From Gaza to Venezuela: The sprawl of the Imperial Monster

We may, at some point, have seen pictures of a global imperial monster.

Many arms, octopus-like but worse, human head at its centre, wearing a top hat, 19th-Century Western style, each arm with a hand, squishing down or grabbing some piece of the world somewhere.

Popping eyes. Corpulent face. The smirk of greed and covetousness. 

Gaza

Over the past two years, people have focused much compassion and attention on the holocaust in Gaza, perpetrated by the proclaimed heirs of victims of another holocaust. 

The Nazi Holocaust spawning the Zionist Holocaust in Gaza and the wider Palestine. Both, genocides.

As expressed by a Jewish American actor and singer with great indignant passion: “How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and you do it to someone else?”

But the Zionist Holocaust by the Zionist state of Israel could not have happened without the support of Britain and other European imperial powers divvying up conquered and colonised lands, á la the sprawling imperial monster.

More contemporaneously, the US and other European powers have been complicit to the hilt in enabling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza to the great self-sabotage of the West’s own civilisational values.

Hypocrisy in full glory.

Venezuela

The West’s ponderous advantage in weapons of ruination and mass killing has enabled its ongoing imperial stampede through the world.

With impunity, Israel and the US bombed Iran in June last year. Then Israel bombed Qatar in September. On Christmas Day, US navy missiles attacked Nigerian territory. 

And on 3 January, the US attacked Caracas, kidnapping the sovereign Venezuelan head of state, Nicolas Maduro.

Respect for international law and for a basic minimum sense of decency between nations were irrelevant. World -class gangsterism made it unnecessary.

Other countries have also been attacked – Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, not just by the US and Israel but with the UK and France somewhere in the mix too. And, of course, do not forget the decimation and ongoing genocide of Gaza and the pillage of the West Bank.

There is much good material already now published about the reasons for the US obscenity in Venezuela – Venezuelan oil and mineral resource control, Venezuelan refusal to be a slave to US demands, a show of force to ward off China and Russia, defending the petrodollar, a muscular display and distraction for the domestic gallery, and a demonstration of the quirkily named ‘Donroe Doctrine’.

Not to forget. Venezuela has long been unequivocal in its support for Palestine, seeing it as a moral and anti-imperialist struggle, which it is.

Another reason to drop the hammer on Venezuela.

It is telling that Trump spun on and pumped up the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine that had all the pathology of imperial psychology by dividing up the world into hemispheres and just declaring who has control. Control over black, brown and yellow people, one might say.

From Gaza to Venezuela, the use of boorish, overbearing, uncivilised power in the bullying, domination and murder of others is on display. And the standard operating procedure of empire means it will be repeated in other places.

The imperialist monster is sprawled around the globe, with the risk of war begetting more war.

Imperialism and white supremacy

Imperialism and white supremacy often come together like Siamese twins. White colonising powers have had centuries of controlling and exploiting others.

This is not to say that empire is exclusive to white powers. Japan and the Ottomans too have demonstrated such behaviour. But as a continuous, long-running enterprise that continues to bring untold suffering in one form or another, Western imperialism has no match.

The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries was a cornerstone of Western civilisational values and arguably provides a basis for the modern world. So it is of considerable irony that it is also a fountain of the racist thinking that accompanied the imperial spread of European and American power.

Here are examples of racist statements from or about some thinkers of the Enlightenment who helped pave the way for non-white people to be regarded as subhuman and, therefore, subject to control or extermination.

Immanuel Kant (Germany): “the yellow [Asian] Indians do have a meagre talent” but the “Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples [Native Americans]” believing that “the White race possess all the motivating forces and talents in itself“.

Georg Hegel (Germany): “Negroes are to be regarded as a race of children who remain immersed in their state of naiveté. They are sold and let themselves be sold without any reflection on the rights and wrongs of the matter.”

John Locke (England): Believed that Negroes were the product of African women sleeping with apes and therefore were subhuman.

David Hume (Scotland): Was “apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men to be naturally inferior to the Whites”.

Thomas Jefferson (US): Believed that Black people “are inferior to the Whites in the endowments of both mind and body”.

(Above extracted from The New Age of Empire by Kehinde Andrews, 2021.)

Things are generally not as brazen today, of course. (But with Trump and others, well…) If it is there, it is generally more subtle now, and we should be alert.

I recall attending a global meeting of directors. A question was asked about the Southeast Asian part of the business. Southeast Asian directors were present, as were East Asian ones.  But it was a director originally from the British Isles that was asked to answer the question, with no utterance sought from directors native to the region.

It was a cringeworthy moment of invisibility. A year later, I had occasion to sit next to one of the Southeast Asian directors on a plane. I asked if he recalled that moment, and he had no recollection of it.

Resisting the Imperial Monster

The above anecdote is instructive. In a neo-colonial state (of mind), it is entirely possible that being excluded by the privileged and controlling minority becomes normalised and internalised.

We come to accept it and become desensitised. But we musn’t. We need to be awake and see ourselves as equals and interact accordingly.

The above is a small example. But it belongs to the same spectrum. From subtle exclusionary acts to where we find people who dominate, control and, in extremis, bomb at will, rob and inflict a holocaust on others.

Empire becomes a habit. We need to make them realise it is a bad habit.

Wherever we are, where we can, we need to understand and resist hegemonic control by others, whoever they may be. Just as the Palestinians continue to do with great resilience and, as we might well see, Venezuelans will also do in time to come.

Wherever we are, we can find ways to support, even engage if we can, in efforts against subjugation and oppression. By doing so, we help resist the hydra-armed imperial monster sprawled around the globe.

What does it mean for Malaysia?

We need to get the basics right. There are implications for us as a middling country seemingly caught in ‘middling-ness’ and in the waves of geopolitics that we have limited influence over.

We need to do better in many areas. Technology, basic research, education, the quality of our people – the most important resource we have. Also, challenges like more equitable social and economic systems, talent loss, and the cancers of corruption and racial polarisation. So too with the abuse of power and hierarchy and the over-respect of it.

Not getting the basics done risks us becoming vulnerable and lesser – speaking occasionally with a moral voice about the affairs of the world, and then, at the next moment, forced to bend a knee.

...