By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
IN the graphic murder of George Floyd, on police camera, by Derek Chauvin on May 25 2020, what horrified millions of people around the world was the look on the policeman’s face as the murder victim was pleading: “I can’t breathe.”
Chauvin pressed his knee upon Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty six seconds.
The policeman did not only appear to be relishing what he was doing and to be proud of it, his whole face displayed the satisfaction of someone who believed that the whole system or climate of white supremacy was behind him and would back him.
That backing was indeed forthcoming, represented by the current US President Donald Trump himself, who went to the extent of linking the power behind Chauvin’s conduct to the right-wing Evangelical Christian movement of the US.
That movement has been galvanised for a long time.
It was used to support US intervention in the Congo, which resulted in the murder of the first Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba; it was used to support and defend Ian Smith of Rhodesia and his Unilateral Declaration of [white] Independence (UDI); and it was used to support and defend white South Africa’s apartheid.
Significantly, on June 13 2020, two white policemen in Atlanta, Georgia, shot and killed yet another African-American man, Rayshard Brooks. He was shot in the back while fleeing from the two whitemen.
The Black Lives Matter movement is correct to recognise that Africans in the US are living in a system which, for 400 years, has treated African lives as if they do not matter.
The focus on removing symbols of white supremacy, however, may divert attention from the whole institutionalised system.
A Zimbabwean journalist approached me back in 2012 to ask: “If the International Criminal Court (ICC) is indeed a universal court for the entire world, why is it that the only people it has indicted for war crimes so far are almost all African leaders, 26 of them?”
I was forced to answer the question in Shona, as follows:
“Musoro waBambata uripi? Uri kuEngland. Musoro waChingaira uripi? Uri kuEngland. Misoro nemapfupa emaHerero vakauraiwa ku Namibia yakaendeswepi? Yakaendeswa kuGerman. Ko varungu zvavakauraya Patrice Lumumba kuCongo, vakanyungudusa mutumbi wake mumishonga kuti usazomboonekazve, handiti pane akabvisa zino rimwe raLumumba akaenda naro sechiratidzo kuBelgium?
Vanhu vese vemuAfrica vakapambwa kuenda kuAmerica neku Caribbean, handiti mapfupa avo nanhasi ari ikoko?”
Bambata is a legendary hero of South Africa, the equivalent of our Nehanda.
The British killed him, cut off his head and took it as a trophy to England.
Chingaira is a legendary hero of the First Chimurenga in Zimbabwe. The white settlers killed him, cut off his head and took it to Britain. In the German genocide against the Herero of Namibia, the Germans took many skulls and bones to Germany.
Independent Namibia is now in the process of repatriating those skulls for proper burial.
When the Belgians killed the first elected Prime Minister of the Congo (now DRC), they dissolved his body in acid in order to erase all memories of him. But one of the white killers extracted Lumumba’s tooth and took it to Belgium as a trophy.
The bones of the millions of Africans stolen by Europeans and taken to the Americas and the Caribbean lie there still, almost forgotten.
This is the context, the historical structure of imperialist evil, within which a white-created and white-driven ICC can masquerade as a universal court and, with the help of many Africans, indict African leaders exclusively and get away with it.
Imperialism hides structured evil through individualism. Most of the empire’s platforms and those sponsored by the empire dwell on individuals and individual virtues and vices.
The strategy is to blind the victims of imperialism to realities of structured evil.
The victims of imperialism fail to see the forest for the tree.
They come to believe that nice individuals cannot be part of an evil system.
As nice as these individual whites may be, most of them will jump to defend or justify their white imperialist system when it is attacked. They do not tolerate attacks on their system.
That is why Trump was elected US President and is still fighting for a second term after narrowly surviving impeachment.
Many whites come to believe and to teach that those who oppose systemic racism and white imperialism are motivated by hatred of white people, that is white individuals, because in their minds, the nice white folks they know could not possibly be involved in an evil system.
Yet, in reality, most nice white folks have been, and still are, beneficiaries, inheritors of an evil system, and they are willing to die defending it in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and anywhere else.
There are exceptions, of course, and these have joined the Black Lives Matter marches.
