Reason Wafawarova

30 November 2009

IF there is one thing that capitalism has managed to achieve over the years, it is the atomisation of communities, at home and abroad and this was the grand strategy that brought down the Soviet Empire.

Britain does not want to part with Northern Ireland and the United States will never hear of letting Texas go its separate way and they even consider Hawaii as part of the US Federation.

This is despite the fact that both the UK and the US are dedicated supporters for the separation of Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan from China, and they boast of succeeding in dismantling the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

They will ridicule Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's dream of a United States of Africa and they will sponsor opposition and rebellion against such initiatives because it is in the interest of the US-led world order that only the West should assume a monolithic alliance that is meant to dominate all others in every aspect of international relations.

The socialist vibe that gripped developing nations in the last half of the 20th century was most telling as Latin America was on fire against capitalism, Africa was all going socialist, and so was the majority of Asia.

The Non-Aligned Movement was so strong that it threatened the very existence of the then two super-powers the USSR and the US.

This writer gets a lot of feedback that says his anti-imperialist work is most appealing but unworkable just because "these people are just too powerful".

The problem is not how powerful imperialism has become but how atomised and fragmented the resistance has become.

Here in Australia there are as many "socialist" organisations as are the letters in the word "socialist".

There is pretty much one little such organisation for each Western suburb, with some of the organisations numbering no more than three or five people.

You look at Guatemala, Venezuela, Bolivia or South Africa. Take any topic on the resistance side and you want contacts there.

For each anti-imperialist topic you pick you bump into 15 or 20 different organisations working on it, maybe right next door to each other, and oblivious to each other's existence.

The common phenomenon is often the peevish rhetoric about how immoral imperialism is and each person is convinced that only "me and my three friends" understand how big this problem is.

Even on the right there is also this characterisation. Take the NGOs considered right wing by the imperial powers of this planet.

Pick any cause of your choice, HIV and Aids, human rights, children, poverty, you name it; and you will find that everything is narrowly focused and attended to by numerous groups that hardly understand the topics they are meant to deal with.

This atomisation of community work was in reality designed to achieve a sense of isolation and hopelessness - a sense that nothing much is going on, because everyone thinks, "it's just me and my three friends" doing something about it. This is why the problems we seek to solve will always perpetuate.

The lack of accountability that harbours all the corrupt people stalling development in Africa has assumed this sense of invincibility because Africans stand isolated in their threes and fours convincing each other that corruption is such an insurmountable challenge that is too complex for the rest of society except maybe "me and my three friends".

Yes it is always you and your three friends, except that just next door there is someone else and their three friends who are also convinced that only them have a capacity to comprehend the complexity of this problem.

So the success in propagandising the population into an atomised community has been extraordinary in the last 20 years.

Imperialism has remarkably managed to isolate individuals and nation states in the most astonishing manner, and clearly the former socialist countries and the rest of the developing countries have immensely helped along.

So we now have all over Zimbabwe for example; people showing up at talk shops and wanting to get involved in solving all sorts of challenges, but there is nobody with a plan or laudable possible solution. The standard outcome of these talk shops is the question "what can we do?"

It is always this argument that, the other guy had very good points but of course things do not work that way these days.

There is a passionate commitment to a very narrow position, and extreme intolerance of anyone who does not see things the way the other person does.

So if you have a slightly different view with what is happening in your country then you feel encouraged to secede and form your own little country. Or you have a slightly different political view from the person next door then it all becomes a war, you cannot even talk to them, you want them departed to hell knows where.

This is how Africa has been divided. This is how Zimbabwe stands divided today. Unity has become unwelcome to us, as a people and that is self-destructive.

When Morgan Tsvangirai declares that he called for sanctions against Zimbabwe because of what Zanu-PF had done or was doing, it is not about what was happening or not happening.

It is about an atomised person who sees no harm in inviting ruinous economic sanctions against his entire community because he is as isolated from that community as is the community from him. This is a matter of a thoroughly propagandised soul and mind that believes in the sanctity of Western superiority.

