Gora Complex

Back in the nineties and early 2000’s, following calls from Bollywood and Indian mainstream media, middle-class Pakistanis—armchair analysts (the equivalent to today’s keyboard warrior)—lamented our desire to be ‘fairer’. They debated prevailing standards of beauty where being fair-skinned was the most important criterion. At an advertising agency, a friend crowed about Fair & Lovely’s ‘clever’ positioning in the market as a whitening cream when it was really a sunblock. It mattered not that Fair & Lovely turned into the pre-internet version of a meme—it was the butt of many a joke for a long time, underscoring Pakistani mothers’ obsession with finding ‘white’ daughters-in-law.

This was, of course, a symptom of the deep-rooted and aptly named goracomplex in our society. Understandable, given the century-long British Rule in the Subcontinent.

Gora complex, however, runs deep beneath skin colour in this part of the world. It is an inferiority complex rooted in the many different types of colonialism that we continue to live under.

For example, we’re victims of language colonialism. The British began this process by first making the national language of India Urdu instead of Persian. Given that Persian was the language of the court, this meant that they effectively removed generations of South Asians from their history—all written in Persian and rotting away gently in libraries across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, where no one can read the records and histories of our own people.

Subsequently, the official language of the country became English, a tradition we have, bafflingly, maintained in modern-day Pakistan. English is now the language of the elite and the ‘educated’. Our gora complex convinces us that Urdu speakers aren’t as smart as English speakers, (the irony that I write in English is not lost on me) and the smartness metre continues to drop with regional languages.

In the nineties, my mother joined Beaconhouse as a teacher and was asked to take part in a pedagogical course out of Bradford University. The course was expensive and the cost was going to be deducted from the teachers’ (already meagre) salaries. She refused, and was one of the only teachers to advance through the ranks without the Bradford certification. The certification offered nothing to the teachers. Her colleagues admitted as much when, two years later, they were still paying off the course and their teaching methods hadn’t changed a whit.

The reality of the course, as with all such knowledge transference out of Western nations, is that it was already obsolete in the West when they sold it to us. Just like the US’s sanctions on Nvidia chips to China in order to retard China’s technological advancement, what the coloniser chooses to sell to us is often out-of-date, irrelevant, and sometimes demonstrably broken, for the sole purpose of maintaining their superiority. They keep us under the illusion that they are magnanimously sharing their knowledge with us, but that’s rarely the case.

Because of language and knowledge colonialism, our gora complex permeates every aspect of our lives. It’s not just mothers-in-law seeking the ‘fairest of them all’. When I worked in corporate Pakistan, I was often frustrated at being unheard. My white colleagues would make the same recommendations I made and our brown CEOs and MDs would immediately scramble to follow. I was doubly handicapped, being brown-skinned and a woman, but I saw the same effect with white-skinned female colleagues as with the men.

We not only believe that white Westerners are superior, the so-called patronage of Western countries towards us (where they come to ‘teach’ us how to do things the right way) exemplifies the belief that we are deficient and uncivilised. Back in the nineties, this wasn’t a conscious reality for us, and we didn’t have the internet to help us evaluate programs coming out of the West.

Now, however, numerous independent journalists (especially Palestinians), across the internet, reiterate the reality that colonialism takes many forms—language, knowledge, debt (where keeping us in debt through the IMF also keeps the majority of our country below the poverty line), technology, and digital sovereignty—and that we are still being colonised.

The Mask is OFF

For decades, a tried and tested Israeli Hasbara tactic has been to denigrate Muslims who defend or speak up about Palestine. One of the most common questions I’d see in comment sections (and later, on Twitter and Facebook) was, “How many Nobel Prizes have Muslims won?”, as if to suggest that Nobel prizes were only given to geniuses and humanitarians. Of course, the value of that honour is less than stellar when you hand out the ‘peace’ prize to people like Henry Kissinger or Menachem Begin—both recognised as war criminals and terrorists stained with the blood of thousands, if not millions, of lives (almost all of them non-white races). Like most awards, Nobel is merely a self-congratulatory event designed to perpetuate white supremacy and domination.

Certainly, in the last year and a half, we’ve seen their facade of civilisation well and truly shattered. Does the dogged inhumanity of countries in the Global North give any of us pause? Are we even surprised that they have been cheering on a genocide, making a mockery of laws they wrote themselves, arming modern-day Nazis, and remaining unmoved by the sight of innocent brown children dying by the thousands?

If we are, we shouldn’t be. Let’s look back at some examples of the conduct of this ‘superior’ race of white people in the last few centuries:

The extermination of indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia.

The theft of land in the Americas and Australia.

The kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of people from Africa.

Slavery.

The Ku-Klux Klan, and Jim Crow (legalised segregation based on race).

The colonisation and siphoning of wealth from the Global South (including natural resources, which they continue to plunder, especially in Africa). For me, personally, the siphoning of massive wealth from the Subcontinent.

The rise of Stalin and the death of 26 million Russians in World War II (often overlooked and rarely mentioned in the Western ‘free’ media).

The nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An unnecessary show of force from the US that had repercussions for generations afterwards.

Apartheid.

Jeffrey Epstein.

All the wars:

• World War I.
• World War II and the Third Reich.
• Crimea.
• Vietnam.
• Korea.
• Cuba.
• Iraq 1.0.
• Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia).
• Panama.
• Iraq 2.0
• Iran (against Iraq, where the US funded both sides in order to perpetuate the conflict).
• Afghanistan.
• Pakistan (drone strikes).
• Sudan.
• Somalia.
• Libya.
• Yemen.
• Syria.
• Lebanon.
• Palestine and the settler colonial project that aims to conduct a modern extermination of the indigenous peoples.

