“In recent years, Wall Streeters have often been seen as ‘responsible guardians of the public trust,’ wealthy men who could be relied upon to act in the national interest … As Steve Fraser shows, there has been another view, one that may come to the fore if the recession lingers and millions lose their jobs or homes, while those who brought on the disaster remain wealthy beyond any dream available to normal people. It is one thing to be seen as venal but brilliant, and another to be seen as both greedy and stupid. That is the risk Wall Street now faces.”
– pg. 18, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Sunday, April 20, 2008
In the beginning of UBAD in 1969, there were many Latin Belizeans who felt that the UBAD message was hostile to them. In 1977, however, UBAD having been dissolved in 1974, the newspaper Amandala declared that the newspaper’s philosophy had become Belizean nationalism, as opposed to black nationalism.
We cite the 1977 change in focus merely to show you that on Partridge Street we are not fanatics or demagogues. The nation changes; the region changes; the world changes. That is why the young may die, but the old must die. The old must die because they find it difficult to accommodate change. And change is not only inevitable, it is inexorable. Each day, the old die. Each day, the young replace them. Such is life.
When the Europeans entered, in fact invaded, Africa and America, it was as if they had entered the Garden of Eden. That is how dazzled they were by the natural and man-made wealth of these new continents. The Europeans experienced a similar astonishment when they first came to India and China (Asia).
Because they had been so poor in icy Europe, the white man was greedy. He was insatiable. And so he wreaked havoc on the native African and American peoples in order to acquire their gold and silver and jewels and land and waterways. The Europeans explained their invasions and conquests as a religious and educational enterprise: they said their purpose had been to Christianize and civilize “savage and barbarian” peoples – those same peoples who were the ancestors of most of us Belizeans.
There were African and native American leaders and thinkers who sought, under duress or out of mere concern, to counsel the European invaders, to teach the white men what they had learned during the millennia of their civilizations’ development in Africa and America. The main thing was that the native peoples wished to teach the Europeans how to respect the land and the air and the rivers and the seas.
The Europeans ignored the native peoples, and they proceeded to become rich and powerful beyond their wildest dreams. The Europeans became the dominant people on planet earth because of their military, naval and air arsenals and superiority. They explained their success with a “philosophy in progress” which we refer to in this newspaper as “white supremacy.”
Perhaps the first fly in the ointment of white supremacy was the publication of a book called Silent Spring by an American scientist named Rachel Carson around the year 1960. This was really the first time when a highly educated member of the ruling whites used scientific evidence to show that there was something wrong in the land and the waterways, that the planet was being poisoned by man and man-made materials, and that the fish and the birds and the animals were being poisoned and killed. Intelligent members of the ruling peoples quickly concluded that if the fishes and the birds and the animals were dying, then man could be next, even if he was not already part of the carnage. Man was killing himself, in other words, and he was killing himself because of greed, because of what man was calling “development.”
The 1960’s became a time of remarkable change in the white peoples of the planet. Millions of their educated young began to rebel against the “way of death” which uncompromised scientists were exposing after documented research. Today there are many people of European origin who are at the forefront of the fight to save planet earth, or at least to slow down the poisoning and the destruction which masquerade as development, but which really constitute unmitigated, obscene personal and corporate greed.
We are saying to you, Belizeans, that there are European people who are friends of nations like Belize and people like the Belizean people. The scientific history of the planet since Silent Spring has convinced younger Europeans that the native peoples of Africa and America were correct when they warned and counseled the original European invaders centuries ago.
As descendants of these native African and American peoples, we cannot afford to condemn a human being just because he or she is European in ancestry. Europeans are in the forefront of the fight to change the philosophy of personal and corporate greed, to protect planet earth. Europeans are in the forefront of that important fight because five centuries of rule over planet earth means that the Europeans, overall, are more educated than we Africans and native Americans are, and they have far more access to the scientific facts.
At the same time, the ruling Europeans remain responsible for most of the violations of planet earth which have taken place since Christopher Columbus in August of 1492. The new paradigm is that we Belizeans have to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the enlightenment, or lack thereof, of their philosophy.
It is much easier to say “black good and white bad” than to seek to identify who is good and who is bad in both macro groups. There are whites in Belize who do not subscribe to the philosophy of white supremacy and untrammelled personal greed. We cannot condemn such whites to the garbage heap, because such whites are our friends. They are friends of planet earth.
All power to the people.