George Bernard Shaw once said that: "When an Englishman wants something, he never publicly admits to his wanting it, instead, his want is expressed as a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants. Hypocrisy was added to brutality while the robbery went on."
When one of the British Nabobs returned from India with his great fortune stolen from India through the British Indian sovereignty called the Raj, his wife asked him what he had learned in India. He said, that he had learned to lie with a straight face, to deceive and delude indigenous people for his own gain
As we have seen, kingdom after kingdom has been annexed by the simple expedient of offering its ruler a choice between annihilation in war or a comfortable life in subjugation.
In 1930, an American historian and philosopher, Will Durant traveled to India for the first time. He had embarked on a journey around the world to write his great book, The Story of Civilization. He was filled with shock and indignation at what he learned of Britain's conscious and deliberate beheading of India, the greatest crime in all history. His book, The Case for India, is a classic, a profound and empathetic work of compassion and outrage that ripped apart the self-serving justifications of the British for their long term and shameless record of rapacity in India.
The East India Company was a despotic oligarchy of merchants who had usurped the sovereignty of a nation. The Company was a classic example of a military patronage state, which distributed its patronage to itinerate bands of warriors without regard to any formal institutional structures. This led to pillage and extortion as the troops advanced, only adding to the suffering and deprivation of the Indian population. They had the license to loot everything they could lay their hands on, which was certainly not a British contribution to good governance in India.
The East India Company finally collapsed in 1948 much to the non-violent Quit India campaign led by the Mahatma, great soul of Gandhi. Gandhi could embarrass the British, but not overthrow them. It was when Indian soldiers who had sworn loyalty to the British Crown rebelled during World War II, and when sailors of the British Indian Navy mutinied in 1945 and fired their own canons at British port installations that the British realized that the colonial game was over. t
Globalization and its modern day successor of American empire remain the predominant instruments of rapacious capitalism. Since 1492 and Columbus's rape and pillage of Haiti, in order to steal their gold, American empire has for over 500 hundred years consistently overthrown hundreds of progressive governments that were sincerely committed to growing their economies and fighting poverty. Instead, we have supported tyrants and the Malthusian madness of killing millions of innocent people, in endless wars around the world. Today, American empire and its neo-colonial villainies operate oppressive military bases in 172 countries.
There is enormous hypocrisy surrounding the pious veneration that our country and war criminals like John Bolton and Elliot Abrams attempts to claim, when it states that we are spreading democracy. In Venezuela we are now witnessing the latest illegal predation, the latest hypocrisy and lies of empire. Since the drop of world oil prices in 2013, American empire has been injecting rampant inflation into Venezuela by stopping the flow of their legally earned commodity of petro-dollars and gold into the country. More than eighty countries, including Mexico support the right of sovereignty of Venezuela. Any act of insurgence or hostility orchestrated by the CIA and Stratfor would be in direct violation of the United Charter on sovereignty.
Since 9/11, we have a new iteration of war, a new heresy hunt, the war on terror, the economic looting of Iraq and the Middle East by multinational corporations, that has become a war against the liberties of those countries and the liberties of Americans. In such a world of prevarication and conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus stated, not to be on the side of the executioners.
There may be a statute of limitations on colonial and the wrongdoings of empire, but there is no limitation on human memory, especially living memory. In the 1952 movie, High Noon, the Marshall of a small town, played by Gary Cooper, struggles with his conflict of conscience of standing up alone to a murderous gang that has returned to the town to kill him. Cooper stands as the principled man who stands alone against the cowards of the town who were too frightened to help him. The movie was a subtle parable of the time about the blacklisted film writers of Hollywood and the heresy hunt of Communism that was part of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. One man stood up against great odds and destroyed the four murderous men, and only then did the cowed towns' people come out from hiding to join him.
British schoolchildren must learn the horrors of colonialism and what built their country, just as Americans must learn the awful reality of American empire and what their forefathers did, just as German children are shepherded to concentration camps to witness the horrors of what their forefathers did.
This is empire's high noon!
We all need to be protestors against empire and the false precepts neo-colonialism. We need to be active apostles for peace in a world long since gone mad with violence and the iron heal of despotism. Martin Luther King so rightly said that, "the evils of capitalism and its ability to destroy democracy are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of racism."
'Man is not the enemy of man, but through a false system of government." Thomas Paine
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