Links

Western Values

Colonialism Respect for Human Rights Totalitarianism Freedom of Speech Imperialism Racism Militarism Respect for Democracy Children's Rights

Photo Gallery  Cartoons

Colonialism

Around 10 million Congolese died as a result of Belgian forced labour and mass murder in the early 20th century; tens of millions perished in avoidable or enforced famines in British-ruled India; up to a million Algerians died in their war for independence, while controversy now rages in France about a new law requiring teachers to put a positive spin on colonial history. Comparable atrocities were carried out by all European colonialists, but not a word of condemnation from the Council of Europe – nor over the impact of European intervention in the third world since decolonisation. Presumably, European lives count for more.

– Communism may be dead, but clearly not dead enough by Seumas Milne, 16 February 2006.

To the European would-be invaders, the presence of Muslims among the African populace was an eyesore. In the European psychic, Islam has always been, especially since the early Crusades, looked down as an anti-thesis to Christianity. It was recognized as an obstacle towards the fulfillment of their dream to plunder and loot Asia and Africa, and to enslave her people. It reminded them of the Moorish or Arabized Muslims in Andalusia (Spain), which had been cleansed [by then] of any Islamic influence. To prepare the ground for invasion and subsequent colonization, first came the propaganda about ridding the black Africans of "slavery" from the Arabs, and then came the muscle – the weapons. It was a "White man's burden" to "civilize" the so-called "uncivilized", "savage", "Negroes!"

Within a few years, the entire Africa was colonized by the Europeans, and her mineral resources looted out to Europe and her people put into chains to work in the white-men's plantations in the new colonies in the Americas. Joseph Conrad, commenting a century ago on King Leopold's conduct in Congo, called it "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." {Ref: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness}

– White Man's Burden: The Never-ending Saga by Habib Siddiqui, 06 June 2004.

[…] experts have estimated Britain's debt to Africans in the continent and diaspora to be in the trillions of pounds. While this was a useful benchmark, its basis was mistaken. Not because it was excessive, but because the real debt is incalculable. For without Africa and its Caribbean plantation extensions, the modern world as we know it would not exist.

Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was how the pull and push from these industries transformed western Europe's economies. English banking, insurance, shipbuilding, wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron smelting, and the cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave plantations.

– The wealth of the west was built on Africa's exploitation by Richard Drayton, 20 August 2005.

On October 12, 1492, America discovered capitalism as Christopher Columbus, financed by the kings of Spain and the bankers of Genoa brought this novelty to the Caribbean islands. In his journal of the Discovery, the Admiral employs the word “gold” 139 times and the words “God” or “Our Lord” 51. These unspoilt beaches filled him with tireless enthusiasm and on November 27 he prophesied that “all Christendom will do business here”. In that at least he was right. He may have believed that Haiti was Japan and that Cuba was China and that the inhabitants of China were the Indians of India, but about the business side of things he made no mistake.

After five centuries of business-like activity on the part of all Christendom a third of the American forests have been destroyed, a significant part of the previously fertile land is sterile and more than half the population eats only one meal a day. The Indians, victims of the biggest expropriation in world history continue to be pushed off their last remaining lands and their identity is still denied. They are forbidden to live in their own way. At the outset the pillage and “othercide” was performed in the name of God; now it is done in the name of Progress.

– Five Hundred Years of Plunder: from Columbus to Corporate America by Eduardo Galleano, 1992.

Respect for Human Rights

A video shown on BBC TV on February 11, 2006 shows British soldiers savagely beating and kicking unarmed Iraqi teenagers in an army compound. Officials at the Ministry of Defense are said to have investigated and established beyond doubt the authenticity of the video.

Shot secretly “for fun” as a home movie from a rooftop in Basra in southern Iraq by a corporal and shown to friends at a home base in Europe, it was given to the News of the World later by an anonymous whistle blower. The footage shows soldiers pulling four Iraqi boys in their early teens into their army base after a riot and beating them with batons, then punching and kicking them repeatedly on the body and head and between the legs. Within the space of one minute, some 42 blows are rained on the four teens whom the whistle blower said “were just kids” who did not even have on shoes.

