By Lenrod Nzulu Baraka

One lesson that people of African ancestry should have been able to extract from the last 500 years of world history is that might is right and that the powerful rule over and exploit the weak.  Whenever the mighty and the weak face off on the battle field in the real world, the outcome is highly predictable. The forces of the weak are slaughtered and the mighty take the fruits of victory.

After playing second fiddle to the Ottoman Empire for centuries, Europeans started waking up from the slumber imposed on Europe by an ecclesiastical order headquartered in Rome. As Europeans started thinking outside the box circumscribed by the Church, new ideas and inventions laid the foundation for the Age of Exploration and Discovery.

Europeans left the cold almost frigid lands in the North and set sail to discover the rest of the world. The genocidally minded Christopher Columbus convinced King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castille that it was possible to arrive in the East by sailing in a westerly direction. By doing so, Columbus provided the grist for an endless stream of motivational talks about going against the grain of contemporary wisdom. Columbus unfortunately also set in motion events that would end in a horrendous Holocaust and in ethnic cleansing for the First Citizens of the New World.

The arrival of the Europeans led to the inevitable clash of civilizations. First Citizens of the New World quickly learned the truism that it is silly to bring a knife to a gunfight.  Armed with the primitive weapons available to them, the indigenous people were expeditiously exterminated with extreme prejudice. The canons, crossbows, swords, and other weapons of mass destruction employed by the conquistadors made light work of the terrorist networks and savages in the New World who dared to attack those tasked with discovering new lands for crown and Church.

The orgy of violence and rapine claimed the lives of an estimated 56 million indigenous people in South Central, and North America. The Taino, an Arawakan speaking people in the Caribbean, were wiped out. The Caribs, who embraced terrorism and savagery, fought back as best as they could and can still be found in the Caribbean islands. The more peaceful Arawak ethnic group sadly went the way of the dinosaurs.

The genocide and ethnic cleansing got so bad in the New World that Bartholomew de las Casas, a Dominican priest wrote to Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, begging that the living conditions of the indigenous people be ameliorated. Initially Bartholomew de las Casas was of the opinion that the inhumane treated being dished out to the indigenous people was better reserved for the sturdier human specimens found on the African continent. He later allegedly repented of this view also.

Thanks to las Casas, the baton of the damned was passed on to the Africans who were rounded up wherever they could be found, marched to the slave forts on the West Coast of Africa, packed on ships like sardines minus the oil, and sold like common animals in the slave markets in the New World.  The Africans, like the indigenous people of the New World, brought knives to a gunfight and suffered similar outcomes. By the time the Africans caught on to the new technology in warfare it was already too late resulting in a conservative estimate of 12 million Africans singing negro spiritual in the concentration camps in the New World.

To add insult to injury, the rapacious Europeans insisted that the indigenous people of the New World and the 12 million African victims of human trafficking and their descendants embrace a religion that asserted that the meek would inherit the earth. It mattered little that no one could find any historical instances of a weaker people defeating a mightier people and taking over their land.  Even the Jews of Bible fame had a god on their side when they were liberated from bondage and later discovered the land of Canaan.

The idea of the meek inheriting the earth is nothing more that a bit of pious fiction invented by the mighty intent on maintaining their position of dominance. In 2022, the US, a supposedly Christian nation, spent $877 billion on its military. The UK spent an estimated 55.5 billion British pounds between 2022-2023. President Emmanuel Macron recently pushed for a budget of 450 billion euros to modernize France’s nuclear arsenal, beef up intelligence gathering, and develop more remote weapons.

Every country that wants to be a major player in the post Bretton Woods era is investing heavily in military technology. Huge investments in military hardware will translate into political influence on the world stage.  While African and Caribbean nations are cajoling and begging for scraps at international forums, the US, Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the rest of the European Union, Saudi Arabia, and a host of other nations that have armed themselves to the teeth, will be enforcing their will on the rest of the global community.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Rebirth of Black Civilization: Making African and the Caribbean Great Again.