Bill Gates, Coronavirus & the Midnight of Western Supremacy

Guest Post By Vincent Kelley.

Bill Gates has been a ubiquitous presence in the media ever since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and has become the center of controversy. Mainstream press such as the New York Times present him as a tycoon savior figure during this crisis. There are others who claim to oppose big corporations but still speak merely of the need “scientific solutions” to this crisis. In saying this they really argue for elite and technocratic solutions. We do not believe any such “science” divorced from humanity offers a solution to this crisis, and we oppose any elites who look to expand and sustain the neocolonial regime that the West has all over the world. Instead we put our faith in the people and their ability to change this oppressive economic system, to fight for peace and to organically produce leadership and organization that can confront this crisis. – OPP Blog Committee

The arrest, imprisonment, and death of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 gave Americans a close look into the moral depravity of the American ruling class. However, only a fraction of the reporting on Epstein’s life mentioned his vast influence within the world of science philanthropy. Though Epstein was promptly removed from the headlines following his death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10^th, 2019, the tight ruling class control of Western science and technology which he stood for has lived on.

Bill Gates was a close associate of Epstein and is undoubtedly the world’s most powerful science and technology philanthropist. The Financial Times wrote in 2013 that, “Through the stroke of pen on cheque book, Gates probably now has the power to affect the lives and wellbeing of a larger number of his fellow humans than any other private individual in history.” Coronavirus will provide the ultimate test of whether or not this statement will hold seven years later and, most importantly, whether or not the technocratic elite as a whole will retain its capacity to define and manage human life.

Bill Gates’ Neocolonial Agenda

“[W]e encourage aid that aids us in doing away with aid. But in general, welfare and aid policies have only ended up disorganizing us, subjugating us, and robbing us of a sense of responsibility for our own economic, political, and cultural affairs. We chose to risk new paths to achieve greater well-being.”

Thomas Sankara, “We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions”

Gates represents the dominant worldview in the West that today’s most pressing problems can be solved by a faith in science and technology. In their Foundation’s annual 2018 letter, Bill and Melinda Gates echoed Steven Pinker’s (another Epstein associate) thesis that science and technology have driven humanity’s progress to the best stage of human history, where “the world is healthier and safer than ever… and more children are attending school.” This proverbial best of all possible worlds provides the basis for the Gates Foundation’s “outspoken…optimism…despite the headlines.”

In the age of coronavirus, these statements from 2018 read like a quaint archive from a bygone era. Despite its objective threat to his view that the world is becoming a fundamentally better place each year, Gates also sees an opportunity in the pandemic: his Foundation has decided to give “total attention” to the virus, which will focus on vaccine development in partnership with “experienced vaccine companies” and “tech companies.” He goes on to state that, “This is like a world war, except in this case, we’re all on the same side.”

This is a compelling piece of rhetoric, but begs the question: what side is Bill Gates talking about? Although he repeatedly discusses helping “poor countries,” many in India want him held accountable for testing vaccines on impoverished adolescent girls without their consent, which resulted in the illness and death of study participants. Gates has also poured millions into the imposition of fertilizer-intensive, genetically-modified monocropping in Africa, which has pushed small farmers into poverty and starvation. During the African Ebola outbreak of 2014-15, the Gates Foundation funded US-based public-private health partnerships to undermine local health systems under the guise of “emergency response” funds.  The goal is never simply or even primarily “public health”—as Gates says himself, his objective is to “transform the societies.”  

Following the model of its response to the Ebola outbreak, the Gates Foundation sees coronavirus as another opportunity to expand its neocolonial agenda, this time on a much larger scale. Indeed, Gates and his technocratic acolytes see in the coronavirus crisis the perfect opportunity to transform not only disparate societies in a piecemeal fashion, but world civilization itself in one fell swoop.  

Coronavirus and the Collapse of Western Supremacy

“The collapse of Europe is to us the more astounding because of the boundless faith which we have had in European civilization…Our present nervous breakdown, nameless fear, and often despair, comes from the sudden facing of this faith with calamity.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa

Despite Gates’ coronavirus ambitions, the world is a very different place five years after the Ebola outbreak. Rather than Asia or Africa, it is America, the global center of imperialism, that flounders in its efforts to manage the current public health crisis. At the same time, “poor” socialist countries like Cuba and Vietnam have not only been effective in containing the virus domestically, but have even provided medical expertise and material aid to Western countries struggling to stop COVID’s spread. Completing the 1-2 punch to “Western leadership” in the age of coronavirus, countries like Serbia have stated that “European solidarity does not exist” and now look to China as their only hope. Even staunch U.S. allies like South Korea have chosen China over the West in the wake of the virus.  