One soldier can also be seen kicking a dead Iraqi in the face. The unidentified cameraman can be heard laughing and urging his colleagues on with vulgarities.

This, mind you, is kinder gentler Britain, whose exemplary interaction with the locals at Basra was held up as a model for American forces. The new video shows this up for the nonsense it is; the Brits on tape are every bit as gung-ho and turned-on torturers of detainees as the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were.

– Axis of Child Abusers by Lila Rajiva, 13 February 2006.

Maher Arar is a 34-year-old wireless technology consultant. Arar was born in Syria and at the age of 17, came to Canada with his family. He became a Canadian citizen in 1991 and in 1997 moved to Ottawa.

In September 2002, Arar was in Tunisia, vacationing with his wife Monia Mazigh and their two small children. On Sept. 26 while in transit in New York's JFK airport, he was detained by US officials and interrogated about alleged links to al-Qaeda. Twelve days later, he was chained, shackled and flown to Jordan aboard a private plane and from there transferred to a Syrian prison.

In Syria, he was held in a tiny "grave-like" cell for ten months and ten days before he was moved to a better cell in a different prison. He was beaten, tortured and forced to make a false confession.

– Maher's Story in Brief from Maher's web site.

Totalitarianism

Fascism originated in Europe. The following European countries had fascist regimes:

Country	Period	Type
Austria	1933-1938	Austro-fascism
Croatia	1941-1945	Fascism
France	1940-1944	Fascism (Vichy regime)
Germany	1933-1945	Fascism (Nazism)
Hungary	1932-1945	Fascism
Italy	1922-1943	Fascism
Portugal	1932-1974	Fascism
Slovakia	1939-1944	Fascism
Spain	1936-1975	Fascism

(Source: Wikipedia: Fascism.)

The other main totalitarian philosophy developed in Europe from the writings of Karl Marx. Bolshevism was a faction of the Marxist Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Before the revolution of February, 1917, main Bolsheviks (Zinoviev, Trotsky, Lenin) lived and worked in Western Europe, receiving financial support from the European social democrats. (Source: Wikipedia: Bolshevik.)

After 1945, we borrowed many fascist methods. Nuremberg only punished a handful of the guilty; most walked free with our help. In 1946, Project Paperclip secretly brought more than 1,000 Nazi scientists to the US. Among their ranks were Kurt Blome, who had tested nerve gas at Auschwitz, and Konrad Schaeffer, who forced salt into victims at Dachau. Other experiments at mind control via drugs and surgery were folded into the CIA's Project Bluebird. Japan's Dr Shiro Ishii, who had experimented with prisoners in Manchuria, came to Maryland to advise on bio-weapons. Within a decade of British troops liberating Belsen, they were running their own concentration camps in Kenya to crush the Mau Mau. The Gestapo's torture techniques were borrowed by the French in Algeria, and then disseminated by the Americans to Latin American dictatorships in the 60s and 70s. We see their extension today in the American camps in Cuba and Diego Garcia.

– An ethical blank cheque by Richard Drayton, 10 May 2005.

Freedom of Speech

The news on Monday that an Austrian court has sentenced crackpot British historian David Irving to three years' imprisonment for having denied the Holocaust seventeen years ago should have alarmed free speech advocates – particularly at a time when Muslim fundamentalists are being lectured as to the freedom of expression that should be afforded cartoonists. In the event, however, a lack of noticeable outcry has exposed a longstanding double standard in the West about who is entitled to free speech and why.

To be sure, Nazi propaganda is an extremely sensitive issue in Hitler's birth country, which for the most part endorsed the madman's vision of the Third Reich. But the repression of the free marketplace of ideas is an endorsement of tyranny rather than its repudiation. And it is not just Austria, and Germany itself, that have banned the views of Holocaust deniers: Eight other European states have joined in. Muslim fundamentalists outraged by the cartoons that have appeared widely in the European media thus have the right to question the conflicting standards of what is considered worthy of censorship.

