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Confronting the Mirror of Empire
For those of us of European ancestry, when we witness genocide, displacement, and imperial violence around the world and cry out, “This isn’t who we are,” or “What have we become?”, we must be willing to face a more sobering truth: this is exactly who we have been for centuries.
Our collective history is not one of peace and innocence interrupted by modern atrocities.
It is a long, continuous thread of conquest, colonization, slavery, and cultural erasure. These are not new horrors. They are old patterns, deeply etched into the fabric of Western civilization.
Our roots trace back to the Roman Empire, whose machinery of expansion was built on military conquest, enslavement, and systematic suppression of indigenous spiritualities and identities. The Celts, Gauls, Britons, and many other European tribal peoples were conquered, enslaved, and forcibly assimilated. Their sacred groves were cut down, their languages suppressed, and their gods replaced by Roman deities.
The Roman historian Tacitus recorded how the Roman governor Agricola aimed to “Romanize” the Britons, encouraging them to adopt Roman dress, customs, and language as a method of psychological conquest [1]
In this way, our own ancestors were colonized before many of us became colonizers. We fought against empire and then, slowly, became its next iteration.
The fall of Rome did not mark the end of this pattern. Instead, its legacy was inherited and rebranded. The Catholic Church rose as the next dominant imperial force, using religion to justify the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Doctrine of Discovery [2] [3], which sanctioned European domination over non-Christian lands.
As European powers like Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France expanded globally, they brought this ideology with them—enslaving Africans, committing genocide against Indigenous peoples in the Americas [5], and exploiting the labor and land of colonized populations from India to the Caribbean.
The systems of white supremacy, chattel slavery, and racial caste did not emerge in isolation. They were rationalized through religious and pseudoscientific propaganda that painted the colonized as savages, subhuman, or “less evolved.”
Propaganda has always been the companion of atrocity.
And now, in the 21st century, propaganda is no longer just tolerated, it’s legalized. In 2012, the United States repealed the Smith-Mundt Act via the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which effectively allowed domestic propaganda to be used legally by the government on its own people [7]. This means that much of what we are told about war, terror, and foreign policy has been shaped for our consent.
The reason so many are awakening now is not because this violence is new.
It’s because we are seeing it.
In Gaza, in the Congo, in Yemen, and in so many other places, the violence of empire is no longer hidden behind diplomatic language or distance. It is streamed in real-time, searing itself into our hearts and minds. The blood is no longer metaphorical. The cries are no longer muffled by borders.
The difference is not morality, but media.
And still, we must ask: why is there so little justice?
Is it because the systems responsible are not defeated? They are still in power. The only reason the Nazis faced the Nuremberg Trials is because they lost the war. When empires win, they write history. They grant themselves immunity. They define what counts as “war crimes” and what counts as “collateral damage.”
So yes—this is who we have been. It is the shadow of our inherited lineage.
But it doesn’t have to be who we remain.
Real change does not come from denial. It comes from reckoning. We must confront the truth that the comforts of the modern West have often been built on the backs of others. That our identities, religions, borders, and even our moralities have been shaped by a lineage of empire.
But we are not condemned to repeat history—unless we refuse to look at it.
We, the people—not our politicians, not our institutions—are the only ones who can break the spell. By resisting dehumanization in all forms. By dismantling the propaganda that numbs us to violence. By restoring memory, culture, and dignity to those long silenced. And by facing our own ancestral trauma, not just as victims of conquest but as its inheritors.
Let the grief come.
Let the rage come.
Let the remembrance come.
And let it not paralyze, but galvanize.
~
References
[1] Tacitus. Agricola. (1st century CE).
[2] Pope Nicholas V. Dum Diversas, 1452.
[3] Pope Alexander VI. Inter Caetera, 1493.
[4] Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.
[5] Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press.
[6] Loomba, A. (2005). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Routledge.
[7] NDAA 2013, Section 1078. Legalization of domestic propaganda in the United States.
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