Human Rights in the Empire of Death
The Westerner, conditioned by a culture of superiority sees human rights violations as simply a non-Western phenomenon, and as such, he is blind to the suffering caused by Western imperialism
This article was originally published on the Dutch online news magazine Joop.nl
By Karim Bettache
On July 20 this year, Joe Biden bombed Somalia, while a day ago he revealed that he was going to send 5000 soldiers back to Afghanistan after announcing his so-called withdrawal. It appears to be a never-ending story: poverty-stricken countries being destroyed by the world's "greatest democracy”. A world superpower that drops its sophisticated bombs on countries whose people still walk on bare feet and in sandals. Why has America been bombing into the Stone Age one country after another, for decades now? Do you actually know? Outside the mainstream narrative about freedom, human rights and the war on terror, have you ever wondered why – mostly with the support of European governments – millions of innocent people around the world are slaughtered by the world's most powerful empire?
According to recent research, the number of casualties of America's war on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan runs into the millions of people. The death toll in Afghanistan alone is at least a million. These are just a few examples out of the dozens of countries in which America has been militarily involved. Other researchers indicate that over the course of thirty years, America has killed at least four million Muslims. Norwegian professor Johan Galtung concludes that America has killed more than 20 million people in more than 37 countries since 1945.
The Westerner, conditioned by a culture of superiority and a one-sided mainstream media, sees human rights violations as only a non-Western problem, and as such, he is blind to the suffering caused by Western imperialism. It becomes painfully obvious when we consider the discussion about Afghanistan. For twenty years, no one in the West cared about America's bloody occupation of the country. However, almost immediately when the occupier announced its supposed withdrawal, newspapers exploded with articles orating about the dangers of the Taliban.
There is something deeply distasteful and morally bankrupt about the fact that the Westerner is silent when a Western power violates human rights in sovereign countries for decades, but is horrified at the idea of indigenous conservatives (i.e., the Taliban) taking over their own country after the occupier withdraws. This colonial mindset where people take it for granted that a Western country is occupying and bombing non-Western countries, without actually questioning why this is happening and how many millions of innocent lives are lost, is a Western cultural sickness. A disorder that increasingly alienates the West as a global minority from the vast majority of the rest of humanity.
Why has the US become an all-destroying empire? Why don't we ask ourselves this question more often? Something that may give you a hunch are the words coming from one of the world's richest men, Elon Musk, who recently wrote on Twitter: "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."
This unusual display of honesty from a member of the capitalist upper class marks a rare moment in history, when the emperor takes off his clothes and shows himself naked to all. Elon Musk's words echoed long-running U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, characterized by support for local death squads that murder indigenous socialists to help right-wing capitalist, pro-American regimes come to power (often comparable to the Jair Bolsonaro regime in Brazil). In this specific case, Musk was referring to Bolivia and his wish to overthrow the indigenous socialist Morales government in order to cheaply hoard the country's lithium.
The unmasking of the United States
Musk’s words are more significant than you may realize, because he unapologetically unmasks the imperialist face of the United States’ government, something that Professor Noam Chomsky has been warning us about for many decades. Namely, that the most powerful country in the world is exploiting poor non-Western countries to hoard their natural resources. It does so by installing pro-American, capitalist puppet regimes (mostly local European descendants of settler-colonialists) who oppress their indigenous populations and profit from the cheap sale of their countries’ natural resources to American corporations.
However, indigenous populations remain a serious obstacle to US interests. In Latin America, for example, many people - in contrast to the ignorance of most Europeans - are aware of America's imperialist motivations and they therefore often vote en masse for anti-imperialist socialists, such as Evo Morales in Bolivia. Such socialists are known for their wish to spend profits coming from the trade of local resources on the betterment of indigenous populations, so as to pull them out of the poverty that European colonialism has forced them into for centuries. However, every time a socialist wins democratic elections in a Latin American country, America intervenes: with the help of our mainstream media the US will demonize the socialist regime as 'authoritarian and undemocratic' and begin preparations to export good old American 'freedom and democracy' (i.e., a right-wing capitalist regime that oppresses its indigenous population). If challenged, US-backed death squads are at the ready to massacre indigenous socialists, union leaders, and critical journalists; should they fail, military intervention is the next resort to teach these unpeople a lesson.
