The Sunday News
It is no accident that it is Cecil John Rhodes, the arch-imperialist and British empire-builder who openly doubted the existence of God.
No one that believed in the existence God or the existence of right and wrong (morality) would have thought and done the things that Rhodes did.
After openly doubting the existence of God and insisting on the right of might Rhodes said but: “if there be a God, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible.”
What he meant is that if God existed, he would love the whole of Africa to come under British imperial rule, even if it meant finishing of all Africans and replacing them with the British.
Rhodes believed in and advanced the paradigm of war and pursuit of conquest.
The paradigm of war and conquest seem to be the oxygen of Empires and the lifeblood of the empire-builders.
It is no accident again that it is Boaventura de Soussa Santos, a decolonial philosopher and a tragic optimist who wrote recently that the United Nations should move with speed to stop World War III that is presently unfolding right under the knows of the world.
Santos describes the new Cold War that is about to be a Hot War as nuclear powers gravitate towards armed conflict.
For Europe, and partly a large part of the world, the consequences of that war are bound to be too dire to contemplate.
Over and above the Covid-19 pandemic, climate crisis, increasing poverty and the escalating refugee crisis in the world, a nuclear war is simmering; a war that might change the world and humanity forever.
A lazy friend of mine, lazy in the sense of thinking and intellectualising only when drunk, believes that after the flood of Noah, when God said he will not destroy the world with water again, but “the fire next time,” he meant nuclear war.
The business of war
For Empire-builders war is the beginning and the end of everything.
The philosopher of liberation, Enrique Dussel, observes it that in western history, “from Heraclitus to Karl von Clausewitz and Henry Kissinger, war is the origin of everything.” Bloodletting, killing and destroying is the oxygen of history for the superpowers that will seek, find and keep world dominance by any means necessary.
And some means unnecessary. Dussel adds that “it is a Cold War for those who manufacture the weapons and a hot one for those that have to use the weapons and those that are to die from them.
For some war is business in two strong senses.
The first sense is that the fights are always military in form when the causes and the content are economic.
The struggle is for economic dominance and the control of resources that lie below the feet of the people of Asia, Latin America and Africa.
The second sense is that wars in Asia, Latin America and Africa mean mega-profits for weapons manufacturers.
The rise of China to be the leading economy, in the world, for instance, is one issue where some western powers find agreement despite their huge political differences.
It is not even the rise of China but its return to dominance because about 200 years ago China was an Empire.
The God question
What is called the “death of God” by philosophers is that event when western thinkers and political actors, back in history, believed that they can use rationality (thought) and science (method) to “master the universe” and conquer nature.
The Enlightenment era was the apex of this delusion. Imperialism which achieved its zenith in the colonisation and enslavement of one by the other was part of the western pursuit of conquering and mastering the universe to achieve economic and political dominance.
So, for Empire-builders, the conquerors and the masters that they made themselves to be, God is dead, very dead.
And in his grave, he lies with morality and peace.
With God out of the agenda politics becomes the domain of the anti-Christ where governments and political parties throughout the world daily mistake themselves for God and exercise power with godless and evil impunity.
And such godless politics inevitably leads to wars, including world wars that by their nature are a war of all against all.
The death of God, and the murder of morality, have allowed the world to develop economically and technologically to such an extent that only the destruction of the world is the only development that is left to happen.
Only a return to God, and a resurrection of political morality in the sense of realising that economic power and military might are not everything, might prevent the Third World War.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contact: [email protected]
