The European Aberration, Part I: The West Was Never Civilized

The West Was Never Civilized

I was raised on the myths. Like so many of us born inside the belly of the beast, I was taught to see the West as the center of the world—reason’s homeland, freedom’s forge, history’s chosen child. We pledged allegiance. We memorized dates. We were told that “civilization” was a gift that Europe gave to the world. What we weren’t told was that it was soaked in blood.

Let’s speak plainly. The West didn’t rise to power because it was wiser, more virtuous, or more advanced. It rose through conquest, slavery, and theft. Western civilization was not the cradle of progress—it was the furnace of empire. All that marble and music, all that philosophy and finance—it sat on top of massacres. And behind it all was capitalism: the engine that turned genocide into GDP.

Capitalism didn’t come after Europe’s greatness. It made Europe “great.” It was through capitalism—through the plantation, the colony, the factory, and the bank—that Europe carved itself into a global power. This wasn’t a story of innovation. It was a story of invasion.

And as capitalism expanded, it needed a story to justify the carnage. That story was whiteness. Capitalism made white people supreme—not by nature, not by culture, but by force. It built a global color line that marked who could be worked, who could be whipped, who could be wasted. Whiteness wasn’t a skin tone. It was a badge of entitlement. A license to steal.

I was taught to believe in that system. Taught that progress was European, that order was Western, that wealth came from hard work instead of hard plunder. But I defected. Not out of guilt, but out of clarity. Because I came to understand that the world I was born into only exists because others were burned to the ground.

White supremacy wasn’t some leftover from a darker time—it was the architecture of the system. And that system—the capitalist empire of the West—is not malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do: extract, exploit, erase.

So no, I’m not interested in saving the West. I’m not here to apologize for it either. I’m here to unmask it. To betray it. Because if we want a world beyond racial violence, beyond poverty, beyond the endless war on life itself—we’re going to have to bury the West with our own hands.

This series is a weapon. It’s written for the colonized, the dispossessed, the ones who never forgot what the empire made us forget. It’s a warning to those still trapped in its illusions. And it’s a signal to those of us breaking ranks: the only way forward is through the rubble.

The West is dying. Good. Our task is not to save it. Our task is to finish it—and build something beautiful from the ashes.

Capitalism as the Soul of the West

I used to think capitalism was just economics. Supply and demand. Buying and selling. The stuff of textbooks and suits. What no one told me—what no classroom dared whisper—was that capitalism is war by other means. Not a market system, but a global battlefield dressed up as a boardroom.

The West didn’t invent capitalism after it conquered the world. Capitalism was how it conquered the world. It wasn’t an accident—it was the plan. Europe didn’t rise because it innovated. It rose because it invaded. It built wealth by draining continents dry, stripping the land, stealing labor, and stacking bodies from Congo to Calcutta. The “West” is what happened when capital put on armor and sailed out to steal the future.

And no, this wasn’t just greed. It was a whole worldview. Capitalism taught that land is property. That time is money. That people are labor. That nothing—not the earth, not the sacred, not even life itself—matters unless it can be bought, sold, or broken down into parts. This is the soul of the West: strip it, price it, own it.

They called it progress. They called it modernity. But I see it now for what it is: organized theft at planetary scale. A system so cold it needs myths to warm it. That’s where Western “civilization” came in—not to temper capitalism, but to excuse it. Its philosophers wrote the justifications. Its scientists calculated the extractions. Its theologians baptized the violence. Its artists painted over the graves.

Capitalism never worked alone. It needed a mask. So the West built one. “Democracy.” “Freedom.” “Civilization.” Words polished until they sparkled, used to hide what was really happening: the brutal accumulation of power through global racial terror. The West didn’t spread ideas—it spread markets. And those markets moved on slave ships.

Every great European power—Spain, Britain, France, Portugal—was an empire of merchants and murderers. And behind every nation’s rise was a mountain of bodies and a ledger of profits. Wall Street was built on slavery. London was built on Bengal’s bones. Paris lit its streets with Haitian sugar.

Capitalism is not a phase of Western civilization. It is its deepest expression. Its natural language. Its reason for being. It is the skeleton beneath the suit, the beast beneath the crown. You can’t extract it from the West because it is the West.

