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Western Colonisation - The Endless Flow of Blood |
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Some of the text below has been adapted from an article at Media Monitors Network Original Article. Few people seem aware that the state of the world today is the result of a history of colonial atrocities perpetrated by (mostly) Christian Europeans. Much of the truth of this appalling human tale has been deleted from the history books, and the Western world seems to suffer an almost total amnesia regarding its own savage conduct. Historian Edward Said, a Professor at Columbia University, wrote: "By the beginning of World War I, Europe and America held 85 percent of the earth’s surface in some sort of colonial subjugation." And it is still being done today - mostly by the US, though France, England and Japan would love another chance. "For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the underdeveloped world like nothing more than war criminals", notes Frantz Fanon. "Deportations, massacres, forced labour, and slavery have been the main methods used by [the West] to increase its wealth, its gold or diamond reserves, and to establish its power." The Europeans not only possessed superior military technology, but believed they were were inherently superior, racially and spiritually, and this gave them the right to invade other countries and exploit the resources while exterminating the inhabitants. It was all based on the concepts of White Supremacy, European - and then American - exceptionalism, the doctrine of cultural, social, mental and spiritual superiority, the pathological quest for domination, and apparently insatiable greed. Moreover, it was founded and supported by the insane conviction of Christians that God was on their side, of the Jews as God's Chosen People, and of the Japanese as a divinely-favored race. This Ideological Facism - adherence to these "colonial values" - are deeply rooted in Western culture and are all as thriving and virulent today as they were 500 years ago. Christopher Columbus is a celebrated hero in most Western countries, famous for having "discovered" the Americas, but what he did was to set in motion an organised program of criminality that today influences the entire world. He laid the basis for Western racism, intolerance of peoples and cultures, and the extensive use of organized religion as a rationale for the enslavement and extermination of people. He began the process of exploitation and genocide that is still with us today. There were originally an estimated 100 million Native Americans in Latin America when Columbus discovered the continent. After a century of exposure to Western Christianity, 95 per cent of the native population of Latin America had been massacred. Entire races of people - the Maya, the Aztec, the Inca - were exterminated, and all their gold, jewels and treasures plundered. Las Casus, the distinguished Spanish priest and historian, documented numerous accounts of the atrocities and horrors perpetrated by the new American colonialists against the indigenous natives, including hanging them en masse, roasting them on spits, and hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food. "The Christians executed massacres and the most evil cruelties among the Native Americans. They spared neither children nor the elderly, nor pregnant women nor those in child labor, as if they were slaughtering dumb animals. They made bets as to who could slit a man in two or cut off his head or spill out his entrails with one wave of his sword. They laughed as they tore babes from their mothers and dashed their heads against the rocks. They burned the Indians alive, roasting them over a slow fire. They cut off peoples' hands and hung them around the victim’s neck." According to Las Casus, the natives: "are by nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome. These people are the most devoid of rancors, hatreds, or desire for vengeance of any people in the world... they not only possess little but have no desire to possess worldly goods. For this reason they are not arrogant, embittered, or greedy... They are very clean in their persons, with alert, intelligent minds." However, this Native American culture of altruism, fraternity, and mutual compassion was to be replaced by other more important European and "Christian" values, mostly torture, cruelty, murder, sadism, looting, plundering and genocide. France's colonial conquests and land seizures were extremely violent. Here are some quotes from France's Lieutenant-Colonel de Montagnac: "All populations which do not accept our conditions must be despoiled. Everything must be seized, devastated, without age or sex distinction: grass must not grow any more where the French army has put its foot. I personally warn all good militaries which I have the honour to lead that if they happen to bring me a living Arab, they will receive a beating with the flat of the sabre… This is how we must do war against Arabs: kill all men over the age of fifteen, take all their women and children. In one word, annihilate all that will not crawl beneath our feet like dogs." Australia did something similar with its aborginal peoples, and the Christian Europeans slaughtered the entire population of Tasmania, South of Australia. They killed every man, woman and child in the country, a people with a history of at least 20,000 years. Tactics for hunting down Tasmanians included shooting them, setting out steel