flows to the colonialists. This tiny group becomes the elite and extremely rich and powerful while the rest of the people fight each other, intoxicated by the scarcity principle, for the scraps that fall down the cracks of the system according to Reagan’s highly insulting “trickle down” theory.

One might trivialize the use of foreign names. However, it is a bigger issue than one realizes. It does not only symbolize the loss of culture and ultimate colonization, it also has many consequences. A name is one of the most intimate possessions and control of the name has a lot of significance and effect on one’s mind. It molds the world around a person. It encourages generalization. A person with a Bengali name will be perceived generally as a Hindu and the circle of friends around him will form partially filtered by that name. The outlook of the person born in an Islamic family with a Bengali name will be much different from that of one with an Arabic name...

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