Invading other countries is wrong.
Right?
Not quite. It’s wrong only if you aren’t the United States or a close European ally. If you happen to be the United States, invading other sovereign countries is not only right, it’s routine.
The “war industry” is a vital cog in the US economy. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has given Washington two gifts: One, a post-pandemic boost to its military-industrial complex; and two, critical real-time intelligence on Russia’s military capability, tactics, weapons and battlefield strengths and weaknesses.
The United States was born out of invasion, so invasion of other countries is second nature to it. Early English colonists settled in North America in the 1600s. They drove indigenous Indians off the land they and their ancestors had lived on for millennia.
The annexation was done with ruthless precision. Sioux tribes who resisted the invading Englishmen were killed. Those who survived died of smallpox and other European diseases that were unknown in North America. Native Indians had no immunity to them.
The facts bear out the clinical cruelty with which the colonial invasion of America unfolded between the 1600s and 1700s. The population of indigenous Indians in North America before the English colonists arrived in 1600 was estimated at around 18 million. By the late 1700s, when the United States became an independent nation, the population of indigenous Indians had plunged to six million.
Meanwhile, a new country had been formed on the other side of the Atlantic: Britain.
Till 1707, Britain didn’t exist. It was only after the kingdoms of England and Scotland merged through the 1707 Acts of Union to form the “United Kingdom of Great Britain” that Britain as a sovereign entity came into existence.
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As Britain lost its colonies in the newly formed United States in the 1776-83 war of independence, it cast its eye eastwards: India would replace America as Britain’s principal colony overseas.
There was a difference though. America had been an invasive Anglo-Saxon colonial settlement. India, from the beginning, was a land to be plundered, not settled.
When the British occupation began in 1757 through the East India Company, the population of the subcontinent was 182 million. At the peak of the British colonial occupation of India, the total number of white British citizens — from administrators to soldiers — was 1,25,945, according to the 1861 Census. For every Briton there were 1,500 Indians.
Back in the United States, British colonial settlers, who now called themselves Americans, had become restless. They wanted more land. But where to find it?
Why, in Mexico of course. Mexico had won independence from Spain in 1821. The British-turned-Americans seized the opportunity and invaded Mexico. The American-Mexican war took place in 1846-48. Using superior weapons and tactics, the Americans annexed large swathes of Mexican sovereign territory — from Texas to California. Under the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded 2.4 million sq km of its territory to the US.
What does all this have to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? The answer lies in two parts.
First, it re-emphasises that it is wrong to invade another country, whether it is Ukraine or Mexico or India.
Second, it underscores the fact that virtually every invasion by one nation or another over the past 500 years has been conducted by Europeans or Eurasians, not by Asians or Africans. The Eurasian Ottomans invaded copiously and cruelly. Britain, France, Spain and Portugal built empires by invading Asia, Africa and Latin America.
But Europeans weren’t satisfied with usurping other peoples’ land: they wanted free labour. The centuries-long transatlantic African slave trade ranks as the most inhumane extra-territorial crime in history. In the 1600s, Liverpool was a tiny impoverished hamlet. By the 1800s, it had become a prosperous town on the back of the lucrative African slave trade. Liverpool’s leading businessmen made vast fortunes shipping Africans to Britain’s North American colonies.
The Africans were captured from the Ivory Coast, Ghana and other west African coastal countries, manacled in chains and shipped to Britain’s American and Caribbean colonies where they were sold to wealthy Americans to a life of bonded slavery.
After the 1950s, the West recognised it couldn’t be business as usual. Decolonisation had taken place. Slavery was long over. It changed tactics. The new way was overthrowing democratically elected governments and putting in their place Western puppets: Iraq, Iran, Latin America and Africa.
But that wasn’t quite enough. The West’s invasive wars on Iraq from 1990 through to 2011 stood out for the costs inflicted on Iraqi civilians. According to Brown University’s Watson Institute, “No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion. However, we know that between 184,382 and 207,156 civilians have died from direct war-related violence caused by the US, its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019. The violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred through aerial bombing, shelling, gunshots, suicide attacks, and fires started by bombing. Many civilians have also been injured.
“Because not all war-related deaths have been recorded accurately by the Iraqi government and the US-led coalition, the numbers are likely much higher. Several estimates based on randomly selected household surveys place the total death count among Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands. Several times as many Iraqi civilians may have died as an indirect result of the war, due to damage to the systems that provide food, health care and clean drinking water, and as a result, illness, infectious diseases and malnutrition that could otherwise have been avoided or treated. The war compounded the ill effects of decades of harmful US policy actions towards Iraq since the 1960s, including economic sanctions in the 1990s that were devastating for Iraqis.”
Hitler was contemptuous of Russians and Ukrainians who are Slavs. At a critical point in World War II in June 1941, he dropped plans to invade fellow Saxon Britain and invaded the Slav Soviet Union instead. That error cost Germany World War II four years later.
The Saxon-Slav conflict erupted again in the decade-long Balkans war in the 1990s that dismembered the former Slav nation Yugoslavia following carpet bombing by US and British warplanes.
Whichever way it ends, the Russia-Ukraine war is an intra-Slav conflict but remote-controlled by Saxons in Washington and London. Their destructive capacity remains as unparalleled in the modern world as it was throughout history.
This article was first published on Firstpost.
The writer is editor, author and publisher. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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