"The savage in man is never quite eradicated." - Henry David Thoreau

This is the primary fear that lurks in the mind of the colonizer, whose identity is constructed on a polarizing narrative of a world divided up into civil and savage, with themself on one side and the barbaric savage on the other.

It grips the west to this day, in communion not only with the more general Christian makeup as outlined in Jones Manoel's excellent essay (https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/), but also more particularly in the characteristics of Catholicism and its symbolic vacillation between sin and confession, rooted in the irreversible mark of original sin.

Briefly (and roughly, I am not a Catholic scholar), for those less familiar with Catholic doctrine, the general idea is we are all born with "original sin" due to the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and baptism bypasses this in a way that allows us to be able to enter heaven. There are degrees of badness of sin, like venial and mortal sin. Venial sin is a minor offense. Mortal is more serious and requires more conscious intent. However, if you are truly sorry, you can confess and be forgiven for basically anything, insofar as the possibility of getting into heaven is concerned. You might have to do some penance in purgatory, but otherwise, you can get there.

The specifics of exact Catholic teaching are less important here than how the more generalized concepts of it get used in western colonial and imperial society.

Going back to original sin, colonialist history acts as a stand-in for it in the liberal mindset. Similar to how Catholicism does not seek to reconcile with its god over the behavior of ancestors once and for all, instead taking on a kind of perpetual responsibility for original sin by contact, liberalism does not seek to do reparations for colonialism, return power to the colonized, or otherwise undo the horrors its ancestors have inflicted. Instead, the focus is on confession.

But this would not be complete without taking into account the side of the conservative also, in particular in the dichotomous scheme of the US. The conservative acts the part of the sinner. The liberal the part of the one confessing to the priest. The conservative always has a justification, no matter how crass or crude they have to be, and they are often found among the most openly violent warhawks. The liberal, though their policy so often is similar to that of the conservative, does not tend to act the same. The liberal is sorrowful, mournful, and when necessary, ready to confess.

"Civil" and "savage", ideas which normally exist in contradiction and in fearfulness of corruption from the light, synthesize with confession to create redemption, the cleansing of sin, even if temporary. Like a real Catholic confessional, which might give you some Hail Mary prayers to say but does not delve into the details of your life and ask material changes of you, this confessional purification process is ideal because it demands no change of behavior. The colonizer continues on and its past crimes are washed away in the confessional.

To avoid responsibility, the confession is done by intermediaries; people who may have had proximity to the "sin", but who are not the most directly responsible for it. And so you get bizarre contradictions like when Joe Biden apologized to the indigenous of Turtle Island for past systemic boarding school abuses of indigenous children, even as his administration was funding a genocide elsewhere.

You can find examples of this inclination in media and even in mundane real life contexts. For example, the infamous character Darth Vader in Star Wars, whose crimes are prolific and horrifying, but who is redeemed when he chooses to save his son and turn against his cartoonishly evil leader. Luke (his son's) belief in the possibility and importance of his redemption reflects and validates this Catholic mindset that no matter how great the sin, it is still possible to make it to heaven. Never mind that Luke nearly martyrs himself pointlessly in order to accomplish this. Surely it is the redemption of "evil" that is of paramount importance, not the liberation of the masses! (So the colonizer's mindset implies and why wouldn't it, when it is of such great importance to the colonizer to wash away their sins rather than give up an ounce of ground they have stolen through war and slaughter.) Or in the more mundane context, almost amusingly so, when a person on the internet might start a comment with an insult and then end it with "have a nice day." As if they have washed away the "impure" intent they started out with by ending it on a more polite note.

For the colonizer's image of self-civility to hold, they have to justify it somehow. They can't justify it through how they behave when they exercise power because the majority of that is genocidal. So they turn to the process of purification, cleansing, and forgiveness. This reflects rather well the phenomenon of liberals who are "against every war but the current one." The current one is still in the grip of the conservative side's wave of overt war mongering. It is only after it is concluded, when the liberals are cleaning up and confessing, that the greater public is allowed to feel bad about it; and at that point, it is somewhat necessary that they do, in order to go through the aforementioned synthesis to create redemption.

What this redemption brings about is nothing substantive in material reality. It's an abstract notion of redemption, centering around metaphysical notions of darkness and light, corruption and valor, and the overcoming of temptation. Were the colonizer judged in its totality, it would be considered a great abuser of the confessional, one who is never actually sorry in the right places and who does the same thing again anyway. But totality is brushed away in favor of whatever is the current, both in the meaning of current events and the wave-like current of inertia.

"What cannot be properly justified right now can be forgiven later" might be a fitting adage for how this colonial and imperial structure operates.

The "savage" conservatives relentlessly pursue power and domination, and the "civil" liberals shy away from power and fear its "corrupting" influence. Through this, they can act in tandem, whether literally as one party handing over power to another, or more figuratively in media representation and language, sinning their way across the world and then moseying their way down to the closest confessional to wash it away.