We live in an upside-down world. The leaders of the richer nations, the old colonial powers, want to rehabilitate the language of imperialism: praise for their past, and a desire to repeat that messianism in the present.
Meanwhile, the peoples of the poorer nations agitate for peace and development, as well as for an apology for the crimes of colonialism and reparations for the plunder carried out during that period. The slogan from the people is simple: ‘Justice must come’. It rumbles now but will grow louder with time.
When officials from the United States come to Europe to talk about geopolitics, senior European officials listen intently. Last year, at the Munich Security Conference, US Vice President J.D. Vance scolded the Europeans for what he called a crisis “of our own making.”
He was rebuked for being insolent toward European democracy, which he chastised for being insufficiently attentive to the ‘issue’ of migration and for being overly concerned about the rise of the far right of a special type.
European newspapers, from The Guardian to Le Monde, criticised Vance for his insolence.
However, most of the senior liberal European officials—from the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte—bowed their heads and said that Europe would do well to meet the goals set by the United States for military spending.
This drive for militarisation has gone hand in hand with a steady capitulation to the far right.
This year, the US representative to the Munich Security Conference was Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In his speech, Rubio offered a fairly accurate history lesson:
“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding—its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.
But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain, and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
Rubio’s general historical orientation is correct. European colonialism was in ascendency roughly from 1492—the opening of the Americas to conquest and enslavement—until the mid-twentieth century.
Then, after the defeat of fascism in the World Anti-Fascist War, led by the Soviet Union and fought at immense cost in China, European colonialism was pushed aside by the rapid rise of both communist and national liberation movements, with the communists in Vietnam (1945), China (1949), and Cuba (1959) prevailing against all odds to inaugurate communist experiments in poorer nations.
Rubio was born in Miami, Florida. His parents left Cuba in 1956, around three years before the Cuban Revolution. In his speech, Rubio makes it clear that he sees himself entirely as an heir to Christian Europe, with nothing of the rich culture of his parents’ Cuba—a culture built on the heritages of Africa, Asia, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as much as on those of Asturian, Galician, and Catalan migrants from the Iberian Peninsula.
The Cuban Revolution gradually sought to dismantle the old racist hierarchies of plantation society and build a society of equal Cuban citizens. This is the kind of decolonisation that Rubio abhors.
During the era of decolonisation and socialism, Rubio said, “many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.” But the leaders of the Atlantic world did not buckle. “Our predecessors recognised that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make.”
So, Rubio argued, today the leadership in the West must stand firm and reject what he presents as inevitable decline, defend Western values against communism, and commit themselves to new forms of colonialism (whether in Gaza or in the Western Hemisphere).
What kind of Europe does the United States seek to ally with? In Rubio’s words: “A Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilisation”—in other words, a colonial Europe for an imperial United States.
The European leaders in the hall greeted Rubio with a standing ovation. They are perfectly comfortable with a few colonial wars if the United States is beside them to provide military support and protection.
There was no outrage at Rubio’s speech, no dismay at the naked display of Western chauvinism and colonialism. For the European leadership, it seems unacceptable to be critical of Europe’s democratic norms but utterly acceptable to champion the return of Western colonialism.
As a new mood grows in the Global South to exercise sovereignty and build a dignified life for the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the leaders of the Global North celebrate the Age of Columbus and cheer on a return to that era.
They want to break into their museums, put on morriones (the helmets of the conquistadors), get into their Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, and bomb the daylights out of the peoples of the South. This is what the United States did to Venezuela on 3 January, what they have been doing to Palestine, and what they want to do to Cuba and the Sahel.
They might have vast military power, built with their plundered treasure, and they might be able to use this power to instil fear among large parts of the human population, but they will never garner respect or submission.
That is clear from the reaction around the world to the flagrant violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty, from the way people have rallied in support of Cuba in the face of attempts to suffocate the Cuban Revolution, and from the outrage of almost every single inhabitant of this planet at the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
In December 2025, Algeria’s lower house of parliament unanimously approved a bill declaring that French colonisation of their land from 1830 to 1962 was a crime against humanity.
The Algerian government had pressed the issue at the African Union (A.U.) previously, which in February 2026 adopted a resolution to designate Nov. 30 as the African Day of Tribute to African Martyrs and Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Colonisation, and Apartheid; to convene an International Conference on Crimes of Colonialism, which the resolution describes as “genocide against the people of Africa;” and to seek “international recognition and redress for these historical crimes.”
Vote at the General Assembly
The vote on the General Assembly resolution on reparations for slavery. (UN TV)
On the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade today the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling on the former slave-owning nations to apologize and pay reparation for slavery.
[The vote was 123 favor, 3 against, and 52 abstentions. The only three nations that voted against were the United States, Israel and Argentina. The European Union abstained as a bloc. The US and E.U. of course benefited from the slave trade and descendants today of slave owners in those countries inherited the profits of slavery while the descendants of slaves inherited the debt.