And yet, they still sell us dreams of reform. Inclusive capitalism. Ethical capitalism. “Green” capitalism, as if the system that devoured the world can somehow heal it. I’ve heard these lies. I repeated them once. But now I know better. You don’t recycle a death machine. You shut it down.

To destroy capitalism is not to destroy an economy—it is to destroy a worldview. It is to break with the entire structure of Western supremacy: the greed, the hierarchy, the cold rationality that measures life by profit and weighs justice by cost. This isn’t about balance. It’s about rupture. Revolution. Renewal.

So let’s be clear: we won’t end white supremacy without ending capitalism. And we won’t end capitalism without putting the West itself on trial. Because the West didn’t go wrong. It went exactly as planned.

The world it built is killing us. The time has come to build something else.

Before the Empire Went Global: How the West Devoured Its Own

Before Europe sent its ships across the sea, before it drew maps of other people’s lands and called them “discoveries,” it turned inward. The West didn’t begin by colonizing the world—it began by colonizing itself.

I wasn’t taught that in school. I was taught that Western civilization was a steady march of progress: Rome, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, then global leadership. But the truth is, the foundation was blood—and the first to bleed were Europe’s own poor, heretics, peasants, and fringe nations.

England enclosed its commons, tossing peasants off ancestral land to make way for sheep and profit. Scotland was cleared. Ireland was occupied. Wales was subdued. The Highlands were burned. These weren’t policy reforms—they were counterinsurgency campaigns. The first laboratories of land theft and racialized hierarchy were not in Africa or the Americas. They were in the Celtic fringe.

Ireland, in particular, was the empire’s testing ground. English lords developed plantation schemes there before exporting them to the Caribbean. The Irish were racialized as subhuman long before Africans were put in chains. What worked in Ulster would soon be perfected in Barbados.

Meanwhile, on the continent, the Inquisition waged war on difference. Jews, Muslims, mystics, midwives—anyone outside the rigid orthodoxy—was purged in fire and sword. The Spanish Reconquista wasn’t just religious conquest. It was settler colonialism inside Europe itself. The logic was simple: cleanse the land, unify the crown, sanctify supremacy.

And then came the prisons, the workhouses, the debtor’s dungeons. The criminalization of poverty. The invention of “vagrancy” as a crime against property. The poor were no longer people—they were labor reservoirs, idle threats, future convicts. The empire didn’t just conquer territory—it engineered obedience.

Indentured servitude emerged in this crucible. England and other European powers shipped off their poor to the colonies, packaging desperation as opportunity. Many of the first settlers in North America were the unwanted—castoffs from a society that had no use for them except as fodder for empire. They were not “white” in the way the category would soon solidify. They were hungry, disposable, and expendable.

But here’s the cruel genius of it all: some of them were given an escape hatch. As African slavery took root in the colonies, European servants—especially Anglo-Protestants—were slowly granted land, wages, and, most importantly, whiteness. In return, they were expected to police the new color line. A settler class was born—not just to build empire, but to defend it.

This is how Europe consolidated itself—not through dialogue and development, but through internal conquest. The state was forged in fire. The masses were tamed by hunger and spectacle. The margins were silenced or erased. And when the machinery was running smoothly, they turned it outward.

So when we talk about Western civilization, let’s be clear: it began with colonization—of land, of belief, of body—and the first victims spoke European tongues. The West didn’t civilize the world. It practiced domination on its own poor, then exported it globally with sharper tools.

This wasn’t just history. It was rehearsal. A dress rehearsal for global empire. A masterclass in how to turn people into property, community into capital, and culture into obedience. That’s what the West perfected at home—and then inflicted everywhere else.

The empire began with its own children. Some of us are breaking ranks. The war didn’t start overseas. It started in the village.

The Blood Behind the Marble

I was taught to admire it. The columns. The statues. The museums. The books bound in leather and gold. The “great achievements” of Western civilization. The Parthenon, the Magna Carta, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. I was taught to see them as sacred—proof of a higher moral order, a nobler lineage. But no one told me about the corpses buried beneath the foundations.

No one mentioned that every marble monument in Europe is a gravestone. That every “great man” of history stood on the backs of the enslaved. That the Enlightenment was drafted in slave ports. That “liberty” was declared with a musket in one hand and shackles in the other.

