“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
— American Declaration of Independence
The above excerpt embodies the idea of ‘universal’ human rights and freedom envisioned by the founding fathers of the United States of America. Much like the black and brown people in America, the global South has systematically been excluded from these ‘unalienable’ rights. The longest American war in history fought in Afghanistan resulted in one massacre after another of Afghan people.
More than a million Muslims (some estimates say 3 million) have been killed since the start of the ‘War on Terror’ — that has felt like World War 3. The assassinations of high-profile Iranian targets, General Soleimani and nuclear scientists, Fakhrizadeh. The 12-year reign of terror of the Netanyahu’s government of Israel, who massacred the people of Gaza for sport (“time to mow the lawn”), cheered on by the popular Israeli slogan, “death to the Arabs.” And the ongoing bombings by American drones targeting Muslims around the world, all say one thing: Western colonialism in the global South has continued as savagely as it did before World War II.
Before the Great War, British and French colonialists, along with other European colonizers, had colonized 83 per cent of the world by early 20th century. The colonized people repeatedly faced slaughter in thousands, if not millions, without anyone holding the colonizing powers to account.
For the first and only time in the history of Western colonialism, World War II saw the deaths of millions of Europeans. This created an elaborate body of laws and institutions to protect the lives of civilians located in the global North.
However, for the global South, not much has changed since the end of World War II and the 20th century. In the 21st century, Western powers continue to kill thousands directly and create millions as refugees, without any accountability. Not a single Western head of state will be prosecuted for the deaths of civilians in foreign lands. These democratically elected leaders have financed and executed the War on Terror that has raged on for 20 years.
In the name of fighting terrorism, with complete disregard for international law, the US has invaded one country after another, killed more than a million people, and displaced and disfigured millions more to find one man: Osama bin Laden. Because bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks. No country in the world would be allowed to follow this logic and invade America to punish American war criminals behind the death of millions of impoverished, defenseless people in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Honduras, Columbia, and so on — not to mention millions of Native Americans wiped out. Criminals such as Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Jim Baker III, Ronald Reagan, Collin Powell, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush family, the Clintons, just to name a few, certainly deserve some sort of punishment because of the blood and suffering of millions on their hands.
The American Gulf War in 1991 against Iraq, followed by 12 years of sanctions and weekly bombings by US and British planes until the invasion of 2003, created poverty and disease that likely killed more than a million Iraqis. We should never forget the macabre reply by Madeline Albright, the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, when asked during an episode of 60 Minutes if the American sanctions were worth the death of more than half a million Iraqi children: "We think the price is worth it."
But it was her other notorious, yet mostly unknown quote, that would further expose the hypocrisy of American colonialism disguised as American exceptionalism. “But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us" (Interview on NBC-TV, February 19, 1998). This logic of a superpower to see itself as occupying a higher moral ground, justifying the killing and maiming of brown and black bodies around the world, represents the moral right of European colonizers and occupiers that has shaped the world for the last 500 years.
The American exceptionalism à la Madeline Albright provides a window into the logical conclusion of a historical process called European capitalism. This process, which is wedded to colonialism, evolved from a system of Italian city-states into the inter-state system of today’s ‘modern’ nation-states. The modern nation-state’s history and pedigree remains tied to continental Europe and the explosion of capitalism that saw every European ruler follow the Italian city-states’ capitalist path.
The nation-states model, aka United Nations model, came about to serve the political and economic objectives of a narrow segment of humanity, the 7 per cent population of the world called the ‘West’. This 7 per cent imposed on the entire globe the modern inter-state system of nation-states.
The recognition and formation of one country after another following the Great War made people of the global South feel liberated, independent, because they now had their own country, military, national flag and homeland, much like the Europeans. But the newly liberated nation-states belonging to the 93 per cent, consisting of the ‘rest, as opposed to the West, could be invaded and carpet bombed anytime the West chose to do so. Examples of this include: The American war on the Korean peninsula that killed about 2 million Koreans. The war in Vietnam that killed at least 3 million people. The secret carpet bombings of Cambodia ordered by Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, and the ensuing collapse and civil war that killed another 2 million people at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The 1980s American funded death squads across Central America that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of poor, impoverished people in another attempt to contain communism. The Iran-Iraq war the West orchestrated with the help of their Arab allies, that killed a million Iranians and half a million Iraqis.
