People have always re-written history, re-told stories with alternative endings just that it was not possible to do it so easily before. Easy as expected is also lazy - just swap the colonizer and the colonized and see what happens. Would be interesting to simulate what happens if major events were prevented from occurring - like putting a hard pause on the storyline and unpausing after a while. All parameters would have changed by then, Problems are sometimes resolved organically when there is a pause and nothing is happening.
The majority of the videos, for instance, don’t actually imagine a future without colonial rule. Instead, they swap the roles of colonized and colonizer. Even accounts that post videos of ancient societies — like “What if ancient Egypt never fell?” — tend to depict their military power. They include images of armor and regalia that those Egyptian soldiers might wear today, visualizing them with automatic rifles in hand.
Those of us who ending up on the losing side of colonization and its aftermath are prone to re-imagining our lives as it might have been if our homelands were not looted and trampled upon. We want to believe the alternate ending to our story might have been a better one - specially when times are tough. This is the kind of escapism I am quite familiar with but each person has their own version of the perfect world where they have been able to correct what did not work out for them. What if they went to a different school when the had the choice, married a different person, took a different job - the list is endless.
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