In spite of the title, this won’t be another post about the Dems. Promise.
“You had your chance” is in this case, post-colonial Africa writ large, “the jungle” if you will, speaking truth at last to their fading Garden-masters in Europe specifically and The West in general.
It would not be hard to make a compelling case that Russia has never been interested in colonizing. They didn’t take over a Congo, like little Belgium did. They didn’t seek to own a Brazil like the Portuguese of all people. You might say that the USSR’s Warsaw Pact was a form of imperialism, maybe … but maybe more like a buffering sphere of influence that sought to protect themselves from a Germany that killed millions of their people at a time, first under royalism in WWI, and again under fascism in WWII.
But they didn’t care enough about “the third world” or “the global south” enough to go around invading and plundering any part of it, during the hundreds of years that even the tiniest Euro nations were building themselves massive wealth and armies by doing exactly that, exploiting the blacks and browns, committing genocides, and even enslaving them and relocating them, over and over, routinely.
In the case of China, we see thousands of years of a history that is even more dramatically isolationist, compared and contrasted to the power bloc that is now called NATO–the self-appointed “First” World.
And listen–there’s no need to preach to me about what bad guys Stalin or Mao were. I’m well aware of how they treated their own people. For now, I’m just saying that they just weren’t in the habit of sailing around the world and killing and pillaging and setting up puppet regimes and sucking whatever blood they could out of ‘poor’ countries and native peoples. Whereas the enlightened white overlords of noble Europe and America did so reflexively and almost automatically for centuries, and grew obscenely fat from it in economic terms.
Over the past few decades, China in particular has gotten pretty hefty themselves. But it wasn’t by drinking the blood of children.
The Chinese got their money mostly by letting their huge workforce serve as a pool of cheap outsourced labor.
The oinking oligarchs of America especially could not help masturbating themselves at the thought of paying people in China pennies on the dollar compared to what they would have to pay Ward Cleaver or Joe Lunchbucket in Pittsburgh.
That Steve Jobs. What a fuckin’ genius, eh?
Pretty soon, ‘we can’t make it here anymore’ was the real national anthem of the Rust Belt, and the former textile mills or furniture factories of North Carolina. We sure as hell could have made it here. But Chinese steel, Chinese drywall, Chinese phones and laptops … we didn’t get to make it here. It wasn’t allowed.
Globalization was the Christly salvation of the fat cats, and the bane of the working American.
The tech giants looked at a billion-plus Chinese as a glorious new ‘market’. Google, and Microsoft, and Apple, and Amazon, they licked Chinese ass four inches deep to please, please, please be allowed access to that market. And China said, yeah, okay, as long as you censor out your capitalist lies, come on down. Maybe help us, you know, modernize our tech in the meantime.
And the Do No Evil people said, well, hell, maybe just a little bit of evil, for a whole lot of sweet profit.
Now Your Exceptional Empire and its, uh, elected representatives are hell bent on trying to tell you that those filthy Chinamen are getting a little too big for their britches.
Should I hate a people, for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes, or the shape I’m in
Should I hate ’em, for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
–James McMurtry, going on 20 years ago and getting more brutally true every day
Am I droning? Am I digressing?
Yeah, I am.
This was supposed to be about Africa.
Tomorrow.