"I believe that the white race should colonize the world."
(Patrick Manson, English physician, founder of Tropical Medicine and owner of the first major reference in this range).
On the 11th of last March, (1) the Indian government announced a package of legal measures that allowed for a more flexible and assertive dealing with the epidemiological situation in the country, starting from closing schools and obliging people to pay their homes and fining them, until considering that exposure to doctors is a crime that puts the citizen under the law However, these laws are really not new. Rather, they are a modified version of the "epidemic diseases law" promulgated by British colonialism in 1897 to confront the plague that spread in several Indian regions.
English colonialism actually managed to contain the disease, but for many years things such a law were seen as achievements of colonialism in the land of ignorance. Indeed, the philosophy of colonialism itself, and we mean those fundamental ideas that lie in the background of every colonial act as a justification for taking it, was based on the leadership of these peoples who were described as ignorant to the light of knowledge, knowledge and civilization, but that - especially in the case of epidemics - was far from About the truth.
A doctor with the rank of soldier
For example (2), one of the most common features of medical intervention in colonial countries was its association with military aspects, not only because many of the medical directors of these medical policies were military, or that the only labor agencies that participated in medicine in the tropics were military, but politics The apparent colonialism - according to David Arnold in his book "Imperial Medicine and Communities" - was that treating the battle of health was a military operation, while armies were allowed to cross the border, and pandemics were used to quell rejection and opposition movements.
In India in particular, you could easily notice that the vaccination of epidemics at the end of the nineteenth century was based primarily on the policy of “health belt”, meaning that the closest to the vaccination of Indians was only the closest in distance to the English, workers in their factories and servants and health-care workers Indian involved in Medical teams and dealers directly with the English doctors, then comes closest to these, and then continue to provide vaccination so that the English center.
In fact, this has prompted the Indians themselves to question the intentions of the British, at first glance you might think that a people who refuse the vaccine for a pandemic is killing him is an ignorant people who supports the colonial idea of it, but put yourself in their place, from their point of view, this occupier offers a medicine that he claims is a cure for the disease But what if, through medicine, he wants to reduce my fertility or just urge me to act like a donkey and use that as an argument? There are many indications that the position of the Indians on the vaccine was logical, for example that the vaccine was damaged during its journey in the ocean and did not prevent disease, which assured the Indians of their vision.
In addition, the interest in Tropical Medicine (3), in Asia, Africa and Latin America, was based on diseases that could cause colonial infection, and researchers and doctors neglected other diseases related to the inhabitants of those regions themselves, such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, dysentery and pneumonia, these diseases continued. Without treatment for long periods, they ate from the bodies of the indigenous people and increased their ignorance, poverty and weakness, but the worst of it is the change that the colonizer brought about in their country.
Where the environmental changes brought about by the colonists, whether by building factories, mines, roads and railways in the African continent for example, contributed to the spread of epidemics at a greater rate, because they push the elements of infection - such as mosquitoes - from their environment to nearby cities and villages, which the indigenous people were not prepared for In addition, colonialism contributed to the spread of diseases by moving citizens, workers and slaves, from one region to another, so they contributed to spreading epidemics, but the most important of all is that - in many cases - colonialism brought new diseases to a land that was not previously spread by it, we talk Here about epidemics of the power of smallpox, plague and Spanish flu.
In particular, we can take a closer look (4) on the spread of Spanish influenza in 1918 in Southern Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe. The British Occupation Administration - the first thing that worked - mitigated the news that spread among people, saying that the new killer epidemic that does not He leaves a village except for its inhabitants until a full saturation caused by the British who came from the epidemic-stricken Europe at that time. The Spanish flu killed 3% of the population of some regions, and with poverty and malnutrition in other regions, 10% of the population was killed.
Indeed, in that period between 1890 and the First World War, Africa embraced the greatest epidemic disasters in its history, whether due to the occupation's modification of its environment, or because of the state of movement of citizens as slaves or workers, or because of the coming of epidemics from Europe to it, especially those that get used to it The Europeans developed resistance to it over time while it was new to Africans.
Who traded with rubber and people
On the other hand, according to Sheldon Watts in his book "Epidemics and History ... Illness and Imperial Power", you can easily notice that the emergence of hotspot medicine was not only intended to serve the philosophy of colonialism, but also to find out whether those Asian and African regions were suitable for European staff, Before colonization, medicine was based on one perception of man and another of disease regardless of the surrounding environment, but with the emergence of epidemics such as yellow fever and malaria in African colonies, for example, there was a need to amend this model.
