In a world where ‘equity’ is the catch-cry of corporatists accumulating unprecedented wealth, the return of colonialism should not surprise. Colonialism, after all, brings great benefits to those whom it disempowers and pillages. Success requires a highly centralised approach to achieve mass control, restricting freedom ‘for the greater good’ whilst silencing those who disagree.
With the World Health Organisation (WHO) now rebooted to promote just such approaches, and its calamitous Covid response having recently pushed former colonies further into penury, the stage is set for a return of the old order. An army of international health bureaucrats, equipping themselves with an array of rhetoric around ‘infodemics’, ‘vaccine equity’ and with a new-found love of corporate sponsorship, is forming the vanguard. The social order of winners, losers and enablers – all the stuff we naïvely thought we had put aside – was just festering in the shadows.
While European colonialism proved an excellent way to extract the wealth of others, it also had its downsides. One was the inadvertent extraction of pestilence such as cholera and typhus. While smallpox had been a devastating European export, clearing coveted lands for colonial settlement, transmission of disease in the reverse direction upset the colonisers; local laws and expectations applied and mass death and suffering could not be hidden from the public eye.
To address with this problem, 12 European countries met in 1851 for the first international sanitary conference. Most were heavily invested in the colonial enterprise, settling and pillaging other lands to demonstrate a higher form of civilisation. Some were still actively enslaving people to make this greater good even cheaper to impose. Thus, the noble field of international public health (nowadays rebranded as ‘Global Health’) was born. Regular rebranding is important as the past becomes awkward.
A series of such conferences culminated in the first Sanitary Convention in 1892, and the establishment of the permanent Office Internationale d’Hygiene Publique in Paris in 1907. The countries of the Americas had got in first with their own International Sanitary Bureau in 1902, but the world’s centre of gravity was still in Europe. While the great public private partnerships that had exploited the colonial populations, such as the East India companies, had mostly dissolved, colonial governments were still able to starve and abuse the locals without too much reference to the norms of behaviour expected at home. International public health was about keeping the home populations safe, not about dealing with the disease burdens of the colonised.
Colonies could be run with the efficiency of private industry free from the growing expectations of health and welfare in Europe. They were sufficiently distant and profitable for the benefits of extracted wealth to temper any feelings of guilt that such abuse might arouse. The extremes of some late-comers such as systemic mutilation could also serve as outlets for those who wished to vent virtue. This could allowing feelings of philanthropic altruism or ‘White Man’s Burden’ to veil the more routine carnage of the more established powers.
Throughout this, the tropical public health schools of Europe helped keep populations productive and profitable whilst reinforcing this veil of benevolence, dictating healthcare to support the corporate-authoritarian state. They also boosted the egos and sense of adventure of the young health professionals the state recruited. There is not much new under the sun.
Between the two World Wars colonialism remained good business. The League of Nations trialed inclusiveness by adding the rising Asian colonial power, Japan. The pre-antibiotic Spanish Flu had recently wreaked havoc globally with 25 to 50 million deaths between 1918 and 1920, and typhus had continued a deadly path through the First World War. International collaboration made sense, but it would be on the terms of the wealthy and remain primarily focused on threats to their own health.
This elitist view extended to the eugenics movement of the time. Supported by much of the Western public health establishment, this came to be expressed most clearly through its enthusiastic embrace of Nazism in Germany. We usually view Nazism as grey images of jackboots and concentration camps, but this is a distortion; a figment of monochrome film and propaganda. It was considered progressive at the time; people working together in the sun for the benefit of the many, growing prosperity and opportunity. It captured the minds and hearts of students and the young, giving them a cause to stand for, sanctioning their right to denigrate deviants, non-conformers and those considered unhealthy or a threat to social purity. As today, this was all promoted from above by a mix of politicians and corporatists and reflected in the professional societies and colleges. It enables people to view the subjugation of others as virtuous. Fascism and colonialism are faces of the same coin.
The consequent rotting piled corpses of the death trains of the 1940s, and the mutilated skeletal ghosts of the camps they served, gave medical authoritarianism a bad name. The Second World War also gave colonised populations a path and a means to throw off their oppressors. There followed a few decades in which public health did penance. Career paths required acknowledgement of anti-fascist concepts such as equality between countries, community control of health policy and the ever-unpopular idea of ‘informed consent’. Declarations from Nuremberg to Helsinki to Alma Ata promoted this theme, with human rights trending in the media. For corporate authoritarianism and the colonialist ideal to be made friendly again, the former themes would have to be sanitised. ‘Greater good’ is a good place to start; “Protect your community, get your jab” makes forced compliance sound caring. “No one is safe, until everyone is safe” justifies the demonisation of non-compliers. A few generations of forgetting, a bit of rebranding, and it all becomes mainstream again.
