Persimmon Alley Press
Persimmon Alley Press
  • About Persimmon Alley Press
  • Books
    • Close Encounters with the Cold War
    • Mother's Century: A Survivor, Her People and Her Times
    • Encounters: Ten Appointments with History
    • Killer Protocols
    • Clean Coal Killers
    • The Killer Trees
    • A Feast of Famine
    • Molly Malice in Alterland
    • Alligator In My Basement
    • Sudden Addiction
    • The Flesh of the Cedarwood
  • Smoke the Dottle
  • Richard's Rants
  • Contact

Rant 658: Giving Back to Former Colonies

10/22/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Japan and the USA. What do these ten countries have in common? (1) They are all among the world’s richest nations. (2) They all had colonial empires. Several clung to those empires all the way into the 1960s and 1970s. (3) They all shared an outlook that viewed their colonial subjects as less-than-human and treated them accordingly, reducing hundreds of millions of them to what amounted to slave-status and extreme poverty. (4) They exploited their colonial possessions in ways that made themselves wealthy at the expense of their colonies. (5) When their colonies finally became independent, the colonial powers abandoned them, left them to their fates, having to fend for themselves.
 
The pandemic opens up a great opportunity for the former colonial powers to help these countries that they abused and mistreated. The ten former colonial powers are well on the way to herd immunity, having vaccinated large majorities of their populations. Meanwhile, their former colonies have been left far behind in the global fight against Covid-19. For example, fewer than 3 percent of Africa’s more than 1.2 billion people have been vaccinated. At the current vaccination rate, it will be many years before Africa’s protection level reaches a point where it is comparable to that of the former colonial powers.
 
And that poses grave dangers not only to Africans, but also to Europeans and Americans. The only way to bring the coronavirus under manageable control is to vaccinate the entire world’s population. Otherwise, we will be subject to new and likely even more deadly variants than the current Delta strain that has caused so much devastation globally.
 
That can be largely stopped if the world’s rich countries go all out to quickly produce and distribute enough vaccines to their former colonies. They have the capacity to do this and to do it without charging these desperately poor nations for the jabs.
 
Among them, these colonial powers subjugated more than 100 colonies, which included virtually all of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and much of Asia and the Pacific. A concerted program of supplying these now independent nations with Covid vaccines is one way to make up for some of the terrible harms they wreaked. Belgium, for example, killed an estimated 10 million Congolese during its rule. In addition, King Leopold II’s emissaries in the Congo brutalized millions more of the people they enslaved, hacking off their hands if they did not meet their production quotas. Leopold’s cruelty was hardly unique. The other nine colonial powers were also guilty of gross mistreatment.
 
“COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access” (COVAX) the international initiative aimed at equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines has been a disappointment. It has fallen far short of its original goal In the 18 months since its inception of distributing 2 million vaccine doses to 92 poor countries. It’s time to try something else. If each former colonial power focused its efforts on directing vaccines to its former colonies, doing something so significant, salutary and morally right would be a huge step toward conquering Covid-19 and a “win-win” for the entire planet.
 
Dick Hermann
October 22, 2021

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Author

    Richard Hermann is the author of thirteen books, including Encounters: Ten Appointments with History and, most recently, Mother's Century: A Survivor, Her People and Her Times. Soon to be released is his upcoming Close Encounters with the Cold War, a personal reflection on growing up in the nuclear age. He is a former law professor and entrepreneur, and the founder and president of Federal Reports, Inc., a legal information and consulting firm that was sold in 2007. He has degrees from Yale University, the New School University, Cornell Law School and the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s School. He lives with his wife, Anne, and extraordinary dog, Barkley, in Arlington, Virginia and Canandaigua, New York.

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed