Lech Walesa, remember him? He was the Labour union leader who succeeded in forming and leading a broad anti-Communism and anti-Soviet Union mass uprising under the banner of the Solidarity Movement which, in 1989, ended Communist rule in Poland and ushered in a chain of events that led to the disintegration of the behemoth called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and brought an end to the Cold War as it was then known – even if temporarily and for a season as recent events appear to demonstrate.
For his efforts, Walesa, an electrician by profession and Polish dockworkers’ union leader, was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, going on to win the 1990 Polish presidential election and becoming the first democratically elected president of his country (1990 – 1995) since 1926 and the first-ever Polish president elected by popular vote. Recently, I read him complaining about the United States’ President Donald Trump’s alleged (mis)treatment of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the superpower United States’ apparent abandonment of its leadership of the so-called “Free World”. And I began to wonder and ponder.
Who constitutes the Free world? “Freed” and or “free” from what, who? According to Google, the term Free World “refers more broadly to all liberal democracies collectively, as opposed to authoritarian regimes and communist states. It has traditionally primarily been used to refer to the countries allied and aligned with the United States, the European Union, and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation).”
In practice, the Western world, as the US and its economic and military allies are called, is the Free World. These, majorly, are the countries of Western Europe, the United States, and Canada. They are also known as the “West”. They are the “metropoles” or metropolitan powers while other countries allied or aligned to them from other parts of the world are their satellites. The United States of America, beginning from the end of the Second World War in 1945, leads the hordes. Hence, it is referred to as the leader of the Free World. Derisively and derogatively, it is also jeered at as “the policeman of the world”!
Policing and protecting what, who? Policing and protecting, ostensibly, the sovereignty, territorial integrity, freedom, and liberties of its members and their satellite states against any encroachment from external forces and or factors. It stands to reason that the arch enemies of the Free World are the other side or section of the world that is not “free” and which is assumed to be opposed to the freedom of others. These are the countries whose political, economic, and social systems are opposed to those of the countries of the Free World.
While the countries of the Free World practice capitalism or what they call the free market or deregulated economy and flaunt as democracy the regular election of its leaders by popular vote, their opponents practice a regulated communist or socialist system where the freedom and liberty to run haywire on all fronts and fly on spoils granted by the Free World is reined in to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources towards the establishment of an egalitarian and more just society.
Led by the defunct USSR, Moscow was the metropole while the satellite states were also spread across the world. Until recently, China, then a sleeping giant (to quote the French general, Napoleon Bonaparte), stood aloof from the Cold War that raged between the US and the NATO countries/forces it led on the one hand, and the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries/forces led by it on the other. Most of the Eastern European countries belonged to the Warsaw Pact/Communist Bloc. They were known as the Communist Bloc or the Eastern Powers. Derisively and derogatively, they have been referred to by the West as the “Evil Empire”.
The disintegration of the USSR in 1991, which resulted in 15 of its constituent republics gaining independence and moving away, one-by-one, from the eastern axis to the western axis, whittled the power and influence of what remained as the rump of the old USSR, which is the Russian Federation, but which, as a superpower, is still strong enough to command immense influence and exert commensurate power in regional and world politics. The meteoric rise of China from the backwoods of superpower politics to the centre stage of power and recognition and its alignment with Russia, so far, has all but ended the sole superpower status enjoyed by the US and its NATO allies in the post-USSR disintegration era.
This is the realisation that must have dawned on Trump but which the likes of Walesa, still marooned in the past and remaining nostalgic of its heroics, want the US to still forge ahead with. The US disastrous policy of policeman of the world is unwelcomed in many parts of the world. Whatever has a beginning must have an end – with the exception of He who is the Alpha and the Omega.
1776 was when America made its Declaration of Independence. Before then it had been a colony of Great Britain. It also had to fight a civil war, buy and grab territories before it became the behemoth that it is today. Even at that, it was not originally interested in world dominance but in the preservation of the Americas as its own “sphere of influence”, which is the import of the Monroe Doctrine (1823) by the 5th US President James Monroe (1817 – 1825).
If the first World World (1914 -1918) opened the eyes of the US to the fact that it had a role to play in world affairs, the second (1939 – 1945) confirmed to it that it must not only assume the leadership of the (Free) World but also put in place mechanisms to create it in its own image, assiduously preserve it, and beat everyone into line. We have since been in that era – the era of the United Nations Organisation – with the enforcement tools of NATO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, among others.
