What has the Eurokleptocene Got to Do with Me?

The Necessity for the Concept of the Eurokleptocene

When hundreds and then, thousands upon thousands of half-starving and diseased Europeans landed on far-off shores, beginnning from the 16th century, no-one demanded a passport from them. There was no police force, or jail to keep predatory parasites out for the regions of the world whose flora and fauna, ad soil health, had been not only maintained but carefully improved over generations by Indigenous peoples.

How the world has change in the intervening centuries following mass Western Europeans' migrations!

This article is going to provide a broad brush overview, tracing the links between West Europeans domination and the climate changes we are witnessing now. I suggest that new terminology is needed if we are to adequately grasp both the causes and the possible solutions needed to the political and ecological crises we face today.

Many Western educationalists, scientists and climate activists are concerned about the worldwide floods, fires, and food shortages we have been witnessing in recent years. There is a growing concurrence in using the term the ‘Anthropocene’ to say we are in the era of human-induced climate change. But I want to assert that this term is serving as a cover-up for the crimes of the Western Europeans. It’s a kind of doublespeak, really. Factually, it is untrue.

Yes, human activities are responsible for ecological destruction and global warming, but using the term the ‘Anthropocene’ dodges the question of which humans specifically?

I say, let us assign responsibility for the current crises and the state of the planet, to those who are actually responsible.

People living self-sufficiently in Africa, Australasia, and the Americas for millennia, well-adapted to their environments, and with their own languages, cultures, architecture, and artifacts, were suddenly faced with a hostile force of ‘palefaces’, from Europe that appeared on their shores in waves of military assaults and mass migration. The rights of these indigenous people over generations, to their own lands and labour were forcibly, brutally denied by the paleface invaders. Any resistance was met with terror, torture, death.

Death on a massive scale occurred. Whole societies were wiped out along with animals, and birds that had co-existed with the indigenous peoples, before the arrival of the Europeans. While the Euro-Americans are now fearing apocaplyse for many cultures, the spread of diseases that wiped out over 90% of their populations in a matter of months, societies that ruthless military forces, tht forced them to abandon their ways of life, the apocalyse has already happened.

Colonialism and species death has been occurring hand in hand with European expansionism. So for example, the European settlers knew they could deliver a final death blow to Native Americans' way of life by extermination of the millions of buffalo that roamed free. So buffalo were slaughtered in their millions, often shot at from trains. There carcasses were gathered and piled high, all to starve out the nomadic Indigenous peoples and foce them onto plantations.

Now, in case you are thinking I am talking about things that happened long long ago, let me give only two examples from the early and mid 20th century. It is well documented that people’s villages were burnt down, and adults forced to gather a quota of rubber, on pain of their children’s hands being chopped off. This terror occurred in the Congo when it was under Belgian control, during which time, about half the population — some 10 million people lost their lives.

More recently still, when Kenyan people wanted to retain access to their own more fertile lands, during the 1950’s the British instigated terror tactics, setting up concentration camps in which people resisting the occupation and exploitation of their lands, were beaten, raped and in some cases, roasted alive. Some survivors came to London as recently as 2017 to claim accountability and a degree of compensation for their suffering of torture, rape, wrongful detention and forced labour.

So it is important to acknowledge that the violence which occurred at the start of the Eurokleptocene era with the ‘voyages of discovery’, in the 15th centure, has not by any means reduced in the ferocity of its destructiveness but has in fact extended into and is now permeating into every living system on earth.

I therefore propose the term, the ‘Eurokleptocene’ as a better descriptor of the era which has lead to the present crises that humanity is facing, as we who are alive now, witness the culmination of centuries of European domination triggering the Sixth Mass Extinction.

The Eurokleptocene era involves a total of five defining features.

1) The establishment and ongoing perpetuation of the ideology of ‘white’ supremacy, used to justify invasion, genocide and occupation of lands far beyond Western Europe, from the 15th century, to the present day.

In addition to the assumption of intellectual and moral superiority, there are four further defining features essential to Eurokleptocenic thinking.

