Chanting Down Babylon

Rastafarian philosophy is a fundamental challenge to colonial thinking and corporate control of the Earth.

Most readers know the words of Haile Selassie sung by Bob Marley on the track War. A recording of the full speech of His Majesty to the League of Nations reveals a broader analysis of economic and corporate power. That power is at the heart of global problems today.

Rasta is an historical overstanding. I&I look back and see that it was the kidnap and slavery of up to 60 million African people, and their rape and murder and torture, which provided the capital for European world domination. Aotearoa was colonised on the torn backs of Africans.

That mentality can be traced back to Rome and Babylon. The Old Testament records the Babylonian captivity and our struggle against downpression. The reasonings in the Dead Sea Scrolls recognise Babylon in the Empire of that time, the Roman Imperium that murdered King Iesus and invented Western Christianity. It is that same Rome whose symbols of power were seen in Nazi Germany and which can be seen on the seal of the President of the United States of America today.

Corporate globalisation is its modern face. The first corporations in the world were the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, set up in the early 1600's. They were mercantile empires bent on pillaging the earth and its people, just as multinational corporations are today.

Colonisation was corporate globalisation, creating private property rights over land, forests, water, knowledge and now even forms of life itself, through Genetic Engineering. Rasta must stand as allies with indigenous people and the poor of the earth in challenging this Babylon shitstem.