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Of bigots, the West and the rest of us

LettersOf bigots, the West and the rest of us

Therese Belisle Nweke writes from Lagos, Nigeria

Dear Editor,

The recent sacking of Professor Brendan Bain as head of an eminent Caribbean regional HIV/AIDS organisation by the University of the West Indies (UWI) was not only cowardly, but retrogressive. Clearly, Professor Bain was sacrificed because he had offended a coalition of Western-funded and directed gay lobby groups in the Caribbean, when he provided medical testimony in the constitutional challenge initiated by a gay relative of the wife of Belize’s Prime Minister against that country’s criminal code, in September 2010.

The regional HIV/AIDS project, which Professor Bain managed on behalf of UWI, relies largely on US funding. And, because the US, the European Union (EU), and the rest of the West are largely in thrall to the powerful Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) lobby, these countries insist that the rest of the world, in particular the Caribbean and other post-colonial addresses in Africa, dance to the piping of the tune for which they paid.

Audrey Matura-Shepherd, in her succinctly argued piece: ‘’Bigots in our midst’’ of AMANDALA, 23 May, 2014, reminds us of this unfortunate fact when she states: ‘’. . . the reason UWI had to sell its soul and cave in is simply over money and as usual we in the region sell ourselves short and love the colonial master mentality . . .’’ And, Dr. Bernard Bulwer, a former student of Professor Bain, in his letter to AMANDALA of the same date, movingly highlights the grave injustice done to the professor, whom he described as a fine, caring, conscientious, but humble professional.

Recently, a number of African countries moved against the subversive arrival of a small, but increasingly vocal, LGBT lobby in their midst, whom they accused of wanting to destroy African culture and undermine the continent’s youthful population, with its culture of sterility and death. In the case of Nigeria, it immediately assented to bills banning same sex partnerships and marriages, prescribing prison terms of up to 14 years, and prohibiting anyone engaged in these acts and directly making a public show of same sex relationships.

It went further to not only ban people, clubs, societies and organisations, and those who register and abet them in operating, but also made them to be liable on conviction to ten years imprisonment.

Such actions by these sovereign and independent states elicited angry condemnation and threats to cut off aid by a number of Western nations, chief among which were the US, Britain, the EU, Canada, and even the IMF countries, such as Uganda and Malawi, whose budgets are largely derived from Western aid – in the case of Malawi, by as much as 40 per cent – were ordered to support the LGBT lobby and its adherents at home.

Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Nigeria’s Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and Senegal’s Macky Sall refused to back down, despite stringent calls from Barack Obama, David Cameron, Francois Hollande and Richard Branson, that these former colonial outposts would be disciplined for refusing to toe the ‘’higher civilisation’’ line, which the West, its media, intelligensia and the LGBT lobby are systematically forcing down the throats of the rest of the world.

However, in this sanctioning of sub-Saharan African nations, CARICOM countries and their institutions, bias, selectivity and hypocrisy are the norm. Saudi Arabia, America’s greatest ally in the Middle-East, after Israel, sentences gays to summary execution, yet no one in the West utters a murmur or ends their arms deals. In the case of China, it just does not sanction gay and lesbian relations, either publicly or privately; yet no Western nation dares to dictate, meddle or persecute it – or for that matter several Middle Eastern nations holding similar views.

Despite Obama’s blacklisting those African and CARICOM countries which criminalise or criticise homosexual practice, more than ten states in the US have anti-sodomy laws on their statute books. Russia’s current homosexual laws merely ban the promotion of homosexuality to minors. Nonetheless, American LGBT activists and the country’s hysterical and partisan media scream that the Russian law is: ‘’one of the most draconian anti-gay laws on the planet’’.

There are a number of key considerations to be noted here in contextualising this debate. First is, if a poll were to be taken, the percentage of gays and lesbians in the West may not be up to 10 per cent of the entire population. Yet, the majority of the population has allowed an aberrant and insidious minority to frighten it into self-censorship, resulting in complying and legitimising the tyranny of the minority.

Secondly, there exists in all communities absolute and non-absolute rights for members. People belong to a particular group or community because they are pursuing the common rights and goals of that entity: examples are labour unions, an association of lawyers, a league of kleptomaniacs, a club of paedophiles and an organisation of gays. Nevertheless, any union or group which violates the rights of others and infringes on those of the larger community is unacceptable – for with rights come responsibility. From all we have seen so far, the LGBT lobby represents a subversion and erosion of universal human rights; this, being a classic case of the rights of the individual superseding those of the overall community.

Therefore, if it is a given that morality is against paedophilia, kleptomania, nymphomania, adultery and a number of other aberrations, which some claim have biological origins and for which the jury is yet out, why is the case of homosexuality different? Why is it allowed to privatise the public agenda by privileging its own narrative over the others to mainstream a marginal counter culture?

Thirdly, one of the worst misconceptions arising from the LGBT debate among Western liberals and their mimics in the so called Third World is that sexual orientation and gender identity are on the same level as race, religion and biological gender. Resulting from this false premise is the assumption that LGBT rights are automatically subsumed under the banner of universal human rights; which, in effect, is an attempt to replace the natural rights of a human being with an unnatural right.