– In Defense of Free Thought by Robert Scheer, 21 February 2006.

The flights for cast and crew had been booked; the production schedule delivered; the press announcement drafted and approved; tickets advertised on the internet. The Royal Court production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, the play I co-edited with Alan Rickman, was transferring next month to the New York Theatre Workshop, home of the groundbreaking musical Rent, following two sellout runs in London and several awards.

We always thought that it was a piece of work that needed to be seen in the US. Created from the journals and emails of American activist Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey from her adolescent life in Seattle, Washington, to her death under a bulldozer in Gaza at the age of 23, we considered it, in a sense, to be an American story, which would have a particular relevance for audiences in Rachel's home country. After all, she had made her journey to the Middle East in order "to meet the people who are on the receiving end of our [American] tax dollars", and she was a killed by a US-made bulldozer.

But last week the New York Theatre Workshop cancelled the production – or, in their words, "postponed it indefinitely". The political climate, we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As James Nicola, the theatre's artistic director, said yesterday: "In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy situation." Rachel was to be censored for political reasons.

– Surely Americans will not put up with this censorship by Katharine Viner, 01 March 2006.

Imperialism

In trying to bring the Middle East into a democratic 21st century, Bush took it – and the United States – back to the dark days at the turn of the last century. Administration officials deeply misunderstood the region and its history. They viewed the Iraqis under Saddam the same way that Americans once viewed the Filipinos under the Spanish or the Mexicans under dictator Huerta – as victims of tyranny who, once freed, would embrace their American conquerors as liberators.

Bush resolved the contradiction between imperialism and liberation simply by denying that the United States was capable of acting as an imperial power. He assumed that by declaring his support for a “democratic Middle East,” he had inoculated Americans against the charge of imperialism. But, of course, the United States and Britain had always claimed the highest motives in seeking to dominate other peoples. McKinley had promised to “civilize and Christianize the Filipinos.” What mattered was not expressed motives, but methods; and the Bush administration in Iraq, like the McKinley administration in the Philippines, invaded, occupied, and sought to dominate a people they were claiming to liberate.

Neoconservative intellectuals candidly acknowledge that the United States was on an imperial mission, but insist, in the words of neoconservative Stanley Kurtz, that imperialism is “a midwife of democratic self-rule.” Yet, in the Philippines in 1900, South Vietnam in 1961, or Iraq today, imperialism has not given birth to democracy, but war, and war conducted with a savagery that has belied the U.S. commitment to Christian civilization or democracy. Abu Ghraib was not the first time U.S. troops used torture on prisoners; it was rampant in the Philippines a century ago. Although nothing is inevitable, the imperial mindset sees the people it seeks to civilize or democratize as inferior and lends itself to inhumane practices. The British used poison gas in Iraq well before the idea ever occurred to Saddam Hussein.

– Imperial Amnesia by John B. Judis, July/August 2004.

Racism

Modern European anti-Semitism has its origin in 19th century pseudo-scientific theories that the Jewish people are a sub-group of Semitic peoples; Semitic people were thought by many Europeans to be entirely different from the Aryan, or Indo-European, populations, and that they can never be amalgamated with them. In this view, Jews are not opposed on account of their religion, but on account of their supposed hereditary or genetic racial characteristics: greed, a special aptitude for money-making, aversion to hard work, clannishness and obtrusiveness, lack of social tact, low cunning, and especially lack of patriotism.

While enlightened European intellectual society of that period viewed prejudice against people on account of their religion to be declassé and a sign of ignorance, because of this supposed 'scientific' connection to genetics they felt fully justified in prejudice based on nationality or 'race'. In order to differentiate between the two practices, the term anti-Semitism was developed to refer to this 'acceptable' bias against Jews as a nationality, as distinct from the 'undesirable' prejudice against Judaism as a religion. Concurrently with this usage, some authors in Germany began to use the term 'Palestinians' when referring to Jews as a people, rather than as a religious group.

– Wikipedia: Anti-Semitism.

