colonialism

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – the annual Alpine gathering of the global elite – to declare that now is “not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism”.

This, of course, was a reference to the current ambitions of Macron’s counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, who, in addition to recently kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to seize the Panama Canal, has made a great deal of noise about taking over the self-governing Danish territory of Greenland.

Trump himself took to the podium in Davos on Wednesday for a typically rambling speech, during which he alternately babbled about windmills, snidely complimented Macron on his “beautiful” reflective sunglasses, and declared that he would not “use force” in the acquisition of Greenland – which he also accidentally referred to as Iceland.

Indeed, Trump’s designs on the island have got Europe’s panties in a bunch, and the European Parliament has announced its unequivocal condemnation of “the statements made by the Trump administration regarding Greenland, which constitute a blatant challenge to international law, to the principles of the United Nations Charter and to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a NATO ally”.

Following Macron’s intervention at Davos, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that European leaders had “lined up” in opposition to the “new colonialism” denounced by the French leader.

Now, it goes without saying that the categorically demented Trump should by no means be encouraged in his predatory international endeavours. But it bears pointing out that, when it comes to colonialism and imperialism, Europe is hardly one to talk.

Let’s start with France, which continues to rule a dozen territories scattered across the globe – many of them marketed as exotic holiday destinations – including the Guadeloupe islands in the Caribbean Sea and the archipelago of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.

While these territories have officially moved beyond lowly colonial status to bona fide departments of the French Republic and thereby part of the European Union, France can’t seem to shake the old patronising imperial mindset and attendant superiority complex.

When in December 2024, residents of cyclone-ravaged Mayotte – France’s poorest overseas territory – criticised the ineffective government response to the disaster, Macron charmingly snapped: “If it wasn’t for France, you would be in way deeper s***, 10,000 times more.”

How’s that for some “new colonialism”?

As for the tried-and-true “old” colonialism, France has a particularly appalling track record on that front, as well. Recall the case of Algeria, where some 1.5 million Algerians were killed during the 1954-62 war for independence from French rule.

Although Macron previously acknowledged that French colonisation of the North African country was a “crime against humanity” that was characterised by rampant torture and other brutality, he has consistently refused to offer a formal French apology.

But it’s not just France. Plenty of other European powers who are suddenly against colonialism also possess impressively savage legacies worldwide.

Indeed, from Africa to Asia to the Middle East and beyond, it’s difficult to find so much as a speck of land that has not been affected in some way or other by past centuries of European plunder, enslavement, mass killing, and similar atrocities.

The Spaniards decimated Indigenous populations across the Americas, Britain wreaked imperial havoc wherever it possibly could, and King Leopold II of Belgium presided over the deaths of 10 million or so Congolese starting in 1885, when he established the “Congo Free State” as his own personal property.

In 2022, Belgian King Philippe offered his “deepest regrets” for the abuses that transpired during the colonial era but withheld an official apology. As one article on the occasion of the non-apology noted, life in the Congo Free State was such that “villages that missed rubber collection quotas were notoriously made to provide severed hands instead”.

Over in Ethiopia, meanwhile, British historian Ian Campbell estimates that 19-20 percent of the Ethiopian population of Addis Ababa was wiped out over a mere three days during the Italian military occupation of East Africa in 1937.

The list of European atrocities goes on.

This is not, of course, meant as a suggestion that Trump should therefore have free rein to commit whatever crimes or plunder he pleases. It is simply a friendly reminder that you can’t be selectively opposed to colonialism. (Greenland, by the way, was a full-out colony of Denmark until not so long ago.)

Speaking of colonial atrocities, Europe has not, over the course of more than two years of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, managed to be sufficiently up in arms over the mass slaughter, preferring to go the route of superficial criticism and de facto complicity.

As the killing continues under the guise of a US-brokered ceasefire, Gaza is now, per the Trumpian vision, set to be administered by a so-called “Board of Peace” chaired by – who else? – Trump himself.

Also participating on the board will be Israeli prime minister and genocidaire extraordinaire Benjamin Netanyahu, which no doubt heralds a “new colonialism” of the most sinister variety.

Unfortunately for the world, however, blood-soaked hypocrisy is nothing new.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Leave it to slow cinema auteur Lav Diaz (2013’s four-hour “Norte, The End of History”) to serve you colonialism in real time, in all its stark ugliness and mind-curdling greed, but also alongside a sense of wonderment. The Filipino filmmaker’s 163-minute epic “Magellan,” starring Gael García Bernal as the 16th century Portuguese explorer, is a regimen and a cure simultaneously, correcting a conqueror narrative that has too often centered on excitement and unfettered might over the madness of such endeavors.

With a breathtaking eye for one-shot scenes and unwavering confidence in the demands he makes on our monkey-brained attention spans, Diaz has crafted a stunning piece of time travel, its languidness and exquisitely hued imagery working in perfect sync. As arthouse fare goes, “Magellan” counts as accessible if you’re familiar with Diaz’s stately, intimate work, but also serves as an ideal introduction to his uncompromising vision.

A nude Indigenous woman rummages in a picturesque rainforest river, then collapses in shock at something witnessed off camera. “I saw a white man!” she warns her people. Shortly after, we see horrific tableaux of slaughtered bodies on the bloodied, gently lapping shores and verdant inland of the Malaysian peninsula, which was conquered by the Portuguese in 1511.

Ferdinand Magellan (Bernal) was then only a cog in his country’s subjugation machinery, but this crewman has ambitions for future campaigns. They’re not necessarily aligned with his superiors’ venal greed, expressed feverishly in a victory speech by a hammered conquistador: “We will suffocate the entire world! Islam will finally disappear!” (Then he passes out.) But as we’ll eventually see, the need to dominate does things to men’s souls.

A few years later, scorned by the king, Magellan is limping around Lisbon like a scruffy, taskless animal. He eventually finds favor with Spain for his grand journey, mapping an uncharted route to the East’s spice islands, which means leaving behind his pregnant wife, Beatriz (Angela Azevedo). That legendary multiyear circumnavigation, a 45-minute sequence marked by paranoia, hallucinations, death, disease, starvation, groaning silence and crushing despair, makes for one of the most casually brutal depictions of transoceanic voyaging ever committed to film. Mesmerizingly severe yet still streaked with glimpses of natural beauty, the sequence practically trains you to listen for the seabirds that spark the eventual scream of “Land!” Devoid of music or melodrama, this is slow cinema at its most viscerally rigorous and patient.

It also sets up the acute psychology that drives Magellan: obsessive curiosity warping into enforced Christian conversion, a consequential folly to which the filmmaker adds his own historical take. Up till then, Bernal, without the conventional assistance of close-ups, registers this feature-length change with brilliant subtlety across Diaz’s and co-cinematographer Artur Tort’s captivating, distanced long takes, often marked by angled perspectives.

Magellan’s occupier’s mentality is pointedly contrasted with the movie’s other key figure, Enrique (Arjay Babon), whose journey from purchased Malay slave to assimilated translator is a harrowing portrait of unrooted ache. Spiritual wailing is common in “Magellan,” whether from Enrique in his moments alone or from the invaded Indigenous pleading for help, or back in Portugal, from the black-clad wives who line the beach, waiting for word of their husbands’ fate. Time stretches punishingly throughout this masterful “Magellan,” foregrounding the painful legacy of colonialism and prioritizing a raw splendor that can never truly be conquered.