I haven’t even mentioned US tactics to control and manipulate nations through regime change, especially in South and Central American countries, where they promoted and installed (just like in Pakistan) corrupt, malleable leaders to do their bidding, often at the expense of people’s right to self-determination and sovereignty. Examples of where this has gone horribly wrong for the targeted nations’ populations include Brazil (Castelo Branco), Pakistan (Zia-ul-Haq), Chile (Augusto Pinochet), Romania (Nicolae Ceausescu), and South Korea (Park Chung-Hee).

In fact, the US routinely supports authoritarian regimes around the world, as long as its ends are achieved, by force or otherwise.

In recent days, Trump has come under fire within the US for Musk’s DOGE activities, in particular, his takedown of USAID. What hasn’t been covered by mainstream media during these tumultuous times is the fact that USAID has long been an instrument of colonisation for the United States. Unlike the British Empire, the US eschews (as much as it can) boots-on-the-ground forcible colonisation. It prefers, instead, to use foreign aid to manipulate populations and instigate regime changes favourable to empire. So, when we continue to see actual criminals (Asif Ali Zardari, who was convicted for money laundering by a Swiss court in 2003, or the Sharif brothers whose Ittehad Foundries have been under investigation for decades) become our leaders, we might consider empire’s role in our continued malaise.

Is this really the race we should consider ‘civilised’? Superior to us? Is this really the First World? Perhaps we should recognise that they became the First World by stepping on the backs and riches of the ancient Third World.

Soft Power

From IMF to Hollywood, gora complex is kept alive through a variety of channels. The IMF and World Bank, of course, are direct instruments of repression, where ‘generous’ loans and grants are delivered with caveats that regress social and economic development. For example, every IMF tranche to Pakistan comes with a demand for ‘austerity’. Our bought and sold leaders happily transfer austerity measures onto their already beleaguered populace while they stuff their own pockets.

Nevertheless, we are conditioned to be grateful to the West for ‘helping’ us with their loans, and with the numerous agencies offering us free ‘aid’.

While they devastate nations under the guise of aid, they obscure their real selves by sending us an endless stream of movies and TV shows that glorify (in EVERY instance) white superiority over other races. In the lurid imaginings of Hollywood, white people are always empathetic, compassionate, on the side of human rights and freedoms. They are always the saviours, the brilliant minds, and thoughtful teachers.

In this, I have to concede the white man’s superiority. They are, in fact, brilliant marketeers. If we weren’t seeing their abhorrent racism and hypocrisy in real time, we may still be living under the illusion that Hollywood’s depiction of the white man is an accurate reflection. They’ve effectively used every image-building apparatus they have, from slickly produced films and TV shows to dominant media, to paint themselves as sophisticated, peace-loving peoples while demonising people of colour and anyone who chooses not to follow their capitalist ideologies (as we see with the Soviet Union).

Under Their Spell

The English-speaking elite of almost every country in the Global South now follows the same rhetoric as the West—idolising secularism, for example, and internalising narratives of the patriarchy (which, to be fair, is accurate in many cases, though not to the extent portrayed in Western media). Meanwhile, Trump’s blunt approach to world domination has taken a hard right turn, accompanied with noticeable sieg heils, into fascism.

To be clear, the turn wasn’t that hard, just well camouflaged. The greatest issue that the West has with Trump is not his policies, it’s that he’s saying the quiet parts out loud. We should listen to him—he’s speaking truths that others before him, liberal and conservative alike, have been too crafty to say out loud. White supremacy is alive and well, and it’s not limited to men like Trump and Musk. It’s not even limited to white men. Let’s not forget that it was a white woman who said the deaths of 100,000 children in Iraq were justified, just like it was a white woman who oversaw the destruction of Libya, and just like it was a black man who dramatically increased the drone strikes against Pakistan. There is no air between ideologies and genders among western leaders when it comes to the rape and pillage of the Third World. They all believe it’s necessary and they all endorse it.

These aren’t people to emulate. These aren’t role models.

I’m a great advocate for us to look internally for our role models and for our needs. We have the resources, and we certainly have the people, though, not,as many may think, Bhutto or Zia or even Imran Khan. Our role models should be artists and writers and philosophers—Eqbal Ahmad, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Bapsi Sidhwa, to name a few. We should be consciously and systematically encouraging their readings and study. We should be writing our own histories and guiding new generations to uncover the real history of our region, not the one written for us by our oppressors.

If we must look outwards, I would suggest Palestine, Cuba, or perhaps China. All three exemplify the greatest resistance to empire.

We need to understand how toxic imperialism has been to our progress, such as it is. It has poisoned the educated classes to the extent that they now eagerly lap up all western philosophies as though they’re the ONLY way to become civilised. For a long time, I did the same myself, wishing our people would learn to live and work the way people in the west did. We can still learn from them, of course, but let’s make our learning selective. We can learn to work together in community. We can learn to keep our environments clean. We can learn to be polite and considerate of others. We can learn to value labour and hard work by every segment of society. These are all values we had long before the British washed up on our shores; they learned many of them from us, in fact.

We need to openly promote ourselves to our population the same way the west has systematically demonised Islam and the Global South for centuries. It’s time to step out of the shadow of our gora complex and from under the boot of imperialism.