We Can Stand Here Like The French, Or We Can Do Something About It.
Colonization, Consumerism, And An Urgent Need To Knock It Off
Don’t know if you have heard about the civil unrest taking place in New Caledonia? You would be forgiven if you thought I was bullshitting you with a name like New Caledonia. It sounds like a city Master Chief might encounter in a HALO game. But it is a real place. It’s a little sliver of land in the South Pacific, about 700 miles East of Australia. New Caledonia is a French Territory. A couple of thoughts:
1. Yes, the French are still holding onto this colonized piece of real estate for reasons I will address shortly. But for four hundred years, the French colonized damned-near the entirety of North and West Africa, much of South Asia, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific. By WWII, they decolonized most all of it. With the exception of a few islands, French influence receded almost entirely. But they are really interested in holding onto New Caledonia.
2. Caledonia is a Latin name the Roman Empire gave to Scotland. Perhaps New Gallia would have been a been a better choice?
The current violence erupting in New Caledonia is related to the indigenous population wanting independence from France. Macron’s government just amended the constitution to allow more French representation in New Caledonian elections. You see, there is a popular movement among the indigenous folks who want independence from France. It is their island, after all. But the French inhabitants want it to remain a French territory. The French government, in a spectacular fuck-you-it’s-ours-and-you-cant-have-it policy move, changed the constitution to allow residents who have lived there for 10 years to vote in general elections. Sounds reasonable, right? But when you realize that the Nouméa Accords of 1998, a pact designed to give the Kanak people greater representation in elections, limited voting in provincial elections to people who resided in New Caledonia before 1998, and their children. The French see the Kanak independence movement growing and are using electoral policy to keep the tide from turning. (Pay attention America)
And the French are super serious about keeping this place. They are sending 1600 French police and soldiers there to intervene in the mess. I’m sure that’s going to work out well.
When I read international news reports about places I don’t know about, I fire up the Google machine and start digging. I went to the Wikipedia page for New Caledonia to gets some context and more knowledge about the location. It’s not a big place. 7,172 sq mi in size. It’s smaller than Vermont by about 2,000 sq mi. The population is 270,000.
I was a bit surprised when I saw that their per capita GDP was $35K. That’s a lot. The French per capita GDP is $40K. Sure, they get some tourism from Australia and New Zealand, but that can’t account for that kind of GDP.
I immediately scrolled down to the “Economy” section of the article and then everything came into sharp focus. New Caledonia accounts for 25% of the world’s nickel production. You know what uses a lot of nickel these days? Yep, batteries.
A crime requires two things, motive and opportunity. The French government took the opportunity to change the laws to increase non-native representation for the reason (motive) of keeping their hands on an enormous nickel resource.
In the US, we have conducted our foreign policy according to the Monroe Doctrine and subsequent historical corollaries. It begins with the idea that any European colonization in the Americas (North or South) is a hostile act against the US. It permitted the US to rationalize intervention in South America to protect our material and economic interests. This sort of interventionist policy underpinned our involvement in WWII and the aftermath (See: Marshall Plan). Basically, what France is doing in New Caledonia is simply what Western Imperialism does. It imposes itself under the auspices of importing democracy and economic well-being. This Trojan Horse is loaded with other shit nobody wants, like claims on human and natural resources. What the Kanak people are doing is not some sort of spontaneous collective rebellion. It is an assembly of autonomous individuals who feel personal outrage at the imposition of the French culture and governance.
When we frame these kinds of conflicts (I chose this one because I’m not emotionally prepared to deal with Russia/Ukraine or Israel/Palestine) as “those people” against “these people,” we miss the fact that the stakes do not weigh on people, they weigh on persons. There are individuals who are living in great distress because they have lost their autonomy and, more acutely, their voice in the democratic process that was supposed to give them a voice.
Colonization is a byword for all that is wrong with the European expansion experiment. There is no way to account for all of the atrocious horrors Europeans and Americans have visited on the rest of the world. We have exterminated people, languages, and entire cultures in the pursuit of resources and wealth. And that is all it has been. Sure, we blame the Church for much of the horror, and there will be bishops and popes burning in hell for it. May it ever be so. But it becomes easy to lose sight of the impulse behind the Church spreading around the world. Whose ships were these missionaries riding on? What were their sponsors doing in these far-flung locales in South America, Africa, and Asia? There is a lot of blame to go around for the sins of European expansion. The privateers who brought with them disease and holocaust are still around. They don’t sail in ships, leading armies of conquistadores. They travel in private jets and command armies of lawyers and politicians.
Look, I’m complicit in this whole system. I’m white. Like super white. Ancestry.com says that I’m Scottish, English, Welsh, and Northern European. I’m so white, I’m almost transparent. I have lived my entire life in the US, on land taken from indigenous people. I work in manufacturing, making stuff that needs that New Caledonian nickel to produce. My beef isn’t with rich people, although I do believe that we have too many poor people to have as many billionaires as we have around here. My concerns run deeper than wealth. There are cultural norms that have to be exposed, diagnosed, and excised, like a cancerous mole. Chiefly, the economic colonization that compels a country to claim ownership of another country 17,000 miles away, because it is profitable. Increasing wealth is not an assumed moral good. Increasing power is never a moral good. It’s the problem of possessing the one ring of power. Power will always, eventually, express itself in evil ways. There is no one who can possess it and do good things with it. This was what the Gospel teaches us. All power belongs to God. No person can wield it justly. Jesus made no claim to the power he had to heal. It was God’s power, and it did what God willed. Now, you don’t have to believe in God or be a Christian to see that what Jesus teaches is true. Those who seek power use it to lord over others but those who are humble and seek peace have no need for power. I don’t yet know how this works in our world, but, God help me, I’m trying.