> Leaders and governments are only a small part of the historical process.
> Social movements, juridical institutions, power-relations, economic
> structures, gender, ethnicity, and a thousand other things are in play,
I'm not sure why you think I would think these other things are secondary. But I'm also not sure how, as you seem to be doing here, you can posit these things as being autonomous from leaders and governments, in a word, the state. Is it really possible to disentangle gender and race from national borders and their accompanying governments and states? No way, I say, but I'm now beginning to understand how and why it makes sense for you to see liberatory possibilities in the EU and the BRICs.
> So by "thinking colonialism", I don't mean sterile denunciations of
> how the Brits, French, or US authorities committed X atrocity on Y
> territory in Z time-frame, I mean grasping this history in its full
> complexity.
I agree. How does approving of Chavez's embrace of Gaddafi contribute to this?