The US-Europe love pact rekindles their colonial kink
People who claim to be our allies are applauding the Trump regime’s invitation to join in devouring us.
NANJALA NYABOLA
THIS VALENTINE’S DAY, it wasn’t just couples publicly declaring their eternal love. At the Munich Security Council, the United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that, despite his president’s moves on Greenland, the love affair between Europe and the US was stronger than ever.
Rubio’s speech received a standing ovation. Across Western media, headlines hailed his speech as a conciliatory overture – a sign of progress or rapprochement after the strident speech US Vice-President JD Vance made at the same conference last year. But if you paid attention, Rubio’s speech was a horrific misreading of the past, a romanticisation of colonisation, and a chilling declaration of imminent violence for everyone who is not part of his narrow conception of “civilisation”.
Rubio’s priorities for this shared Western future include securing supply chains for vital minerals and fighting the “climate cult”, while decrying the welfare state as an obstacle to rather than sign of progress. He echoed the racist “replacement theory” to insist that migration is a threat to Western societies. Yet arguably the politics of immigration enforcement in the US this year demonstrates that as a son of Cuban migrants he is not part of the “we” that he wants to defend.
This “what” is chilling enough: the “how” should alarm us all. Rubio explicitly invited Europe to join the US in reviving and defending the Western civilisation that with “missionaries, pilgrims, soldiers, and explorers pouring from its shores across oceans [to] settle new continents”, built “vast empires extending out across the globe”.
He congratulated the administration he serves for bypassing the United Nations to bomb Iran without domestic congressional oversight. He hailed the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a successful international intervention. He casually referred to people as “barbarians”. It’s clear Rubio’s position is that Europe’s survival rests on joining the US to carve up the rest of the world. He wielded the myth of Western cultural superiority as a justification for militarisation of the continent, citing Dante, Shakespeare, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones as examples of “the way of life” that Western armies must fight for.
Yet even his beloved Beatles have admitted to borrowing heavily from African-American musicians. Rolling Stones frontmen Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have said they were influenced by the gospel music of African-American artists like Mavis Staples. But in the myth of Western civilisation Rubio advances, Western culture emerges spontaneously from ingenuity and grit, transcends the Atlantic, and must be insulated from contamination by outsiders.
Rubio’s was not a diplomatic speech recognising the birth of a new world order. This was racist, violent sentiment that admitted moral defeat and invited other countries to join in conquest. We should be worried about the speech and everyone who applauded it. They should be worried for themselves, too. Aimé Césaire wrote that “a civilisation that draws within itself atrophies” and that “a nation which colonises [and] justifies colonisation …is already a sick civilisation … morally diseased and progressing from one consequence to another”. The “another” here is its own annihilation.
For Africans, this speech was a warning that could not have come at a worse time. As in Berlin in 1885, the carving knives are being sharpened and our continent is on the menu. Yet, too many countries are saddled with morally bankrupt, selfish, and short-termist leaders, many of whom have already rolled over and accepted their 30 pieces of silver in exchange for a photo-op.
We are in desperate need of an African foreign policy and diplomacy that articulates, organises, and advances the defence of African people. The intent to devour us has been declared – and people who claim to be our allies are applauding it.
It was a horrible display, the likes of which have an established history inaugurated by the ships that left Portugal and Spain in the 15-16th centuries. Walter Benjamin (who took his own life en route to escaping Nazi Europe) wrote “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
I guess and hope that most who applauded, didn't applaud the indeed dreadful neo-colonial, imperial and civilisational dimensions of his speech, but the superficially reconciliatory tone. So, let's hope this was only a (very) superficial (and I fully agree, misguided) sign of relief, even though we shouldn't be relieved but increasingly worried on substance...