Quentin Poulsens ask if there is really any difference between the crimes of the past and those of today.
When we look back on the horrors of the past, the genocide of native peoples, the quashing of culture, the colonisation of stolen land, there is a tendancy to attribute such crimes to the ignorance, blind obedience and incapacity of the general populace.
In this way we disconnect and render ourselves immune from any real sense of guilt and responsibility. We live in more ‘civilised’ times, we assure ourselves. The age of barbarity is behind us.
But is there really any difference between the crimes of the past and those of today? Multitudes have perished as the result of wars in the Middle East, for example. Countless more have been wounded, displaced, bereaved of loved ones and otherwise traumatised.
The American occupation of Afghanistan is the longest foreign war in US history. Conflicts resulting from the invasion of Iraq have endured almost as long. That invasion, in violation of the United Nations Security Council and opposed by most of the world, was proved to be based on a falsity – even before it began.
Is the US not, therefore, behaving in much the same way as the white settlers did following their arrival in the Americas? But still we look on impassively, just as our forebears did two and three centuries ago. This is not the result of ignorance and blind obedience, for all the information is available to us, and if we are incapacitated it is only because we have failed to make a stand.
America’s involvement in the Vietnam war during the sixties and seventies led to one of the biggest anti-war movements in history. Multitudes took part in demonstrations all across the nation, regularly clashing with police. Celebrities got involved, politicians got involved, and finally even the veterans themselves got involved. Why no such reaction to the United States’ actions in the Middle East today?
Is it only because the draft has gone, and that far fewer Americans are returning home in body-bags? Or is it simply that the West has become desensitised? Could it be that such conflicts now appear as little more than reality TV shows, brought to us almost daily by the news channels, invariably with our own government’s slant on the issue?
Does Israel’s ongoing colonisation of Palestine not provide a mirror image of the ethnic cleansing which occurred in North America two and three centuries ago? Yet the US sends Israel billions of dollars in ‘aid’ each year; a substantial portion of which is used for the purchase of weapons. Is the US not, therefore, knowingly and deliberately repeating its crimes against its own native population?
It has taken Americans several generations to come to terms with their past.
How many generations more before they come to terms with the present? Probably, only when the last living witness has returned to molecular form, and all possible gain has been extracted by the perpetrator, will society as a whole ever be ready to come to terms with its crimes. By then it will be too late, of course, and those looking back from the future will undoubtedly dismiss it as the result of ignorance, blind obedience and the incapacity of the general populace. They will regard it as having occurred in an age less civilised; an age of barbarity.
America’s junior partner in the ‘Coalition of the Killing’ has never really been held accountable for its many crimes in the past, and for this reason, no doubt, Britain has gone on behaving in much the same way.
The ‘Great War’ was not a battle for ‘freedom and democracy.’ It was the culmination of the European scramble for colonies during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and in this respect Britain was very much to the fore.
It led directly to an even greater catastrophe two decades later, just as soon as a new generation of sacrificial lambs had been raised for the fighting. But the scramble for colonies has continued unabated.
So how is Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq any different to its actions of a century ago - except that it now rides along on America’s coat-tails? Is Britain not, therefore, knowingly and deliberately repeating its crimes of the imperial age?
And still no bad guys? We all know the villains of the Nazi regime. Many have been convicted and punished, as have various black African leaders and figures from the Yugoslav Wars.
How many Britons have been brought to trial for their crimes? Who has been made accountable for the genocides in Australia and New Zealand, the massacres in India and North Africa, and the concentration camps in South Africa and Kenya?
Some will assure you they know all this, that they learnt it at school – presumably due to the liberal nature of their society and its education system.
But they will do so with an air of superiority which is itself a relic of the imperial age. And they may do so with a defensive edge to their tone; warning that, while they themselves are cognisant of such matters, it would be impermissible for others to claim any insight.
And they may tell you, also, that it was all due to the ignorance, the blind obedience and the incapacity of the general populace; that these are more civilised times, and the age of barbarity is behind us.
*Poulsen is a former New Zealand journalist, currently living in Istanbul
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
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