The Africans had become accustomed to these diseases but the Europeans did not. This led to the emergence of a perception, or position (5). A racist among the doctors from the colonial countries says that "blacks are inferior to whites" because of these differences, that he envisioned himself based on That they have their diseases that are different from the “usual diseases”, and that they are a source of harsh “abnormal” epidemics that are a threat to eggs ’life, due to their ignorance and backwardness, a matter that has been used culturally to justify the necessity of colonialism in general, and is still used by many politicians In their political wars against Africa, Asia and South American countries, you can, for example, consider Donald Trump's response a few days ago to an Asian-born journalist saying, "Ask China."
In fact, the reason why the medical schools of the hot regions flourished in Europe and America, specifically the London and Liverpool schools, was the political and economic concerns of those countries in Africa, Asia and South America, one of the most famous examples of research interest (6) is the relationship between the emergence and prosperity of the medical department Harvard hotspots, American interests in Liberia, Africa, specifically for the establishment of the Firestone Natural Rubber Company in 1926, the largest company in this area in the world, which was established in response to the restrictions that other colonial countries exercised on the United States in the special matter Rubberized, I went to Liberia.
Medicine makes what weapons do not make, it prepares for the world that the colonizer carries a message of peace, not consumption, and would like to bring people out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of civilization, and in the case of epidemics, your abilities to control disease can be used to subjugate peoples, and any dissent in Absolutely still, you can see that now - but differently - in the case of the new Corona, there are fears that democratic countries will be disturbed by the ease with which people bargain for their health in exchange for dispensing with privacy.
But colonialism did not present civilization to the people of the world that we now call "the third." He left that country equipped with health and political unrest, by extension, and it was not until the 1970s that the World Health Organization decided to follow a system of medicine in hot regions that genuinely cared for the interests of those residents. Territories, emanating from their environment and diseases, but what is left by colonialism is still a residual disaster.
Is the story repeated?
For centuries, epidemics have been the closest thing to a biological weapon that some use to some of the most vulnerable, and this is a precursor to what we talked about at the end of the nineteenth century. It was in this scope that was during the Pontiac Rebellion of 1763, when a group of Native American tribes who were unhappy with British politics united to the war.
Meanwhile, William Trent (7), the leader of the local military force, is reported to have written in a letter to his commander: “We gave them a set of blankets and napkins from the smallpox hospital, I hope that the desired effect will happen.” Smallpox outbreaks among the indigenous population and there are indications that it was He had a strong role in ending that rebellion, but according to Jared Diamond, the American multidisciplinary scientist, in his book "Weapons, Germs and Steel", it was more than just a blanket and a handkerchief, it was the cause of the fall of two ancient civilizations forever.
Diamond believes that the Western superiority over the civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas, in the sixteenth century, is not related to a unique intelligence, but rather to a geographical circumstance experienced by the colonizer for years. Advanced weapon, some viruses easily moved from the Spanish to the Native Americans and annihilated them.
According to the Diamond 8 hypothesis, humans have managed - throughout their history - to domesticate about 15 animals, the vast majority of which are found in the Fertile Crescent, meaning the region that starts across rivers from Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and northern Egypt .
The experiences of domestication of these animals then moved to the east and west of the Fertile Crescent over thousands of years, from China in the east to Spain in the west. The inhabitants of those areas lived for thousands of years alongside many animals, some of which transmitted to them highly contagious viruses that in the past killed millions of them, but over time they developed immunity to these diseases and remained static with them over time, and with the first meeting between the Europeans and the inhabitants of the Americas, These epidemics passed to them, causing them to be annihilated, sometimes unintentionally, and at other times the transmission of the epidemics was intended.
During our battle with the epidemic throughout our history, the tragedy was not limited only to the actions of the epidemic with us, but about what we did to each other taking advantage of the epidemic, even medicine did not escape exploitation, but rather it became a tool in the hands of racism driven by how it wanted, and we can see that clearly - on the Example - in a famous quote by Patrick Manson, the English physician, founder of Tropical Medicine and the first and most important massive reference in this range, when he said: "I believe that the white race should colonize the world."
Are we going to do that now? Will some of us take advantage of the epidemic to subjugate others? What we are seeing now is a struggle between several major countries that does not foreshadow the good, and the same cycle may repeat: the epidemic kills some, and some searches for the political and economic interests that can be achieved at the expense of these dead.
___________________________________________________________________________