traps to catch them, and putting out poisoned food where they might find and eat it. They cut off the penis and testicles of aboriginal men, to watch the men run a few yards before dying. After killing the adults, they would deal with the children by smashing their heads against the rocks until brains were spilled everywhere. The last survivor was the Tasmanian Queen named Truganini. They stabbed her mother to death, kidnapped and killed her sister. They killed her intended husband by drowning him while she watched, then they all raped her. She eventually died, still defiant. In all of this, it is worth noting that when these Christians returned home to Europe, they considered themselves "civilised". They drank afternoon tea, they preached love and tolerance to their families. And no doubt they attended their churches on Sunday, thanking their god for their great profits from the nations they had looted and plundered. "The British tell their children a fairy-tale story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping".(1) This myth is carefully propagated by the UK right-wing press and media, revelling in the greatness of the British Empire, with a "remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard" their evil past. We had recent revelations that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing its colonial atrocities, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing information on others. The disgusting and unconscionable part of this is that even when the documentation of England's great crimes is abundant, it is not denied by the English people, but simply ignored. The British genuinely do not care. Newly-discovered documents now prove that not so many years ago, the British Government, in one of the most infamous episodes of British colonial history, perpetrated extremely brutal and truly savage torture. This included the widespread and systemic castration and rape of black civilians in Kenya - as punishment for their move for independence from British colonisation. Perhaps 100,000 died and countless more suffered horrendously. Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly ten years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. According to her book: Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts. They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound. Prior to that, the British Government and Military in India removed all feed grains from the countryside to the cities to feed themselves, knowing that millions of civilians would die of starvation. Winston Churchill thought that was "a good thing". The British, with their powerful military, invaded China and spent almost 100 years attempting to colonise the country by turning an entire nation into drug addicts. The damage done to China was unimaginable in terms of human suffering, totally eviscerating China's social order, to say nothing of the financial cost. By most estimates, this depravity by Britain and the Jewish families who had the opium franchise, set China's development back by 75 years. And when the Chinese resisted, Britain committed what is assuredly the most reprehensible act of cultural genocide in the history of the world. China's Yuan Ming Yuan, was almost certainly the greatest - and most valuable - palace / museum complex the world has ever seen. This incredible creation contained more than 10 million priceless and irreplaceable treasures representing more than 5,000 years of the history of the world's most ancient civilisation. It took 150 years to build, and only three weeks to utterly destroy. It was so large that more than 7,500 British, French and Punjabi soldiers needed more than three weeks to wantonly and unforgivably loot and burn the greatest concentration of cultural treasures that had ever existed. And it was done primarily to protect the Jewish Sassoon family's exclusive opium franchise and the profits both for them and the British Empire. More than 100 years ago, the British decided to force open the Tibet area of China - without China's knowledge. They recruited spies in India and Nepal, trained them for two years, then sent them into Tibet to spy and gather information. This was followed by an invasion in which thousands of Tibetans were slaughtered. The British boasted about how easy it was to kill Tibetans by the hundreds, since they had modern rifles while the Tibet peasants had only swords and bows with arrows. From what you have read above, it is a great benefit to the people in Tibet that they were not "freed" by the British or Europeans, since today they would all be dead. Anyone following current affairs in the Middle East must surely be aware of the endless litany of atrocities that the Israeli Jews have inflicted on the Palestinians - a people who have watched 95% of their country taken from them by force of arms and the infliction of unbelievable misery. Where is the discussion of human rights in these events? Where is the recognition that our actions outside our own borders are just as relevant as those inside? Colonising the world is a complicated and difficult business, primarily because most nations are unwilling to be colonised, and they tend to resist foreign invasions and the enslavement of their people. Therefore, you usually need a large and powerful military to not only invade and conquer, but to frequently kill, torture and terrorise large portions of the population, in order to keep them obedient. And you need large numbers of officials willing to relocate to these