Hostages of the empire
Andrew Murray
Tuesday July 1, 2003
The Guardian
The words of Paul Bremer, Washington's overlord in Iraq, need no "sexing up". "We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or... kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country," he declared at the weekend. "We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country."
Neither General Dyer at Amritsar nor General Westmoreland in Vietnam could have put it any clearer. Welcome to the new colonialism. Bremer's words are not just bluster. US forces are now engaged in massive search-and-destroy sweeps in central and northern Iraq against forces opposing their rule.
While the Westminster village remains riveted by the Campbell-BBC pillow fight, it is the real war on the ground in Iraq that should be commanding our attention. The six British soldiers killed last week, like the US servicemen under daily attack, are victims of an overbearing and inept occupation policy that is alienating ordinary Iraqis of all persuasions.
Civilian deaths, particularly of demonstrators, are mounting. Basic services and basic rights are in scant supply, with neither democracy nor a reliable water supply on offer to Iraqis. The only advanced programme is for the privatisation of state industry. This occupation, which has no modern precedent, should be at the centre of political attention. Ending it needs to be at the heart of public activity.
Tony Blair has placed Britain at the service of the first major post-1991 attempt to fasten foreign domination by force on a sovereign country, an endeavour as unlawful as it is unwise. And there is no easy way out for the government. British troops in Iraq are now hostages to the Middle East policy of the Bush administration and its boundless appetite for domination.
[snip]
guardian.co.uk
Ron, that article gave me a flash of foresight... Here's my tentative theory: about 50 years ago, the world entered the so-called stage of decolonization. Seemingly, it only concerned Europe's colonial powers (UK, France, Belgium,...) that, somehow, were compelled to grant independence to their colonies in Africa, Asia and the Mideast. However, that's only half the picture --what I call "geographic decolonization". But the US itself, through its infamous Jim Crow regime, practiced another kind of colonialism --"domestic colonialism"... And, likewise, while Europe engaged a process of (geographic) decolonizing abroad, the US underwent a similar decolonization at home (the Civil Rights mayhem). Of course, those two decolonizing patterns overlapped each other. For instance, while France was fighting the FLN guerilla in Algeria, she also had to cope with a hundred thousand Algerian migrant workers in metropolitan France. And the US was also involved in colonial warfare abroad --in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba,... Granted, those US interventions were branded as anti-Communist (ideological) ventures, not as American neo-colonialism.
Today, we're witnessing a second stage of decolonization, a stage that is the mirror-image of the first one. Europe's Arab and Muslim minorities, increasingly kicked around by Judeofascist hatemongers, will soon bring about a "domestic decolonization" in Europe --similar to America's in the 1960s-- whereas the US will find itself struggling with "pockets of resistance" all along the faultline between Islam and Judeo-Christianity....
Gus |
