Opinions of Friday, 5 December 2014

Auteur: Femi Akomolafe

The Philosophy of White Supremacy

“We [therefore] weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso - to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery…” - The Bull Romanus Pontifex (Nicholas V), January 8, 1455.

“Four hundred years, it’s still the same philosophy.” – Peter Tosh

What is ‘White Supremacy,’ and is it a philosophy?

Some definitions are necessary for clarification. The dictionary defines Philosophy as: “the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethic); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge (epistemology); and what are the correct principles of reasoning (logic).”

The same dictionary defines ‘White supremacy’ thus: “a racist ideology based on the assertion that white people are superior to other races. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates social and political dominance for whites.”

We intend to show here that (1) ‘White Supremacy’ (aka racism) exists and that (2) it is a philosophy, if we accept that philosophy is a way of life.

First, we define White Supremacy as “the arrogant belief of White people that the world and its resources (especially its resources, including human) belong to them.”

The domination and control of non-white people and their resources underpins this philosophy.

As Dr. John Henrik Clarke correctly pointed out: “No matter what Europeans say they believe religiously, politically or culturally, their main objective in the world is control. Everything that has ever been developed in the European mind was meant to facilitate mind control of the world.”

No matter how much veneer Western scholarship and leadership try to put on the actions of Europe, the truth remains that Europeans, wherever they go, never are interested in honourable dealings; they sought always to take advantage that will result in their taking control.

Trimmed of all its glossy rhetoric and fanciful propaganda, the actions of the European belied this philosophy.

We will urge that we judge the European solely on the account of his actions, and not on the sanctimonious declarations of his leadership\scholarship, or the sweet nonsense we read or see in his mass media.

We can begin by looking at the simple fact that there is no place in our wide world where the Whiteman is prepared to treat any non-white as an equal, not even in their post-racial America.

The mindset that seems to guide Europeans is the belief that the world is their oyster, and that the distorted world order constructed in their favour is their birthright.

This way of thinking was the philosophy that underpinned the wiping out of whole societies where white people find resources that they craved. It was this same mentality that prompted Columbus and his bandits to virtually wipe some races of the Indians off the face of the earth. It’s the same mindset that enabled Captain Cook and his brigands to kill off the aboriginals in Australia, and it is the only reason why the British could, without compunction, killed off every man, woman and child they met on the Australian Island of Tasmania. And it is for the same reason that the Boers in South Africa tried to do Africans in.

To those who like to argue that we harp too much on the past, my response is that our polemics would be pointless, and even silly, if there has been a change of heart on the part of the white people.

Wherever we care to look even today, it is the same unabashed lust for other people’s resources, using cunning and wholesale violence, that still inform the actions of the Whiteman today.

The Whiteman continues to use every trick in the books to gain control of other people’s resources. The trick-bag includes the sending of missionaries to far-flung lands to preach what the European neither believe nor practice: ‘love your enemy,’ ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us,’ ‘my kingdom is not of this work,’ ‘turn the other cheek,’ etc etc.

Nowhere do Europeans turn any cheek; nowhere do they forgive anyone that offended them. And while they crave the resources of other people and build their economies on processing raw materials from other land, the same attitude of: ‘Why pay for it, if you can kill for it,’ still applies todays as it did centuries ago.

No, we do not talk only of the past. We all witnessed to how the West brazenly tried to steal a whole country, Iraq, right before our very eyes. They humiliated their former client, Saddam Hussein; stripped him of the wherewithal to defend himself, and yet they went ahead and crushed him nonetheless. They destroyed his country, hunted him like a fugitive and hung him like a common criminal.

Unluckily for them, they did not count on resilient Iraqis’ nationalism.

Again, the last time we checked, Afghanistan is a landlocked country in Central Asia. How then do we explain the presence of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) troops in that unfortunate country?

NATO was set up to defend the North Atlantic, yet the Whiteman was able to rationalize his presence in Afghanistan.

We saw the same thing in Libya, where under the pretense of saving lives, the Whiteman brazenly stole a country, killed its leader and installed his puppets.

Unfortunately for him, his project went awry. Sadly for us all, a once-prosperous land is unravelling before our eyes.

The disproportionate power white people wield in the world today, relative to their size, perhaps represents the most potent argument for the existence of White Supremacy.

By some estimates, White people represent about ten percent of the world’s people.

