The West’s Woke Imperialism

Frank Furedi wrote an excellent piece last month on Spiked titled Joe Biden’s Woke Imperialism: Developing nations have had enough of the West’s lectures. He argues that America under President Biden is deliberately hectoring smaller nations about its pet values, demanding they be implemented abroad. For example, in early 2021, Secretary of State Blinken announced that US embassies and consulates around the world could fly the Pride flag on the same flagpole as the American flag during ‘Pride season’. In June 2021, the US embassy in Kabul raised the rainbow flag, not long before their humiliating withdrawal from that land. A few months later, it was reported that the State Department was developing a ‘precept on diversity and inclusion’ to ensure that the US diplomatic corps were sufficiently diverse. In March this year, the State Department announced that new passport applicants would be able to ‘self-select their gender’. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden outlined his ambition for establishing a new world order based on woke values. He told a group of American corporate leaders that the world is changing and that “there’s going to be a new world order and we have got to lead it and we have got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it”.

I suspect that Joe Biden is too incompetent to lead anything, not America, and certainly not a new world order. This woke moralising, this imposition of ideology on poorer, ‘less developed’ nations, is patronising and deeply offensive. America is not alone. Four years ago, it was our own Prime Minister, a man known for his gigantic reserves of integrity and personal morality, who as Foreign Secretary, removed the ban on British embassies flying the Pride colours on their official flagpoles. Western imperialism would now impose the holy month of Pride the world over, and evangelists at home and abroad earnestly propogate its values. 

The West was once a blessing to the world, sharing its technology, its statecraft and its Christianity with Africa, Asia, South America and Oceana. Now it is a curse, a force for ill, an evil influence. Consequently, its days are numbered.

The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God. Psalm 9:17

Image by Angela Yuriko Smith from Pixabay