Power and Glory, or should that be Gory?

Recent travels have put me in a reflective mood.

Trying to understand the fears which we live under, the arrogance of post colonialism, the sense of self-righteousness, the ongoing repression of indigenous people through the post colonial and currently recolonising world.

I was standing in an ancient cathedral in the Dutch city of Utrecht. A truly majestic building, it’s high soaring ceilings echoing the sounds from below, giving a sense of the etherial, a mysticism. The floor made up of slabs, engraved with the names of those who had fought to build this holy place, paid for through ‘indulgences’, the catholic fund-raiser used as an entry into heaven by paying in money to be forgiven the sins by which that wealth may have been acquired.

That was the time of The Holy Roman Empire which dominated much of Europe, incorporating the time of the Reformation when the power oft the Catholic Church was undermined, thanks to the invention of movable type and the printing press, making books such as the Bible available to those not restricted to the cloistered religious priesthood. The images of Christ were removed as Catholic icons were stripped from the building, but the building and its representation of reverence to the God of the Bible remained, and still remains.

But the history of that building goes back even further. It was built on the remains of a Roman fortress dating back over 2,000 years.

The ebb and flow of history encapsulated in that building mirrors so much of European history where empires waxed and waned, where religious power and political power went hand in hand, where dissent was quelled with violent repression.

Yet, the Netherlands survived. The free city of Utrecht remained and still today remains the free city of Utrecht.

The Dutch have survived invasion after invasion.

When we consider other European nations, they too have gone through times of violence and upheaval, the ebb and flow of history, power struggles, the quest for dominance in the competitive world of Empire Building.

The end of the war in Europe in 1944 and the reconstruction that followed has seen a unification of Europe, especially so in Western Europe, starting with the Treaty of Rome in 1957 which laid the foundation for what today is the EU, the European Union, which has seen the opening of borders, a common currency and integration of the formerly disparate economies.

An interesting question posed to a number of people I met along the way was whether they felt more Dutch or European, and the answers inevitably was Dutch, but also European. I asked a German friend the same question getting the same answer, German, but also European.

In part, the long history of conflict throughout Europe, dating back to the time of the Romans, necessitated the development of defensive and offensive technologies, and this in part led to what became the industrial revolution. Technological developments in ship building, and weaponry, powered by the quest for supremacy both within Europe and also globally in building and defending expansive empires.

The devastation of wars in Europe has seen the continent come together in what could be seen as The United States of Europe, and as The United States of America, the beneficiaries of empires which have stretched across oceans and continents.

The sense of supremacy, whether it is through the colour of skins, commonality of histories, the dogma of religion or of language, that attitude, the sense of superiority is common to both versions, The United States of Europe as well as of America.

This was so well demonstrated in the carve up of the Ottoman Empire during and after the First World War. In David Fromkin’s study of that ‘negotiation’, A Peace to End all Peace, the carving up of the region into what are now supposedly nation states, with little or no negotiation because as various leaders involved, government leaders of nations which included to most productive colonies, who governed not just nations, but the empires they ruled. These then provided the wealth and privileges that these entailed, believed that those ‘Arabs’ could not run countries, did not have the intellect; the skills to govern. As a result, that region has not seen peace since the end of World War I.

Included was the commitment to the British taking Palestine and developing it into a Jewish homeland. The Prime Minister was Lloyd George, who was “…only the latest in a long line of Christian Zionists in Britain that stretched back to the Puritans and the era in which the Mayflower set sail for the New World. Promised lands were still much thought about in those days, whether in the United States or in Palestine.” (A Peace to End All Peace, page 268).

The long history of having successfully retained their lands despite repeated invasions, their ability to govern nations which controlled greater wealth than had ever been accumulated, to have an industrial and agricultural base, naval and military power which ruled the seven seas and kept restive occupied populations in check, placed them above those ‘others’ who had not achieved such ‘success’, principally because they were not white, and dare I say, Christian European.

