The Wretched of the Earth.

Amongst the many Third World people still fighting their way out of the rubble of advanced colonialism, and among political minorities in the west generally, there is terrific suspicion and hostility towards suggestions of any “religious solutions” to the world’s real problems.
This anger and doubt is understandable, and thoroughly justified. For centuries they have stifled and conquered the whole of humanity in the name of the so- called Christian religious experience.

“They” of course, refers to the Christian West. The “so-called religious experience” has been that of a dominating European and American male elite (with their auxiliary “wives” and families), which has for three centuries proceeded to “realize” its pathological lust for individual power and enrichment at the expense of the rest of the world. Western patriarchy has plundered, raped, plundered, ripped off, brutalized and massacred lavishly, always in the name of God – “God” is always available to justify what cannot otherwise be justified; the Holy Bible itself is the first written example of this phenomenon.

Western Christians, throughout their long gory history, have convinced themselves that this God virtually gave them the entire earth to use, to control, to profit from and in the final insult, to missionize – to teach “spirit” to!—through, a rifle barrel, if necessary. It is a kind of dematerialized fairy tale Christians have long and wistfully told themselves; that the living earth is not “real” anyway, so “God” gave it to them to abstract into wealth (which is quite real).

The entire planet, with its exotic varieties of peoples, lands, animals, and resources, has been viewed by Western Christianity as little more than raw material, just waiting to be appropriated and reprocessed by enterprising religious men into an ego-enhancing experience. Because, clearly, the God in whose name the west has terrorized the rest of the world has not been a God spirit, not ever, but a God of inflated, religious ego; an ego so full of itself it has always been able to “spiritualize” – i.e., rationalize as “divinely ordained” – the most blatant robberies and repulsive crimes. –Franz Fanon