colonies in order to 'manage' the plunder of their wealth and resources. And of course, this requires large sums of money and effort. Also, you must normally remain present in these colonies. History has proven it's quite difficult to be an 'absentee coloniser' since the colonies quickly tend to become forgetful and disobedient, being more interested in their rights rather than yours. And what with having to put down the constant rebellions, the trouble of loading all that gold and treasure, the selfish peasants preferring to grow food products instead of opium, dealing with a local government that resists the enslavement of their people, it was a difficult job. But the Americans, inventive as always, discovered a new and almost effortless way to colonise the world while still ensuring the constant flow of treasure to their shores - true remote-control colonisation. Here's how it worked: It worked beautifully, in about 50 countries. US multi-nationals could come in, virtually enslave the population by paying dirt-poor wages, export all the resources, and become not only obscenely rich but enormous, world-scale companies. These US government-sponsored CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow. This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, the use of interrogation, torture and murder. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust." Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, and the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates. More than one million Iraqis died from the US invasion, mostly civilian women and children, though the US is willing to acknowledge only about 150,000. They do, however, mourn and whine about the 5,000 or so American "sons of freedom" who "gave their lives in the service of democracy", or some such rubbish. The real point is that Iraqis are not actually people, at least not so real as Americans, and therefore of much lesser value. As Dick Cheney so famously said, "We don't count Iraqi deaths". Typical of the killers is the American soldier who said: "We'd open up (open fire) on anything. They even didn't have to be armed. We were keeping scores." For him, Iraqis are "not even people, you know. Like, they're not humans." Sound familiar? This is how the US became a rich country. It was not, as most Americans believe, by being 'free' or by having 'democracy', or by being smarter or more inventive than other nations. Instead, it was all done mostly with illegal military force, virtually enslaving many dozens of countries as brutal military colonies, using all of these nations as cows to milk. It began with the Dulles brothers and their United Fruit Company in Central America, with ITT (the US firm named International Telephone and Telegraph, that helped to finance the overthrow of local governments), and continued from there. All of South and Central America, much of Africa and much of Asia, were all exposed to this brand of American 'freedom and democracy'. And it is not a surprise that so much of the world bitterly hates the US today. Americans never see this side of their country. Indeed, the internet and the US PR machines are full of glowing praise for the power of US companies, with terms like "The American Copper Industry: Bright Future Glorious Past". But that 'glorious past' consists of raping, looting and plundering other nations for more than 100 years. It is not a surprise that most of South and Central America is as poor today as 100 years ago, in spite of a century of being exposed to American 'freedoms and human rights'. The US is only 4% of the worlds population, but has been consuming 25% of the worlds resources. That is why Americans are "exceptional" and rich, but those days are over, forever. This 4% of the worlds population will have to get used to consuming only its 4% of the world's resources and that is going to be a very, very painful adjustment. By 1929 the US mining giant Anaconda owned all of Chile's copper - the world's most productive copper mines - and made billions in profits while Chile remained in poverty. In 1971 Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, nationalised Anaconda’s copper mines because the company was plundering his nation. The US government immediately sent in the CIA to destabilise Chile, they overthrew the Allende government, and installed Augusto Pinochet as the new US dictator, a man whose brutality was legendary. The new 'government' agreed to pay Anaconda more than $250,000,000 for its expropriated mines - an astronomical sum of money in those days, especially compared to Anaconda's total costs of only 77 million for the mines, and the billions in profits they had already made by plundering Chile. It has only been since the removal of the US puppet Pinochet that Chile has begun to recover from 100 years of civilian terror and the plundering of its resources. Brazil and other countries are the same. It was only after they finally managed to overthrow their brutal, US-installed and supported dictators, that these nations began to progress and develop. It is absolutely true that the US kept dozens of nations in virtual slavery and terror for many decades. But nowhere in all of this history is there any American discussion about the US-sponsored violations of human rights. And that is because 'human rights' are reserved for 'democratic' and 'Christian' White Americans who are special because they are superior and God is on their side. Return to Index Article at Monbiot.com. Article at mediamonitors.net. |