These monumental geopolitical shifts have been in the making for years, but are now gaining widespread recognition from the mainstream press. The Financial Times identifies the fallout from coronavirus as a direct threat to the global economic dominance of the dollar and the hitherto perceived superiority of American higher education around the world. The New York Times states that the pandemic is “shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism” and suggests that it will contribute to “speeding up a decline in influence of both the United States and Europe,” juxtaposed with the rise of Asia. Indeed, the American domestic crisis of legitimacy is so severe that the Times asks, “After Coronavirus, Colleges Worry: Will Students Come Back?” while a Harvard law professor panics that parents will choose homeschooling en masse as they lose faith in government schools.  

Where does all of this leave Bill Gates? Because his technocratic philanthropic model is inextricably linked to the institutions of Western dominance—the dollar, American higher education, pharmaceutical and tech companies, and the overarching ideology that the darker nations of the world can and should serve as the guinea pigs in the experiments of Western scientific “progress”—it is unclear whether he will be able to advance his neocolonial agenda much further. While certain consequences of the virus, such as the physical closure of schools and universities, play into his related objective of promoting “e-learning,” disillusionment with American educational institutions is so deep that fewer than half of students are even logging into classes.

As the midnight of Western civilization envelops us in the foreboding darkness of uncertainty and anxiety, what was once our unshakable faith in scientific rationality to solve any problem finds itself in peril. Leo Tolstoy observed long ago that science answers its own questions “clearly” and “precisely… while having nothing to do with the question of human life.” As this truth confronts us with an intensity like never before, where can we in the West turn for guidance on the perennial question of human life?

Science and Civilizational Suicide: The Future of the West

“Science has its proper sphere in analysing this world as a construction, just as grammar has its legitimate office in analysing the syntax of a poem. But the world, as a creation, is not a mere construction; it too is more than a syntax. It is a poem, which we are apt to forget when grammar takes exclusive hold of our minds.”

­Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity

In 1963, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon that gets to the heart of the question of human life. In “A Knock at Midnight” he states that, “When confronted by midnight in the social order we have in the past turned to science for help.” Though science has saved us from material inconvenience, superstition, and disease in the past, it is now unable to rescue us “for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age.” King points out the paradox that it is in fact science that has given us “the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.” Nearly sixty years later, we have little excuse not to reflect sincerely on King’s words.

While the virus and its fallout may seem to demand scientific solutions more than ever, any multifaceted problem of this scale requires neither a mechanical application of the scientific method nor a technocratic delivery of health services, but first and foremost, creativity. However, as Paul Robeson argued in his 1936 critique of applied science as a justification for Western superiority, it is precisely our creative faculties which have been diminished by Western civilization’s devotion to science and technology. In a dialectical twist of fate, an unquestioned faith in scientific progress and technocratic solutions has hampered our ability to apply science in service of humanity.

The failure of what many understand to be the most scientifically advanced country in the world to contain the coronavirus throws into sharp relief the fact that science and technology will not save us. The Black Radical Tradition, exemplified by King and Robeson, reminds and encourages us that a love of truth, a commitment to brotherhood, and a reverence for creativity must form the foundation of any response to crisis, just as they must lay the bedrock for our understanding of the question of human life. Without these values, any technology—no matter how advanced or powerful—can only cause more harm than good.

With the liberal doctrine of “rising material living standards as the basis of society” now deemed a thing of the past in the pages of the New Statesman, the West is losing its longstanding monopoly on power and, along with it, the ability to define and control the meaning of human life. The liberal technocratic elite may still command the majority of the world’s resources, but their worldview and proposed solutions have less and less currency in the lives of the people. As their hegemony wanes, YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook have resorted to overt censorship of documentaries that criticize Gates, vaccine profiteers, and the neocolonialism of Western public health policy. 

King’s and Robeson’s prophetic writings on the nature, contradictions, and ultimately self-destructive character of a civilization based on scientific domination stand in direct contrast with Bill Gates’ approach to global health. There is no room for love, brotherhood, or the creative spirit in Gates’ vision for the world. All he offers are false technocratic “solutions” that have as their objective not the unity of humanity, but, rather, the preservation of the Western-controlled status quo. While the death of his associate, Jeffrey Epstein, exposed the moral degeneracy of a decadent ruling class, Gates himself might live to see the death of something much greater: Western global supremacy.