By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE legacy of Zimbabwe in contributing to solving contemporary world problems still shines through the role of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) in UN peacekeeping missions abroad.
This ZDF role has enhanced our own local knowledge and understanding of history and international affairs.
It has increased our interest in strategic studies, with Zimbabwe ending up establishing its own National Defence University (NDU).
So when we speak of the old guard’s relevant and continuing knowledge and skills as ‘indispensable,’ we can point to the NDC as one clear and evident illustration of that claim.
Precisely because of its direct involvement in international peacekeeping and peace building, Zimbabwe was alert when the North Atlantic powers sought to re-invent white supremacy and imperialism by preaching, shaping and imposing new doctrines of human rights, good governance and economic reform as covers under which to disguise continuing white Anglo-Saxon domination of the world which soon became aggressive, expansionist and brutal over Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011) among others.
The movement appears to have started with the late former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the late former US President Ronald Reagan.
But by the time of former US President George W Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, it had become openly Anglo-American, aggressive and racist.
One remembers the visit to Zimbabwe by one of Blair’s ministers by the name of Claire Short and how crudely aggressive she was, going as far as telling us the West wanted regime change in Zimbabwe and Britain was not going to honour its 1979 pledge to compensate white settler-farmers being displaced by the African land reclamation movement here.
But because we had local elites with a wide knowledge of history, political science, international affairs and war, it did not take long for Zimbabweans to catch up with exactly what the white neo-liberal reformers were hiding under their claims to teach the world human rights, good governance and economic reform.
For instance, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was explained as a humanitarian mission to rescue minority Kosovars from ethnic cleansing by Serbs; but the bombings actually precipitated the ethnic fighting which ended up looking like ethnic cleansing, with Serbs resenting Kosovars for inviting the NATO destruction of their cities.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sold as a mission to uproot a ruthless dictatorship presiding over a traditional society which also allegedly sponsored international terrorism against the West.
This was a blatant lie sold through the press. After uprooting this dictatorship, we were told the US, the UK and Australia would plant, in Iraq, the first true market economy and democracy in the Arab world.
But exactly on the night of that disastrous Iraq invasion, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) hosted a special Current Affairs programme for local experts to share with the people the implications of this Western aggression for Zimbabwe, for Africa, for the UN and the rest of the world. This is the sort of approach we miss in local media today on issues such as the on-going war over Ukraine.
As already shown, within eight years after the US-UK invaded Iraq, NATO was in Libya and the disastrous fall-out from there is still unfolding to this day.
Now the war in Ukraine literally affects the future of every country.
There, all the powers that have preached neo-liberal reforms, democracy and human rights are on the NATO side.
They are throwing in everything, including hallucinations about nuclear war. They are using the conflict to test new weapons and to do research on weapons from all over the world which are being dumped on the now divided country.
In Inside Story for October 17 2022, Anthony Barnet cited a document by intellectuals critical of the Western neo-liberal reform movement of the last 30 years in relation to Ukraine and Taiwan.
The cited document is in the form of a petition titled: ‘To All Who Care About Humanity’s and the Planet’s Future.’ It casts the problem in the Ukraine war in the following terms:
“More troubling still is the toxic relationship between the United States on one hand and Russia and China on the other. Here lies the key to both conflicts (over Ukraine and over Taiwan).
“What we are seeing is the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement of global security (by recent neo-liberal reformers).
The United States has been unwilling to accept, let alone adapt to, the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. It remains unwilling to break with outdated notions of global dominance — a legacy of the triumphalism (and short-lived euphoria) that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
In other words, the very same group of reformist neo-liberal leaders who thrived on the rhetoric of neoliberal change at home and regime-change abroad have been clinging to the left-over trappings of an empire long in decline.
They year to restore the unipolar distopia which seemed to have been established by default between 1986 and 1999, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Amendment of the Charter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to reflect the dream of global neo-liberal expansion of NATO.
That is the irony of neo-liberal reform on a global scale.
What they are refusing to confront and accept is here and real:
“A global power shift is taking place. The West-centric world, in which first Europe and then the United States held sway, is giving way to a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world in which other centres of power and influence are demanding to be heard.”
Instead of the new era of human rights, good governance, and economic reform and prosperity promised by the neoliberal reformers, we face a dangerous situation for humanity as a whole:
“Failure (by the few countries in this conflict) to accept this new reality (of a multi-polar world) spells immense danger. A new Cold War is now in full swing, which can at any moment mutate into a hot war.”
The Cold War is already hot.
Features of catastrophe
One feature of the catastrophe is the on-going militarization of literally the entire population and the proliferation of military grade, military scale weapons among civilians. The post-war outcome for Europe could be worse than the terror situation faced by Africa after the destruction of Libya.
In a study called “Weapons proliferation in Post-War Ukraine,” Peter Kurts-Glovas of Penn State University says that things will be worse for the people and for Europe if the outcome of the conflict is indecisive.
There will be a proliferation of insurgencies and counter-insurgencies controlling unregulated military grade weapons systems. Disarmament will be near impossible.
A second feature of the catastrophe is illustrated by a Eurasian Times story called “Ukraine ‘Invites’ Defence Firms to Test Their Weapons In Active Conflict Zones; Says Must Resist Russian Electromagnetic Weapons Attacks.”
“Ukrainian special operators asked US Defence firms to send their military equipment, including drones, that can resist Russian electromagnetic warfare attacks so that Kyiv could test them against Russian forces.”
This sounds simple and straight-forward: There are Ukrainians and their forces on one side, and Russian invaders on the other side.
But the real situation for the people is not like that.
There is a global war super-imposed upon a civil war.
The country is so fractured that peaceful re-unification and reconstruction are in doubt. Partition may be more certain.
The current leadership of Ukraine represents a Western-sponsored elite who over-threw a government of Ukraine which the West accused of being too friendly with Russia.
The current affairs, media and society, media and security challenge
Conventional Western journalism has proven woefully inadequate in its coverage of Western claims and intentions before and during the wars against Yugoslavia in 1999; Afghanistan in 2001-2022; and Libya in 2011.
This is the reason why our national media need to define their own framework and stance in the face of the Google monopoly in social media and US information-related sanctions against China and Russia.
Those sanctions affect information which the global South can readily access on world affairs, including the Ukraine war.
The on-going quest by Brazil, India, China, Russia, and Iran to by-pass the US-Dollar bottleneck on trade ( in the firm of SWIFT) requires a media and information equivalent, a programme to establish a new framework more powerful and more sophisticated than the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) proposed in the 1970s.
SWIFT stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications.
The system enables the US Treasury Department to monitor and control global trade payments using the USD as medium.
This then enables the US Government to enforce the more than eight thousand sanctions it has imposed on other countries, individual companies and persons.
Controls on information are more nuanced and discrete than the SWIFT, but they happen to be assisted also via technology sanctions.
Their results manifest themselves in many countries through the maintenance of a pro-Western mindset as illustrated at the UN when so many Africans voted with NATO countries against Russia, despite the recent disaster the same NATO created for Africa through the destruction of Libya.
Our local media coverage of these contradictions remains very weak.