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The Mainstream Western Worldview Pretends The Global South Does Not Exist by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2024-11-04 at 23:56:22 )
The Mainstream Western Worldview Pretends The Global South Does Not Exist by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Until we open up our worldview and begin taking into account the needs and struggles of our fellow human beings around the world, it will be like we are at a dinner party that is being waited on by slaves.
Mainstream western politics and culture pretend the rest of the world does not exist. The mainstream western worldview shrinks the earth down to United States-aligned countries and acts as though the billions of people who live in the global south do not share a planet with us.
You really see this illustrated in United States presidential election season, when debates will feature five or six minutes on "foreign policy" with the remaining two hours dedicated to "domestic policy" and culture war wedge issues despite the the White Houses relationship with foreign countries having orders of magnitude more significant real-world consequences.
Americans discuss election results as though the whole thing revolves around them and their feelings and how much more convenient or inconvenient the next president might make their lives, while Europeans discuss what the results might mean for NATO expenses and trade agreements. The fact that the next United States president will be committing genocide, starving people with economic sanctions and increasing Washington,D.C.s stranglehold on earths population by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary barely ever enters into the conversation.
Whenever you hear western officials talking about how "the international community" views a particular issue, they are almost always talking about the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and maybe a few United States-aligned Asian countries like Japan and South Korea - while pretending the rest of the world just is not there.
The international community "please see here:" - Terrible Maps (TerribleMaps) November 16, 2023
You see it in politics, but you see it throughout our culture too.
In our movies, our shows, our conversations, our thoughts. We do not really think about all the exploitative imperialist extraction of resources and labor that makes our lifestyles possible, even though it directly affects damn near every waking moment of our lives.
You would not be reading this sentence right now had not this exact dynamic led to a highly complex electronic device making its way into your field of vision.
We just conduct ourselves from moment to moment like this relationship is not happening.
It is as though we are all walking around with living people strapped to our feet like slippers, but we are just laughing and talking about the weather and celebrities and how we are feeling about this and that without ever acknowledging the existence of the human beings we are standing on top of.
The global south is omitted from our thinking and our conversations in this way all the time, leaving us in this fractured, redacted mental universe where we pretend we are the only people living in this rapidly shrinking world.
Our lives are no less significant or valuable than those of people in Africa or Asia, but we live as though they do not exist, even when their labor may affect our moment to moment reality far more than the white-skinned person we are paying attention to in this instant.
This is going to have to change if we are to become a conscious species and create a healthy world together.
Our perception of the world is going to have to reflect the actual world, not just the small cloistered segment which exists within the confines of western civilization. We are going to have to start thinking about humanity as a whole and stop living the lie that we are not intimately interconnected with the lives on every populated continent.
Until we open up our worldview and begin taking into account the needs and struggles of our fellow human beings around the world, it will be like we are at a dinner party that is being waited on by slaves.
We are all looking at each other and talking about our lives and our families as the slaves clear our plates and refill our drinks, never acknowledging them or discussing the fact that they are being kept as material property and forced to do what they are doing to avoid punishment and torture.
Until we demand their freedom and invite them to come and dine with us, we are going to be in a highly dysfunctional and abusive relationship with them, and nothing will ever feel quite right - because it will not be!!
"This Ms Caitlin Johnstone article, its pictures, and its links are here:"
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Ah, the Buddha Ms Caitlin speaks the truth!!! - Cousin Lucky