The World Keeps Moving Backwards

A month on from my last message, almost every prediction has come to pass about what would befall the world since the outbreak of the war on Iran by Israel and the United States. The price of fuel has spiked the world over, putting many people's lives and livelihoods at risk.

While the recent ceasefire brings hope, we are living through uncertain times. How this war ends is anybody's guess as the powerful gleefully wreck world peace and try to remake the world as they think it should be.

What should concern us more than anything about this period is the deliberate, unashamed reinscribing of many of the issues the world has been working to overcome for over a century and a half. European enslavement of Africans and colonialism rested on racism. Europeans saw it as their right to rule the darker races of the world. Some thought it appropriate to deploy unrestrained violent terror on people they were colonising.

Anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles brought about the end of oppression in its most overt forms. In Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, liberation movements fought for and achieved the end of colonial rule by the second half of the twentieth century. Yet for the next fifty years the domination of the global South by the North changed very little. Domination became more sophisticated and more subtle: it was in the one-way direction of minerals and other economic resources while seemingly being equals when sitting around multilateral tables.

To many it was clear that there was a long way to go to achieve things like racial equity as well as parity of power and influence in the world. Of course, Nelson Mandela was one of these freedom fighters who made immense sacrifices to keep moving the world along the path towards realising ultimate liberation for all the formerly oppressed peoples of the world. The continuing asymmetry required ongoing work to balance the scales. All along it looked like things were progressing in the right direction - towards equity and parity.

It is then shocking to see military might being reasserted with more force than we have seen for a long time in Palestine, Iran, Ukraine and elsewhere. More tellingly, we are hearing language that recalls Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem, The White Man's Burden, in which he exhorted the Americans to take colonial control of the Philippines:

Take up the White Man's burden-
Send forth the best ye breed-
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Unlike Kipling's assertion of the white man's burden as being to educate and 'civilise' natives, the burden is simply to rule and extract wealth for private individuals while using state resources such as the military and development aid dispensed to selected accomplices to further the wealth extraction end. Of course we've seen this before. Recall the Dutch East India Company of the nineteenth century.

This age is looking more and more like imperialism reminiscent of a previous age. Today more than ever, we need to learn our history to understand how previous iterations of imperialism were overcome.

If history teaches us anything, it is that progress is neither inevitable nor irreversible, and that it demands constant vigilance, courage, and collective action.