Josep Borrell says that Europe is a garden and the rest of the world is a jungle (for the most part, excluding Japan presumably). In this not so carefully coded speech (reminiscent of colonial era rhetoric) Borrell warns Europe that “The Jungle”–what a Japanese friend here in Berlin sarcastically refers to as “monkey countries”(Asia, Africa, etc.)–are going to trash the great white fortress.
Must it be reiterated yet again that Borrell, the good Catalan, conveniently forgets that this “jungle” he so snidely references is merely the end product of what he and his great European colonial forbears have made of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and most of the Americas?
This “jungle” is the creation of Europe. The inhabitants of that vast “jungle” have every moral right to question why is it that they are doomed to live in chaos while their counterpart lives luxuriously (by third world standards) at the expense of those who labor like actual slaves to maintain the luxury of that so-called “garden.” They have every moral right to demand change, to demand that the world in itself be a garden for all and not just a handful of Western elites living at the expense of 99% of the entire human race.
Clearly the EU is headed by people who think we are stupid or, at the very least, wish to believe that we are stupid. The EU likes to pretend that certain sections of its own vaunted “garden” are nothing but endless fields of lilies and roses when in fact they are very often nothing but poisonous weeds, morning glories at best, riddled with its own issues of poverty, alienation, structural racism, classism, etc. The weeds of Nazism in nearly all western countries in fact have begun to wreak havoc upon their little “garden”–nothing new in this, it has happened before: and as in the past one European country after the other has begun to fall prey to the vile Nazi weed.
It was inevitable that things would shape up this way because quite frankly, one of the most precious flora in this so-called European “garden” is in fact the Nazi weed, cleverly camouflaged as “nationalist pride.” Meloni ought to know herself. It is the height of hypocrisy on her part but this is to be expected from a hopelessly bankrupt and decadent West. At least she is absolutely right in pointing out that France is running an open con job on West Africa, that France still has fucking colonies, for crying out loud. The broken clock has actually been right this time. But Hitler was also “right”–and this must be understood strictly within the context in which I say it–when he, after being chided by the American press for his relentless persecution of Jews, hypocritically remarked, “look at how you treat Negroes.”
This remark does not make Hitler worthy of honor (he has already put himself in leagues with the Devil, if he isn’t one himself) but merely highlights an instance in which one villain points to the moral failings of another villain. So it goes with Meloni. If Meloni is willing to work with African nations in helping them to liberate themselves from the clutches of French exploitation, well and good. That would merely make her and her fascist gang a necessary evil. For Africans the main concern of course is ridding the continent of economic and political parasites such as France and China. If a two bit fascist can actually aid in this possibility then so be it.
Having said that, it does not even bear repeating that fascism will never be Africa’s friend.
A Black Writer in Berlin 