Anyway, All The Dogs Are Howling a POSSIBLE FUTURES Podcast Exploration 1: Basics Conversation 2: “Global South” More on this POSSIBLE FUTURES podcast at https://decolonise.possiblefutures.earth/anyway Samantha Suppiah: Hi, this is Samantha Suppiah and you are a fly on the wall here amongst the POSSIBLE FUTURES Collective. Ecocide. Genocide. Ethnocide. Epistemicide. These are the four colonial harms we consider at POSSIBLE FUTURES, to help us recognise and assess where coloniality is situated in any context, and how it operates. For example, we are speaking English today because of British colonial supremacy in centuries past, and because of United States imperial supremacy today. We are speaking in English today in a global context where the colonial world order, created and maintained by our mostly European ruling classes, is rapidly imploding. In case you haven't noticed, modern Western civilisation is splintering into unrecogniseable fragments before our very eyes. It is in this context that we are talking about the rise of the Global South, no longer commonly referred to as the "developing world". Western liberals lean into other terms like "majority world" or "rest of the world". Sustainability and regeneration professionals are desperate to engage so-called "indigenous wisdom" as they begin to realise the vast limitations of colonial sustainability. The cesspool of colonial ignorance, misappropriation and co-optation is massive. It is filled with insulting terminologies and ignorant usage of words – that might come across as more appropriate. As usual, context is king. There is no such thing as a definitively inappropriate, insulting or harmful term. It all depends on how words are used, who uses them, and for what purpose. As a Crew we've had to learn the hard way how coloniality co-opts liberation through words, faking meanings and futures to garner and retain approval, validation, reward, and, by extension, how convenient, power structures. Is it doublethought or doublespeak? Are we lying to each other or lying to ourselves? Where does accountability lie? How do we appropriately correct mistakes? First and foremost, respectful use of terminologies starts with awareness, self-interrogation and self-regulation. How can one become aware of colonial harms in terminologies through awareness? How can one grow habits of self-interrogation? And how can one take public responsibility through self-regulation? It always comes down to how coloniality profits from how terms are used and abused. — Anna Denardin: You asked if this is doublethink or doublespeak. I think it is both. Doublethink is a form of mental manipulation where individuals can hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously. Like knowing sustainability conferences are sponsored by oil companies, but still applauding net zero pledges. It’s the art of selective forgetting, and then even forgetting the forgetting process. Doublespeak is the language that props it up. Euphemism, jargon, and vague terms to obscure the truth or make unpleasant things sound more palatable. It’s the greenwashing, diversity-washing, the resilient strategies and stakeholder engagements that serve as deodorant for decay, corporate poetry for continued exploitation. Mastering the new buzzword becomes a moral performance as if using the right term is the same as doing the work. In 1984, Orwell describes entire departments devoted to “newspeak”, a controlled language designed to narrow the range of thought by scrubbing old words, banning others, inventing new ones. That constant churn was about control. If you can destabilize meaning, you can paralyze action. Confusion and distraction becomes a governance strategy. I see the parallel now with this hypersensitivity around terms. This breeds a culture of entitlement where people expect others to use the “right terms” as if language was a personal service owed to them, and claim a moral high horse through linguistic compliance instead of action. It’s narcissism. That’s how coloniality keeps winning, it shifts the battlefield into the terrain of semantics, where people can compete for purity points without ever changing material conditions. And this is not only imposed from above through propaganda or education. It’s self imposed through cognitive dissonance, denial and willful blindness to prioritise self comfort. In Orwell’s world, people learned doublespeak and doublethink partly because they were watched by Big Brother and there was a threat of punishment, so yes, enforcement mechanisms existed. But eventually, people policed themselves, not only due to fear, but due to peer pressure and a desire to fit in or gain status within the party. So, are we lying to each other or lying to ourselves? I think both. We lie to each other to feed illusions of false belonging, and we lie to ourselves to feed false identities. One lie buys false community, the other buys false comfort, and both keep the colonial machine running, efficient, well oiled, soul crushing. — Luiza Oliveira: Double think, double speak, created from the double standard of the dissonant colonial logic that, due to its violent control mechanisms, cultivate confusion, paralysis and compliance through false belonging, false identity, false community, as you both just mentioned. Hegemonic thinking erases context, complexity and nuance, under the unification motto, mining what actually makes us strong, our various ways of thinking, being and doing. This colonial logic is also applied in the way we communicate, and how we learn to communicate, as Samantha mentioned in the beginning. Coloniality profits from the standardisation of language, also informing