Discerning colonial terms
Language is a hegemonic tool—And these common expressions reek of colonialism.
Oppressive structures don't just monopolize violence, they also impose cultural hegemony. This includes normalizing words and expressions that shape the way we view or analyze reality. The following expressions, for example, reek of colonialism.
World War 1 and 2
As mentioned in my article "Freeing the world from colonial institutions", the first of these wars was not a world war but a European war. Of course, Europeans called it a world war because non-Europeans didn't really exist in their eyes (of course, in some cases we actually didn't exist after they genocided us). The second "world" war was also a war of the global North's colonial powers. The role of the Global South in it was mostly limited to being a battlefield or providing soldiers for the "Commonwealth" (another misleading colonial term).
The European Continent
Britannica defines a continent as "a large continuous mass of land conventionally regarded as a collective region". Subtract the culturally hegemonic "commonly regarded as", though, and you're left with "a large continuous mass of land". Europe is not a separate continent from Asia—Eurasia is a single continent.
The West
The Pacific is so big that using a map that places Europe at its center makes sense (one should note that placing Europe on top is colonial, but that's a different story). But according to the common map, shouldn't "the West" encompass all of the West—everything left of that red vertical line, including Africa and Latin America? Why does "the West" refer only to Europe and North America, i.e. the North-West? Simply, because in the eyes of the North, the South is irrelevant.
The Middle East
The "Middle East" is only to the middle east of Europe. It is certainly not "middle" east to Mexico, it definitely is "west" to India or Mongolia, and it actually is "north" to Eritrea or Madagascar. Just like "Near East" and "Far East", "Middle East" normalizes Eurocentrism. By the way, English only capitalizes cardinals when they're part of a country's or region's name, so Europeans actually named other people's regions. Although this seems less dangerous than when they genocided and enslaved millions of us, it's the same colonial supremacist mindset, and it's part of what makes it so easy for them to establish and support a colony in Palestine.