In other words, other sexual behaviours such as incest, paedophilia, zoophilia/bestiality, ie., sex with animals – and is legal in some European countries – and necrophilia, ie., sex with a corpse, all have the same rights as sodomy now does in some countries, to be part and parcel of universal human rights!

Clearly, the much vaunted ‘’human rights’’ argument, which the LGBT lobby makes ad nauseam, is merely a fig-leaf to conceal its naked agenda to entrench the culture of entitlement.

Fourthly, historically powerful nations like America, and the 28 which make up the EU, and global institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, which are Western-controlled, are not only influential because of their size and reach, but because of their concept of themselves. Their interaction with the nations of Africa and the Caribbean carries the assumption that these nations need their ‘’superior’’ wisdom and assistance.
Unfortunately, it also creates a situation whereby a number of Machiavellian devices are deployed to permanently derail development and growth and sustain dependency through pernicious agricultural policies, subsidy regimes for certain agricultural produce, harmful administrative policies, one of which is losing duty free access to Western markets, as a way of punishing those they wish to arm-twist, and unreasonable lending transactions through those global and regional financial institutions they control or influence, which leave African and CARICOM countries with huge financial debts at cut-throat interest rates. At the end of it all, the aid they proffer, most times, paradoxically benefits the donor more than the recipient, as we have seen in Iraq and Haiti.

Fifthly, in African societies there are laws which support beliefs which are authentically and originally African – the same is true in the West. For example, Western societies prohibit polygamy, which in Africa, whether Maghreb or sub-Saharan, is an inherent part of the ethos, norms and values of African societies. These societies, like some Afro-Caribbean ones, espouse a communalist morality which, generally, is at variance with the moral anarchy and rampant individualism of the West.

In the light of this, it beggars belief that one of the most enlightened individuals ever to become president of the US, while on an official visit to a number of African countries last year, unwisely rammed the LGBT agenda up the collective backsides of sub-Saharan Africans? Little did Obama know that these people regard legitimising homosexuality, same sex marriage, prostitution, the use of drugs like marijuana, abortion, euthanasia and genetic manipulation as ‘’diseases of the West’’ which, in African cultures, are considered an ‘’abomination’’ or ‘’taboo’’. The Igbo people of Nigeria call it ‘’alu’’.

We now live in a post-Christian world and an apocalyptic age. There is a total absence of moral sensibility when Conscience is not only uninformed, but dead. This means a poverty of both mind and soul, as well of spirit, reigns supreme. It is also needful to acknowledge that imperialist exhaustion is a part of the American reality and dilemma. The moral decay of Western culture is the beginning of the end, as these societies are now under attack by nihilism, and the most insidious form of idolatry – the worship of self.

The West’s decline is inevitable because the rest of the world is catching up, and there is now a growing multi-polar world. Economically, we are already in a multi-polar world. A key index of this is that the US, which used to be a formidable world leader in education, has fallen to 36. The new kids on the block, according to the December 2013 OECD Report on World Education, are Shanghai (in China) at No.1, Singapore (2), Hong Kong (3), Taiwan (4), and Finland (5). It is noteworthy to see that in Finland, the top ten per cent of that nation’s university graduates are sent to train as teachers.

What does this mean for CARICOM countries, and UWI? That there is no need to do ‘’follow-follow’’ or, to borrow from V.S. Naipaul, become ‘’Mimic Men’’. UWI should, and must, return to the UWI of the 1960s and ’70s, which was noted for its academic rigour and research-inspired teaching; with lecturers who taught their students to be independent, critical thinkers. Its faculties boasted radical Caribbean scholars, most of whom were in their 20s and 30s, trail-blazers in their disciplines who wrote some of the texts from which they taught. The subjects, emphases, perspectives, concepts, issues and case illustrations were dominated by an acute ‘’Third World’’ and Caribbean consciousness, steeped in philosophical and cultural independence.

My list includes the likes of Walter Rodney, the Marxist Trevor Munroe, and ‘’Left of Left’’ Carl Stone, Maurice Patterson, George Beckford, Norman Girvan, Vaughan Lewis, Edward Brathwaite – historian, poet and culture activist, who introduced me to Africa – icons like Elsa Goveia, and that grand, old man of philosophy, Roy Augier, (who taught me ‘’to think’’) Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris, Kenneth Ramchand, the likes of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and C.L.R. James, (who briefly passed through) and much later, Amechi Uchegbu (our own Schwarzenberger).

The CARICOM countries only have to look towards Cuba which, despite its imperfections, has taught the rest of us not to be craven. Today, that tiny Caribbean state, despite having to deal since 1959 with a hard-line, imperial and implacable foe as its neighbour, is a shining symbol to the 54 nations across the African continent.

Last December, at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, Cuba’s Raul Castro took pride of place in South Africa in just the same way as America’s Barack Obama did. The secular-humanist philosophy, decadent world view and carrot-and-stick approach much of the West is now at, should not intimidate the rest of us into unquestioning and servile acquiescence.

Nor should the miserable crumbs which fall from their table serve as bait. We had Marxism and Freudism – and where are they today? No social movement has any inevitability, and the same is true of the present sexual revolution.

The Yoruba people of South-West Nigeria, among whom I live, taught me this proverb: ‘’Blessed is he who tries to make a fool of you: and woe unto him who accepts to be treated like a fool’’.

Therese Belisle Nweke
Lagos, Nigeria,
June 3, 2014

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