Of all the ideological mystifications created by the white West to rationalize and justify its brutal exploitation and colonization of the world the last 500 years, the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on the colonized and the entire world is the idea that the West has the capacity or intent to define and protect something called human rights.
The conquest fueled by advanced weapons and a style of war that has as its objective the annihilation of the enemy, the barbarians that poured out of what became “Europe” into what was eventually named the Americas burned, murdered, raped and destroyed cultures and peoples in a war of extermination. The people that were spared, or who escaped or resisted, were enslaved alongside Africans brought by the millions to provide free labor that would result in consolidation of riches and capital key to the development of what has been characterized as Western civilization.
In this process of conquest and subsequent global colonization there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that what is referred to as Western civilization possesses any ideas that propel collective humanity forward. Every intellectual and religious production, from Christianity to the so-called Enlightenment period was undermined and distorted by a fundamental flaw in European culture and thought.
That flaw was graphically captured not by the cartesian assertion of Western “man” as rational, but by Thomas Hobbes’s accurate characterization of European society reflected in a “state of nature” or in civil society that life was, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
This characterization was for life in Europe. For non-Europeans, the assumptions were even worse. Non-Europeans did not even qualify to be included in the category of “human.” The conquest, slavery and colonization institutionalized conceptual and moral frames that defined who belonged in the category of human and who was to be excluded.
They defined who was human and, thus, deserving of inalienable rights and who were “killable” as Europeans “discovered” new lands and peoples, and exercised their “God given” providence of “manifest destiny.”
This exercise of power, of “white power,” is defined and informed to this day by the colonial/capitalist, racialized, gendered world views of Westerners who still believe they have the right to determine who lives and who dies, who is provided for and who is not, and what kinds of governments should exist and whose lives count.
Ajamu Baracka writes for The Black Agenda Report.