The US and British delegates told the Assembly that among other reasons, they could not support the resolution because slavery was not against the law when it was carried out. The resolution, which is not legally binding, urges UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and setting up a fund for reparations]
Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama had tabled the resolution which recognised the Transatlantic Slave Trade as the “gravest crime against humanity.” [European delegates said they abstained in part because of this “hierarchy” of crimes against humanity.]
“All peoples of African descent have been waiting for this day,” Mahama said. “The truth cannot be buried. The legal foundations are sound; the moral imperative is undeniable.”
On one side of the Mediterranean Sea, the Global North sees colonisation as positive and suggests its return, while on the other side, the Global South excoriates it with historical fact and calls for reparations. Mahama’s comments and the G.A. resolution come in the wake of the release of Kwesi Pratt, Jr.’s book Reparations: History, Struggle, Politics, and Law, for which Mahama wrote an incisive foreword.
In the book, presented at the A.U. summit in Malabo (Equatorial Guinea) in July 2025 and released in Accra in September 2025, Pratt argues that the Global North owes the African people between $2 and $3 trillion in unpaid wages and between $4 and $6 trillion for unpaid colonial extraction.
Combined, this amounts to between $6 and $9 trillion. At the upper end, this is a tenth of the Global North’s annual GDP, and it is vastly greater than the African continent’s total external debt of $1.5 trillion (which, at the very least, should be wiped out as a gesture of contrition).
Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda threw off his suit, put on a bandana, and, under the name “Gassy Dread,” teamed up with reggae star Gramps Morgan to release the single “Reparations” in February.
Here are some of the lyrics:
Reparations, justice must come
Africa and the Caribbean as one.
Not charity, but exposing them bold
Restitution for the labour and the gold.
Across the ocean, torn from the land,
Chains on the feet, whip in the hand.
But Jah light carried us through the storm
Now a new day of justice is born.…
They plundered bodies, diamonds, and cane.
Generations carried the weight and the pain.
But the people strong, we still survive.
Now it’s time to let justice arrive:
Reparations, justice must come.
Indeed. Prime Minister Browne should send a link to his song to Marco Rubio and to all the European heads of government. Rubio longs for the colonial ‘spirit’ that sent ships into ‘uncharted seas’.
But the people of the Global South remember what those ships carried—and what they took.
If the Atlantic world wants to speak of ‘civilisation’, let them begin with restitution: cancelling illegitimate debts, returning stolen wealth, and paying reparations for centuries of colonial plunder and neocolonial extraction.
The era of colonial impunity is over. Justice must come.
 | A guest post by
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When the 'western colonialists' attempt to reassert the model of their systems of dominance they have yet to be challenged about their illiteracy about Abstract Representation using their own systems of 'Math & Science'.
Why does the world, or any country for that matter, accept the hegemony of any currency? How much of the 'will toward dominance' would be eliminated by correcting the Misrepresentation of Money? Iran and Venezuela and other places prohibit usury...Tucker Carlson has spoken up against usury….but is that enough?
Money creation, from nothing and yet turned into a thing of 'value' - Poof! - is NOT a power that anyone actually has, not anyone, not any government, not any bank.
The first premise most people willingly go along with is the absolute illiteracy and illegitimacy of there being these so called "financial powers." WE ALL are the ones accepting the nonsense that the origination of the monetary unit is a magical process of 'creation' by some magical monetary power within government or banking. And we accept this nonsense because we think that the monetary unit is an actual item of 'value'.
When we stopped using fungible physical commodities as 'trade goods' and moved to bookkeeping about the value contained in the goods and services of our interchange, we mistakenly and foolishly and illiterately assigned "value" to the number units themselves using symbols ($, etc.) as though those units were still commodities that had just lost their physical form.
All very mysterious really, the claims of these magical powers. Where the hell did that come from!?
In ancient times the temple priests told the peasantry who came to make their offerings to God that the offerings brought by the peasants were not acceptable to God. The priests told the people they needed to take the coins, that only the priests issued, and leave the Real Goods that the peasants had brought to the temple with the priests, go lay the coins on the altar because that was acceptable to God, and then go home. The original claims of 'authority' about ‘money’ by the temple priests is where the eventual claim of authority about money by government originated.
But the claim of 'authority' is nonsense, and so is the system of money itself; since what is real is the wealth of a people, and money is made up nonsense that the people have been told is real (acceptable to god). It's a long history of lies and deception. It is like unto the miss use of genuine authority as egregious as telling kids lies!
We are not going to get out of this mess while using the very system instituted ages ago to enslave and deceive and steal. And we certainly are not going to solve a systemic problem that is based on illiteracy by moral condemnation of those still acting illiterately within the illiterate system and never condemning the system. That is like telling slave masters they have to be good masters but never challenging the system of slavery.
