WELL at least they are honest about it! Colonialism is back but this time on steroids.

The truth is, of course, that colonialism never disappeared. There was simply a change of costume — an only half-hearted attempt to disguise the exploitation and brutality that has been meted out against the Global Majority by the Western colonial powers and their latest leader the United States for centuries.

Murderous conquests were replaced by contracts that amounted to the same thing.

Colonisation rarely now arrives at the end of cannon fire but is now enforced by strangling trade deals that leave the Global Majority impoverished while all the wealth extracted heads north and west.

The pronouncement by the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the recent Munich (in)Security Conference is essentially a declaration that the extraction, exploitation and control of the wealth of the Global Majority will be stepped up in a pretend partnership between the US and western Europe.

Of course, it’s no partnership at all that was being offered. Rubio was inviting western Europe to place themselves under US control for the pillage of the global South. The role of western Europe will be to essentially do as they are told by the US or face the consequences of stepping out of line.

Western Europe will become agents for what was dubbed by journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar as the “Empire of Chaos.”

During his Munich speech Rubio actually did us all a favour by taking off the mask to reveal the true face of the US. No need for any more excuses. The US belief that they are unapologetically the “masters of the universe” is plain for all to see.

The fact that the speech received a standing ovation from the Western former colonial lap dogs wishing a return to their former “glories” under the colonialism of old says everything that you need to know about them.

This what Rubio said to leave these colonialists foaming at the mouth for a return to the good old days: “For five centuries, before the end of the second world war, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.

“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.

“The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swathes of the map in the years to come.”

The notoriously anti-communist Rubio rightly admits that socialism played a leading role in the defeat of colonialism but, disgracefully, attributes no agency to those living under the jackboot of colonialism for their own liberation.

But, Rubio, who polling shows to be by far the most popular US Republican, possibly because he is rarely allowed by his President Donald Trump to get involved in very much, droned on that under his leader Trump “the US will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilisation’s past.

“And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.

“For the US and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before.

“The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.”

He added: “We are part of one civilisation — Western civilisation. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilisation to which we have fallen heir.”

There it is. If you ever needed proof. The US is clearly and without any shame making it clear that so-called Western civilisation (forgive the pun) trumps all other civilisation. It extends the usual cry of “American exceptionalism” to a Western version of the same doctrine.

No mention of the mass genocides across entire continents, including the US. No mention of the brutal enslavement of more than 20 million Africans and entire populations.

Of course there was no mention of the genocide currently being waged, with Western backing, against the Palestinians by the Israelis.

This alleged great Western civilisation needs constant war, exploitation and extraction to survive. This is the same civilisation that is attempting to starve Cubans to death, take control of Venezuela and Greenland and is preparing for war with Iran.

This is the same US-led Western civilisation that arms the Israelis so that it can carry out without consequence its genocide on Palestinians in Gaza and its almost daily attacks on southern Lebanon.

Like a puppet master, the US also handles Egypt and Saudi Arabia on one side and the United Arab Emirates on the other in the proxy war in Sudan. A conflict that has killed at least 40,000 people, displaced millions and has been dubbed by the UN as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

This is also the civilisation that gave us Jeffrey Epstein that has implicated the top echelons of US police, including Trump, and many of the political (mis) leadership of western Europe.

All of this is what brought the leaders of western Europe to their feet with tears in their eyes as they yearned for this bygone era.

If anyone ever needed a spark to move beyond the theory of revolutionary change to the seriousness of actually putting it into practice, that wake up call speech by Rubio should be it.

The decadent ruling elite have told us exactly what they intend to do. We no longer have to debate what they mean. They have spelt it out for us.

The question we, those of us who believe in revolutionary change, have to now answer is what are we going to do to organise against the tsunami about to hit us all and, in particular the Global Majority?