As African leaders today begin to realize Russia’s and China’s anti-colonial talk is a hypocritical ruse for their own racial-colonial ambitions they will admit to themselves that the actual ideals embraced by Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi are imperial goals for the Global South, pursued together as Mr. Putin pursues in Ukraine and as per Xi’s oppression of other nations in the South China Sea region. Africa’s future leaders will discover that they are expected to acquiesce to Russian and Chinese imperial foreign policy expectations in which Africans are tools, or they will be removed, even by signature Putin methods.
A more accurately evocative image by which to remember the KGB ideals of the Russian nationalist Putin despite his diplomatic charm offensive, is an allegory for what Putin has made the Russian flag to mean. Russia’s tricolor has White on top, once standing for purity yet under the KGB-leader, death. White death is on top burying the colors beneath: blue which often stands for truth and beauty, and red which stands for life, or the lifeblood of the people.
In Ukraine, Russia’s behavior under Putin’s ethno-nationalist leadership is exemplified in his death-cult ideal toward Ukrainians and toward his own, as he sends Southern Russia’s needy migrant workers and current and former republics’ sons to war first; those who Muscovites call ‘blacks’ to the Ukrainian front. How real can Putin’s respect for African heritage be?
As the President of Equatorial Guinea reportedly embraces Mr. Putin’s foreign policy via former Wagner Group, now branded as the Russian state-sponsored mercenary group Afrika Korps, here are a few reality checks to remember.
Erik Prince (U.S. sourced mercenary, Putin confidant, and Trump loyalist) earlier this year tried to justify the outright colonization of Africa. These statements are not made for fun, but to desensitize free nation voters to the likely behavior of autocrats and their preferred candidates in countries Putin wishes to overthrow.
Should that bother the head of Equatorial Guinea and his African state counterparts, or just about everyone in the Global South? Yes. Yes it should.
Remember what Putin did in Grozny, Chechnya; or against Syria’s majority long oppressed by the Assad regime. Ask: how were seven million Venezuelans driven from their own country by a regime a fraction of their numbers? Answer: Moscow and Beijing kept their oppressors in power: from Chavez to Maduro, the imperial ideology of Russia and China has cursed Venezuela for decades.
Russia and China wish not only to enslave the Caucasus, Eurasia, and the Middle East, they want Africa and Latin America also.
After a hypnotic conversation with the deceptive diplomacy of Russia’s Sergei Lavrov, you may say the United States flag is also red, white, and blue. That is a symbol of the oft-used false equivalencies Putin’s KGB-state tries to make between Russia and with the United States.
Against daunting odds, the United States has made of its ideals something greater over time. Within the traditional U.S. colors, this: the colors are intermingled, giving-off starlight within the beautifully true dark blue, itself filled with light, while the first colored stripe on top of the flag is the warm people’s color of red, intermingled with the white stripes standing for enlightenment, not skin color. The people of the U.S. and their veteran heroes have by today made of Old Glory the ideal that is E Pluribus Unum to signal repentance and reform from the hypocrisy, slavery, and segregation of the past. That work is ongoing and the majority believes in it.
The people of the United States today having elected an African American president is now close to electing a second, who is also Indian American, reaching our ideals despite temporary, sometimes messy political fallout. Have Russia or China ever enthroned or elected one of ethnic African descent? Never.
The majority of Americans support these ideals, even today in 2024, while rightfully wanting rational, secure controls over immigration so that assimilation to freedom ideals is assured.
Americans labor under immense technological change while dictators of the East have been spending billions using the freedom enabled by technology developed here for some 30 years to try to rip U.S. American society apart, imposing their dishonest disinformation campaigns. Yet the American people aren’t going to let them win.
That’s the truth as plainly as it can be told. We need Africa’s leaders’ and future leaders’ to embrace with us ideals of E Pluribus Unum as when in West Africa during the ebola epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere, the Obama Administration sent decisive U.S. military medical assets to help end the epidemic saving millions of lives.
And consider the European Union today: when Russia helped the Assad regime ethno-religiously cleanse Syria, the E.U., led by Germany, accepted the refugees and helped them find homes during the crisis caused by Putin. In the Western Hemisphere, when Putin helped Maduro weaponize migration by driving away some 7 million Venezuelans, the United States has so far taken in nearly 1 million.
Freedom can overcome history’s bitterness and the endless failure of tyrants, dictators, and warlords. There is no better way forward whether in Africa, North America, and the European Union.
