Colonialism is hardly a thing of the past. It’s alive and vibrant as ever—from the Middle East to Western Europe to the United States to India and God knows where else. And it can be profitable as hell, at least for the right industries.

Be afraid. Be very afraid!

This is true especially if you belong to a wealthy, heavily armed nation—because your enemies are everywhere, clustering at your borders or, even worse, daring to claim possession of their ancestral land and inconveniencing your possession of it.

In an interview at Democracy Now, Anthony Lowenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, referred to the phenomenon as a “global Palestine.” That is to say, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and its current bombing of Lebanon—possibly the beginning of a devastating war in the Middle East—is just the most egregious example of the planet’s evolving colonialism in the present moment.

And as Lowenstein points out, the global link is both political and financial (not to mention racial). It doesn’t always morph into war, but violence and loss of life are always present in various ways.

Consider the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of surveillance towers have been installed over the last two decades, giving invaluable assistance to border patrol agents. As a recent Guardian story points out: “All along, officials have claimed the new technology would deter migration and help migrant safety, yet nearly 10,000 migrants have died crossing the border in the last 25 years, and the deaths are increasing.”

This is because migrants, fleeing hell in their homeland, are forced to take longer and more dangerous routes to the U.S. border, often with lethal consequences. Still, those who are in true danger, at least according to the “border protectors”—such as, for instance, surveillance-tower construction company Anduril—are the Americans. Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, for instance, said the company’s goal is to “radically transform the defense capabilities of the United States” via AI.

In other words, this is war. Rather than a global effort to address the causes of all the emigration occurring across the planet, the wealthy countries—the ones that have inherited the rewards of colonial conquest—are choosing to “protect” themselves from it. As Pedro Rios of the American Friends Service Committee has put it, according to the Guardian, “the framing of migration by media and politicians in war-like terms—such as ‘surge’ or ‘invasion’—drives more investment in border security.”

You know: Be afraid. Be very afraid. And of course, if the ones who are surveilled and/or occupied dare to fight back, they’re called terrorists.

Moving across the Atlantic, I note that the European Union has to........

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