2) An insatiable avarice, meaning a rejection and consequent loss of the sense of ‘enough’ in terms of consumption and accumulation on an individual and societal level.

3) A sense of entitlement to the lives, labour and resources of African/Asian/Australasian/people of colour, cloaked in religious and later, scientific sounding language.

4) Short-term thinking, in order to maximise profits and minimise costs and responsibilities.

5) The equation of manhood and masculinity with military-derived concepts of dominance.

What is Eurokleptomaniacal Thinking?

The erasure and demonisation of forms of thinking that honour the Earth’s intricate web of life and humanity as one part of that web, is intrinsic to the patriarchal nature of Eurokleptomaniacal thought. This is by definition, based on delusions such as the Church-led notion that beame pervasive in Europe, that women were consorting with the devil — this concocted nonsense had horrifying resutls: the torture and murder of millions of women, burnt as witches and their properties taken over by the priestly class of men and state power of princes. The stolen wealth — land and property of these women (often widowed or unmarried) was used to fund some of the early ‘voyages of discovery’ by Britain, Holland, Spain and Portugal , for example.

The resulting acts of piracy created capital accumulation as the basis for further incursions onto other continents. There have been massive genocides and enslavement of Black and Brown peoples over the course of some 400 years. This destruction has continued to the present day, with only slight variations in form.

The notion of white supremacy itself is likewise, a delusion. Notice how the category itself has changed over time, indicating that phenotypes matter less than many other facts, including simply what is expedient. The Irish, the Italians and Jewish people for instance, were regarded as outsiders to Whiteness and then labour shortages and their willingness to assimilate, won them acceptance in the Anglo-Saxon dominant hierarchy in the USA.

As recently as the turn of the 20th century, there were eminent scientists attached to universities, who wrote papers and books on the superiority of the white race, and who attributed deficiencies, such as a lower IQ, moral weakness and sexual depravity, as the genetic dispositions of Black people/people of colour.

Now, in case you are thinking that no-one believes in this eugenics nonsense any more, well, maybe not consciously but notice how in recent months, in 2022, a vast difference has emerged in how Ukrainian refugees escaping war are being treated in contrast to people from African or Arabic regions.

Here in the U.K people have been offering a room in their home, Ukrainian flags were hoisted up in the grounds of the local university where I live and in shops and even in parks, the blue and the yellow was everywhere to be seen. Yet anyone remember when praising the ANC or Nelson Mandela, would get you labelled an extremist? And only last year, kids were being sent home by a Leeds headmaster for displaying the Palestinian flag on an exercise book/bag.

Another example of Eurokleptomaniacal thinking is the Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D) policy whereby massive amounts of wealth and resources are diverted into producing nuclear weapons that could wipe out all life on earth several times over. Low level radiation is already having a devastating effect on the purity of air, water, soil and consequently, human and animal health, as documented by Dr Rosalie Bertell in her book, ’No Immediate Danger’.

The desire to accumulate wealth far beyond meeting actual needs, whether by individuals or by corporations, is another defining feature of the Eurokleptocene. Such avaricious motivations have resulted in widespread destruction of human life and the degradation of the environment, from the deliberate spreading of European diseases in the Americas, in the earlier stages of its occupation by swarms of European migrants, to say, the experimentations carried out on babies kidnapped from indigenous communities, to develop baby powder, as recently as the 1930’s in Canada. WHo knows how may died of malnutrition while the white scientists perfected the formula, whose profts would be shared between them and the University?

Also in the 20th century were horrors such as the experimentation on African-American men in Tuskegee. These involved infecting the men with syphilis (obviously without their knowledge or permission) and then observing the effects of the disease, while knowing it was being spread in their communities too. It can be said accordingly, that the practice and research of medicine has become harnessed to the greed for profit and the urge to dominate as much as the USA’s military itself. Further details can be read in the article below.

The horrific levels of suffering, the loss of life, and long term consequences of seeking profit are defining motifs of the Eurokleptocene era which is molded by a predominantly unconscious form of doublethinking that pervades Eurocentric scholarship, typically presenting itself as representative of humanity as a whole. (This is demonstrated in the use of the term, ’the Anthropocene’, for example). This posturing of Europeans as representing humanity is a falsehood as damaging as the notion of white superiority itself.

