LIZZIE PHELAN: Freedom is slavery, popular support is authoritari...

LIZZIE PHELAN: Freedom is slavery, popular support is authoritari...

....I have noticed some surprise from people who discover the role of organisations like HRW and Amnesty International. The humanitarian-intervention discourse however is perhaps one of the oldest tricks in western empire’s book, but it has only evolved its disguise. This Global Research article was right to call western NGOs modern “Missionaries of Empire” or as Black Agenda Report labelled HRW, “Human Rights Warriors for Empire”. Accounts of the first English presence in Africa, like those given in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, show the insidious way in which missionaries following the first carve up of Africa at the Berlin Conference would embed themselves in African communities and prey on some points of tension as an opportunity to promote the idea to minority sections of those communities that their grievances with their community were examples of suffering of the gravest degree, the cause of which was the moral backwardness of their society and could be solved if they embraced the only correct moral path, the English church. This splitting of the community meant that by the time the disastrous consequences became clear to all, and true suffering of the gravest degree felt, it was too late.