The world is woke to Western posturing and global white privilege
A tipping point has been reached, even if it has hardly been discussed within societies and by political leaders. Across the non-Western world, there is growing awareness and rejection of the hypocrisy, insincerity and insecurity embedded in the Western world with regard to its relations with the global majority.
Western narratives and propaganda took hold across the world over the last 200 years as a result of colonisation and imperialism. Mind capture was a necessary tool of oppression to subjugate people. And despite decolonisation, mental colonisation became the new frontier and remains a key strategy of postcolonial imperialism. Citizens of former colonies remained receptive to Western ideas, having been indoctrinated for so long, and this influence is still actively cultivated via Western soft power as well as through Western education and its global media.
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The world, however, is not fooled by disingenuous arguments which say that support for the Palestinians is support for "terrorists" and a call for the destruction of Israel and its right to exist as a Jewish state. These were the same arguments used to uphold indefensible positions of colonial powers - including genocide - when they were confronted by their oppressed subjects, be it in America, Algeria or Angola. The reality today is that most of the world would not tolerate a scenario in which Israel is not also safeguarded in a deal that frees Palestinians from decades of oppression. These arguments are in fact rooted in racism: a belief that the rest of the world is backward, does not possess values, can be talked down to and will buy such superficial and untenable reasoning. The current position of the West reminds the rest that, what can be simply called white settler colonial behaviour, is in fact hard-wired into the Western psyche. This has been exposed to the world, which for decades gave the West the benefit of the doubt.
It has reached a stage in the West, from Mediterranean Spain to Nordic Norway and right across the US, that China cannot be credited with doing anything right and is a real threat to the world. However, this relentless xenophobia has boomeranged because the global majority, who belong to nations which were subject to the brutalities of Western imperialism, recognise these sorts of lies and the similar tactics used to keep them shackled and misinformed. They may have concerns about China's rising influence in their regions, but they do not share the same fears as the West, which have more to do with their inability to share power than legitimate concerns for others. Given this, the big question on people's minds is whether the orthodox view that the world needs the West to protect it from China is simply self-serving and constructed to serve Western economic interests and dominance.
Finally, there are two other contemporary issues that have helped expose Western hypocrisy and raised awareness in many across the world.
These recent events have helped reveal how white and Western privilege is maintained and reproduced at a global level. This is by no means novel - Western societies have long relied upon global inequities to maintain economic dominance. The difference is that now, instead of being captive to an idealised vision of the West, the rest of the world is waking up to what Western narratives, fallacies and weaknesses really are - part of a system of oppression to keep the Western hegemon alive and in sole control.
Chandran Nair is the founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and member of the Club of Rome. His forthcoming book Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World will be published in December 2021
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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