Cooperation for change, this is essentially what multilateralism is all about. Countries with common goals, working together. While what this suggests is working together for positive change, the global politico-economic scenario has given an entirely different connotation to this term. Colonial, ethno-racist, genocidal governments and their cronies, with documented histories of annihilating oppression and suffocating suppression, coalescing and working together to bring about their version of change have only ushered death and destruction in terms of humanity as well as the environment.
We are living in the anthropocentric age where man’s greatest impact and influence has devastated the earth. It did not begin merely at the turn of the century, but man-made emergencies, colonialism and fascism (to name a few) have accelerated this devastation manifold. In addition to this, capitalistic profiteering and expansionism have been the driving force not just behind environmental degradation, but extermination of humanity in every sense of the word.
Apartheid states and tyrannical governments have been instrumental in making non-places: spaces where movement and behaviors could be monitored and surveilled. There is a concerted effort to create a disconnect between people and the environment by not just uprooting both altogether, indiscriminate bombardment, but also building artificial concrete structures – example the death camp that is Gaza. And all the while decimating structures like hospitals and universities across Palestine.
Historically, making use of propaganda, instigating war and anarchy-building narratives through fear-mongering and consequently hate and bias have systemically polarized the world as masses, especially in the West, lap up heavy, anesthetic, mind-numbing doses of misinformation in its most theatrical form. This keeps the entertainment-thirsty masses entertained with pre-meditated, sensational plot mixed with jump scares. A recent example is a Fox News anchor likening the bombing of Iran (such as a warhead dropped by a B-2 Stealth Bomber on nuclear sites… to save Iranians , and people across the region – from its ‘regime’ and bring about peace!!) to a Hollywood movie, Top Gun.
All the while, the profiteering agenda of expansionism and control sees yet another day, year and century.
Written in blood, history bears witness to barbaric, multilateral acts of war and violence initiated and propelled by the West against some of the most culturally rooted countries in the East such as Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Syria – again to name a few from a very long list.
On another note, is this an ongoing attempt to Hellenize; not just Asia that the French thinker Jean Paul Sarte suggested in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; but the rest of the world as well… the others? Racist humanism! White-washed, privileged and imperviously imperial.
The French thinker further postulated that the Europeans (given the current context, I would expand it to the West) have only become ‘men’ by creating slaves and monsters. He then concluded that to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, ‘since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation’.
In his forward for the assassinated Guyananian author and political activist Walter Rodney’s book, Decolonial Marxism, Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiongo writes colonization with all its interlinked economic, political, cultural and even psychic dimensions have been central in the making of capitalist modernity
The vicious circle embedded with both overt and covert acts of aggression and oppression, through war, implanting puppet governments and spreading a storyline about their version of villains – are all efforts to enslave and to claim that the others are monsters. Taking cue from Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, the white man only thinks of the non-white as sub-human, non-man. A notion, reminiscent of a comment made by an Israeli official back in 2023 calling for burying alive dozens of civilian Palestinians whom he described as subhuman.
Upon his visit to the US in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela “was accused of playing favorites to America’s rivals like the late Fidel Castro, late Palestine leader Yasser Arafat and late Libyan PM Muammar Gaddafi… Mandela’s answer brought light to the inception of politics and the United States’ thirst for ultimate power.”
Mandela’s response was: “One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies.”
In his book, Decolonial Marxism, Walter Rodney pondered about the true meaning of independence, emphasizing that it is not just expelling colonizers but also to make sure efforts and their outcomes are not stolen.
What is actually independence anyway?
To Ngugi, capitalist modernity consists of dehumanization of the African body.
It is certainly not just the African body, but actually the entire Global South!
He also said that the most propagated Western colonial mythology is that Europe and the West have developed Africa. One would go on to expand this further to most of the countries across the Global South!
Indeed, as the Kenyan author emphasizes that “even our methodologies need to be decolonized from the Eurocentric basics.” Stronger roots create movements of resilience, resistance, subversion and strength – in other words Hope. And “at a certain point, a movement becomes irreversible, and all the efforts of the enemy smack of desperation and insanity.”