Interestingly, the majority of those killed by the US since World War II, all lived in rural areas or forests, like the Native Americans. Most Afghans massacred during 20-years of occupation were farmers. The genocide committed on the American continent against the nomadic natives, became a global enterprise for the US, particularly, after World War II.
The system of nation-states imposed on the ‘rest’ allowed the most powerful Western state, the United States, to subordinate the 93 per cent to the forces of capitalism. Previously, the British had done this. Similar to the previous 500 years, European colonialism and capitalism continued onward unfettered, constantly reorganizing, evolving to this day.
The creation of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization paved the way for American exceptionalism and domination. It also created a path for the primacy of the American dollar, subjecting other nation-states to the logic of American political and economic imperatives— to expand profit and accumulate capital at all costs.
The World Bank-IMF-Wall Street nexus of high finance made loans to poor countries of the global South at impossible terms. During the last two decades of the 20th century, some 5 trillion dollars have departed the so-called ‘Third World’ or the global South as loan payments.
David Harvey has termed this an “accumulation through dispossession.” Bankrupt and poor, the countries of the global South felt cornered. They effectively handed their sovereignty to Uncle Sam’s political and economic institutions. These institutions have continued the great tradition of Western banks and high finance that have run European capitalism for 500 years in the same manner, causing starvation, social unrest, political instability, and war.
When Afghanistan fought communism on behalf of the US, the country suffered for nearly two decades. They sacrificed the lives of 1 million Afghans, followed by an additional 20 years of American war and occupation that killed thousands more. The shame is not the ragtag warlords, farmers turned guerilla fighters, and suicide bombers.
The shame belongs to those with bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, floating islands of death on the seas called jet carriers, and deadly drones, holding the fate of humanity in their hands in order to achieve certain economic and political ends. The shame belongs to the elite club of 7 percent, or the West, whose great universities attract genius brains from around the world to research, develop, and invent the most diabolical weaponry and killing machines.
This machinery keeps the majority of the world’s inhabitants subdued and frightened into obeying the laws the very same 7 percent has enshrined into nations and borders. Holding the world hostage, this 7 per cent wants nothing but gold, diamonds, precious minerals, oil, natural resources, best minds of the world for their corporations, and unlimited access to consumer markets and cheap labor in the global South. All this to continue making trillions in profits. The shame belongs to the 7 per cent, for their slogans of democracy, human rights, women’s rights, and freedom they denied the ‘rest’ of the world. The only thing the 7 per cent has secured since World War II is peace and prosperity for itself by damning the ‘rest’ to endless plunder.
Frantz Fanon, the Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, trained in France, wrote about his Algerian patients suffering debilitating psychosis in Algeria under French colonialism. Fanon authored a number of important books on the impact of colonization on people of the global South. These have become essential in re-framing issues of racial justice, reparations, and the prison reform movement in the US.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon lays out the existential suffering of people living under colonial occupation and domination in the Third World: racialized, dehumanized, violated, humiliated, and excluded socially, politically, and economically. The colonized mind and body cannot find any other way to make sense of the colonial trauma except through a sudden explosion of violence.
The impossibility of the colonized to rationally cope with their dehumanizing colonialism throws wide open the door for the colonial power to deal with the colonized as violent savages, terrorists, torturing, lynching, bombing them as unworthy of civilization or humane treatment. This has essentially what the world has witnessed since the events of September 11, 2001, shook the US.
The resulting American vengeance meted out to the “terrorists, extremists, enemy combatants” of the colonized global South continues to shake our world. Fanon’s decades old declaration, “People of the Third World unite!” holds true to this very day, for the ‘rest’ to unite against the West.