One way by which developing countries have helped the cause of isolation and fragmentation is by allowing huge amounts of frittering away of energy on absurdities and trivialities.

The energy and passion that has gone into things like who runs Zimbabwe's central bank or how the Editor of The Herald should be practising his journalism is really extraordinary, and frankly very self-destructive for the country.

The intellectual community is not spared this atomisation either. These are people who ought to be involved as think tanks for nation states.

When you look at people like Moeletsi Mbeki of South Africa and John Makumbe of Zimbabwe you see people mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed post-modernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the whole lot of the people involved in the whole thing.

We know the rhetoric is good for careers and making a bit of money from the imperial coffers and those sorts of benefits.

The reality is that these intellectuals employ tonnes of energy into activities that have this great value that they are guaranteed not to affect anything in the world order that the imperial authority has created.

There are also the illusions about what is going on in the world. We are all guilty of that. We are lied to about terrorism as being only the act of other people other than the West and we believe it.

We are given this narrow view of human rights that seeks to perpetuate the primacy of Western values and the rule of corporate capital and we all rally behind this version of human rights, oblivious to the rights of victims of imperial brutalities like the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans. We even complain when an oppressed people rise up to reclaim their rights as happened with land repossession in Zimbabwe.

In 1991 we were told that the Gulf Slaughter was the Gulf War and we all endorsed this absurdity as part of our history.

We have been told that Iraqis were delivered from Saddam Hussein in 2003 and that the invasion of their country is some kind of democratisation process and we have endorsed such vulgarity as a decent claim by the United States and its allies.

The general feeling is that we cannot do anything about all these things. We are atomised, isolated and rendered useless in all our numbers.

Zimbabwe has had to suffer the pain of sanctions because as Africans we are atomised and isolated and we feel we cannot do anything about it. We have all the numbers but we stand in twos and threes and we ask that hopeless question: "What can we do?"

It is terrible when Africa asks this question, especially with all the resources. One year we heard of a proposal to mobilise a rescue package for Zimbabwe by particular African States.

After the seminar mood that inspired this most inspiring proposal there was the dawning reality that "it cannot be done" and all we then saw was only South Africa making a committed follow-up to this promise.

Well, Zimbabwe itself does not seem to believe it can be done either. More than three months after securing US$500 million from the IMF, the country is still not agreed on what to do with the money. It is still the same "me and my three friends" know best and the rest are sworn enemies.

With three principals presiding over the GPA, JOMIC monitoring its implementation, and six seasoned politicians negotiating every so often so thoroughly, Zimbabwe is still struggling to convince a few of its citizens how the constitution empowers the President to appoint the central bank governor and the Attorney-General.

We even argue about how sub-editors and reporters should be doing their work and even such trivialities are taken as global concerns to such faraway places like Libya.

That is what happens when a community is atomised and is running on isolated groupings living each in their own tiny worlds.

We are informed by Zimbabwean politicians that there is consensus in the GPA, about the irreversibility of the land reform programme and the need to have sanctions lifted.

And then we hear this big hoopla about "stopping fresh farm invasions" and about there being no such thing as sanctions but "mere travel bans" and "mere restrictive measures".

When you are operating in an atomised community you can sign papers on consensus position but it will not be as easy to implement those agreements as fragmentation and fighting will just not go away.

The telling thing is that Western communities teach and sponsor others to rebel against consensus when they themselves have an unwritten monolithic consensus to unite against everyone else as can be seen with military invasions we have been seeing over the years.

The EU opens borders to all its member states but its members sponsor African leaders to say no to such an arrangement for Africa. Divide and rule is the soul of capitalism.

While imperialism has immensely benefited from the squabbles and schisms in developing countries, it cannot be overemphasised that the people of the developing countries themselves have tremendously helped this process along and most of the blame lies squarely there.

We need to learn our lessons fast and now, and Zimbabwe needs to rid itself of atomisation based on political affiliations, if we are going to solve the challenge of rebuilding our economy. Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!