Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Cohen

Cohen’s line lands like a bucket of cold water on the earnest rituals of protest. “Barking up a tree” already implies misdirected effort; adding “that has already been cut down” sharpens it into a double rebuke: not only are you targeting the wrong object, you’re doing it after the object has ceased to exist in the form you imagine. The wit is in the overkill. It’s not enough that the campaign is misguided; it’s anachronistic.

The intent is less to defend colonialism than to question the political utility of anti-colonial posturing in a world where formal empires have largely dissolved, rebranded, or been replaced by subtler mechanisms of power. Cohen is poking at a familiar contemporary move: treating a historical structure as if it’s still the primary operating system, then gaining moral clarity (and social capital) from opposing it. The subtext is about substitution. “Colonialism” becomes a rhetorical stand-in for global capitalism, military hegemony, debt regimes, extractive trade, cultural domination, and tech-platform dependence - messier phenomena that don’t fit neatly into the clean villainy of pith helmets and flags.

Context matters because the sentence is a framing device, not a history lesson. It’s designed to redirect attention: away from symbolic denunciations and toward whatever Cohen thinks is the live wire now (national governance, corruption, internal authoritarianism, or contemporary imperial influence that doesn’t call itself empire). It also carries a risk: by declaring the tree cut down, it can sound like permission to stop interrogating how the stump still shapes the landscape.