My favourite* troll is this**: you probably have to wait until December to do this, not because doing it at any other time makes you look peculiar (you’ll look peculiar regardless, and this is something you have to make peace with), but because it’s unlikely that you’ll be given the opportunity at other times of the year. You wait until the subject of Father Christmas comes up, ideally if someone you know is telling a cute story about their childhood, and you say this: “Father Christmas is imperialist propaganda”. They will ask you what you mean, and that’s when you fill in the details. The relationship between the Global North and the Global South (a distinction based on levels of consumption and relationships of extraction and exploitation, rather than a strict geographical one) relies at least in part on the gentle introduction and then progressive entrenchment of one brute proposition: each individual life on this planet has a value attached to it, and some lives have greater or lesser value depending on accidents of birth. This first principle is monstrous and so cannot be announced – the seeds have to be planted when the subject is very young. You don’t have to (and indeed must not) say to children that they matter more than a similar child in another country, so instead you charm and flatter them into thinking it. Some sharp children will observe that Father Christmas does not appear to visit other children, even in places where they celebrate Christmas, and since children are rarely blessed with analytical capacities and presumably do not arrive with an a priori knowledge of the history of colonialism, they draw an inevitable conclusion: either the children in those countries aren’t good, or they have been passed over for other reasons. By the time they find out that Father Christmas isn’t real, the foundation stone of what will turn into an impregnable propaganda fortress has been laid. They, in the eyes of Father Christmas, matter more than the other children, which must mean they matter more in other ways too, and as they grow up the other ways increase in number. Further, the bribe of relatively cheap commodities, paid for by the labour, death and displacement of other people and the thorough destruction of the planet, seems to be an acceptable one. What … whoever has had their heartwarming anecdote upstaged would probably say … What a mad thing to think! Father Christmas is about reintroducing magic into the world! It’s a nice thing for children to believe! Is it even that deep? Now, first of all: pretending things “aren’t that deep” when what that means is that you’d rather not think about them is a perfectly standard rhetorical trick and one I’ve used many times. Second, I’m not saying it’s not magical. What I would question is the nature of the magic.
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