Colonial occupation forces at first glance appear to have left the world, but if we look a little closer, this is not the case either. The United Nations tries to police the world. Yet if we look at its composition it is not a world body, but dominated by Western nations - the United States, Britain, France and Russia - which constitute the permanent members of the UN Security Council. These are the same old primary colonial powers of the earlier part of the century. The United States itself often unilaterally takes upon itself the role of policing the world. While it calls this enforcing democracy and human rights, it is often little more than protecting American vital interests, which are economic, as in the case of the Gulf War where no democracy was being defended (no country in the region being a democracy!). Economic interests mean the freedom of affluent countries to enter into and exploit poor countries for their raw materials. Or let us take the example of Tibet. The West makes a feeble protest about the Chinese destruction of this venerable culture, but quickly bows down before the greater economic interests of trade with China.

Military colonialism continues not so much will the exporting of armies as with the selling of weapons. The United States remains the greatest arms supplier to the world, selling weapons of mass destruction mainly to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, and then wants to enforce its human rights code against weaker countries that have no vital economic interests for it. A weapons seller, like a drug dealer, can hardly claim to represent human rights or morality, or be any kind of a role model. In fact it is now known that CIA arms shipments to Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Laos were funded by drug money from the heroin trade. This is the dark force behind much of Western values and global interests and its talk of human rights.

For example, recently Western countries have taken out patents on medicinal plants that are indigenous to other parts of the world, as if someone could own the wealth of nature itself. Clearly military colonialism is not dead, but only subdued and redirected. Should economic domination fail then the colonial armies may come out again to protect their economic interests as the world already witnesses when the oil supply is threatened.

 [ Back ] [ David Frawley ] [ Up ] [ Next ]