I lead a charmed life. My life has been governed by what some New Age spiritual teachers call “The Law of Attraction.” Simply put, the Law states that like attracts like. It holds that what consumes one’s thoughts eventually manifests in one’s life.
So, what has consumed my thoughts and attention?
As a theologian, teacher, and world-traveler, they have been focused on understanding the world (and especially spirituality) from the underside – not from the usual viewpoint of the rich and powerful, but as experienced by the world’s colonized, but the poor and oppressed.
And what has that attracted to me?
Almost unbidden, it has brought me extraordinary experiences throughout the former colonial world and Global South. It has attracted extended sojourns in Brazil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Mexico, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, and Israel-Palestine. Early on, during my graduate studies and their 5 years in Rome, I also found myself journeying throughout all the home countries of European colonizers in Italy, Great Britain, France, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany.
At every stop, I’ve had the privilege of working with and engaging in conversation scholars and activists much more informed than me about the ins and outs of colonialism.
All of that has helped me understand colonialism for what it is – a system of robbery. In the form that has shaped the world, it has had white Europeans and their descendants (a very small fraction of the world’s population) roaming the planet and subduing its entirety for purposes of transferring its wealth and resources to the so-called “Mother Countries.” As a result of colonialism, white Europeans and their descendants has prospered; those they’ve colonized have largely been impoverished.
My current stop in this rather automatic Odyssey has brought me to Granada in Spain a country that happens to be governed by a socialist coalition. Coming from a right-wing country like the United States, that’s noteworthy. Whereas, of course, there is not even a Labor Party in the U.S., Spain happens to be run by a left-wing coalition between the Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and an even further left anti-austerity party called PODEMOS (“Yes, We Can”).
For decades in this country, such development would have been undreamt of. This because Spain’s left-wing political shift follows hard upon a long period of extreme right-wing rule by the infamous Francisco Franco, who governed the country with an iron fist from 1936 to 1975.
Franco was a Fascist who allied himself with Hitler and Mussolini during World War II.
After the war, his anti-communism secured unwavering support for his regime from the United States which is always more friendly towards fascism than socialism.
To establish and maintain his power wielded on behalf of landowners, industrialists, and the Catholic Church, Franco slaughtered more than 200,000 Spanish workers, trade unionists, teachers, intellectuals, and others who sided with the country’s poor and disenfranchised.
Over the next few months, I want to find out more about that. I also want to get a better idea of what’s really happening here in Europe generally. To that end, I’ll be talking to as many people as I can about these matters.
In the short term, I anticipate that my principal dialog partner will be a language teacher I’ll be employing to help me recover my fluency in Spanish. I’ll keep you posted here.
About Things That Matter 