Of the ‘disease of Eurocentrism,’ its roots in colonialism and the conflict in Ukraine

By John Wight

John Wight is an author and political commentator based in Scotland.

An important by-product of Russia’s military assault against Ukraine has been the education it has provided when it comes to the hierarchy of human worth that informs the thinking of Western governments, their media, and the masses of their own people who are bombarded by this thinking from cradle to grave to the point where they have internalized it and normalized its moral turpitude.

The conflict in Ukraine is brutal and constitutes a complete breakdown in human affairs, but so do all conflicts wherever they break out or are unleashed. And though brutal the conflict now raging in Ukraine is thus far a long way from being the most brutal that has been unleashed in modern times, and indeed is not the most brutal that is raging now.

Yet given the hysteria that has gripped the West in response – the clamor for action against Russia, the unbridled jingoism and horror with which it has been met – you would think that the prolonged suffering of the Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian and Yemeni people was neither here nor there; merely part of the natural order of things when it comes to people of a certain culture and skin color.

Eurocentrism is a disease rooted in white supremacy and colonialism, and it has never been more open than during Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.

Take, for example, the sentiments of CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata. While on air at the outset of the conflict, D’Agata stated that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”

Resolute in his belief in Western exceptionalism, D’Agata spared his viewers the bother of explaining that the reason that Iraq and Afghanistan have seen “conflict raging for decades” is due to the West’s crimes of aggression against both countries.

Or how about the BBC interview of a former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, who said, “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair … being killed every day.” Rather than challenge this openly racist utterance, the BBC host instead replied, “I understand and respect the emotion.”

Britain’s ITV news network also has questions to answer, when one of their correspondents, based in Poland, declared, “Now the unthinkable has happened to them [the Ukrainian people}. And this is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe!”

As if war and conflict should only ever take place in developing, third world nations – nations whose de-development is precisely a consequence of their histories of subjugation in service to European and Western colonialism and imperialism.

The description of Vladimir Putin as the new Hitler and a dictator and madman will have landed in the ears of people in Egypt, Iran, Palestine, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela like an old and familiar friend. After all, Nasser, Khomeini, Arafat, Chavez, and Castro have all in their time been regaled with this moniker and others like from state rooms and newsrooms in Paris, London and Washington, etc.

Putin’s real transgression is not that he has decided to wage war on Ukraine – and done so after spending years warning of the consequences of NATO’s expansion all the way up to Russia’s western border. It is that it’s only the US and its European allies that are allowed to wage war. This is a white European ‘privilege,’ you see dear reader, afforded only those nations of a higher culture and civilization than the rest, including Russia.

In the UK and across Europe special fund drives have been set up for Ukraine. The devolved Scottish Government, led by Nicola Sturgeon, has donated £4 million to Ukraine for humanitarian aid, while the UK government is donating £20 million. Not a penny did either administration send to the Palestinians in Gaza in 2009 or 2014 after Israel’s murderous assaults on the Strip – land, sea and air assaults that killed thousands of men, women and children. And not one penny have they sent to help the long-suffering people of Yemen since Saudi Arabia unleashed its barbaric war on the country in 2015, and which continues to this day.

The hypocrisy and double standards have been off the Richter scale since Russian forces entered Ukraine, measured in the unprecedented vehemence and grief that has underpinned the West’s response.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has gone out of his way to capitalize on his new found status as a European Spartacus, prancing around Kiev in khaki like the anointed savior of Western so-called civilization he believes himself to be. It is clear his entire strategy hinges on pitching the West into direct military conflict with Russia, making effective use of social media to tug at the heart strings of those who have allowed themselves to believe that Ukraine and its president currently represents absolute good and that Russia and its president absolute evil.

In the last analysis, this disaster to have befallen Ukraine and its people could easily have been averted. It could have been averted if not for the tin-eared refusal of those who consider the West to be a latter day Rome to Russia’s Carthage to understand one vitally important new reality – namely that decisions concerning Russia’s security or lack thereof will from now on be taken in Moscow rather than London or Brussels or Washington.

End.

^{The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.}

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