I admire Umar Haque’s bare-knuckled assignment of responsibility of the failure to contain Covid where it is due. Having suffered the arrogance of ‘Great’ Britain’s institutional structures of covert abuse all my life, it’s really great to see him give a verbal kicking to Blundering Boris, and all the Tory La-Dee-Daa twits who voted him into power. But one thing I must respectfully take issue with Umair Haque is his abiding by and therefore perhaps inadvertently upholding, the conventions in the use of terms promulgated by the arrogant doublespeak of Western academia. Is there anything more contemptuous than this doublespeak, whereby you rob a person blind, and then call them ‘poor’?
Please, let’s all stop this bowing to Western academics, for once and for all, whose so-called sciences, such as economics, conjured up designations like ‘developed/developing/poor’ nations. Instead, let our naming express the truth of how the different regions of the world came to be in the conditions we see them in, in the present moment of time. Upholding the intent to speak the whole truth, let us declare through the labels we apply, that the EXPLOITING nations, who have committed genocide, the enslavement of millions, and the degradation of the environment for some four centuries, to the point we are facing species death on a scale never before seen in the millions of years since Life forms began, should never again be called, ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’. This is the language of the perpetrator, equivalent to a rapist, calling himself a lover.
Umair Haque suggests that, ‘the human race still has not learned to care for itself’, but surely, it is incorrect to tar all human beings with the same brush that the cancer of Euro-American greed has gifted us! For, in fragments and tatters, the survivors of the peoples whose lands were stolen, to whom diseases were deliberately spread by the ‘White Ghosts’ arriving in swarms from Europe, had and have still, a philosophy and ethics that must become the major ruling idea of European sensibilities and those of us people of colour who live, study and work amongst them. It is time arrogant Westerners, who have so badly mismanaged the Covid emergency, humble themselves enough to learn from those who have refrained from copying their models of ‘development’. I am speaking of the Indigenous peoples who have to this day, an ethics and an epistemological framework, which asserts that any action should be judged by the effect on the 'children who are yet in the soil'. In far-flung parts of the world, people lived for thousands of years applying similar principles of life. In Australasia, where the Indigenous cultures existed for some 40,000 years, it is held that, the consequences of actions should be guaged to seven generations from the present one. It is the barbaric Whites who are the anomaly in human culture, promoting a vicious individualism that we are seeing bearing its death-dealing fruit, in the current handling and response to the Covid emergency. Contrast the ‘me, me, me’ of Anglo Americans with the sense of societal responsibility, that the ’I’ exists essentially and arises only from within a nexus of relations — this sensibility has existed in the Native American, the Australasian and African cultures and ancient Indian ethics too, (until decimated by European invasions and the deliberate spread of disease and famine). The majority of the world’s people’s had a deeply embedded experiential knowingness, rooted in understanding humans as not above Nature, with the God-given right to dominate and exploit, but rather that human beings are part of the web of life, and what we do to that web. we do to ourselves.
It's surely time to expose and put a stop to the diseased Wests’ definitions of reality. The societies who arrogantly abrogate to themselves such labels as ‘advanced' or 'developed' must be renamed as 'the 'Exploiting' nations and those labelled 'underdeveloped', 'developing' or 'poor', must be more accurately, more truthfully, be labeled as the Exploited regions.
Western economists, and their scientists in the form of drug-pushing, disease-causing Big Pharma, along with their greed-promoting philosophies must be exposed and opposed as the dehumanising, nihilism-promoting psychopathic/narcissistic entities that they are.
