by ANDRE VLTCHEK
“An account in 1884 describes the actions of an officer known as Fievez taken against those who refused to collect rubber or failed to meet their quota: ‘I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people… but that allowed five hundred others to live.'” (p166) Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost—A story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa PHOTO/Ultimate History Project TEXT/World Socialist Web Site
Many North American intellectuals have this ongoing love affair with everything that is European, particularly with the European ‘social system’ and ‘European culture’.
It is a deadly, shameful obsession; partially based on a desperate desire to maintain the belief that the West is not finished, yet, and that to a great extent it is still superior to the rest of the world. Europe is portrayed as ‘unique’, as different to the United States, as something that is worth admiring… or at least its past and its essence.
It is never propounded or defined like that, of course, but this belief (and yes, it really resembles a religious faith) indirectly points out that it is quite legitimate that the West (or at least a big part of the West) continues its rule over our planet.
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But let us go back to that European ‘social system’ – the holy cow of the great majority of North America’s left:
It has not been built by the exertions and honest labor of the European people. Anyone who bothers to look and study those maps of the world depicting our planet up to WWII would understand the reality, in just a few seconds.
That famed ‘social system’ it is built on the enslavement of colonized peoples; it is built on the unimaginable horrors visited on those hundreds of millions of men, women and children, who were slaughtered mercilessly by the colonial European powers. It is built through oppression, terror, and almost exclusively, on theft and plunder.
To admire it, is like admiring some brutal thuggish oligarch, who has amassed huge wealth by extortion and open plunder, built a gigantic palace and provided his family or his village with free medical care, education, some theatres, libraries and parks.
European colonialists ‘opened the veins’ of Latin America. They stole everything they could lay their hands on; in what is now Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and so many other places in Latin America.
They murdered everybody, unlike the US neo-colonialists, but 100% of the people, as happened during the French reign of places like Grenada or (near 100%) in the Polynesian Easter Islands.
Europe committed slaughters that are unimaginable in today’s times, like those by the Belgian king, Leopold II, who was responsible for around 10 million lost lives in Congo, in the days when Congo had just a fraction of the population that it has now.
And at present again, EU companies are responsible, together with US companies, of course, for another bloodletting of near to 10 million Congolese people (in DRC); simply because that unfortunate country is very rich in strategic minerals like Coltan and uranium, that those greedy Westerners simply cannot control their cravings. The West supports murderous regimes in Rwanda and Uganda that are killing and plundering on its behalf, by manipulating mass media, and creating insane historical narratives about the 1994 genocide… The French are openly plotting to carve off the mineral rich East Kivu from DRC, and to give it to Rwanda, so it could be ravaged in a much more organized way.
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