August 2000

RACISM: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

According to the following article, there is no difference between the religious, cultural and racist gospels preached by Western missionaries in the Third World during the colonial era, and the substance of the present-day good-news tidings borne by the jargon of financial institutions, the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the apparatus set up for perpetuation of dominance.

By Jeremy Seabrook

Third World Network Features

There is something implausible in the efforts of leaders of Western Europe to distance themselves from spontaneous expressions of racism within their own countries. Their haste to repudiate responsibility for attacks on migrants, asylum seekers and refugees leads to a rhetoric of bombastic disingenuousness.

The indignation is surely affected when they speak as though racism, prejudice and discrimination were alien to their culture and experience, as though these things had erupted of their own volition, without antecedents, at the heart of their societies. The tone of their speeches, ‘we will not tolerate’, ‘there is no room in a democratic society’, ‘unacceptable levels of...’ is one of lofty irascibility. The very idea.

It seems like another culture, a world away from the time when the forerunners of these same leaders were proud to proclaim their racial superiority, when it was their mission to civilise, raise up, instruct, bring the peoples of empire from ignorance and superstition and compel them into the benefits of enlightened administration, and our own unique forms of wisdom and truth. It seems ruling elites have forgotten earlier postures; what a misfortune that so many of their people have not.

Indeed, the re-emergence of overt racism all over Europe, among the dispossessed, the disadvantaged and marginalised, is treated as though they themselves had generated all the pernicious ideas of racism, of contempt for lesser breeds, for foreigners, interlopers, and schemers from the Third World desperate to dispossess us of what we have. The firebombings and street attacks, the racist knifings and beatings shock and horrify those who have learned to forswear the sombre fascinations of racism, and who would prefer to leave the remains interred in the shallow graves of an only recently expunged history.

They wish to do so, not because they have recently become lovers of the (mainly non-white) poor of the earth; not because they have been converted to values of equality and justice (if that were the case they would not preside so imperturbably over the exacerbation of inequality in their sacralised global system). It is because their way of keeping faith with officially discredited doctrines of racism has evolved, become more evasive and complex.

For it has fallen to them in their high calling of ‘governance’ (a recent linguistic retrieval designed to ennoble their squalid dealings) to reconstitute the institutions of dominance, and their unjust extractive purposes in the Third World, in a way less offensive to the modern sensibility. No more declarations of the inferiority of blacks, savage races, Asian tyranny, medieval barbarism, no more talk of converting the heathen, of bringing them from darkness to superior civilisations. No more about savages, the jungle and coming down from the trees.

Now it is all hyperactive high-level missions dispatched to the poor corners of the earth in order - not to share wealth, that would be asking too much - but to tell them the secrets of wealth-creation. The objectives are no longer the annexation of lands, the physical coercion of peoples, the violent seizure of their resources, treasures, cultural artefacts and wealth. A different kind of tribute is exacted, one more in keeping with the refinement of the age.

They can dispense with racist rhetoric, even though their superintendence of the global system has an outcome indistinguishable from that of the days when they assumed the white man’s burden, when they took their civilising message to the world. The question to ask is, what is the difference between missionaries preaching religious, cultural and racist gospels in the imperial era, and the substance of the good-news tidings borne by the jargon of financial institutions, the WTO, the World Bank and the apparatus set up for perpetuation of dominance in the present? There is none.

It is simply that the status of messenger has been conferred on a different personnel. The cast has changed. The scenario is the same. The supremacy of the traditionally supreme  -  embodied  in  the  inoffensive  through economic instruments, no longer through military occupation, contributions, plunder and piracy, which have been officially consigned to a bygone, cancelled colonial era.

But contuinity is unmistakable. Macaulay’s desire to create ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ has metamorphosed - never mind about the tastes and morals, just make sure they behave in conformity with the globalising imperative.

The implacability of the financial institutions towards the Third World, attaching them to global money-lenders through debt, imposing structural adjustment, liberalisation, cutting government expenditure, impoverishing the poor further, the ‘rules’ of the WTO which institutionalise indefinitely the advantages of the already rich - is of a piece with older alien ideologies dictated by Britain and the other former imperial powers.

What is this interference in the affairs of others, guidance, tutelage, bringing them from the darkness of archaic Statist, nationalist or socialist ideologies into the pure bright light of the global market? Through all the upheavals, ‘revolutions’, movements of liberation and decolonisation in the South, the West remains the bearer of salvation.

How little has changed. The only nuance is that the rhetoric is entrusted to those sometime Leftists, who once wore on their sleeve the heart of their compassion, but who are now stern preachers of orthodoxies and pieties from which no departure is permitted by Third World countries under their surveillance.

When such people become the chief defenders of the WTO, IMF and World Bank; when they plead the repentance of the financial institutions (those perpetual penitents who have not changed a jot), their new devotion to the poor, what is their intention? Its ostensible aim is to bring greater efficiency to the Third World, to encourage transparency, to wipe out corruption, to bring the light of good governance to their paltry shabby affairs, to succour them, whether they like it or not.

It is about observance of new forms of ideological rectitude imposed from without, on pain, if they fail to do so, of being declared pariah states, rogue countries, outlaws from the great family of the international community of globalisation. Dominance, control, maintenance of the status quo; all in the noble interest of widening further the gaping chasm between rich and poor.

Never mind if this ensures new forms of poverty, the forfeit of the last vestiges of alternative ways of answering need and ordering human social and economic affairs. In its insolent disregard of other cultures,  the inflexibility of its blueprints, programmes and rescue packages, its rigidity, arrogance and sole ownership of truth, in it we discern faithful echoes of the missionaries and converters, the bringers of enlightenment of the age of imperialism.

Which brings us back to racism at home. They must disclaim the crude caricatures beyond which they, the rulers and leaders, have moved so smoothly, so disarmingly. If they publicly abhor the skinheads and neo-Nazis, the brutal racists on their streets, it is not because they do not share the same ideology. Indeed, if anything, it demonstrates their effectiveness in having colonised their own people - they are only giving voice to views absorbed not long ago from their betters.

These brazen truths have now been embedded in neutral institutions, dissembled in the pseudo-science of economics, buried in the impersonality of ‘humanitarian’ values which roll across the earth crushing the poor as they always have done. No wonder they do not see in the faces of hate the reflection of their own values, their own image; they do not see their kin beneath the skin, their kindred with the skinhead, their skin-deep defence of a monochrome of privilege. - Third World Network Features

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About the writer: Jeremy Seabrook is an author and freelance journalist based in London.

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