Orgy of Western Atrocities Will Not Stop Until the World Decolonizes Information

The Empire's Last Colony Is Your Mind.

I want you to look at the photograph above.

I want you to look at it slowly. Read Kathy’s words. I want you to resist the impulse to scroll past, the reflex that has been trained into your fingers by a thousand algorithmic interactions designed to keep you numb, distracted, consuming.

This is a boy. He is smiling. His mother took this photograph the morning he left for school. She straightened his collar. Perhaps she kissed the top of his head. Perhaps she told him to behave, or handed him a snack wrapped in a napkin. She did what mothers do in Tehran and Toronto, in Minab and Hong Kong, in Gaza and Glasgow. She sent her child into the world and expected the world to send him back.

It didn’t.

Does this photograph bring tears to your eyes? Does something in your chest constrict? Do you feel, even for a fleeting second, the unfathomable weight of a mother’s grief — the kind of grief that bends time, that hollows out rooms, that turns a backpack hanging on a door hook into a reliquary of unspeakable pain?

If it does, it is because you have been confronted — perhaps for the first time, perhaps despite every effort of the machinery that governs your information — with the psychology and spirituality of our common humanity. You have been reminded of what you already know: that a child is a child, regardless of the passport they never asked for, the religion they were born into, or the color of the skin their mother caressed.

This recognition — this simple, primal act of seeing another human being as fully human — is precisely what has been systematically denied from you. And this denial is why the atrocities keep happening.