YOU read the Western press and Western academia about the death of some leaders in Hamas and Hezbollah and you see through the superficiality of Western journalists and Western academia. The West is full of money so it has resourceful universities and wealthy media outfits.

The academics can write a book every year because they have the money to travel. But read the end- project. It is a shallow output on international relations. The scholarship is always Euro-centric or Americanised. We in Third World universities tend to admire these American scholars because their output is so enormous but the scholarship is always way off mark.
The leader of the pack is a journal titled, “Foreign Affairs” (FA) produced by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). This journal is rated as one of the most prestigious in global intellectual circles but, in fact, it is one of the most sophisticated and complex Western propaganda machinery since World War II.

The CFR is an unapologetic, pro-American, anti-Third World, anti-Russia and now anti-China think tank. This is an enduring pro- establishment institution that consists of the richest CEOs of American corporations, former American power-holders and pro-establishment academics. The CFR will not tolerate even for a minute, a scholar publishing an article in FA that researched the messianic desire of the West to control the world and to maintain its hegemony over the Global South.

Third World scholars refer to this hegemony as the New Imperialism (see the recent autobiography of Guyanese scholar, Dr. Maurice Odle) but FA will never allow that term to be used in its pages. You want to a write a book about the greatness of the West and how invaluable the West is to the World, CFR will give you enormous money to do the research. You want to write a book demonising China, Iran and Russia, the CR will fund it.

I have been reading FA since I was a university freshman at UG in 1974 and I still read it today. Every article, going way back to the Cold War with USSR versus USA and Western Europe is a subtle rehash of every previous article on international relations in general.

Every scholar that writes in FA sees the world as being held together by the democratic instincts of the West. All the articles on China see China as a threat to the West that the West must confront. There hasn’t been a publication in FA that analyses the generous aid and trade in China’s relationship with the Global South and concludes that this is good for the world.

Since the death of some of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, Western scholarship and Western journalism see the advantage in the battle in the Middle East as going Israel’s way. All the academic and journalistic pieces interpret Hamas and Hezbollah as being severely weakened after the assassination of some of its high-profile leaders and Israel now has the upper hand.

This is poor academic theorising that could only come from scholars who do not understand the Third World and when they write on the Third World the research is either superficial or characterised by serious incompetence. To understand why Hamas and Hezbollah are not weakened and will go on fighting is to understand the relation between the colonised and the coloniser.

Western scholars and Western journalists belong to countries that were imperialist penetrators. They have no psychic connection with colonised psychic destruction brought about by imperialism. In this regard the scholarship of the Palestinian thinker, Edward Said (deceased), is phenomenal. Third World scholars have a permanent psychic link with colonised psychology.
When Third World scholars (especially those from the Caribbean; again I refer you to Odle’s autobiography) write about the West that consciousness becomes genetic. And that genetic inherence will live on forever. Western academics that fill the pages of FA will not do a good job understanding the Third World in international relations. They should not touch that subject because when they do, they end up producing mediocre and misleading scholarship.

There will be no weakening of Hezbollah and Hamas because those two organisations have thousands of angry men and women who have seen the death and destruction brought about by the apartheid system and colonisation of successive Israeli leaders.

It is poor, arid theorising to think that Hamas and Hezbollah will not go on fighting. Any intellectual who understands the psychic and physical brutalisation apartheid and colonisation bring will know that the state of Israel will once more witness violent confrontations with Hamas because once Israel continues with its Nazi-like mistreatment of the Palestinian people, there will be violent resistance. Really! Even a moron could comprehend that logic.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.