Another aspect of the doublethink inherent in Eurokleptomaniacal thought is its radical departure from a sense of responsibility for the well-being of future generations. Whilst indigenous thought on all the continents of the planet, has religious and ceremonial ways of honouring and affirming the rights of the ‘children who are yet in the soil, or ‘the rights of those, seven generations from now’, Eurokleptomaniacal thinking is defined by the seeking short term benefits with total disregard for the rights of future generations.

This posturing of Europeans as representing humanity is a falsehood as damaging as the notion of white superiority itself.

Of course, there are always exceptions to every rule. The term the ‘Eurokleptocene’, has explanatory efficacy in terms of what the overwhelming trends have been but thankfully it must also be affirmed that there were always individuals challenging white supremacist modes of thinking and action.

Those people acted as allies in defence of the humanity of peoples and Nature. So it was white Catholic missionaries from Ireland who took photographs of the atrocities in the Congo including the amputation of children’s hands, done to pressurise their parents to work harder to fulfil quotas the invaders set for the gathering of rubber. Imagine if you please, your crops and homes are burnt down, so you are rendered dependent on the maniacs who put you in chains and force you to tap trees for rubber all day long. If you fail to meet the quota they have set, your child’s hand is amputated as a punishment. And these are the people who have the audacity to lecture everyone else about their ‘rule of law’, their ‘advanced’ civilisation and their ‘Enlightenment’.

But what gives me hope are the individuals or small groups who defy these societal norms of the Eurokleptocene. So let’s also honour the small mostly very young band of Germans resisting Nazi propaganda, who called themselves the White Rose of Munich. Sophie Schon, her brother and others in the group faced the guillotine and execution for resisting fascism in the early 1940's.

The critique of Western science and industry given by Rachel Carson in her book, ‘Silent Spring’ could have wrought great changes if only the political systems of the West were not so corrupt and working hand in glove with corporate power.

Putting the greater good before her own safety, let’s remember the brave attempt by Karen Silkwood to expose the cover-ups by the nuclear industry in the USA.

Sadly such heroic individuals have been too often attacked, marginalised and silenced, as we are see most recently, concerning critics of USA/UK domination nowadays, such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Katherine Gunn and Julian Assange.

While these individuals have been or are under threat due to exposing war-related crimes there are organisations exposing the grip of maniacal corporate power that seems to be hell bent on profit no matter the cost to people and planet. Friends of the Earth International have been exposing the influence of corporations in sabotaging attempts to pull back from the impending extinction of a million species.

On 5th December 2022, FOE International published a new analysis titled: ‘The Nature of Business: Corporate Influence Over the Convention on Biological Diversity and the BioDiversity Framework”. This report highlights how corporate capture has ‘blocked, eliminated or corrupted efforts to prevent furhter biodiversity loss on the global scale, by influencing the Framework in ways that enable business profits to continue at the cost of continued species extinction.

Hemantha Withanage stated “We need rules and regulations to frame an agreement that would allow Peoples-led solutions to biodiversity loss and to regain momentum. Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities already protect 80% of existing biodiversity, and they often defend it with their lives”.

Rita Uwaka of Friends of the Earth, Africa declared:

“I ask governments to put communities and indigenous peoples first, we are colonized by big corporations, and now they want to capture our lands and nature. We need regulations and rules for corporation, the people should be at the center of this agreement, we need to protect the people not the shareholders.” (Sourced from a report by pressenza.com)

Only if many more people of White/Euro-American heritage join such courageous individuals and movements for social justice around the world, and thus, stand up for truth and justice against corporate interests and oligarchs, can the moral imperative of our age, be fulfilled: the need to turn back to the indigenous modes of being with and in Nature.

In the spirit of the Sudanese proverb, ‘A child is a child of everyone’, we must pull together to leave the world not a desert, or a flooded mess of poisons, but a life-giving oasis for our children.