People & Money

Why we must overthrow the West

At bottom, this battle between Russia/China and the U.S./democratic Europe has always been about social envy writ large and dangerously.

…one can understand how today’s homiletics from the West about democracy and individual rights can grate on more sensitive non-White ears. There is an understated beauty to Winston Churchill’s assertion that “democracy is the worst form of government ― except for all the others that have been tried”. But isn’t this simply a variant of the mongrel spiel with which the West appears to have held the world in thrall to its weltanschauung for so long?

Stripped of the high-sounding phrases and a lot of the moralising, much of the support across the world for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is all about indignation with the United States of America and the company of democratic European states that it keeps. The latter group of countries do have an impressive list of holdover charges against them from much of what was recently described as the “Third World”. As slavers. Colonial overlords. Neo-imperialists. In all of these roles and more, an almost messianic disposition has had the West preach to the rest of us on the rectitude of its positions vis-à-vis the uncivilised contingents of humanity.

As slavers, Europeans were in no doubt of the correctness of their position vis-à-vis non-whites. As abolitionists, they were no less evangelical in their condemnation of slavery. Not that this later passion did much to prevent the West from taking the moral high-ground in its latter roles as colonialists. Here, the civilising mission was no less execrable in the many outcomes for its victims, as was the case with the anti-Black racists’ insistence on slavery as a cultural and moral responsibility in the American South.

By extension, one can understand how today’s homiletics from the West about democracy and individual rights can grate on more sensitive non-White ears. There is an understated beauty to Winston Churchill’s assertion that “democracy is the worst form of government ― except for all the others that have been tried”. But isn’t this simply a variant of the mongrel spiel with which the West appears to have held the world in thrall to its weltanschauung for so long?

…are we allowed by concern with the West’s ideological dominance to forget that formidable though China might appear today, all of what it now boasts of was because it copied extensively from the West’s economic playbook? In this sense, not just does Comrade Xi Jinping’s ongoing reset of the economy along traditional communist lines then threaten to rob the world’s second largest economy of its vim.

Fortunately for the rest of us, and despite the preferments of a few, history did not end with the fall of the USSR in 1991. Concerned lest “mankind’s ideological evolution” should grind to a screeching halt, Providence gave us China ― today, the world’s second largest economy by market exchange rate and already the biggest by the purchasing power parity measure. If nothing else, the Middle Kingdom has continued to offer a counter-narrative to the post-Cold War unipolar narratives favoured by think-tankers in the West. At a further remove, China is, of course, the main foil to Francis Fukuyama’s hope that the “universalisation of Western liberal democracy” will be “the final form of human government”. Its Belt and Road Initiative combined with massive lending to emerging and frontier markets (in its good books) have at times endangered what’s left of the Washington Consensus.

But are we allowed by concern with the West’s ideological dominance to forget that formidable though China might appear today, all of what it now boasts of was because it copied extensively from the West’s economic playbook? In this sense, not just does Comrade Xi Jinping’s ongoing reset of the economy along traditional communist lines then threaten to rob the world’s second largest economy of its vim. To the extent that it ignores Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s warning that “When you open windows both flies and air come in”, Comrade Xi’s pivot towards an autarkic China also holds out the risk of eventually asphyxiating the economy, just to keep Western flies out. Nonetheless, the main vulnerability that China faces is that this new stage of the conflict with the West will be prosecuted with recently acquired tools from the West, and on the latter’s terms. Accordingly, the main irony of China’s emergence as the white knight for illiberal autocracy is that to have had a shouting chance at rivalling the West, China had to ride the wave of globalisation driven by the West. Because it has no plans to, nor can it beat the West by force of arms, its path to further greatness will necessarily pass by even more familiar economic routes.

Also Read: For The People and Of The People: Towards a Truly Representative and Accountable Democracy in Nigeria – Olu Fasan

…through his hijinks in Ukraine, Comrade Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin simply returns us to our recent past. Familiar tropes like George Kennan’s “Containment”, the abjuration of the first use of weapons of mass destruction, and the mutually-assured destruction that is the lot of a world bristling with nukes are all back.

Russia’s latest confrontation with the West, though, is a different kettle of fish. There is a qualified sense in which Russia was a harbinger of the changes to communist thought that, in China’s case, resulted in the redemption from poverty of the largest number of people ever by any country. But if Glasnost and Perestroika were a pivot away from dialectical materialism and its focus on the antagonistic contradictions inherent in capitalism towards development and modernisation, it is a safe bet that Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s cat turned out to be a better mouser than Comrade Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’s.

In this sense, then, through his hijinks in Ukraine, Comrade Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin simply returns us to our recent past. Familiar tropes like George Kennan’s “Containment”, the abjuration of the first use of weapons of mass destruction, and the mutually-assured destruction that is the lot of a world bristling with nukes are all back. To focus on this bells and whistles, though, misses the point. For at bottom, this battle between Russia/China and the U.S./democratic Europe has always been about social envy writ large and dangerously.

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