A few snippets for thought in light of the orange orangutan’s latest revelation that he, in fact, is not all that different from the majority of white Americans who do, indeed, see the countries on which their entire material existence is founded as shitholes. They’re shitholes indeed. Only after meeting white people, however. You see, what we call the Global South today was, for the majority of human history, the advanced segment of the world. While the English were bleeding each other to death for the common cold and burning women as witches to steal their property and break the vicious resistance waged by working class women against the theft of the commons and the onset of primitive capitalism, Africans, Arabs, Mayans and Chinese were performing advanced surgeries and making advancements in the hard sciences. My African ancestors that were dragged to this shithole by force had knowledge of inoculation while Europeans were dying from smallpox. They performed this lifesaving procedure on themselves and their children, while letting the Europeans die miserable deaths, as they should. We should seriously learn to keep our knowledge among ourselves and our friends and let the majority of white people suffer the fruit of their own mistakes. Better yet, when they appeared on our shores, they should, objectively, have been massacred. Why shouldn’t they? Have we seen peace since their coming? No, we haven’t. The average African in 1600 lived better than the average European at the same time.

“When the first white explorers and settlers came to Zimbabwe in the 1890s, they were shocked. The Afrikans were living better than most people did back in Europe. You can see what an emergency that was, and how capitalism had to send in troops to stop that. ‘Over the centuries the Zambezi valley had received crops from outside Africa and diffused them to other areas. By the 19th century, the Shona could make use of wide varieties of crop types. Thus, the first white settlers in Melsetter in 1893 listed mealies, poko corn, kafir corn, millet, ground nuts, beans (5 sorts) egg fruit, cabbages, tomatoes, peas, pumpkins of all sorts, watermelons, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, chilies, tobacco, bananas, and lemons, and all these grown to perfection.” — Butch Lee and Red Rover, “Night Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-colonial Terrain” (required reading, just fyi)

My people were not starving, hungry, desperate ones. Neither were the people of the Americas, India, China, Southeast Asia, Australia, or any of the other places that the Europeans saw fit to lay their dusty hides. We lived in relative plenty. The famines in India, Bangladesh, and other parts of the global South began when the British and other imperialists started mandating the export of food to feed other parts of the empire or industrial workers in the metropole. There were people starving in years of bumper crops, thanks to the Europeans. We talk about Stalin’s supposed “man-made famine” and the “genocide” of the Great Leap Forward, the British were committing actual genocide and the man who engineered the most cruel genocide of the Indian people, Winston Churchill, is on British currency and was buried with full military honors. He should have been hanged as a war criminal and his ashes thrown in the trash like many a Nazi. His death toll nearly approached that of Hitler and was more worldwide in scale, spanning Ireland to Africa to India to the Middle East. This scion of the British shithole also helped stir up enmity between Muslims and Hindus by promoting partition and civil war and now both countries are nuclear powers who have come very close to annihilating each other in the past. Once again, who is responsible for the shithole? Who made development in these countries go backwards, instead of forwards? Who eats off the rest of the world? Haiti? If I were Haitian, I’d be proud to be from the “shithole” that had sense enough to drive out the damn crackers and declare independence. The Middle East? If they’re such shitholes (the borders of most of the countries there were drawn by the Brits, by the way), stop drinking their oil and intervening in their countries.

Before you call another country a shithole, “middle class” white people, look in the mirror. Remember this quote. Does it make you feel guilty? Good. Do better. Those shitholes are shitholes so you can be, for all intents and purposes, useless. Which is the shithole? The place in which the vast majority of the world’s stolen wealth is concentrated, where YouTube videos of people wasting food go viral, where a man in my own city died, homeless, in a portapotty right outside one of the world’s first skyscrapers, where millions of people go without basic healthcare, where an orange orangutan worth billions of dollars for doing nothing has the power to end the world as we know it, where black people no longer have any economic value and are thus either marked for assimilation into imperialism or genocide? Or the places that this country has turned into “shitholes” to feed the biggest one in human history. Think well through your white wine hangover and talk to your family.

“Since white culture doesn’t support itself, doesn’t produce its own daily necessities, every breath that white women take costs someone else something. Revolutionary women have pointed out that the food white women eat was taken from a Third World woman’s mouth, the clothing their children wear was taken off a third world child’s back. Since it costs over $200,000 a year above and beyond that to educate a us medical student, many women in the third world must be robbed of the necessities of life to pay the bill. White men don’t pay it, that’s for sure.”