Nothing dissolves illusions and uncovers hypocrisy faster and completely than a massive pandemic followed by a European war! The coronavirus pandemic taught us in Africa, Latin America and poorer parts of Asia, largely all former colonial possessions of the US and Western Europe, just how mean and extremely selfish our former colonial masters are!
The working class from Africa and descendants of slaves in the US and Western Europe suffered the worst effects of the pandemic, because of their location at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid in these countries, followed by all other Black people, especially immigrants. These layers of the working class were the “frontline workers” doing the menial but essential everyday jobs that sustain cities and towns such as providing labour on farms, packing food in factories, cleaning streets, homes and health facilities including clinics and hospitals, nursing, delivering parcels, manning tills in shops, plumbing, and so on. They are providers of “essential services” no human society can live without, even during an infectious pandemic.
Billions of them got infected during the pandemic, and millions have died, throughout the world. But in the US and Western Europe these African and Black workers account for disproportionately larger than normal share of those infected, and those who died from the pandemic, even as they are “minorities”. The enduring racism grown during the period of slavery has guaranteed that the African and Black person is usually at the bottom of the perking order, everywhere in the world but more especially in the US and Western Europe.
We who are trapped in Africa witnessed US and Western European greed and selfishness as they overbought and monopolised vaccines and other health technologies essential for the fight against the pandemic. It is a historic shame when the statistics of people vaccinated in the US and Western Europe are compared to Africans. While the US and Western Europe are opening up their countries “because they have the vaccines and other preventive strategies and technologies” – Africa is simply abandoning the fight against the virus, as it has no capacity to test, trace, treat, and vaccinate the majority of its 1.2 billion people, let alone give them “boosters”!
Since the end of the Second World War, the US and Western European countries have sponsored and directly participated in numerous wars – all fought overwhelmingly outside the US and Western Europe. Today the world is teeming with internally displaced African and black people, migrants and refugees, as a consequence of these wars. The so-called independent states were left with economies booby trapped to never develop beyond a certain point as the US and Western Europe dominate the global economy and control global finance and using patent rights stop the diffusion of science and technology evenly, throughout the world.
From coupes in Africa, to preventing Left governments lifting their people out of extreme poverty in Latin America via regime change to the wars in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and many other places the US and Western Europe have sustained their war economy, perfected their military weapons, and unleashed massive waves of refugees all over the world. Meanwhile both the US and Western Europe have extremely anti African anti Black immigration policies. Thousands of Africans have died at sea and on European borders, trying to flee wars and poverty both largely engineered by the US and Western European countries, or their proxies.
Neither the US nor Western Europe have seriously respected UN Resolutions on Palestine, and generally treat Palestinian freedom fighters as “terrorists”. We have not seen anything near the economic sanctions the US and Western Europe have swiftly imposed on Russia and Russian capitalists and their businesses, on Israel, a country being built on stolen Palestinian lands which, with impunity, carries out military invasions on Gaza, an apartheid ghetto specifically designed for Palestinians.
Zambians 45 years and older are very familiar with the ferocity with which successive British governments opposed sanctions against racist apartheid South Africa. We will never, for example, forget Margret Thatcher and her opposition to sanctions. We now know without any doubt that the sanctions were opposed because a White European government, Britain, could not hurt its White kith and kin in apartheid South Africa.
Ukrainian civilian refugees fleeing war in Ukraine need all the help they can get, from all of us. So do Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Palestinians, Ethiopians, Somalis, Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Mexicans, Venezuelans and so on, fleeing wars and economic violence. Every human being not party directly to any conflict who needs sanctuary from war and any other threats to life deserves equal treatment by all world governments and peoples.
It has become extremely annoying and painfully disgusting to watch the US and Western European underlying White Supremacist and extremely racist media coverage of the war in Ukraine, including sometimes from so called South biased media such as Aljazeera. We now know what to be a hero means, and who can be one. We now know who the true refugees are, and who are subhuman beings freeing from uncivilised countries.
We now know it is possible to travel without any documents and still be guaranteed of a warm reception in another country, if you are a European freeing from a war among Europeans. Visa and other requirements can be set aside, to protect human life, European human life. In fact, you will be invited into your country of choice of asylum!
We now know how swiftly the US and Western Europe can act in their selfish interests even as they pretend, they are doing this for Ukraine! We know massive sanctions are possible, and can be globally coordinated, if the interests of the US and Western Europe are threatened.
We are yet to see how the resolution of the UN General Assembly on the war in Ukraine will be abused and exploited by the US and Western Europe, in the war in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has exposed the US and Western European civilisation for what it truly is: a violent, racist, White Supremacist edifice built from the blood, sweat and tears of Africans and Black people and their natural resources. It is a lying, deceitful, hypocritical system whose rules matter only as far as the interests of the US and Western Europe are protected.
The coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine are two excellent teachers the world must listen to. It will be a terminal disaster to return to a racist, White Supremacist fake liberal democracy dominated world post both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. These two historic events offer all human beings including US citizens and Western Europeans of good will the opportunity to fashion a world different from the current one, in which human beings must not be judged and treated on the basis of their history, race, gender, nationality and class.
At the heart of the US and Western European civilisation and in the East nestles a small group of supper rich billionaires who own and control the global economy, finance and therefore also reap huge profits from the world war economy. The current global arrangements have historically evolved to sustain, grow and defend the wealth and power of this very small coterie of cruel billionaires. Unless this filthy rich tiny group of vampires is overthrown, and a new civilised in which all human beings will be truly and fully human is constructed, the world will not know peace; for war is just another economic industry for these fellows.
In this war, as in all wars, the poor peoples of the world and the working class are the ones whose bodies and lives will bear the greatest costs. It is also them who can end all wars; by destroying the current civilisation which makes wars simply another economic activity!
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