By Adekeye Adebajo
Proudly touting his Christian Italian-Spanish ancestry, and echoing his president, Donald Trump’s prejudices and pet hates, United States (U.S.) Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently delivered one of the most historically flawed speeches in living memory at the annual Munich Security Conference.
Praising the supposedly benevolent role of Western Christian nations in creating the contemporary world, he persistently stressed to his largely European audience that: “We are part of one civilisation – Western civilisation. We are bound to one another…by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry….our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours.” Rubio went on to extol a “great civilisation that has every reason to be proud of its history,” and not be “shackled by guilt and shame.” The fact that the cream of Europe’s political elite greeted this prejudiced speech with a standing ovation exposed its own moral turpitude and historical amnesia.
The white man’s burden
Rubio gloats effusively in noting that: “For five centuries….the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires expanding out across our globe.” However, we should more accurately recall that five centuries of European slavery and colonialism caused massive political, socio-economic, and cultural damage to indigenous people across the Black Atlantic in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.
Between 1450 and 1888, 12-15 million African enslaved were transported across the Atlantic as human chattel. Their four centuries of free labour greatly benefitted European slaving nations and America, enabling the West’s industrialisation. The rape and abuse of enslaved women by European and American men was ubiquitous. Across the Americas, European invaders committed genocide against indigenous populations. Britain seized India in 1700 – with 27 per cent of global GDP – and two centuries later, left it as one of the world’s most impoverished countries through brutal pillage and expropriation.
Rubio’s talk of wishing to end a mythical “global welfare state” that was established to “atone for the purported sins of past generations,” is thus grossly distorted, as barely any reparations were paid by the West for these crimes against humanity.
The U.S. Secretary of State then describes the Western alliance as one that “saved and changed the world,” without acknowledging how much of the world’s people regarded Hitler’s war as having represented their own liberation, as exhausted European colonial powers were, in fact, forced by Asian and African liberation fighters – from Dien Bien Phu, to Java, to Algiers, to Kenya – to give up their ill-gotten imperial loot.
Between 1945 and 1960, 40 Asian and African countries with populations of 800 million – over a quarter of the global population at the time – won their independence in the “Revolt against the West” that transformed an unjust international order into a cosmopolitan international society. The death knell was finally sounded on the notorious European legal concept of colonial territory being declared terra nullius (no man’s land) in an era of a perverse “White Man’s burden.”
The curse of Berlin
Rubio then portrays Berlin as the symbol of the Western alliance’s victory during the Cold War. Berlin, however, holds a different significance for Africans. This was the city where 14 largely European states met in 1884/1885, with no Africans present, to set the rules for the orderly partition of Africa, cloaking the fraudulent scheme under racist moral platitudes of a civilising mission. The effects of this conference on Africa remain devastating: imported political systems; fragmented and weak economies; artificial, insecure borders; and 16 land-locked countries, all of which have resulted in six and a half decades of post-independence conflicts.
Contrary to Rubio’s rosy picture of a beneficent Western civilisation, European rule in Africa saw widespread human rights abuses that contradicted the very Christian principles that these imperialists were preaching. Belgium’s King Leopold’s annexation of the Congo saw unspeakable atrocities and forced labour on rubber plantations, which resulted in 10 million African deaths. Germany perpetrated the 20th century’s first genocide in Namibia (1904-1908), exterminating 80 per cent of the Herero and 50 per cent of the Nama populations, while establishing concentration camps in which diabolical experiments were conducted on human flesh and skulls.
One million Algerians died in the savage French war of 1954-1962, while British troops killed 25,000 Kenyans and detained 100,000 without trial in torture-filled concentration camps during the Mau Mau anti-colonial rebellion in the 1950s. Italian imperial rule involved the use of chemical weapons in Libya in a brutal attempt to exterminate the Bedouins in the 1920s, accompanied by forced labour in Somalia, and the widespread rape of local women by Italian soldiers across its African colonies.
The West’s organised hypocrisy
Rubio then falsely portrays the West as having “embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade,” which is contradicted by massive Western subsidies to its industries and farmers, and Washington’s neutering of the World Trade Organisation’s arbitration tribunal after losing cases to China. America’s Secretary of State demonstrates his economic illiteracy in talking of the West naively deindustrialising. However, post-industrial Western economies instead became service-oriented ones, as their avaricious corporations went abroad to exploit cheap labour, particularly in Asia.
Rubio a historically ignores the damaging impact of the beggar-thy-neighbour American tariffs that deepened the Great Depression in the 1930s and helped trigger the Second World War, quixotically talking of “creating a Western supply chain for critical minerals.” He goes on to condemn the naivety of a “rules-based global order” having been promoted rather than the seemingly more enlightened “national interest.”
But, even Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has caught up with what the global South has known for eight decades: that the rich and powerful never really observed the rules of this system, as constant illegal U.S. military interventions in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Africa, and widespread Western economic protectionism demonstrated.
Rubio – whose country accounts for 39 per cent of global military spending – then makes the extraordinary claim that “other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in human history.” He castigates the ineffectiveness of the UN in Gaza, but ignores American and European arming and enabling of Israel’s geocide in the territory.
He spews Trump’s climate denialism in attacking a “climate cult” that he claims was “impoverishing our people,” ignoring the fact that U.S. government agencies have conclusively demonstrated that global warming has resulted in rising temperatures, extreme weather and wildfires, and shifting oceans, while 90 per cent of scientists agree that the negative actions of humans is the main cause of climate change.
Mass migration and other myths
Rubio then repeats the lie that “we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture.” Nothing could be further from the truth. It was, however, migration that had earlier built America into the largest and most innovative economy in the world. Not only are the draconian policies being pursued by the Trump administration to exclude black and brown immigrants in a bid to whiten America, counter-productive, much of Europe is actually enacting similar policies.
The European Union has conducted a decade-long crackdown on irregular global South migrants fleeing conflict, climate disasters, and poverty, sending migrants to Tunisia and Libya where scores have been raped, brutalised, and killed. These incidents all have echoes of the “Whites Only” immigration policies of America (from 1790), Australia (from 1901), and Europe (by 1920).
Rubio’s White supremacy then goes into overdrive, crediting Europe with having invented everything from ideas on liberty, rule of law, universities, the scientific revolution, music, and literature. It is almost as if Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, and Aztecs did not contribute anything to world civilisation.
The best riposte to Rubio’s racist rant was provided by India’s anti-colonial hero, Mahatma Gandhi. When asked what he thought of Western civilization, he wryly quipped: “I think it’d be a very good idea.”
Prof. Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.
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