In the Middle East it’s the same story. America is currently occupying large parts of Syria, coincidentally the areas with the most natural resources. In fact, last November a top Pentagon official unmasked US imperialism by proudly admitting that a third of Syria is now owned by the US military. You read that correctly; she said "owned”. In other words, anyone who thinks that Western colonialism is over lives in a fantasy world. In 2018, Reuters reported that an estimated half a million Syrians had been killed in the bloody war in which America once again trained and funded death squads (Al Qaeda-related extremists) to fight against the Assad regime, while simultaneously bombing the country into oblivion.
America used a similar strategy in the 1980s, when Reagan funded and trained death squads in Afghanistan to fight the Russians. Who were these death-squads? The Mujahadeen, later transformed into the Taliban. In Libya we observe a similar story: the once-richest country in Africa with top of the line health care and a superb education system was destroyed to such an extent by the Obama and Clinton administration, that it turned into a country where men, women and children are currently sold on slave markets.
Western blindness to human suffering
In short, the Westerner is blind to the total havoc the US, mostly with the support of Europe, is wreaking around the world. In fact, the West is lecturing China about its minorities who are supposedly being put into prison camps but is dead silent about the fact that with only five percent of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prison population, America is the largest penal colony in the world. Of these prisoners, a disproportionate amount is of non-European descent such as African Americans and Native Americans who are forced into slave labor at the behest of private corporations. Furthermore, America is currently actively participating in Saudi Arabia's genocidal war in Yemen, supports the illegal theft of Palestinian land by Israel, and is still occupying Iraq.
Not to mention the murderous sanctions America imposes on non-Western countries that refuse to comply with its unreasonable political and economic demands. The intentions of US sanctions are to starve a population to the point that it begins to revolt against its government in the hope that it will eventually be overthrown. The next step is to install a pro-American puppet regime that will surrender to the will of its masters. The countries currently suffering from US sanctions are: Cuba, Haiti, Syria, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Eritrea, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and the Sudan. While they are culturally very different countries, they do have a few things in common: They are all non-Western, non-White countries that have refused to surrender to the idea of their countries being ruled by a capitalist European and American (mostly white) elite. According to former UN Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas, the sanctions on Venezuela alone have resulted in over one hundred thousand innocent deaths. Sanctions can thus be seen as a form of siege warfare, and therefore always result in human suffering of an indescribable magnitude.
It soon becomes clear that the so-called freedom and democracy the West likes to promote only applies to a very select group of wealthy populations in the West. The rest of the world must suffer under the terror of Western imperialism. In fact, even in the West this so-called freedom appears to be applied selectively when we consider the journalist, Julian Assange, who is currently being tortured in a British prison because he dared to expose the murderous face of American imperialism for all of us to see. The same goes for all the innocent people being tortured and abused in the US prison at Guantanamo Bay.
In sum, my advice to all of you is that whenever our mainstream media covers the wars involving the US without questioning its presence in sovereign countries and the motivations behind these wars, you should be highly skeptical of the content of the message. Any media outlet that discusses US-led wars as a natural state of affairs should be dismissed as highly suspect. If you want to better understand the reasons behind the many wars in which the West is involved, I advise you to consult alternative media such as the phenomenal investigative journalism of The Grayzone, or to read books – and watch interviews – by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad and Michael Parenti.
Ignorance is no longer an option.
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No, ignorance isn’t now and never has been an option. Many of us as Americans have been quite aware of the evil our nation commits in our name. We have remained however steadfast in our belief we could return to first principles. The intent of our founding ancestors was that the establishment of a government by and for the people with the importance of unalienable rights being ascendant and self-evident was something to fight for for all people. This has not happened. We are now under the yoke of fascism along with the entire world. It is going to take the whole world to fix this.
All governments, corporations, institutions are now United by globalists to rule the world.