The question arises as to how and why this tiny minority come to rule the world.

This is the central question we all ought to ask, and it is a question western scholarship would pretend is illegitimate.

Except for those who are still sleeping, we all know that we live in a Eurocentric intellectual, cultural, economic, political and social universe.

And this did not happen by chance or by accident; it was a conscious decision of Whiteman to rule and control the non-white world.

Not even those Europeans with liberal pretensions question this unjust and unnatural state of affairs.

White people simply accept it as a natural order and, as they have amply demonstrated, most of them certainly would be prepared to go war should there be any attempt to dislocate the unfair status quo.

Perhaps the most effective weapon in the hand of the white people is the virtual monopoly they wield over global communication and information.

This, again, is a conscious strategy. Of all the crimes Europeans committed against the non-white people (and God knows that they are vast), the greatest is the colonization of history and of information.

Armed with the total control of the means of information dissemination, Europeans were able to totally rewrite history.

The hagiographies they constructed all praise Europeans that brought the light of civilisation to the world. Which is the exact opposite of what they did, which was to attempt to extinguish all forms of life and of civilization wherever they went.

Since they were unable to wipe the Africans off militarily and genetically (not for lack of trying, we should add); they tried to wipe us off historically.

That explains why some of them suggested (with straight faces) that Africans have no history. That explains why Greece has to be credited with ideas the Greeks borrowed from Ancient Egypt, among other places.

What is it if not implicit racism to suggest that Africa, the birthplace of modern man (as every scientist now accepts) is bereft of history?

Concomitant to this erasure of Africa from history is the conscious promotion of a Eurocentric world.

According to this gospel, every non-white was waiting in darkness until the Whiteman brought him the light of civilization.

That the Whiteman succeeded in making the rest of the world believe this odious historical distortion is due in large measure to his dominating much of the world’s means of communication; a conscious strategy as we mentioned supra.

Contrary to what the Whiteman is forcing down our throats, history showed him a destroyer of civilizations.

He didn’t bring civilization to the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the Aboriginals and certainly not to the Africans; he destroyed those ancient civilizations.

I do not know of a civilisation the British brought to my Yoruba people. However this historical fact hasn’t dented the enthusiasm of Western scholars and leaders from promoting the historical distortion of the Whiteman as a Civilizer.

That explains why the former President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, a loutish racist of the first degree, can go to Africa (of all places) and said that: “The tragedy of Africa is the African man has never really entered history.”

I do not know what type of education or mis-education Mr. Sarkozy had but he, and people like him, should look up on just two or three instances in history and tell us who hasn’t entered history, the European or the African.

“Mansa Musa was the grand-nephew of the founder of the Mali Empire, Sundiata Keita, and ruled over the Mali Empire, during which it was the source of almost half the world’s gold.

Musa was a devoted Muslim, and Islamic scholarship flourished under his rule. With Musa as a benefactor, Sankore University in Timbuktu reached its height. Craftsmen and especially Islamic scholars came from all over the Muslim world to receive a free education at Sankore’s guild and madrasas.

On the way to Mecca, when he passed through Cairo in July of 1324, he was reportedly accompanied by a caravan that included thousands of people and nearly a hundred camels, giving away so much gold that it took over a decade for the economy across North Africa to recover, due to the rapid inflation that it initiated.

On the path to Mecca, Mansa Musa had around five or six slaves or apprentices walking in front of him, sprinkling gold dust before his feet, so that he could walk on gold. He had this done because the Mansa would apparently not take a step without stepping on gold. – (all quotations used here and hereunder are from Wikipedia and related sources).

“The Great Famine of 1315–1322 was the first of a series of large-scale crises that struck Europe early in the 14th century, causing millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marking a clear end to an earlier period of growth and prosperity during the 11th through 13th centuries. Starting with bad weather in the spring of 1315, universal crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer of 1317; Europe did not fully recover until 1322. It was a period marked by extreme levels of criminal activity, disease and mass death, infanticide, and cannibalism. It had consequences for Church, State, European society and future calamities to follow in the 14th century.”

