Is Ukraine really the great cause of freedom and liberty? Or is it a boutique, social-media obsession for Westerners — as well as a cynical proxy war for Western governments beholden to the military-industrial complex?
The latter view seems to hold the strongest sway in that part of the world that many in the West might assume shares their ideas of freedom and democracy: the Global South.
The results of a recent survey by the University of Cambridge might shock, even anger a great many Westerners, especially the ones with their rinky-dink Ukraine flag social media avatars.
The findings in the study, while not free of a margin of error, are robust enough to take seriously. For the 6.3 billion people who live outside of the West, 66 percent feel positively towards Russia and 70 percent feel positively towards China, and, among the 66 percent who feel positively about Russia the breakdown is 75 percent in South Asia, 68 percent in Francophone Africa, and 62 percent in Southeast Asia.
Public opinion of Russia remains positive in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam.
Rather than rail at all those hordes of brown ingrates, though, the West might like to consider the litany of policy failures that have done so much to set up such a result. Not just the failure to stem Xi Xinping’s relentless influence-buying, but the oblivious selfishness of Western elites.
Consider the Covid pandemic. Jacinda Ardern’s much-vaunted Covid strategy was selfishness incarnate: slam the door shut on New Zealand, wait for the pandemic to rip through everyone else and then open up and expect the goodies to come tumbling back through the door. It was all very much a case of, us first, bugger you, Mbopo. Especially when it came to vaccines.
Regardless of their eventual efficacy, it didn’t go unnoticed in the Global South that rich, Western countries hoarded far more vaccine doses than they ever needed for even a full, five-course jab.
Despite the Global South’s repeated pleas to share intellectual property on the vaccines, with the goal of saving lives, no Western nation was willing to do so. Africa remains to this day the most unvaccinated continent in the world. Africa had the capability to make the vaccines but without the intellectual property they could not do it.
But help did come from Russia, China, and India. Algeria launched a vaccination program in January 2021 after it received its first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines. Egypt started vaccinations after it got China’s Sinopharm vaccine at about the same time. South Africa procured a million doses of AstraZeneca from the Serum Institute of India. In Argentina, Sputnik became the backbone of their vaccine program. All of this was happening while the West was using its financial resources to buy millions of doses in advance, and often destroying them when they became outdated.
Sure, they might have been Chinese knock-off vaccines, even more useless than the West’s ones, but, however cynically, China was seen to be there.
Just as the Communist bloc was during the great wave of decolonisation.
Again, Communist meddling in anti-colonial wars might have been cynical, proxy-war stuff. But then, so was France’s meddling in the American Revolution. Today, those former colonies see their former colonial masters in Europe ganging up on the successor to the state that helped them gain independence.
On February 18, 2023, at the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the foreign minister of Uganda, Jeje Odongo, had this to say, “We were colonized and forgave those who colonized us. Now the colonizers are asking us to be enemies of Russia, who never colonized us. Is that fair? Not for us. Their enemies are their enemies. Our friends are our friends.”
The war in Ukraine is seen very much as a European squabble, rather than the future-defining apocalypse Western propaganda would have us believe. At the same time, though, its fallout is punishing the Global South that isn’t even involved. Cutting off Europe from Russian gas has tremendous knock-on problems beyond leaving British and German pensioners to shiver through an unheated winter. The scarcity of gas is driving up prices, not just of energy, but fertilisers.
A recent survey published by Nature Energy states that up to 140 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty due to the higher energy prices that have come about over the past year.
Soaring energy prices not only directly impact energy bills, but they also lead to upward price pressures on all supply chains and consumer items, including food and other necessities. This hurts the developing countries even more than it hurts the West.
The Global South is also not blind to the cynicism of Western leaders. Not only has the Biden administration intervened to thwart peace initiatives from third parties, but the whole Western narrative is one of astonishing duplicity.
One must also ask, does the rule based international order apply even to the West?
For decades now, for many in the Global South, the West is seen to have had its way with the world without regard to anyone else’s views. Several countries were invaded at will, mostly without Security Council authorization.
Sri Lanka Guardian
Yet, Western leaders point the finger at Russia as some kind of enemy of civilisation, for doing no more than they have done in recent years.
Some people are bound to notice.