Let us dig further into our enlightened present. We pull down the statues of the tyrants, ban the books of racists, then close the markets and schools across low-income countries and expand their debt, ensuring they remain subservient. In wealthy countries, corporatists fund the colleges that train the cadres who then save the ignorant and needy in ‘backward’ states. They arrange for the children to be injected with the medicines the corporatists make, proven effective by the modellers they sponsor and approved by the regulatory agencies they support. The big new public-private partnerships ensure private profit can be driven by public money.
An ever-growing bureaucracy, in an ever-growing list of international agencies, now implements the centrist agenda, removing remaining vestiges of local ownership and control. Thousands of well-salaried ‘humanitarian’ workers are the new East India Company bureaucrats, projecting the same façade of Western largesse to the distant, ignorant and undeveloped. Untouchable international agencies such as WHO, external to national judicial control, do the leg work for those with money and power. Two decades ago, emphasis was on empowering communities. I have sat in meetings in recent years where these same people shamelessly discuss defunding countries that don’t comply with emerging Western cultural norms. Cultural imperialism has become acceptable again.
With the world turning full-circle, post-World War Two concepts of human rights, equality and local agency are exiting the international stage. The veiled colonialism currently dressed up as vaccine equity looks like a bunch of colonial bureaucrats forcing their sponsors’ wares on those with less power, whilst building policies to ensure this imbalance remains. Malnutrition, infectious disease, child marriage and generational poverty are side issues to the East India Pharma and Software Company’s bottom lines. This will stop when those being colonised once again unite and refuse to comply. In the meantime, the enablers could open their eyes and understand whom they are working for.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
Stop Press: A coalition of African scientists has accused the WHO of “colonialism” and “classical Western imperialism through the backdoor” with its sweeping new pandemic treaty.
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Anyone who uses a vax pass is participating in medical apartheid and should be ashamed of themselves.
Well said, especially using one to get into bloody Luxembourg.
It’s really simple now. Don’t wear a mask, don’t take the vaccine. Ever.
While I have this comment box open, do you remember the classic movie, The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston. I keep thinking about that movie. And the moment, where his ally, the woman of colour (I don’t recall her name), gets back to his apartment, and unwraps her scarf, to reveal that she too has become one of the zombies/vaccinated, and that chilling line: ‘Matthias sent me’. If you know it, you know what I’m talking about.
That’s all I hear these days when I read about someone else who has succumbed to the mask/vaccine madness: ‘Matthias sent me’.
Ok, that’s it, carry on.
Meanwhile in Austria (according to something I heard of yesterday): Police out in masses everywhere to hunt for unvaccinated in shops and other prohibited places. They’ve brought this on themselves! How dare they exercise a choice with THIS situation in the hospitals!
[THIS situation typically being someone claims something really bad will happen in a few weeks if his conjectures should turn out to be true for the first time, although I have no specific information on that]
Thanks for the nice article.
Hands up anyone who knows where Adolf Hitler was born and spent his formative years.
Here’s a piccy of one of the architects of our misfortune entering a local temple of worship.
“If you want to have a strong immune system, don’t cover your face – just stop stuffing it.”
Perhaps keeping a mask on whilst eating will do the trick.
They certainly don’t deserve General Patton’s grave anymore.
Another depressing postcard. It does seem that, for the moment at least, England seems to be an outlier in terms of restrictions. But why? This doesn’t seems to fit in with the global capitalist plan. Maybe we just seeing a delayed reaction before the upcoming by-elections?
Fuck Luxem…….. fuck it, can’t even be bothered to spell it
Well that just confirms that my decision not to have a foreign holiday was the right one
Correct, even having a holiday in dear old Blighty feels foreign nowadays.
Carrots in baked beans for breakfast! Weird!
Perhaps they should rename it “the paranoid inn” instead of Novotel.
Lovely writing Russell thank you the good old British sense of humour always prevails.
I went there on a school trip decades ago. It was shut. Good article, especially the following observation:
“Public health zealots now run the world, enabled by craven politicians, an alarmist media and dubious Big Tech organisations. Having travelled to five European countries in the last 16 months, I’ve noticed the screws getting tighter, not looser. (So much for the miraculous vaccines getting us back to normal!) It’s moderate tyranny dressed up in nurses’ scrubs. The lands we thought the most civilised have enacted the most authoritarian controls. But then wasn’t this the case in the 1930s, when one of the world’s most sophisticated nations started a cataclysmic conflict?”