by YANNICK GIOVANNI MARSHALL
We need a global cultural revolution. A bringing to a sudden end this half-millennia long faith healing show where a perspiring West preaches humanistic values and economic prosperity while cutting holes in the pockets of an entranced colonised world.
We need not only an end to the world order set up by Western hegemony but an end to the appreciation of the West. We need the rage we feel after looking out at the charred remains of our earth under centuries of Western rule to mature into an act. The act of putting the West aside.
There must be an ushering in of a new day on earth where pulling our bodies, our lives, our lands back from the hammer-pry of colonialism is not deliberately misreported as “clashes” where white racists who deliberately hunt and deliberately kill Black elders in communities deliberately ruined by white racists are not immediately comfort-blanketed with reports of being “troubled”. Where our chanting to be allowed to live – and the inevitable procession of mourners come down upon by apartheid’s police forces – are no longer deliberately misframed as culture wars or intractable conflicts. This current chapter of Western-run human history must be flung shut.
We should have been more desperate for a post-Western world. A world where it is odd for white-skinned refugees to have every type of door flung open for them at the sight of their Primark shopping bags while it is routine for darker-skinned refugees to be force-fed toilet water in the American borderlands or sold on Libyan slave auction blocks.
Odd, reporters openly calling for guerrilla resistance against oppression in Ukraine while the killing of Black people whether by drone strikes in Yemen or by an American in a grocery store must be responded to with pacifism.
Odd. Not hypocritical. Unintelligible.
Dark-skinned refugees horsewhipped by American border agents in cowboy hats. Shot at by Europeans while on unseaworthy crafts sutured together with Hadiths and Psalms. Pointed at to explain resurgent Nazi sentiment. Ordered to let white people board first during evacuations. Referred to as crime waves and invaders while flaxen-haired refugees benefit from Fortune 500 company fundraisers, Airbnb programmes and win singing contests. Odd. Not hypocritical. Unintelligible.
It must be accepted now that the West, however mythologised, be it American-led “democracy” or classical “Western” political ideas, has proven that it does not have the necessary intellectual or political infrastructure to put down its perpetually rising Nazism. It has proven inadequate to the task of not harming the vast majority of humanity. Its ideas and institutions have proven incapable of destroying and ridding itself of colonial racism – if it is to be accepted that the project of the West is something other than the project of colonial racism.
The apologists will bring you Locke and Rousseau and protest that the West brought you life, liberty and the social contract. They are careful not to reveal that in the Atlantic Ocean of the fine print, sharks were learning to trail the slave ships, waiting like yelping dogs for the feast of live Africans dumped over the starboard side. They will say we brought you the telegraph and the railway but will not mention the jokes they made at the indentured South Asians they sent to be mauled by lions in East Africa as they laid the tracks. Nor their hunting of families in Tasmania, nor the women abused at the Kamiti concentration camp accused, like the American “negress”, of subverting the aims of the settler state. They will say one-day delivery but say nothing about the suicide-prevention nets and the urine in driver’s bottles to keep up the pace.
Whatever it takes to leave racism and thus hatred of the vast majority of people on the earth behind, the Western world does not possess and will never possess. That alone disqualifies it from continuing any further.
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