I FIND it rather ironic that the people who like to discuss ethnic and cultural identity had nothing whatsoever to say about the systematic destruction of Brazilian tribes that was facilitated by Jair Bolsonaro’s puppet-government. The excuse, I suppose, is that our people come first and that what happens on the other side of the world doesn’t really affect people here in Europe. This, it must be said, is an extremely dangerous and fallacious viewpoint and suggests that most people have no real inkling about the enormous impact that seemingly ‘isolated’ events can have on the world as a whole.

There are people who rightly point out that the devastation of the Amazonian rainforest is a threat to the entirety of mankind, but such people are usually silent when it comes to offering their support to those who are being forced from their native soil at the behest of huge corporations. The Bolsonaro administration abolished the country’s Department of Culture and forced the National Indian Foundation – responsible for protecting the ancestral land of its people – to merge with the Ministry of Agriculture that is now overseeing the theft of that same land. This will not interest the average white nationalist, of course, who is perfectly happy to see ‘inferior’ races crushed beneath the grinding wheels of Western civilisation like piles of grain. However, not only is it hypocritical to ignore the plight of South America’s indigenous people, but what is happening to them also helps to strengthen the hand of capitalism as a whole and this is precisely where we come down to the nitty-gritty.

It is a fact that in order for people in the West to maintain their present standards of living and secure the commodified trappings that come with it, communities elsewhere must be deprived of their most vital resources. What is happening on the periphery, in places such as Brazil and elsewhere, is the compulsory extraction of land and resources at the point of a gun. This booty is then distributed to the centres of capitalism in Europe and North America in the way that a huge spider might suck the moisture from an insect until it resembles nothing but a hollow shell. Each time you switch on the television and see footage of semi-barbarised Africans who appear to live in the ruins of a former civilisation, living among the stagnant industrial cesspools of a makeshift shanty town, you are witnessing the full effects of capitalist exploitation after it has swept through a particular area like a political, social and economic tsunami. Once the thieves have taken what they need the region is left to wither and die. Unless, that is, the people had not become so dependent on their temporary masters that they lacked the basic wherewithal to rebuild their shattered communities and move on.

What this should tell you, as Amazonian villages are still being smashed to the ground by the latest administration at this very moment and their Indian inhabitants forced into the cities, is that such places are highly prized by the vultures who both fund and manipulate governmental administrations like that fronted by Bolsonaro and other such vermin. In other words, any kind of resistance to what is taking place in these peripheral areas has enormous ramifications for international capitalism as a whole and if they cannot seize land and resources it is the West that will begin to wither and die in the way that a spider might perish in the absence of a regular supply of insects.

This is why you must ask yourself one very important question. Will you adopt the ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ approach in the hope that Europeans, at least, will be able to continue importing the resources that are necessary for us to maintain a certain level of subsistence, i.e. the kind of ‘survival’ that includes the freedom to go shopping and buy the latest gadgets, or will you finally wake up to the fact that denying these parasites the materials they obtain from other continents will help to weaken and kill the capitalist beast that presently dominates our own continent?

This is no time for the old ‘I’m-all-right-Jack’ mentality, particularly when the problems of the First World have been engineered by the very people who sustain themselves by what is happening in the Third. Once the Macrons and Merkels of this world are exchanged for other Macrons and Merkels, the men in yellow vests will go home and the financial plunder will continue. For those on the periphery, where the more important events are taking place, there will be no homes to go to. It’s time to take off the blinkers and see beyond the threshold of your own immediate reality.