BRITAIN and the nations of the European Union are now nations of an old imperial past. In contrast, Africa and Asia are continents of the future.

This is one of the reasons why we are seeing the rise of the far right across the old imperial empire — including the United States.

These nations of yesterday are flailing around trying to hang on to a long gone past.

They feed the more susceptible members of their populations stories that everything was wonderful in the past and all the woes of today could be solved if only we could go back to those always sunny halcyon days of before.

All across western Europe right-wing and far-right politicians are trying to sell their version of the same snake oil that US President Donald Trump is attempting to purvey of “Make America Great Again.”

Across the old imperial powers and their wannabes or “shuddabeens” we see variations on the same theme. The rise of the far right in Britain, France, Germany and the already successful (at least for now) Italian job, is in my view based on the same basic notion of ethnic superiority and power.

These nations of the past long for the old days of imperialism when their word was law and the inhabitants of the much larger continents of Africa and Asia were simply sub-human or “un-people.”

As we were so far removed in their eyes from anything that mattered we could be genocided — Native Americans, so-called Congolese, countless nations across central and southern America and the Caribbean plus Aborigines in Australia and many, many more.

The transatlantic trade in Africans may not fit the exact legal definition of genocide but it certainly wiped out millions of nations in the cause of profits for the few and was a certain crime against humanity.

This is why the genocide that has been carried out by the Israelis in Gaza in plain view — despite media controls and the wanton killing of journalists — cannot be acknowledged by many nations such as Britain.

To do so would mean Britain and others having to acknowledge their own genocides such as the one Britain carried out against the people in what is now known as Kenya.

But it was Britain that pioneered that evil institution known as concentration camps in South Africa during the Second Boer War, taken up by Germans in what is now known as Namibia and then developed further by the Nazis during World War II.

Concentration camps appear to be making a comeback with proposals that amount to that in all but name in Gaza.

No amount of ackee and saltfish, bun and cheese, pakoras or samosas during October Black History Month can mask the genocides and crimes against humanity that these imperial “masters” are responsible for across the globe.

The ruling classes laud people such as Martin Luther King Jr for pioneering methods of non-violence against injustice. We are supposed to continue to take beatings — non-violently — and to protest quietly about our apparently rightful place at the back of the bus like Rosa Parks.

But they conveniently ignore the explicitly anti-Vietnam war stance adopted by Dr King, the marches for economic justice in towns and cities of the US north and the fact that he was killed while in Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking sanitation workers.

The incredible efforts that historians and their corporate media stooges have taken to ignore the fact that Rosa Parks was not just some tired bespectacled woman on a bus but that she was already a seasoned civil rights organiser.

The direction of black people’s attention to the US also assists this deception.

Historians, film-makers and many journalists would have us all believe that the trade of Africans across the sacred burial grounds — the Atlantic Ocean — was almost entirely to the US or the Caribbean.

More Africans were stolen and shipped to Brazil than everywhere else. Brazil received around 12 times more enslaved Africans than the US but around the same number as all the Caribbean islands combined.

The only thing that equals these intellectual gymnastics are the efforts taken to almost completely ignore the resistance to racism by people of African and Asian descent in Britain.

For more on the many organised acts of resistance and the building of communities of resistance in Britain I humbly recommend a read of my first book African Uhuru: The fight for African freedom in the rise of the global South (Manifesto Press).

The culmination of these many acts of resistance in Britain, the diaspora and on the continents of Africa and Asia has created a moment of possible real change on the planet.

Thirty years ago the British economy was around four times the size of the Indian economy. By around 2030 the Indian economy is expected to be four times the size of the British economy.

That is a huge change that the British Establishment knows all too well and kicks in a racist reaction to the fact that not only will India — the former jewel in the crown of the empire — outstrip them, but China — on which they unleashed the opium wars of the mid-19th century that began a century of humiliation — will soon become the biggest economy in the world (it already is by some measures).

Countries in Africa are increasingly waking up and reseizing control of not just their natural resources and their cultures but also their dignity and control over their destinies.

Niger, for example, a not-talked-enough-about part of the Alliance of Sahel States with Burkina Faso and Mali, is one of the fastest growing economies on the planet having regained control of its natural resources — such as uranium, so vital to the economies and the war machine of the West.

The conflict being stoked up by the West between Guyana and Venezuela is precisely because the Guyanese economy is racing ahead — one of the fastest on Earth — after the discovery of vast oil reserves. The US of course wants to get their grubby hands on this oil.

Much of this is about the control of the resources that capitalism needs to boost its profits but nobody should believe that these factors have not also stoked a rise in racism.

Racism is not something that can be turned off and on like a light switch. It lingers and transforms in its shape but — importantly — it remains and in its new form can grow.

Resistance does eventually work but it always creates a series of reactions and one of them is a rise in racism.

So October Black History Month needs to move beyond a selective celebration of the carefully edited lives of individuals towards a real understanding of how the world is changing irreversibly and, I believe, for the better.

The old imperial world is at last coming to an end.

Our job is to support the movements that are leading this change and not to presume from our lofty perch in the belly of the beast that we have the right to tell people how best to conduct their struggles for liberation.

Roger McKenzie is international editor of the Morning Star.