The US and Germany are the leading shameful suppliers of 99% of Israeli weapons, the former unconscionably providing billions in military equipment to continue the daily carnage, says the writer.
Julian Kunnie
In 1975, African scholar Chinweizu penned a book that needs to be widely read by all seeking decolonisation and liberation: The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite.
He wrote: “For nearly six centuries now western Europe and its diaspora have been disturbing the peace of the world. Enlightened, through their Renaissance, by the learning of the ancient Mediterranean; armed with the gun, the making of whose powder they had learned from Chinese firecrackers; equipping their ships with lateen sails, astrolabes and nautical compasses, all invented by the Chinese and transmitted to them by Arabs; fortified in aggressive spirit by an arrogant messianic Christianity... and motivated by the lure of enriching plunder, white hordes have sallied forth from their western European homelands to explore, assault, loot, occupy, rule, and exploit the rest of the world.”
In essence, the collective West has never adhered to its own statutes in preserving peace; instead, it has lied, cheated, deceived, murdered, suppressed, and imprisoned those who challenge its hypocrisy, using fancy “humanitarian” jargon so that it can retain privileged political, economic, and military dominance in the world against the majority.
The world today has been deconstructed from its natural indigenous evolution and colonially arrested by the marauding hordes from Europe launching slavery and colonisation and then capitalism, the enduring ugly unjust legacies of which we suffer daily today.
Colonialism, like capitalism, was designed to rape the lands of the indigenous peoples of colour globally, and to extract the vital resources, like minerals, cotton, food, and energy, and confiscate the value of the labour of the billions who were and are enslaved in the mines and factories of the colonised nations.
Marikana mine near Rustenburg in the North West, signified a chilling cry against this entrenched and unmitigated exploitation and repression in 2012, and 34 miners were forced to sacrifice their lives, heroic African martyrs for justice.
June 2024, like the Soweto Uprising of June 1976, indeed turned out to be a month of all kinds of shifts and tendencies with revolutionary resistance in Gaza and the West Bank of occupied Palestine, 76 years in the making. The Ansarullah Movement in famine-besieged Yemen has successfully defended Gaza by targeting ships in the Red Sea destined for arming and equipping the genocidal Israeli regime.
Equally historic, are the revolutionary movements in Burkina Faso led by Ebrahim Traore; in Niger; Mali, where French is being abandoned as the lingua franca; Guinea, Eritrea; and most recently, Senegal, where demands for the withdrawal of French and US military personnel have ejected these foreign neo-colonial occupiers.
In the Pacific island of New Caledonia, the Kanak youth embarked on a struggle to regain their island country stolen by the French occupiers. French President Emmanuel Macron called for brutal suppression of indigenous Kanak resistance, retorting that Caledonia was “not the Wild West”.
The collective West has never upheld its own laws, principles, and statutes anywhere, Gaza being the classic case in point in 2023 –2024. Westerners “speak with forked tongue”, indigenous Indians of Turtle Island (North America) have always said, since indigenous lands have never been either returned nor respected as sovereign in accordance with the 370 treaties made between the colonial occupiers and indigenous Indian nations. San Carlos, Arizona, unbelievably, where 11 000 Chi Ende (Chiricahua Apache) people live is still controlled by the US military under colonial “lease”.
Indians are still unable to own their homes and lands.
Even after South Africa’s May 29 elections, the unholy exploitative and oppressive oligopolistic capitalist system continues full steam in the ostensible new political dispensation.
Johann Rupert, Nicky Oppenheimer, descendant of the Oppenheimer oligarchy that owned Anglo-American and now De Beers, Christoffel Weise, owner of Pepkor and found guilty of financial fraud in 2017, Patrick Motsepe, major stakeholder in Sanlam and owner of Mamelodi Sundowns, the first black billionaire, Koos Becker, chairperson of Naspers, the media conglomerate, and Michiel le Roux, founder and major board member of Capitec Bank, are the top six billionaires in South Africa who saw their income increase by $4.6 billion.
Mercedes-Benz, which reaped a golden profit of over R4bn, is set to lay off workers. Capitalism’s greed unabated.
Yet, resistance to such injustice mounts. Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Landless Peoples’ Movement, persists in the struggle to house the landless poor on the outskirts of towns and municipalities in eThekwini, uMgungundlovu (Pietermaritzburg), Gauteng, and other places.
Elections, while seemingly exciting, hardly pay attention to fundamental questions of land ownership in a “democratic” manner in South Africa and elsewhere, or to equitably shared ownership of all people within particular states, the egalitarian role of women and youth, or whether the millions in respective nations even participate in such elections. Forty-two percent of South Africa’s eligible voters – most of whom are unemployed and working-class people who earn so much less in real value today compared to 1994 due to the absurd devaluation of the rand to the dollar – did not vote.
They did not feel that their votes counted because they did not trust the deceptiveness of politicians since 1994. South African workers are required to work much harder than 30 years ago for much less, unable to meet food, housing, education, and healthcare costs.
Small wonder that South Africa’s crime rate is one of the highest in the world. The original colonial and capitalist crime of dispossession of indigenous people, forced recruited cheap labour in the mines, the cornerstone of the South African economy, and the payment of starvation wages to black workers in particular, are conveniently obscured in the discussion of “rampant crime” and “blatant corruption” in the conglomerate-owned media.
Israeli-occupied Gaza is yet another extreme case of genocide by starvation. Deliberately imposed starvation of Palestinians by the US-funded Israeli occupation regime, coupled with constant bombardment by US-made bombs, has caused massive death, malnutrition, humiliation, deformed limbs and annihilation, and forced 2.4 million people to live as refugees in their own land, in tents in overcrowded areas in Rafah in the south, Jabalia, Deir Al Balah, Nuseirat, Gaza City, Tulkarm, where people huddling in bombed-out schools suffer further bombing.
To add insult to injury, the apartheid Israeli regime has bombed hospitals, clinics, fleeing people, even people freed from prison and standing in line for food aid, journalists, medical personnel, and children selling paltry items on the street, akin to Soweto in 1976.
Now the Israeli regime has demanded that the UNRWA, the agency providing relief to the stranded and devastated people in Gaza and the West Bank, leave.
The US and Germany are the leading shameful suppliers of 99% of Israeli weapons, the former unconscionably providing billions in military equipment to continue the daily carnage.
India is another culpable accomplice in supplying weapons to the Israeli regime, while Gabon, Nigeria, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and the US unconscionably provide oil even to the military.
With the unmitigated actions recounted above, the Western imperialists are saying to the rest of us: “Oppose our domination and control of the world, and you will suffer the agony and annihilation as the people of Gaza... keep your mouths shut and accept your lot as the underprivileged and subjugated ones of history since we are the ones destined to rule the world as we always were!”
Racism and genocide have always been cardinal practices of Western colonial societies, even while the same nations promulgate and legislate endless laws on “law and order”, human rights, even the conventions against genocide and torture from the 1940s.
“Know the truth, and the truth will set you free” – so taught a Palestinian teacher and healer 2000 years ago.
South African people, too, should take heart and have continued courage to speak and live the truth. The Universe is still inclined toward justice and that which is right, as Martin Luther King jr taught. Aluta Continua....
* Kunnie is a professor, decolonisation educational activist, and defender of indigenous peoples around the world. His book, “The Earth Mother and the Assault of Capitalism: Living Sustainably with All Life” (McFarland), is due to be released early next year.
Cape Times
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