The deaths of seven astronauts is a catastrophe, an event to be pored over and grieved. But the deaths of thousands of Afghans, and the future deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, is barely noticed in the West, and is hardly considered a catastrophe. Instead, it's just one of those largely invisible tragedies, like death from starvation or from preventable disease that carry off numberless people every day, in out of the way Third World places we don't worry about, because we don't notice them or because we don't see them, or maybe can't notice them and can't see them.

We call these tragedies "regrettable," because that's what you're supposed to call them, but we don't really feel much regret, except maybe in a kind of intellectual way, as if we're saying, "Well, it's not the kind of thing I'd wish upon my enemy, but what happens, happens, and there's no point in obsessing about it."

– When a child screams in Baghdad, will anybody hear? by Stephen Gowans, 07 February 2003.

Nobody but Americans celebrates Thanksgiving. It is reserved by history and the intent of “the founders” as the supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar. No Halloween of the imagination can rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year – a pure glorification of racist barbarity.

– The American Thanksgiving: Rejoicing in Genocide and White Supremacy by Glen Ford, 22 November 2006.

Militarism

WWI Casualties

WWII Casualties

Respect for Democracy

The following democratically-elected governments were overthrown by the US:

Year	Country
1949	Greece
1949	Syria
1952	Cuba
1953	Iran
1954	Guatemala
1963	Dominican Republic
1963	Ecuador
1972	El Salvador
1973	Chile
1975	Australia
1987	Fiji
2002	Venezuela
2004	Haiti

Source: Coups Arranged or Backed by the USA by Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi, 2004.

Honest observers on the left and right have long complained that California's voting district map is a masterwork of cynicism that assures victories for incumbents as well as party hacks seeking open seats. The fix is so complete that in 2004 not one of the 173 state legislative and Congressional seats being contested in California changed party hands. Robert Stern, president of the liberal-leaning Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles, told me that California's elections are "less democratic than the Soviet Politburo."

–Terminator vs. Gerrymander by Jill Stewart, 07 November 2005. From the New York Times.

See also Bringing 'democracy' to the world for information on the subversion of democracy.

Children's Rights

The true measure of a nation's standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.

–  Child Poverty in Rich Countries 2007 from UNICEF, 2007.

Protecting children from the sharpest edges of poverty during their years of growth and formation is both the mark of a civilised society and a means of addressing some of the evident problems that affect the quality of life in the economically developed nations.

–  Child Poverty in Rich Countries 2005 from UNICEF, 2005.

Poverty in New York City

Domestic poverty knows no geographical barriers, but it is especially widespread here in New York City. The latest study released in 1995 by the Citizens Committee for Children of New York reveals that New York children fare worse in virtually every category than their counterparts at the state and national level. This includes low birth weight, infant mortality, violence-related deaths, abuse and neglect, education, and job preparedness.

Life for New York City children is getting worse:

• 25% of New Yorkers are children.
• 762,000 children live in poverty.
• 181 babies are born into poverty each day.
• 10,000 children are homeless. This number has doubled since 1988.

– Children in Poverty from Hearts & Minds.

Key Facts

• 3.4 million children are living in poverty in the UK (after housing costs)
• The proportion of children living in poverty grew from 1 in 10 in 1979 to 1 in 3 in 1998. Today, 27 per cent of children in Britain are living in poverty.
• Since 1999, when the current Government pledged to end child poverty, 700,000 children have been lifted out of poverty.
• The UK has one of the worst rates of child poverty in the industrialised world
• The majority (54 per cent) of poor children live in a household where at least one adult works.
• 43 per cent of poor children live in a household headed by a lone parent. The majority of poor children (57 per cent) live in a household headed by a couple.
• 42% of children in poverty are from families with 3 or more children

– Key Facts from End Child Poverty UK, 2005.

The UK has been accused of failing its children, as it comes bottom of a league table for child well-being across 21 industrialised countries. The Unicef report looked at 40 indicators including poverty, peer and family relationships, and health. One of the report's authors told the BBC that under-investment and a "dog eat dog" attitude in society were to blame for Britain's poor performance.

– UK is accused of failing children from the BBC, 14 February 2007.