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” bemoans the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Little wonder, then, that the battle cry of the French Revolution of 1789 was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” in its “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen”. The Americans, in their 1776 Declaration of Independence, stated unequivocally that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Please, don’t rejoice yet! Whenever the West speaks such eloquent words and espouses noble principles that make the hair stand on the body, they mean it only for themselves, the so-called Free World, and not for anyone else! Otherwise, there would have been no centuries of Slave Trade when the human resources of Africa especially were pillaged and carted in the most inhuman, horrid, horrible, and despicable conditions to develop the so-called New World. Walter Rodney’s seminal work, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” graphically depicts the effects of this inhuman trade on the underdevelopment of Africa and Africans.
Otherwise, too, there would have been no decades of colonization of the African continent following immediately after and the Berlin conference of 1884/1885 where Africa’s head was shaved behind its back (to quote MKO Abiola). There would have been no gruesome murder of African leaders demanding the same “unalinable rights” that the same leaders of the so-called Free World had so eloquently propounded and so forcefully demanded, fighting even to the death to earn them. Patrice Lumumba! Kwame Nkrumah! Walter Rodney! Conscientious African and other satellite-country leaders that raised their heads to demand equal rights for their own people were murdered, were hounded out of office, and were prevented from taking office. Salvador Allende! Sylvanus Olympio! Obafemi Awolowo! The list is endless!
Neo-colonialism or imperialism, which Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, described as the highest stage of capitalism, has replaced direct colonial rule. What we have in many satellite countries today is Frantz Fanon’s black mask or faces hiding the face of the white colonial masters still calling the shots. Africa’s mineral and material resources are pillaged for the benefit of the metropoles. Peanuts are what the Free World pays for these resources.
Just one example here: While France paid $0.8 per kilogram of uranium to its former colony, Niger Republic, it paid $200 for the same quantity of the same commodity to Canada, a member of the same “Free World” like itself! We may mouth the same cliches, but they mean different things to different folks. We may be rallied to fight for the same principles (as was the case during the Second World War), but when the chips are down, the same principles and ideals will be interpreted and implemented differently for different people.
Their freedom is our slavery. Their rights, our chains. They are the Free World. We are the Enslaved World. They have reasoned – and reckoned – that we cannot both be free together. One has to be enslaved for the other to be free. One has to be looted and deprived of its resources, human and material, for the other to enjoy the good life. One hand must be down for the other to be on top. Their prosperity and our poverty are inversely proportional to each other. For those who may not understand that mathematical expression, what it means is that they are rich because we are poor and we are poor because they are rich. To get rich, they first make us poor. Another way of putting it is that they must make us poor before they can become rich.
There is no moralization involved here. Or, better put, the morals of the situation is that, to break their yoke from off our neck, we must stand up and fight, like the French did, and like the Americans did. This has got nothing to do with religion; in fact, religion was, has been, and remains one of the tools they employed for our subjugation. It is the reason Karl Marx described it as the opium (sedative) of the people. If we cannot turn the tables and employ the same religion against them – now that we cry more than the bereaved and act holier than the Pope on the matter of religion – we should at least see beyond the veil.
Morals play no role in the Free World’s code of conduct. Their ethics revolve around the good life for themselves and themselves alone. To achieve this, their doublespeak and deceit even make the few conscientious folks among them blush. Otherwise, how can second- or third-generation immigrants and sons of immigrants like Trump sit in judgement over – and begin to deport – the descendants of those who have been there centuries earlier?
Bob Marley then was right: Them crazy/Them crazy/We gonna chase those crazy baldheads out of town/I an I build a cabin/I and I plant the corn/Didn’t my people before me/Slave for this country?/Now you look me with that scorn/Then you eat up all my corn/…Hate is your reward for us/Telling us of your God above/We gonna chase those crazy…”
Only by first freeing ourselves shall we help to free the so-called Free World from their pride and prejudice, hatred, bigotry, jaundiced worldview and oppressive manipulation of the other parts and peoples of the world.
Eid Mubarak to my teeming readers and all our moslem brothers and sisters all over the world! But should I put it on record that none has yet considered sending me ram, rice, and condiments for me to also hillariously join them in the celebration?
Former Editor of PUNCH newspapers, Chairman of its Editorial Board and Deputy Editor-in-Chief, BOLAWOLE was also the Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of The Westerner newsmagazine. He writes the ON THE LORD’S DAY column in the Sunday Tribune and TREASURES column in the New Telegraph newspaper on Wednesdays. He is also a public affairs analyst on radio and television.
