“Every time Trump or members of his administration have lashed out at Europe, including Ukraine, Europeans have absorbed the blow with a forced smile and bent over backwards to flatter the White House.” (…)
“While a systemic answer to Europe’s security conundrum is not in sight, Europeans do have the levers to prevent Ukraine’s capitulation and create the conditions for a just peace.”
Since the question is clearly meant to be rethorical, but it seems none obvious to me:
It wasn’t rhetorical, it was meant to encourage you to question the current conditions the EU exists under because imperialism never ended despite the European assertion that everything is fine now because they feel bad about it. Yes, colonised people are part of the EU as they are part of ever fucking nation on this planet because of the scope of effect that trajectory of colonialism achieved. You’ll notice that Irish people are far more vocally decolonial than French or German people, how curious.
I do not care who was the naughtiest imperialist in the past – though that history teaches us a lot about how this system developed – because the EU is still fundamentally a colonial system. The dissonance many Europeans on these threads express is that their understanding of colonialism is conveniently drawn at the borders and exists on the scale of severity you described above. Notice how this understanding also positions the violence in the past, as though it functions to obscure the continuance of that violence. EU states invest in colonialism directly and foster corporations – which are also conveniently imagined as separate from formal organising despite neoliberal policies – that engage in colonialism. Pick any commodity around your house, and look up who owns the resources that built it. Where does your phone battery come from, the fish you eat, the oil that fuels your cities.
The world extends beyond your doorstep.
In other words Europeans are evil by default, so it is best to ignore any sort of complexities in it and treat all of them as the evil race of people they are, but you put it into some leftists speak to make yourself look not racist.
“Racism is when you say colonialism is bad.” It is wild to hear people unironically admit to identifying so strongly with an oppressive system that they cannot seperate themselves from it. There is no complexity in how you think.
Sir, that is the definition of a rhetorical question.
Anything is the definition of anything.