A global reading of history has been going on for a long time throughout the world; it is growing every day; it presents itself as a global explanation of all the problems of today and makes the West, the one responsible for all the misfortunes of all the peoples of the world.
According to this reading, the West would not have become the dominant power of the planet if it had not plundered the raw materials and labor of other peoples; its wealth would have started with the spices of Asia and gold of America followed by cotton of India and America, then fossil fuels of the Middle East; it would have been impossible without the exploitation of a free labor force, slaves, put to the service of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, the United States. According to the proponents of this theory, the Western discourse that its abundance is explained by the values of freedom and human rights is a misrepresentation, the result of hypocrisy seeking to mask the reality of looting and impose a self-imposed discourse.Universal saying that it only serves its own interests.
Consequently, they say, the Westerners (and more precisely the dominant white males) cannot, after having exploited and pillaged them, prohibit the peoples of the world, who were their slaves, from benefiting in turn from the fruits of growth. He must therefore make amends, give back everything that he took from other peoples, give way, and no longer claim that their values are universal.
According to this reading grid, the countries of the South must unite, whatever their political regimes, to claim their due; they must not let the West force them to reduce their use of fossil fuels, conditions of their growth, under the pretext of ecological problems whose only cause is the West; nor impose values, such as those of democracy or secularism, which would be nothing but masks of white ideology.
The strength of this discourse is its coherence: it explains everything. It gives meaning to the fight of the «damned of the Earth» which Franz Fanon spoke in his last book, published in 1961, in whose preface Jean-Paul Sartre justified attacks against civilians (“To kill a European is to kill two birds with one stone: to remove an oppressor and an oppressed at the same time”). In particular, this speech illuminates the conflict in the Middle East that would oppose colonized peoples to an artificial Western entity, imposed in a region where it would have nothing to do». And likewise, it leads to the idea that in the countries of the West, descendants of slaves and migrants from these countries should recover the wealth stolen from their ancestors and not be imposed values that are not theirs. Naturally, some people also come to assimilate feminism and anti-colonialism.
But here, like any globalizing theory, much of the above is false: slavery is not an invention or a monopoly of the modern West. It existed in all previous societies; in Egypt, India, Mesopotamia, China, Africa, pre-Columbian America. Historically, many peoples have considered that their neighbours deserve nothing but to be treated as slaves. Many merchants bought, transported and sold slaves long before the arrival of the Europeans. Many peoples have plundered the resources of others. Moreover, the abundance of natural resources and slavery are not the real sources of the economic take-off of the West; on the contrary: when resources and labor are free, no one is encouraged to innovate. And it is precisely through the awareness of lack that innovation and development have come. It is also cities in need, such as Bruges, Venice or Amsterdam, which were the first places of development of individualism, individual freedoms, the rule of law and hope for the well-being of each person.
So, we must take a big step and recognize that no one is innocent and that we will not build a happy humanity on hatred, but on the recognition of the barbaric past of each of our peoples, and by our commitment to put an end to it, in respect for the other.
j@attali.com
Image: Proclamation of the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies, 27 April 1848, François-Auguste Biard.