When a gruesome six-minute video of Ukrainian soldiers shooting and torturing handcuffed and tied up Russian soldiers circulated online, outraged people on social media and elsewhere compared this barbaric behavior to that of Daesh, and they were right.
Unable to conceal the war crime, and in a rare admission of moral responsibility, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, quickly publicly reminded, on social media, Ukrainian fighters of their responsibility under international law. “I would like to remind all our military, civilian and defense forces, once again, that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” he said, asserting that “We are a European army”, as if the latter is synonymous with civilized behavior.
Even that supposed claim of responsibility conveyed subtle racism, as if to suggest that non-westerners, non-Europeans, may carry out such grisly and cowardly violence, but certainly not the more rational, humane and intellectually superior Europeans.
The comment, though less obvious, reminds one of the racist remarks by CBS’ foreign correspondent, Charlie D’Agata, on February 26, when he shamelessly compared Middle Eastern cities with the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, stating that “Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, (…) this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city”.
The Russia-Ukraine war architected by Colonizers and Imperialist nations has been a stage of racist comments and behavior, some explicit and obvious, others implicit and indirect. Far from being implicit, however, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov, did not mince words when, last February, he addressed the issue of Ukrainian refugees. Europe can benefit from Ukrainian refugees, he said, because “these people are Europeans. (…) These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”
One of many other telling episodes that highlight American and European racism, but also continued denial of its grim reality, was an interview conducted by the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, with the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion Commander, Dmytro Kuharchuck. The latter’s militia is known for its far-right politics, outright racism and horrific acts of violence. Yet, the newspaper described Kuharchuck as “the kind of ‘fighter’ you don’t expect. He reads Kant and he doesn’t only use his bazooka.” If this is not the very definition of denial, what is? Because as far as I know, Kuharchuck is a hardcore neo-nazi with a swastika tattooed on his body and his book of reference is far from being any of Kant’s phisolophical writings but Mein Kampf, by his idol, Adolf Hitler. And yet…
That said, our proud European friends must be careful before supplanting the word ‘European’ with ‘civilization’ and respect for human rights. They ought not to forget their past or rewrite their history because, after all, racially-based slavery is a European and western brand. The slave trade, as a result of which millions of slaves were shipped from Africa during the course of four centuries, was very much European. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, 1.8 million people “died on the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade”. Other estimations put the number much higher.
Colonialism is another European quality. Starting in the 15th century, and lasting for centuries afterward, colonialism ravaged the entire Global South. Unlike the slave trade, colonialism enslaved entire peoples and divided whole continents, like Africa, among European spheres of influence.
The nation of Congo was literally owned by one person, Belgian King Leopold II. India was effectively controlled and colonized by the British East India Company and, later, by the British government. The fate of South America was largely determined by the US-imposed Monroe Doctrines of 1823. For nearly 200 years, this continent has paid – and continues to pay – an extremely heavy price of US colonialism and neocolonialism. No numbers or figures can possibly express the destruction and death toll inflicted by Western-European colonialism on the rest of the world, simply because the victims are still being counted. But for the sake of illustration, according to American historian, Adam Hochschild, ten million people have died in Congo alone from 1885 to 1908.
And how can we forget that World War I and II are also entirely European, leaving behind around 40 million and 75 million dead, respectively. (Other estimations are significantly higher). The gruesomeness of these European wars can only be compared to the atrocities committed, also by Europeans, throughout the South, for hundreds of years prior.
Mere months after The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949, the eager western partners were quick to flex their muscles in Korea in 1950, instigating a war that lasted for three years, resulting in the death of nearly 5 million people. The Korean war, like many other NATO-instigated conflicts, remains an unhealed wound to this day.
The list goes on and on, from the disgraceful Opium Wars on China, starting in 1839, to the nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945, to the destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, in 1954, 1959 and 1970 respectively, to the political meddling, military interventions and regime change in numerous countries around the world. They are all the work of the West, of the US and its ever-willing ‘European partners’, all done in the name of spreading democracy, freedom and human rights.
If it were not for the Europeans, Palestine would have gained its independence decades ago, and its people would have not been made refugees, suffering under the yoke of Zionist Israel.
If it were not for the US and the Europeans, Iraq would have remained a sovereign country and millions of lives would have been spared in one of the world’s oldest civilizations; and Afghanistan would have not endured this untold hardship. Even when the US and its European friends finally relented and left Afghanistan last year, they continue to hold the country hostage, by blocking the release of its funds, leading to actual starvation among the people of that war-torn country.
