By Dr Salim Nazzal
(The Corona war) revealed many things, first and foremost of the greed of Western countries, especially with regard to providing vaccines for poor countries in the third world.
It also revealed that globalization which said to have made the world a small village has become questionable issue. The borders of countries were closed and each country had to rely on itself, which strengthened the idea of self-reliance, especially in basic foodstuffs.
The Corona war has provided an important lesson for the countries outside the Western world that they must rise as a cooperating force, especially in crises such as the Corona crisis, where countries closed their borders.
And the Ukrainian crisis revealed in an unequivocal way the ugly face of the West, which we thought was from the past. We watched on TV screens how racist dealt with Arab, Indian and African students in Kyiv when they were not allowed to board the trains to escape the war.
We also saw how the racist episodes with the colored persons on the Polish border. Though this thing may vary from a western country to another, yet this confirms that the superiority view over the people of the countries with brown and black skin is still there.
The Moroccan thinker Al jabre explained this phenomenon from a historical perspective. In his view the slogans of the French Revolution about brotherhood, justice and equality were only for the French, because the state of the French Revolution was itself the one which colonized the Third World and deprived its people of their basic rights.
In crises, real positions are revealed. It appears that the rhetoric in the West about human rights in the nonwestern countries has been a tool often used against any regime that challenge the west domination.
Therefore, the west must not be surprised that most of the third world countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America did not stand with America and the West in the Ukrainian-Russian war. The reason in my view is that nonwestern counties do not support occupying any country but rather they are more aware than ever of the hypocrisy and duplicity of the West
These countries saw that it is in the interest of their countries to take a position of the center. The Pakistani Prime Minister expressed this position by saying that we are not slaves to the West. This blunt position expresses the essence of the position of many countries outside the west that do not see that America’s enemies are necessarily its enemies.
We may still remember that Nelson Mandela took a similar position when he was told in America that has friends like Castro and Gaddafi, and his response was that America’s enemies are not necessarily his enemies
It seems that the time for America to drag the nonwestern world into its wars, choosing friends for them and choosing enemies for them, is over. It is true that many non-Western countries are still in conflict with each other. And it is true that its abilities to stand up to America are still limited, but it is also true that the world outside the west is no longer ready to accept that America determines its options for it, including who are its friends and who are its enemies.
Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology.
6 April 2022
Source: countercurrents.org