He was a Scottish writer. His name was J M Barrie. Maybe fate prepared him to write this story. The story was aptly centered around a character called Peter Pan. Today his country Scotland long colonized by Britain might yet gain independence. Peter Pan was a self-centered selfish boy who never grew up and lived in this magical place called Neverland.
The story of Peter Pan from a western writer might end up being the geopolitical Opus Magnum of the decline of the West and the rise of the long despised Other. We will talk about the Peter-Panization of the West in the light of recent changes in the realm of geopolitics in Libya and Ukraine.
The Collapse of Libya began with a falsehood. Libya was a prosperous and wealthy state in Africa with free education and health care for its people. A great man-made irrigation system which provided Libya with a strong agricultural base was an engineering marvel.
Many Africans traveled to Libya in search of work. Qaddafi was planning on ditching the petro-dollar and sell oil in Euros or gold. He was setting up a plan to create an African central bank with gold backed capital to fund development projects around Africa.
Let us now tell a story about the first African satellite. Prior to 1992, telephone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world. This was because the west demanded and received annually $500 million dollars from Africa for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for telecommunications.
This was a rip off. A rape of the continent. Then in 1992, 45 African countries established the Regional African Satellite Communication Organization (RASCOM) to provide a satellite for Africa so as to reduce communications costs. The onetime cost was $400 million dollars. Who will pay for it? For more than 14 years, African pleas to the World Bank and IMF for money for the satellite had gone unheeded.
Then came along Qaddafi. He gave $300 Million dollars. The African Development Bank put down $50 million dollars. The West Africa Development Bank put down $27 million dollars. The money was now collected. Africa finally got her first satellite launched on December 26 2007. This was just the beginning.
Russia and China followed suit and offered their technological help and helped launch satellites for South Africa, Nigeria, Angola and Algeria. No wonder the mobile communications revolution took off in Africa. Africans now use more mobile phones than any region in the world. But for the west, this was unacceptable.
The enlightenment of the West and its democratic values demanded that they could not lose the $500 million dollar cash cow and the haltering steps toward African self realization. Qaddafi and his dreams had to go just like Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and Mr. Patrice Lumumba.
We might just add that Qaddafi financed and supported Mandela and the ANC in its fight against Apartheid. To the elite of the land of the free and home of the brave, Mandela was a dangerous black terrorist least we should forget that.
A western orchestrated rebellion against Qaddafi in 2011 morphed into a NATO bombing so odious it was mockingly called “Responsibility to Protect” and “Leading from Behind” which was drivel uttered by a certain persona favored with a Harvard education.
The result of the NATO bombing of the country led to Qaddafi fleeing to his hometown of Sirte where he was targeted in a NATO bombing and then summarily executed by so called freedom fighters funded by the west.
The western press hailed the dawn of western style democracy in Libya and the end of a “dictator”. The western press vilified him. They turned him into a monster on their blood stained editorial pages that had similarly celebrated every depredation of colonialists as they goose stepped across Africa.
The facts that their so called democracy activists fighting against Qaddafi for so called freedom in Libya were responsible for the massacre of thousands of black Libyans did not generate a single line of condemnation from the mainstream western press.
After all, blacks are cannon fodder, the other, subhuman for the west. Their western “Enlightenment” of course did not extend to black Africans and others the dignity of humanity. Hence it was okay for blacks to be massacred in Libya. Three years have passed since the assassination of Qaddafi. Libya is now a failed state in civil war.
Just recently Islamist allied fighters from Benghazi battled it out in Tripoli with their opponents and finally seized the burning Tripoli International Airport and the city. The images of Tripoli and the burning airport are apocalyptic.
Meanwhile an American sponsored General Haftar whose name sounds eerily like Hitler is fighting the Islamists in Libya to maintain a modicum of American influence in the failed state of Libya. Libya has now been officially Somalized, another failed state on the African continent.
We can erect an epitaph over the grave of a Somalized Libya – Here lies a “shining” monument to western democratic values and the enlightenment.
The Ukraine is another geopolitical flash point on the way to being Somalized. An artificial country cobbled together from former provinces in the Russian empire and joined to lands conquered by Soviet troops in the early days of world war II after declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 became known as the Ukraine.
A senile American geopolitical thinker Zbigneiw Brzezinski in his book “The Grand Chess Board” picked the Ukraine as a geopolitical pivot that if taken away from Russia will weaken Russian power in Eurasia and hence open the way for American dominance in Eurasia.
In this warped thinking, he was developing the idea of the English Geographer and Geopolitical thinker Halford Mackinder that whoever controls Eurasia controls the world island.
Today the Ukraine is on the verge of being a failed state. It is a geopolitical flash point between Russia and the West. The West repeatedly rejected calls for federalization of the Ukraine with two languages Russian and Ukraine both guaranteed equal rights and the country staying politically neutral as a bridge between the East and the West.
The obdurate western refusal to accept that boggles the mind! Canada is a federal state with two languages English and French. What prevents the Ukraine the biggest country in Europe (excluding Russia) from becoming federal like Canada?
Today there is a ceasefire in the Ukraine. But it is highly doubted if it will hold. It seems more likely that the Ukraine is heading for a breakup, a Libya and Somalia in the heart of Europe.
The reason for the breakup and Somalization of these two countries can be found in the Peter-Panization of the West. From their initial successes goose stepping across the world in building their rule also called colonialism, they drunk by the seeming permanence of their successes refused to grow up.
As nations humiliated under the boot jacks of European armies slowly shook of the initial shock and powerlessness and began to achieve first independence and economic and finally military power, the Peter-Panized West could not fathom that she had to grow up.
The West preferred to stay in the Neverland of infantile illusions of superiority and dominance, and hence the attempts to destabilize countries and regions around the world in a desperate attempt to preserve their power in a world in which power is shifting to Asia and where a resurgent Africa will put the final nail in the coffin of Western decline.