So before bragging about the virtues of Europe, and the demeaning of everyone else, the likes of Arestovych, D’Agata, and Petkov should take a look at themselves in the mirror and reconsider their unsubstantiated ethnocentric view of the world and of history.
In fact, if anyone deserves bragging rights it is those colonized nations that resisted colonialism and imperialism, like mine, the slaves that fought for their freedom, and the oppressed nations that resisted their American and European oppressors, despite the pain and suffering that such struggles entailed.
Sadly, for Europe, however, instead of using the Russia-Ukraine war as an opportunity to reflect on the future of the European project, whatever that is, it is being used as an opportunity to score cheap points against the very victims of Europe everywhere.
Once again, valuable lessons remain unlearned.
Furthermore, if we are going to have criminal prosecutions for war crimes, let’s do it right. Let’s prosecute all accused war criminals, Russian, American, Israeli, British, and so forth.
Why should we give a pass to any of them?
While there are calls for independent investigations into those allegations, the US and NATO member state governments have been pushing the claim that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine including the major war crime of invading another country, the unasked question in the US media is: Why hasn’t the US been kicked out of the Human Rights Council for similar war crimes that aren’t at all allegations, but are well documented fact? Why indeed, for all the accusations that Russian President Vladimir Putin is himself a war criminal responsible for all these crimes, haven’t a number of US presidents still living been accused of war crimes?
Let’s look once again at some of those crimes:
First and biggest, there is the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq posed no immediate threat to the US. Not even close the way Ukraine shares a 1300-mile border with Russia, Iraq had no navy, no long-range bombers or missiles and is located 7000 miles from the nearest US border.
That war, completely illegal, went unpunished, as did the people who ordered it: President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Not mentioning British war criminal Tony Blair, who is also responsible for doing Israeli dirty job in Palestine.
The same is true of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The excuse for that was was that the US wanted to hunt down and capture or destroy the Al Qaeda terrorist organization which was primarily based in Afghanistan, guests of that country’s Taliban government, which claimed not to know that the group and it leader, the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden, were plotting a terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Because this was not an attack by Afghanistan, and because the Taliban was ready to surrender Bin Laden and his accomplices if offered assurances that they would not be executed — an offer the US refused — there was no justification for that invasion o the 20-year war and occupation that followed it, whose aim shifted from pursuing Al Qaeda to ousting the Taliban from power.
The US & UK & France invasion of Libya and the overthrow and murder of its leader Muammar Qaddafy in 2011 was similarly a war crime, as, like the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq before it, was never sanctioned by any UN Security Council Vote, and because Libya posed no threat to the US, imminent or otherwise, as required under international law. Presidents Obama and Sarkozy, who ordered and carried that war, is also as much a war criminal as is President Putin.
It should also be pointed out that while the number of civilians killed in the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, horrible as they are, are being tallied in the hundreds at most to date, The US is directly responsible for 363,000 civilian deaths — many of them children — in the years since September 2001, most of them in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in numerous other illegal bombings of other countries targeted in what the US government has called the War on Terror. A string of presidents has been responsible for those criminal killings but none has even been charged.
President Trump, with his Tomahawk missile attacks on Syrian targets and his military attacks inside Syria is also a war criminal, as Syria too poses no threat to the US and military action against that country too has never been authorized by the United Nations.
Even the destruction we see every day on the news about Ukraine pales compared to the destruction that has been inflicted by the US upon Iraqi cities like Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq, or Raqqa in Syria.
Since neither the US, Israel nor Russia has ever agreed to accept the jurisdiction of the World Court, none of these criminal leaders — Putin nor Bush, Cheney, Obama, Trump, Netanyahu — will ever face a war crimes tribunal.
I understand that reality, but not the servile and ignorant howls of US citizens calling for sanctions and criminal proceedings against Russia and its leader Putin, but not for other European, American and Israeli war-criminal leaders who should be held to account for the far vaster war crimes that they have perpetrated in our names (and falsely declaring to be in defense of our freedoms) over the last more than two decades.
If nothing else, at least the US media, which boasts of its supposed freedom, tenacity and integrity, should at least reference the home team’s crimes while condemning the villain of the moment. It’s embarrassing to be a journalist these days where a 1960s Pravda-like squad of lickspittle stenographers posing as reporters dutifully report on Russia’s “latest crimes” in Ukraine without checking the veracity of the information press-released by Zelensky’s & Washington’s propaganda squads, while ignoring even the current crime of genocide being perpetrated with US-supplied planes and bombs against the people of Yemen, which for years now has been targeted by neighboring Saudi Arabia and Palestinians by Israeli brutal and unjust occupation for decades.
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