who is allowed to speak, and how. Who carries value when they speak, and who will be automatically erased when they try to speak. Coloniality also cultivates paralysis, to incentivise people to continue to avoid seeing how political their acts are, including their silence, profiting from their "indifference", to maintain those in power, with their systems in place. And this is where self-interrogation is a crucial practice that needs to be developed if you want to break colonial cycles. — Samantha Suppiah: Yup, that is precisely how coloniality keeps winning and keeping us mentally enslaved, politely compliant. Self-policing and the art of self-gaslighting. An elaborate superficial performance tending to the nanolayer of the false self, to convince oneself that things are acceptable, comfortable, and there is really no need to rock the boat. If every individual in that society tells themselves that, despite their own experiences of mistreatment, injustice and outright abuse, then they must also participate in the charade wholeheartedly, in which their experiences are normal. Mistreatment is normal. Injustice is normal. Abuse is normal. Thereby enslaving each other through mutually unspoken understanding, begging for treats from our slavemasters, because compliance is normal. And if we step outside of this self-policed, self-regulated compliance, we are shamed and blamed for the abuse inflicted upon us. As though we are abominations to seek and build systems of justice, of anti-oppression. It is in this realm that we are all too easily sabotaged and manipulated. We are already putting ourselves on the back foot, seeking to people-please for validation by those upheld by coloniality, by white supremacy. No wonder we are primed to accept control when we are pushed to do so. We've been trained to do so all our lives. And so we end up with non-white Westerners in the Global North grandstanding on LinkedIn declaring, "I am not Global South". In their posts, they romanticise their own experiences of their histories, their cultures, and their lands, ignoring centuries of decolonial struggle and revolution, sweeping under the rug the immense price paid by their ancestors in their movement towards sovereignty, to be free once more, free from colonialism and imperialism, to be free from work, labour, capitalism. And they write that the term "Global South" flattens their identities. As though it were a pronoun to announce that others refer to you by. These posts are celebrated by thousands of white people in this declaration, with hundreds of colonised and racialised people chiming in to give and receive this same validation from coloniality. In the same fell swoop, the authors of these posts insult a broad diversity of actors within the global decolonial movement, including nation states themselves, that use the term "Global South" to refer to anti-colonial, anti-imperial collaboration, organisation and solidarity – a unified global effort against colonisation and imperialism at the international level. Because that is where power lies: concerted narratives and organised action. Liberal hegemony prefers to denounce it as a mere identity matrix to promote Western individualisation and romanticisation. A colonial trap many fall into because it feeds the egotistical false self by bringing narcissist supply. Because words are easily weaponised by what Anna referred to as "linguistic compliance". — Anna Denardin: Luiza mentioned about this colonial propaganda tactic where you don't need to speak to those who are pro-something or anti-something, you just need to keep people who are neutral to stay neutral, benefiting from their so-called “indifference” or “impartiality”. We are also touching on another tactic here: keeping those who are already pro- or anti-something confused and distracted, because that leads to paralysis and inefficiency. The Global North decolonial movement — especially the privileged LinkedIn rhetoric and “decolonisation of the mind” fields — is often mined with this kind of confusion. Samantha highlighted the “I am not Global South” trend as a clear example of this. In this case, people building critiques of the term as if it were a simple geographic label. Global South does not only describe location; it is not merely a way to locate colonised countries relative to the North. Yet people so easily buy into this performative nonsense. How do we get good at combating this in service of true decolonisation? Samantha emphasized that respectful use of terminology starts with awareness, self-interrogation, and self-regulation. Developing habits of awareness means understanding how systems of colonisation and coloniality operate by researching and informing oneself on the mechanisms, the dynamics, the strategies of coloniality to infiltrate even its alternatives. This allows one to approach ideas critically and to separate with more precision and clarity what is substantive from what is performative or manipulative. You become better at avoiding the traps. Self regulation entails a continuous process of assessing coloniality within any given context. Luiza posed some questions that can be really helpful in that. I normally find that setting questions for yourself that you can constantly come back to, to check assumptions and biases, can be a really helpful process. Self regulation entails creating, implementing and iterating strategies to regulate and address coloniality. Iterating on strategies means testing them and continuously nudging them, considering that by testing, mistakes will happen. So there also needs to be a practice of skilling up in acknowledging mistakes and harms caused, and making amends by