'Savages, Savages, Barely even human'.....

I must warn all readers, this is a slight rant ....

I was going through a rarely opened drawer recently, and I came across my favourite movie as a child, Pocahontas. Of course, me being me, I found myself singing the songs of the movie. The first one that came into my head was 'Savages'. I could proceed into an indepth psychoanalysis of the reasons for this song popping into my head, but thats just boring. Very simply, 1. Its a REALLY catchy song, and 2. I am currently finding myself plagued by an imperialistic essay which is consuming most of my time, and this song makes refernce to that plague.

The song mentioned above consists of the words 'savages, savages, barely even human, savages, savages, killers at the core.... I wonder if they even bleed'. It is shocking to me, that after 600 years of colonial invasion, and thousands of people dead on all sides, that we as humans still hold the idea that one culture is superior to the other. From Britains's colonisation of the native Americans and Indians, to Spain's colonies throughout the world, one must come to the conclusion that it appears that as humans we incapable of fully accepting the routines and life choices of others. That, along with the inate need within humans to improve their personal status with the help of material goods, despite the cruelty to other humans that is required in order to acquire these material goods, is completely detrimental to one's faith in humanity.

Yet, I found when reading E.M Forester's 'A Passage To India', that there was a knowledge present within the imperialist settlers that what they were doing was not only immoral, but completely non-beneficial to their lives or the lives of the people they were forcing out of their homelands. Forester constantly makes reference to the suppressed knowledge within both communities that they were, in many ways, similar. Also he makes it clear to the reader that the placement of the young men within the colonised society was not what they desired, and was based on a mixture of social expectations of the brave male, and a inbred feeling of duty to ones country. In simple terms, the English in India didnt particularly want to be there, and the Indians certainly did not want the English there, yet the situation remained. Why?

Towards the end of the novel, as the Indians were declaring their lack of need for the English within their society, Forester points out that the Indian people were sort of morphing into English, and they were adapting the idea of the 'nation', which is originally and English idea. In other words, the British colonialism, as with all colonialism, takes away the essential essences of a culture, and replaces them with colonised ideals, and essentially eradicates the individual chatacteristics of a culture, making cultures similar. The shocking thing is, that the culture being ripped apart always appears to be oblivious to their adoption of the other culture's ways, along with their self made dependence upon the invading culture, and they continue to insist that they are completely seperate in all ways from the invading culture.

The outcome of all this? In the future, we will find the differences between cultures will slip away, and characteristics of one main culture (most probably the 'American' culture of Macdonalds and Apple Inc.) will be present in every major country and culture in the world. The world will be left looking like either a miniture or larger version of New York City.

And all because someone, somewhere, held the small belief that their daily routine worked better than that of others across the ocean. That idea grew, and everything else died.