In fact, the system is so structured that even a nice Barak Obama, once he agreed to run for the US Presidency and to be elected President of the US, ended up glorifying, enforcing and even extending the structured evil of the same empire.
His role was even worse because he had to bend over backwards to prove that he could manage the system for the white empire even better than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before him.
In the African philosophy of hunhu, the evil that should pre-occupy us, the evil that should concern us, is structured relational evil.
In African philosophy, evil people are those who deliberately design, structure, maintain, enforce, try to universalise and benefit from harmful and destructive relationships.
That is why the African says: I relate, therefore I am, while the European, after René Des Cartes, says: I think, therefore I am.
This means that if the European thinks slavery is good, apartheid is good, racism is good, imperialism is good, then it has to be good.
He definitely thinks the ICC is good, not for trying his own leaders but for trying leaders of those other people who threaten the empire.
To explain the difference between individual (private) evil and structured evil, I like to use the metaphor used in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 7, Verses 3 to 5:
“And why do you recognise the mote in your brother’s eye, but you fail to notice the beam in your own?”
In other words, why do you readily condemn individual acts of evil while ignoring structures which make it continue?
Taking this picture as a metaphor, it is clear that a mote is private, individual; but a beam is industrial, institutional.
The modern term for beam is rafter.
A rafter is shaped intentionally and institutionally in a sawmill.
A rafter cannot fit in someone’s eye.
It is a fitting image for structured evil which can be mystified through exclusive attention on the evil in someone’s heart or mind alone.
The importance of making this distinction is that it is institutions and relationships which can be mobilised to teach, to
λ From page 4
train and to correct the individual wrongdoer.
And, again, it is the structure, the institution, which can be used to encourage or exonerate the individual who has committed evil.
The Zimbabwean journalist who asked why there were no European or US leaders under ICC indictment (while there were 26 Africans) should perhaps read MIT Emeritus Professor Noam Chomsky’s answer to a similar question:
Woman: “What do you think stopped the impeachment drive against (US President Ronald) Reagan after the Iran-Contra scandal?”
Chomsky: “It would just embarrass the hell out of everybody I mean, nobody in power wants that much disruption for something like that. Look, why don’t they bring every (North) American President to trial for war crimes? There are things (even evil things) on which there is a complete consensus in the elite (imperial) culture: the United States is permitted to carry out war crimes, it’s permitted to attack other countries, it’s permitted to ignore international law. On those things there is complete consensus, so why should they impeach the President (of the US) for doing everything he’s supposed to do?”
Indeed, the current US President, in 2020, also escaped an impeachment process for the same reasons given by Chomsky.
Professor Chomsky’s answer means that most of the 45 presidents of the US have committed war crimes and not even one has been tried for such crimes.
In fact, at the same time the stories about George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks were running, there was a related story: The US, through Trump, imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court to prevent that court from investigating US soldiers accused of murder and rape in US occupied Afghanistan.
The system fought to keep a lid on its crimes and to preserve itself.
In other words, the way evil has been built into the imperialist system allows the US President to be praised for doing the same or even worse things than those for which African leaders are to be hanged.
And the purpose of the structures and platforms which this empire constructs and sponsors is to naturalise, normalise and even ‘universalise’ harmful and destructive relationships so that, to the victims, they appear to be normal, the way the world is, even the way the world should be.
The most painful result of structured evil is the role of its victims in upholding and even glorifying that system without much critical thought.
One of the best philosophers at explaining structured evil is the Latin-American liberation theologian Jose Miranda. In Marx and the Bible, for instance, he wrote that:
“(Evil is structured) into a total civilisation; it is able to co-opt for its own reinforcement even the best intentional attempts and initiatives for justice; for these (attempts and initiatives) accept the rules of the game imposed by the system.”
These initiatives or ‘projects’ do not only help the empire to earn a good name for itself; they also serve to fragment any resistance to the system, by dividing victims between those who are partly benefitting from the empire’s sponsorship and those who are targeted for exclusion from the projects.
That is the purpose, for instance, of what I have called the Western-sponsored chema economy in Zimbabwe, which is meant to hide the reality of Western illegal sanctions.
Miranda continues:
“Clear perception (or understanding) in this point is intolerable to the West.”