— American Declaration of Independence
The above excerpt embodies the idea of ‘universal’ human rights and freedom envisioned by the founding fathers of the United States of America. Much like the black and brown people in America, the global South has systematically been excluded from these ‘unalienable’ rights. The longest American war in history fought in Afghanistan resulted in one massacre after another of Afghan people.
More than a million Muslims (some estimates say 3 million) have been killed since the start of the ‘War on Terror’ — that has felt like World War 3. The assassinations of high-profile Iranian targets, General Soleimani and nuclear scientists, Fakhrizadeh. The 12-year reign of terror of the Netanyahu’s government of Israel, who massacred the people of Gaza for sport (“time to mow the lawn”), cheered on by the popular Israeli slogan, “death to the Arabs.” And the ongoing bombings by American drones targeting Muslims around the world, all say one thing: Western colonialism in the global South has continued as savagely as it did before World War II.
Before the Great War, British and French colonialists, along with other European colonizers, had colonized 83 per cent of the world by early 20th century. The colonized people repeatedly faced slaughter in thousands, if not millions, without anyone holding the colonizing powers to account.
For the first and only time in the history of Western colonialism, World War II saw the deaths of millions of Europeans. This created an elaborate body of laws and institutions to protect the lives of civilians located in the global North.
However, for the global South, not much has changed since the end of World War II and the 20th century. In the 21st century, Western powers continue to kill thousands directly and create millions as refugees, without any accountability. Not a single Western head of state will be prosecuted for the deaths of civilians in foreign lands. These democratically elected leaders have financed and executed the War on Terror that has raged on for 20 years.
In the name of fighting terrorism, with complete disregard for international law, the US has invaded one country after another, killed more than a million people, and displaced and disfigured millions more to find one man: Osama bin Laden. Because bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks. No country in the world would be allowed to follow this logic and invade America to punish American war criminals behind the death of millions of impoverished, defenseless people in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Honduras, Columbia, and so on — not to mention millions of Native Americans wiped out. Criminals such as Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Jim Baker III, Ronald Reagan, Collin Powell, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush family, the Clintons, just to name a few, certainly deserve some sort of punishment because of the blood and suffering of millions on their hands.
The American Gulf War in 1991 against Iraq, followed by 12 years of sanctions and weekly bombings by US and British planes until the invasion of 2003, created poverty and disease that likely killed more than a million Iraqis. We should never forget the macabre reply by Madeline Albright, the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, when asked during an episode of 60 Minutes if the American sanctions were worth the death of more than half a million Iraqi children: "We think the price is worth it."
But it was her other notorious, yet mostly unknown quote, that would further expose the hypocrisy of American colonialism disguised as American exceptionalism. “But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us" (Interview on NBC-TV, February 19, 1998). This logic of a superpower to see itself as occupying a higher moral ground, justifying the killing and maiming of brown and black bodies around the world, represents the moral right of European colonizers and occupiers that has shaped the world for the last 500 years.
The American exceptionalism à la Madeline Albright provides a window into the logical conclusion of a historical process called European capitalism. This process, which is wedded to colonialism, evolved from a system of Italian city-states into the inter-state system of today’s ‘modern’ nation-states. The modern nation-state’s history and pedigree remains tied to continental Europe and the explosion of capitalism that saw every European ruler follow the Italian city-states’ capitalist path.
The nation-states model, aka United Nations model, came about to serve the political and economic objectives of a narrow segment of humanity, the 7 per cent population of the world called the ‘West’. This 7 per cent imposed on the entire globe the modern inter-state system of nation-states.
The recognition and formation of one country after another following the Great War made people of the global South feel liberated, independent, because they now had their own country, military, national flag and homeland, much like the Europeans. But the newly liberated nation-states belonging to the 93 per cent, consisting of the ‘rest, as opposed to the West, could be invaded and carpet bombed anytime the West chose to do so. Examples of this include: The American war on the Korean peninsula that killed about 2 million Koreans. The war in Vietnam that killed at least 3 million people. The secret carpet bombings of Cambodia ordered by Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, and the ensuing collapse and civil war that killed another 2 million people at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The 1980s American funded death squads across Central America that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of poor, impoverished people in another attempt to contain communism. The Iran-Iraq war the West orchestrated with the help of their Arab allies, that killed a million Iranians and half a million Iraqis.