addressing them respectfully and appropriately, practicing accountability and more healthy ways of relating. — Luiza Oliveira: Exactly, Anna, healthy ways of relating. For me, this is a key element that requires practice and care, and can help break from the isolation and confusion created by coloniality, in appropriate ways. Fostering healthy ways of relating is what makes empty and co-opted terminology to become very clear, exposing how colonial discourses are not based either in experience nor grounded in context, but in fake scenarios. As we were talking before about the false sense of identity, false sense of belonging and false sense of community. There are many ways to relate centering care & health. And for me, there are some aspects that are central to these relationships, that make them healthy. Like, holding each other accountable, taking responsibility for individual and collective continual learning, practicing and skilling up, as you mentioned. Knowing that each person brings different experiences, and are part of various contexts, and these differences are opportunities for learning, and unlearning, and not badges for entitlement. In healthy contexts, performative interactions show their true selves, characterised by fragile egotistical transactions, a black hole thirsty for narcissistic validation, expecting that a never ending chain of supply will maintain itself in a position of power over everything else, and of course, forever. I mean, any similarity with modern economic models is not a coincidence. And as you both mentioned, to practice awareness, self-interrogation, and self-regulation committed to decolonisation is not a list of things to do, or a recipe on how you should behave or relate. For me, to commit to decolonisation is a life-long process to continue to learn, and unlearn, risking making mistakes and holding oneself accountable to take responsibility and making amends, while navigating colonial traps, dismantling colonial patterns and cycles, while developing healthy relationships through practice. — Samantha Suppiah: Recap: coloniality wins when confusion is fostered because this allows Western hegemony and soft power to saturate, dominate and pressure. Coloniality also wins when so-called decolonial perspectives use colonial methodologies in an effort to educate colonisers. Newsflash, the so-called education is extremely limited, while the effect of engaging you in colonial behaviours and ways of being is guaranteed. Worth it? Terms like "developing world", "Global South", and "indigenous wisdom" need to be perceived and assessed in the context of broader power structures that actually matter, be it on cultural, legal, material, or geopolitical levels. Not narcissist ideologies that you can choose to identify with or not like a fashion accessory to breed confusion and allow the infiltration of Western hegemony. Indigenous leaders around the world need to be clearer about the point they've been making for centuries. You want "indigenous wisdom" to help regenerate the planet you destroyed? Then go to decolonial tables and cut deals. Indigenous leaders have been demanding security guarantees, apologies, rights, the return of stolen wealth and lands, compensation for colonial atrocities, and broad cultural respect so that indigenous folk stop being used and abused. Rich brown women in Global South countries with your soft neutrals ethically-branded cosmetics businesses exploiting middle-class and economically disempowered folk while profiting off indigenous knowledges to fund your megacity condo apartment, are you listening? Bank-backed brown men commodifying architectural heritage you never grew up around but claim to identify with simply because of national borders drawn by your colonisers, have you gone deaf stuffing your ears with too much white validation? Or are you both too busy talking about how insulted you feel to have your identities flattened by being referred to as Global South? — Anna Denardin: Samantha, you just ripped the mask off and slapped directly in the face. As you said in the beginning, it always comes down to how coloniality profits from how terms are used and abused. When people that are born in the Global South, but spend most of their lives in the Global North, enter elite institutions, and leverage their heritage as professional currency, claiming to be decolonial — while lacking even the basic understanding that ‘Global South’ is not a geographic label — this is exactly what Fanon warned us about. The oppressed can become the oppressor the moment they adopt colonial logic to gain proximity to whiteness, to Western legitimacy, or elite approval. Being part of a web of reciprocity is what defines culture and tradition. When you remove yourself from that reciprocity, and only participate in the final benefit, that is not culture. That's colonial outsourcing. It’s entitlement disguised as identity. This is the twisted logic that coloniality feeds us: convincing confused individuals that they are participating in their culture, when in fact they are fueling ethnocide and epistemicide. It is easier to lie to oneself, to pretend that your participation in culture is intact, even as the practices, the context and the relationships that once held it together are severed. So where does accountability lie? In reckoning with our colonial complicity and privilege. In addressing heritage confusion. In supporting Indigenous sovereignty instead of raiding Indigenous lifeways and offering them as a service to benefit colonial powers. — POSSIBLE FUTURES Crew: This is Luiza Oliveira. This is Samantha Suppiah. This is Anna Denardin. Anyway, all the dogs are howling.