Those who point out to the reality of structured evil will be punished through various ways, including demonisation.
And this is where the practice of individualism works wonders.
Once the victims accept the explanation of history and reality in terms of individuals and individualism, it becomes easy to target and isolate leaders of the resistance to imperialism.
They are demonised as evil individuals rather than liberators who seek to build an alternative system in opposition to the empire.
Miranda goes on to say the drama which unfolds through efforts to dismantle the imperial system of evil is a deadly one because the empire has succeeded in defining and creating an anti-human human being.
As long as we do not stop to think outside the imperial box, we remain confused because almost all the platforms of communication to which we are exposed are telling us that the white empire went into Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Cotē d’ Ivoire, Chile and Haiti to do good.
Miranda continues:
“(Evil is) a reality totally penetrated by good intentions and calculations, a reality which seems to be possessed by a substitute for the human soul and which, endowed with a prodigious dynamism, raises itself before real man to control him and submit him to its ends.”
For a very long time, the tendency world-wide has been to collaborate with imperialism, to accept domination with pride and to relish the nauseating attention which the empire confers on those who agree to be treated as perpetual children.
Zimbabwe diamonds and the operations of structured evil
Zimbabwe’s discovery of extensive alluvial diamond deposits was a God-sent miracle at a time when illegal sanctions against the country had almost totally broken the economy.
But the US, the EU and their white allies did not hesitate to mobilise their imperialist structures to turn the diamond miracle into a curse.
At the Kimberley Process conference in Tel-Aviv, for instance, the strategy of the racist minority was to turn the whole process and the conference on its head, by rejecting the official legal documents and replacing them with un-official and clandestine ones obtained through fraud and espionage.
The strategy first revealed itself when two Western spy-linked organisations demanded the re-writing of KP rules and the re-definition of ‘blood diamonds’ especially against Zimbabwe and for the purpose of vengeance on Zimbabwe.
These two spy-linked organisations are the British Global Watch and the Canadian Partnership Africa Canada. They were
soon followed by yet another pair, the British Amnesty International and the US-based Human Rights Watch.
When the Zimbabwean delegation got to Tel-Aviv, they discovered that the racist countries had conspired to treat the official KP Monitor Abbey Chikane and his reports on Zimbabwe as mere decoys which were used to keep the Zimbabwean State from noticing an alternative and clandestine network of spies and compromised officials operating secretly inside Zimbabwe and working on a fraudulent report or reports which would then be introduced abruptly and dramatically at the meeting in order to force a displacement and rejection of the officially sanctioned-KP Monitor’s report.
The so-called Centre for Research and Development was a key player in the clandestine and fraudulent network.
Then there were some officials in the inclusive government and the Parliament of Zimbabwe who had also been roped in to concoct the fraudulent report(s) which were supposed to bury Chikane’s official and professional report in muck.
What the Anglo-Saxon racists did not count on was that the State would uncover enough of the clandestine and criminal network to force the isolation of the US and its allies at the conference. What was uncovered demonstrated to the majority of the members of the KPCS that the US-led operations to tarnish Zimbabwe’s diamonds were not only illegal but also diabolic, bordering on economic terrorism and total contempt for the rules of international trade, diplomacy and decorum.
Despite their defeat at Tel-Aviv, the imperial powers did not give up. The struggle continued at St Petersburg, Russia; at Kinshasa, DRC; and within Zimbabwe, where the Anglo-Saxon powers paid and mobilised NGOs to try to reverse Zimbabwe’s victories at Tel-Aviv, St Petersburg and Kinshasa.
The EU, for instance, infiltrated the African Diamond Producers Association by bribing the Liberian representative.
When India and other diamond marketing countries neutralised US-EU machinations, the US managed to pressure enough KPCS members into electing it as Chairman of the process, even though the US is not a diamond producing country.
At the same time, the US used its global control of the US-dollar-denominated payments to block Zimbabwe’s diamond earnings from reaching the country.
The strategy, as usual, is to deny the Government and people of Zimbabwe any independent sources of income and development resources while driving the population into poverty and into accepting and praising US-sponsored charity and relief as a substitute for autonomous development.
That is how structured evil works.