We’re supposed to believe that Western civilization gave the world democracy, science, and reason. But the world already had those things. Africa had complex governance. The Americas had astronomy and architecture. Asia had philosophy and medicine. What the West brought to the world was something else: smallpox, chains, debt, and death.

That’s what lies behind the marble: centuries of organized plunder. The British Museum is a hall of stolen goods. The Louvre is built on colonial looting. The university is a laundromat for imperial ideology. These aren’t accidents. They’re the infrastructure of empire, dressed up as culture.

They call it “civilization,” but it was conquest. They call it “progress,” but it was pillage. They call it “modernity,” but it was mass death. And the beauty of it all—the art, the architecture, the literature—is used to hide the bodies. Western culture didn’t transcend its violence. It refined it.

I see it clearly now. Civilization didn’t rise above barbarism—it mechanized it. Turned it into policy. Into contracts. Into currency. The genocide of Indigenous nations was called “settlement.” The mass rape of Africa was called “commerce.” The occupation of the globe was called “order.” That’s the Western genius: murder with paperwork.

And yet, the world believed it. The colonized were forced to worship the thief. To learn his language. To memorize his gods. To thank him for their own dispossession. That was the final act of violence: epistemicide—the killing of other ways of knowing. Of seeing. Of being.

That’s what this “civilization” does. It burns your house, then teaches you how to rebuild it in its image. It guts your traditions, then gives you textbooks on “development.” It kills your ancestors, then sells you a ticket to see their bones in a glass case.

But the truth doesn’t stay buried forever. The blood leaks through the marble. The stolen voices begin to rise. And the descendants of empire’s children—some of us raised on its lies—begin to break ranks.

I don’t mourn for Western civilization. I mourn for what it destroyed. And I fight for what comes after. Because buried under the ruins of conquest are seeds. Seeds of a different world—one not built on domination, but dignity. One that remembers. One that heals. One that lives.

No Accident, No Redemption

Let’s cut through the noise. The West didn’t lose its soul. It never had one. What it did have was a plan—a brutal, brilliant, blood-soaked plan—and it carried it out with precision. The genocide, the slavery, the world wars, the debt traps, the drone strikes, the disappearing forests, the dying seas—none of it was an accident. It was the price of progress. And the West was always willing to make someone else pay it.

I was raised to believe there was a good West and a bad West. That somewhere behind the wars and the Wall Streets was a real set of values—freedom, dignity, reason. But I don’t believe that anymore. Because I’ve seen the ledger. I’ve seen what was done to build this order, and I know what’s still being done to maintain it. And I’ve come to the only conclusion that makes sense: Western civilization is not broken. It’s fulfilled.

Everything they call “reform” is a distraction. Every version of capitalism they try to dress in green or rainbow colors is still the same system—just with new slogans. Every appeal to Western values is a lie written on the back of a colonized corpse. There is no going back to some imagined moral center. There is no reformation coming. There is only rupture.

You can’t save what was built to kill. You can’t humanize a machine that was designed to extract. You can’t decolonize a civilization whose very logic is colonization. And you can’t dismantle white supremacy while keeping the system that made whiteness supreme.

We’ve now laid the foundation. We’ve seen how Europe rose not through genius but through theft. How capitalism was not an evolution but a weapon. How the West practiced on its own poor before exporting its methods worldwide. How it built a culture to conceal its crimes and called it civilization. What comes next is not a search for redemption. It’s the beginning of a deeper memory—one that was never fully erased.

Because while the West was building pyramids of profit on bones, others were watching. Others were warning. Others were remembering what it meant to be human. The colonized did more than survive—they prophesied. They resisted. They preserved entire worlds that the West tried to burn. And they carried those worlds forward—not as nostalgia, but as blueprints for another future.

That’s where we go next. To the voices the West tried to silence. To the cosmologies it tried to destroy. To the ancestors who saw this coming—and who never gave up on life. The ones who told us: this world will end in flames if it does not return to balance.

Part I ends here—with a truth too dangerous for textbooks: the West is not a model to be saved, but a warning to be heeded. It cannot be fixed. It must be finished.