In the olden days, the world was divided into the ‘developed’ countries and the ‘underdeveloped’ countries, the latter thanks to Donald Trump, also known as the ‘sh*thole countries.”
And while China is no longer considered underdeveloped, it is still not a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which consists of 38 countries which together comprise what we consider to be the ‘developed’ world today.
The first confirmed case of Covid-19 appeared in the United States in January,2020. By February, cases and deaths were being reported throughout Europe, and by March, the CDC began issuing guidelines for controlling public meetings with 50 people or less. We all know what happened after that.
Remember a virus called Ebola? This pathogen had been floating around Central Africa from at least the 1970’s, but it became a virulent epidemic and then pandemic in 2013, with more than 11,000 deaths reported by 2016.
We were very lucky with that one because clamping down on travel and trade between the United States and West Africa had little or no impact on the economies of either place. As near as we can tell, there were only two confirmed cases and one Ebola death in the United States even though the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Ebola to be a global health emergency in 2019.
What about AIDS, a.k.a., Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV? This disease may have been lurking in animals for maybe a century before it jumped into the human genome in the 1970’s and became a full-scale epidemic in many countries, including the United States. Like Ebola, the HIV virus also originated in Central Africa, with roughly 25 million Africans currently infected out of an estimated 35 million worldwide.
Aside from a common etiology in which all three viruses jumped from animal carriers to human hosts, there is another commonality shared by these three pathogens which is usually overlooked. This has to do with thew fact that these threats to the human community all originated in locations that were at some point invaded and despoiled by Western whites.
Until some new research proves otherwise, we have to assume that at some point back in the pre-civilization days, that the socio-economic level was more or less the same for every place that humans lived. Then at some point, we don’t exactly know when, where or how, certain human communities jumped ahead of others and started the long process of development, while leaving the others behind.
This is the usual explanation for why countries in Europe are so advanced, whereas countries in Sub-Sahara Africa and the Pacific Rim still lag behind.
But does this explanation take into account what happened when whites from Western Europe began to spread out and militarily impose their control over non-Western territories and native populations beginning in 1492?
Know what happened when the ships which carried Columbus and his crews returned to Seville in 1493? The first onset of syphilis erupted in Europe which then spread throughout the continent thanks to the movement of French and Spanish armies besieging cities on the Italian coast.
The appearance of syphilis has been described as the ‘New World’s revenge on the Old,’ but I prefer to think of it as the attempt by non-white humanity to redress some of the balance disrupted by the spread of white populations throughout the globe. Because only white-skinned humans ever jumped onto ships and then sailed thousands of miles to plunder and steal away resources from Indigenous populations throughout the globe.
And worse yet, the white marauders refer to these wholesale acts of piracy and theft as bringing ‘civilization’ to lesser-developed folk around the globe.
I am motivated to write this column in response to what has become an ongoing attempt by the GOP noise machine to figure out who should be blamed for helping to spread Covid-19. The latest such crap comes from that asshole Elon Musk, who is denouncing Anthony Fauci for mandating a Covid-19 vaccine.
Just remember that in the greater scope of things, history also has its claims.