Proudly touting his Italian-Spanish ancestry and echoing the prejudices of his president, Donald Trump, US secretary of state Marco Rubio delivered one of the most historically flawed speeches at the annual Munich Security Conference.
Praising the supposedly benevolent role of Western Christian nations in creating the contemporary world, he stressed to his largely European audience that “we are part of one civilisation — Western civilisation. We are bound to one another … by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry".
The fact that the cream of Europe’s political elite greeted this prejudiced speech with a standing ovation exposed its own moral turpitude and historical amnesia.
Rubio gloated effusively in noting: “For five centuries … the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires expanding out across our globe.”
Yet five centuries of European slavery and colonialism caused enormous political, socioeconomic and cultural damage to indigenous people across Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. Between 1450 and 1888, 12-million to 15-million enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic as human chattel.
Their four centuries of free labour greatly benefited European slaving nations and America, enabling the West’s industrialisation. The rape and abuse of enslaved women was ubiquitous. Across the Americas, European invaders committed genocide against indigenous populations.
Contrary to Rubio’s rosy picture of a beneficent Western civilisation, European rule in Africa saw widespread human rights abuses that contradicted the very Christian principles these imperialists were preaching. Belgium’s King Leopold’s misrule of the Congo resulted in 10-million African deaths.
Rubio describes the Western alliance as one that “saved and changed the world”, without acknowledging that exhausted European colonial powers were, in fact, forced by Asian and African liberation fighters — from Dien Bien Phu to Java, Algiers and Kenya — to give up their ill-gotten imperial loot.
He portrays Berlin as the symbol of the Western alliance’s victory during the Cold War. But Berlin holds a different significance for Africans. This was the city where 14 largely European states met in 1884/85 to set the rules for the orderly partition of Africa, cloaking the fraudulent scheme under racist moral platitudes of a civilising mission.
Contrary to Rubio’s rosy picture of a beneficent Western civilisation, European rule in Africa saw widespread human rights abuses that contradicted the very Christian principles these imperialists were preaching. Belgium’s King Leopold’s misrule of the Congo resulted in 10-million African deaths.
Germany exterminated 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama populations in Namibia between 1904 and 1908. One million Algerians died in the savage French war of 1954-1962, British troops killed 25,000 Kenyans during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, while Italian imperialists used chemical weapons in Libya in a bid to exterminate the Bedouins in the 1920s.
Rubio criticises the West’s supposed embrace of free trade, which is contradicted by enormous subsidies to its industries and farmers. The US secretary of state — whose country accounts for 39% of global military spending — then makes the extraordinary claim that “other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in human history”.
He castigates the ineffectiveness of the UN in Gaza, but ignores American and European arming and enabling of Israel’s genocide in the territory. Rubio then repeats the lie that “we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies”.
However, it was migration that built America into the largest and most innovative economy in the world. Not only are the draconian policies being pursued by the Trump administration to whiten America counterproductive, but much of Europe is actually enacting similar policies.
The best riposte to Rubio’s racist rant was provided by India’s anticolonial hero Mahatma Gandhi. When asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he wryly quipped “I think it’d be a very good idea”.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
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