It seems absurd because it is absurd, yet in this the 21st Century we are still not using an economic accounting/credit/number system that gives direct credit to the doer after the doing is done. Many, many rightly point out that in this country the black slave population that basically built such a large part of this country did not get ANY credit for the doing that they did. Indentured servants of many races and places of origin also have been given No Credit for the doing that they did. Most all of the absolute most critical doing that a society needs done is given No Credit in the system we have today. (child care, elder care, environmental care, ….) And still today the very notion that there must be an issuer of the numbers before The People can give and receive credit amongst themselves persists. When one thinks about how rich a society can be if it does not use banks (or government or temple priests) to originate acCounting units but only gives and receives credit for real doing it boggles the mind to think that we are still borrowing the use of the numbers with which we do our acCounting!
'Never anywhere and at any time in history in the BIble, Quran or elsewhere has money's logical function been defined and specified as is required by any modern information system. This can be done authoritatively with formal information science and dynamical systems theory and practice. Here we have done just that!' - Marc Gauvin bibocurrency.com
We can do something about this by not conceding power to "them" and by reclaiming monetary literacy and bringing these resolutions to every jurisdiction.
https://www.moneytransparency.com/msta-resolutions
Systemic: always operating on everything within it all the time
Imagine the healing of a world that will come from the leadership of a country that recognizes and abandons the ages long conceptual error of attempting to attach the features of a fungible commodity to their 'unit of measure' in their production and exchange and record keeping about 'value.' The leadership of every country must have its sights on what the Real Value is: the resources and labor and innovation and creativity and capacity of its land and people.
But can that full capacity manifest when the means by which the bookkeeping about their own economic activity holds an abstract Unit of AcCount - Money - to also BE an item of value akin to and/or equal, even superior, to the very natural resources of the land?
When we stopped using fungible physical commodities as 'trade goods' and moved to bookkeeping about the value contained in the goods and services of our interchange, we mistakenly and foolishly and illiterately assigned "value" to the number units themselves using symbols ($, etc.) as though those units were still commodities that had just lost their physical form.
The very conceptual subjugation of the full capacity of a society to an illiterate preoccupation with the preliminary acquisition of an abstract acCouting unit is a mistake of monumental proportions that even the best intentions cannot overcome while not correcting it. The 'inherited or imposed illiteracy' that surrounds money itself cannot be cured by holding the actors in this melodrama accountable for their actions within the illiterate paradigm. You see, one first has to think of, or be forced at gunpoint to accept, that money is an item of value that can also perform the function of 'unit measure of value.' But those two are mutually exclusive. The function called 'measure' is not sensible or reliable if the unit is constantly in flux and self-referential. That is the core illiteracy about money in the 'educated' class of the present day.
The 'reality transformation' that first occurs is the assumption that abstract units of representation possess the same characteristics of their predecessor trade goods and that some magical entity has the power to 'create' the abstract units of representation representing nothing but themselves!
But 'Money creation', from nothing and yet turned into a thing of 'value' - Poof! - is NOT a power that anyone actually has, not anyone, not any government, not any bank.
The first premise most people willingly go along with is the absolute illiteracy and illegitimacy of there being these so called "financial powers." WE ALL are the ones accepting the nonsense that the origination of the monetary unit is a magical process of 'creation' by some magical monetary power within government or banking. And we accept that this whole process must precede and subjugates economic activity of genuine value. And we accept this nonsense because we think that the monetary unit is an actual item of 'value'. It is NOT.
So, when the leadership of a society truly is motivated to establish "inclusive and sovereign endogenous development” it must realize that the present system and conceptual basis of money itself cannot assist but only interfere with this effort.
But won't it be amazing for a society's leadership to abandon this age old problem and correct the conceptual error by calling the world to genuine liberation through the establishment of a genuinely Logical and Mathematically Literate System of The Abstract Representation Of Value !?
Here are the Resolutions that can be presented in every jurisdiction that will call the world to correction of the conceptual error. https://www.moneytransparency.com/msta-resolutions
Remaining within the framework of the conceptual error leaves people thinking that they must contend with others in ways that can only bring more and greater cycles of conflict.
We cannot keep accepting self-declared 'authority' on the part of the "issuer" of the numbers we use to do the bookkeeping about our own activity. Nor can we accept that the numbers on the ledger (or the coins of the realm that came before) are items of value all by themselves.
Yet, most all are going along with this.
Money is not a resource at all. That is the core illiteracy that people struggle with. Holding back genuine economic activity waiting for the abstract units to record that activity is like waiting for some of the inches to be available so that you can measure the boards to build something. And the unit of money is itself an absurdity in the field of Applied Math. How can one make sense of equations using a term that is undefined and unstable?
https://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/299-stop-wwiii
Marc Gauvin:
"If we debunk our current notion of money as the misrepresentation that it is, then no one has power over anyone, yet all become far better informed than they currently are.”