And before they start telling us that it happened only in medieval times, this is what history also tells us:

“The Great Irish Famine (known as The Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór in Irish, or A Drochshaol, the Bad Life), refers to a famine, and its aftermath, in Ireland between 1845 and 1851. The famine was caused initially by potato, which almost instantly destroyed the primary food source for the majority of the Irish people. The blight explains the crop failure but the dramatic and deadly effect of the famine was exacerbated by other factors of economic, political, and social origin. The impact of the Great Famine in Ireland remains unparalleled, in terms of the demographic decline, the Irish population falling by approximately 25 percent in just six years, due to a combination of “excess mortality and mass emigration.”

And before you start entertaining illusions that it was only famine that was plaguing Europeans in those times, read this:

“The Black Death, or The Black Plague, was one of the most deadly pandemic in human history. It probably began in Central Asia and spread to Europe by the late 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide from the pandemic is estimated at 75 million people; there were an estimated 20 to 30 million deaths in Europe alone. The Black Death is estimated to have killed between a third and two-thirds of the population.

The same disease is thought to have returned to Europe every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the 1700s. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe.

On its return in 1603, the plague killed 38,000 Londoners. Other notable 17th Century outbreaks were the Italian Plague of 1629-1631, the Great Plague of Seville (1647-1652), the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), the Great Plague of Vienna (1679).

There is some controversy over the identity of the disease, but in its virulent form, after the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–1722 and the 1771 plague of Moscow it seems to have disappeared from Europe in the 18th century.

The fourteenth-century eruption of the Black Death had a drastic effect on Europe's population, irrevocably changing Europe's social structure. It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, foreigners, beggars and lepers.” (Italicized to show that the Whiteman persecution of minorities is as old as his history)

When African emperor was dazzling the people of Arabia with gold, Europeans were dying of famine and plagues, today we are being told by the children of those whose parents were living in alpine caves when our king was making his pilgrimage to Mecca that we had no history!

Another manifestation of White Supremacy philosophy is the conscious negation of non white people through media manipulation or should we say annihilation.

A visitor from Mars who landed in a white society might be pardoned for thinking that the only inhabitants that matters are white folks who are always assisting their dark-hued co-earthlings dying of AIDS, Ebola, famine and wars.

Or what do the CNN and the BBC and the other media of the Whiteman show you?

No mention is ever made of the fact that Africa repatriated more money to Western banks than all the aid they so vociferously proclaim to give to Africa.

One manifestation of White Supremacy philosophy is this pervasive tendency for the Whiteman to arrogantly dismiss the institutions, cultures, including religions of non-white people.

We saw how White missionaries destroyed complex African traditional religious belief systems, simply because their materialistic, one-track, one-dimensional epistemological minds cannot grasp them.

They made bonfires of the African gods only to replace it with the image of a redeemer (?) nailed to a cross.

We see this also in the glib dismissal by Western anthropologists of Africans who go semi-nude in their hot climate. Yet, when we go to any beach in Europe in the summer we are confronted by the sight of naked people. They are white, so they cannot be primitives: They are called NUDISTS.

By White Supremacy, we talk about how white people gave themselves the right to determine what they pay for the labour, the resources and the produce of non-white people.

This is an awesome power which Western analysts do not like to talk about. They talk about a mirage they call ‘market forces.’

Need we not ask what magical forces gave a Whiteman sitting behind his computer in London, the right to determine the prices he will pay for cocoa, grown by the peasant farmer in Ghana, or gold dug up in South Africa or diamond from the soil of Sierra Leone?

And this state of unjustified theft the world has come to accept as a natural state of affairs.

And they pretend not to know why Africans are still poor!

While it’s true that it is not every Whiteman who is a racist, the indisputable fact remain that in the Eurocentric world in which we live today, every Whiteman is born with an advantage conferred solely by the colour of his skin.

As Albert Memmi wrote in his classic, ‘The Colonizer and the Colonized,’ “While it is true that it is not every white person who is a colonizer, but the Whiteman needs only to step into the colony to start enjoying the advantages of the colonizer.”

You can confirm this simply by observing how Europeans posted to Africa easily and automatically ease into the roles of colonizers. People who yesterday were struggling in their home countries immediately start to enjoy the paraphernalia of the colonizers: the big mansions, the servants, the security guards, the gardeners and the washing lady as though they were born with the privileges.

If tomorrow, as we hope, Africans take their affairs firmly in their hands and start dictating the prices of their commodities and produces and, more importantly setting their own agendas, we shall see whether or not every White man is not wailing: “What a tribulation!”