A Perspective from the Global South: Has Western Civilization Passed its Sell-By Date?
In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, extraterrestrial tripods descend upon Earth, intent on obliterating indigenous life and terraforming the planet to suit their needs.
For many of us in the Global South, Wells’ science fiction narrative strikes a chord of unsettling familiarity. For Global Southies (the formerly colonized), the invaders of our reality were not interstellar beings but rather humans from Europe. Humans who would eventually expand their dominion to encompass the entire globe, unaliving Indigenous populations and annexing territories in modern-day Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Today, added to Europe, they are known collectively as “the West” or ‘Western civilization. The West tends to use terms like “the civilized world” or “the free world” to describe itself while referring to the Global South as the “Third World”.
The Global South was terraformed to European “standards” through the introduction of Abrahamic religions, capitalist and Marxist economic systems, and popular culture. Western ideals such as democracy, freedom, and human rights, often vaguely defined, were enforced upon the Global South. Resistance was met with acts of violence. The terraforming continues today by Western institutions, corporations, and their imperial…