It is easy to look at a new found land with no fences, with no permanent structures, with a population which does not have the sophistication of those who have landed, to see them as not using the land effectively, not producing wealth, as a lesser people, a people whose lands are there for the taking.

The culture of superiority is formed through the history lived, and a history which demonstrates survival after thousands of years of invasion and repulsion, of loss and reclaiming that which was lost, the religious ethos which places a people as ‘God’s Chosen’, based on mythologies which are as old as time, allows an attitude of taking lands as their ‘manifest destiny’, a term used to break treaty after treaty with indigenous people of North America, as European settlers took the lands which are now The United States of America as their right since they saw it as God’s promised lands.

No thought given to the people who had lived there for countless generations, their culture, their connection to the land, their ‘farming’ practices, seeing the earth as a source of life, rather than a resource for the enrichment of the colonisers. That lack of consideration, the lack of seeing the humanity in the indigenous peoples enabled the genocide of those people. A pattern repeated throughout the colonial expansion since the time of Christopher Columbus.

Ignorance and an unwillingness to learn who these indigenous people were led to savage atrocities. Part of the ‘dehumanising’ of them included accusations of cannibalism, a charged levelled at the Hawaiians after the death of Captain Cook, but also as the various American Indian wars progressed from 1850 till 1890 in the westward expansion of the US.

“The clear purpose of the charge of cannibalism was to put the Indian beyond the limits of civilisation, which is probably why documented instances of settler cannibalism such as occurred in Jamestown in 1609, were often ignored.” (Empires of Violence, page 73).

The question of the origin of scalping is also disputed. In fact: Respected traditionalists, including the nineteenth-century Tuscarora sachem, Yuntana Nire (‘Chief Elias Johnson’ 1837-1913) and the Twentieth-century Cayunga sachem, Teiohonwe;thon (‘Chief Jacob Thomas’ Cayunga, 1922-98), heatedly repudiated scalping as a pre-contact practice… he stated that contrary to common belief, it was Europeans who introduced scalping to the Iroquois during the Beaver Wars of the Seventeen-century. In 1881, Yutana Nire likewise disclaimed scalping, specifically because the custom appears nowhere in the extensive oral base of Iroquoian tradition. (Ibid, page 72)

Scalping, it is further claimed, was introduced when a price, a bounty was placed on Indians. The scalp delivered as proof of the killing.

European violence during that time had a particularly vindictive side.

“It does not hurt to recall what European executions involved. In North American colonies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people were drawn and quartered, pressed to death, disembowelled, broken on the wheel, mutilated and dismembered, as well as hung from a slip-knotted cord for a lingering, uncertain death. In Europe, counterfeiters, sodomites, heretics and witches were still being burned at the stake, while torture was practiced even if it was falling into disuse. The English were also not averse to torturing and dismembering Indigenous Americans at times of war.” (Ibid, page 74).

Included in the book Empires of Violence is a study of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and North Africa, where intimidation of invaded peoples included burning villages as a warning to neighbouring villages to be compliant to the wishes of the invaders. Similar strategies were carried out during WWII by the Nazi invaders where the death of a German soldier in occupied regions meant the taking of at least ten innocent lives in retribution.

The settlement of Australia shows that same disregard for humanity, not just in the treatment of Aboriginal people, but also the contempt shown for those who were sent to the largest outdoor prison which has ever been, all because the emerging social system in Britain could not provide for the least of its people and there was a ‘totally unoccupied’ continent available. A vacant land, far from home, an ideal place to house the unwanted.

But Europe today is peaceful. The United States of Europe.

However, the collapse of empires after WWII, due in large part to the cost of maintaining them meant that those who were ‘too ignorant to govern themselves’, somehow had to govern themselves, and war after war occurred, corruption in governments, the violent put down of dissent, the rapacious greed of those who assumed power.

It seemed the colonised had learned well, having seen their countries used to enrich their Imperial overlords, the violence of repressions.