Interestingly, the majority of those killed by the US since World War II, all lived in rural areas or forests, like the Native Americans. Most Afghans massacred during 20-years of occupation were farmers. The genocide committed on the American continent against the nomadic natives, became a global enterprise for the US, particularly, after World War II.
The system of nation-states imposed on the ‘rest’ allowed the most powerful Western state, the United States, to subordinate the 93 per cent to the forces of capitalism. Previously, the British had done this. Similar to the previous 500 years, European colonialism and capitalism continued onward unfettered, constantly reorganizing, evolving to this day.
The creation of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization paved the way for American exceptionalism and domination. It also created a path for the primacy of the American dollar, subjecting other nation-states to the logic of American political and economic imperatives— to expand profit and accumulate capital at all costs.
The World Bank-IMF-Wall Street nexus of high finance made loans to poor countries of the global South at impossible terms. During the last two decades of the 20th century, some 5 trillion dollars have departed the so-called ‘Third World’ or the global South as loan payments.
David Harvey has termed this an “accumulation through dispossession.” Bankrupt and poor, the countries of the global South felt cornered. They effectively handed their sovereignty to Uncle Sam’s political and economic institutions. These institutions have continued the great tradition of Western banks and high finance that have run European capitalism for 500 years in the same manner, causing starvation, social unrest, political instability, and war.
When Afghanistan fought communism on behalf of the US, the country suffered for nearly two decades. They sacrificed the lives of 1 million Afghans, followed by an additional 20 years of American war and occupation that killed thousands more. The shame is not the ragtag warlords, farmers turned guerilla fighters, and suicide bombers.
The shame belongs to those with bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, floating islands of death on the seas called jet carriers, and deadly drones, holding the fate of humanity in their hands in order to achieve certain economic and political ends. The shame belongs to the elite club of 7 percent, or the West, whose great universities attract genius brains from around the world to research, develop, and invent the most diabolical weaponry and killing machines.
This machinery keeps the majority of the world’s inhabitants subdued and frightened into obeying the laws the very same 7 percent has enshrined into nations and borders. Holding the world hostage, this 7 per cent wants nothing but gold, diamonds, precious minerals, oil, natural resources, best minds of the world for their corporations, and unlimited access to consumer markets and cheap labor in the global South. All this to continue making trillions in profits. The shame belongs to the 7 per cent, for their slogans of democracy, human rights, women’s rights, and freedom they denied the ‘rest’ of the world. The only thing the 7 per cent has secured since World War II is peace and prosperity for itself by damning the ‘rest’ to endless plunder.
Frantz Fanon, the Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, trained in France, wrote about his Algerian patients suffering debilitating psychosis in Algeria under French colonialism. Fanon authored a number of important books on the impact of colonization on people of the global South. These have become essential in re-framing issues of racial justice, reparations, and the prison reform movement in the US.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon lays out the existential suffering of people living under colonial occupation and domination in the Third World: racialized, dehumanized, violated, humiliated, and excluded socially, politically, and economically. The colonized mind and body cannot find any other way to make sense of the colonial trauma except through a sudden explosion of violence.
The impossibility of the colonized to rationally cope with their dehumanizing colonialism throws wide open the door for the colonial power to deal with the colonized as violent savages, terrorists, torturing, lynching, bombing them as unworthy of civilization or humane treatment. This has essentially what the world has witnessed since the events of September 11, 2001, shook the US.
The resulting American vengeance meted out to the “terrorists, extremists, enemy combatants” of the colonized global South continues to shake our world. Fanon’s decades old declaration, “People of the Third World unite!” holds true to this very day, for the ‘rest’ to unite against the West.