I spoke about this to a person on my beach walk this morning and she pointed to Zimbabwe and how that has turned out, the implication being that Zimbabwe proves the point made time and again that good governance was only able to be achieved by the European colonisers whose very intent was to enrich themselves at the expense of the colonised. Power in Zimbabwe came through a corrupt system closely resembling the Imperial model it replaced.

Other post colonial governments have been as rapacious, as violent to opposition as demonstrated in Zimbabwe, each having learned that power comes through violent repression of opposition and the rapacious accumulation of wealth for those in power.

The attitude of superiority persists today with the greatest remaining empire, The United States of America which is actively supported by the former imperialist colonisers, the EU and Britain. There is some tension with threats to undermine NATO, but the attitude of superiority persists.

The unquestioned support for the ongoing holocaust in Gaza and the West Bank where the ‘unworthy’ Palestinians and Bedouin people are stripped of any ability to survive, are being starved out of existence, the places they lived in reduced to rubble while the ‘civilised’ world of Christian Europeans are complicit in their support for Israel, both diplomatically and in the supply of weapons to continue the conflict, even as it spills over into Lebanon and Syria.

The ignoring of other conflicts where those ‘too ignorant to form governments’, the conflicts in Africa, Central and South America and Asia remain under-reported despite the length conflicts and the of human costs involved.

Failure to consider why there is a flood of immigration, as people seek to find safe places to live, the destruction of Syria, the violence and poverty of Central America, survivors of civil wars and conflicts in Africa, religious repression in Myanmar to mention just a few, fuels the numbers of stateless refugees seeking safety. Immigrants are not welcome, ‘go back to where you came from’, with no thought given to the inhumane conditions which drive the need to leave from those places.

‘Everyone Who is Gone is Here’, is a book by Jonathan Blitzer considering ‘The United States, Central America, and the making of a crisis’, which continues today as capitalist greed has displaced people and continues to do so in Central America ably supported by successive American governments and Presidents going back to the the formation of the State of Panama, taken from Colombia to build the Panama Canal in 1903 so the US could build and control the canal and the revenue it raised.

The continued threats made against Cuba and other Central and South American republics, whether to stop the flow of drugs into America or just for the sake of demonstrating American superiority, American power.

The ongoing war against Iran and the language used to describe Iranian leaders as less than human. The Iranian inability to govern effectively, to be a good global citizen, when the rise of the Islamic Republic was the direct result of Western interference in Iranian politics going back to the overthrow of the democratically elected socialist government in 1953, all because that government wanted to use the profits of their resources for the benefit of the Iranian people rather than the corporate interests of the petrochemical industry and their investors.

China had the nerve to send a long range missile into the Pacific recently, much to the consternation of Fiji and Australia. China is seen as a threat, yet it has not shown any intention of creating an Empire, of colonising, or even threatening other nations, possibly with the exception of Taiwan which used to be part of China. The intent of the rocket was to show its defensive power to America which has about 70 military bases in the Pacific from Japan to Australia. No shipping activity, whether commercial or naval goes undetected.

China has nuclear weapons, it has the second largest military in the world, and it is defensive, not offensive, despite fears which may want to see that differently. Much the same with North Korea and its nuclear and missile programme.

The fear of threats from China in particular have been used to build alliances, such as AUKUS, but when we consider the main ally, the US, we see the one surviving imperial power, cajoling support to retain that power, and we fall in line. We too are the product of imperialism, the mindset of superiority and the fear of having that challenged, even by our largest trading power, suckered us into a deal which is essentially benefitting just one member of the alliance, the USA.

Power, throughout history power has been used to invade other countries, to expand empires, to subjugate people, to plunder lands so as the enrich the invaders. And rivers of blood have flowed in that quest for power and wealth, for the taking of lands under whatever pretext, but most commonly because of some perceived notion that it is ordained by some god or other, that the acquisition is because the invaders are god’s people, or it is their manifest destiny to commandeer the land.