Henry Mountbatten-Windsor, known to supporters of the British monarchy as “Prince Harry”, has casually admitted to killing 25 people while flying an Apache attack helicopter in Afghanistan. He didn’t, he writes in his new autobiography, Replacementthink of them as “people.”
The war in Afghanistan, started by the United States, was an illegal war. Estimates of the number of lives lost due to the US-led, NATO-backed invasion range from 176,000 to 360,000. The lowest estimate breaks down as follows: 52,839 opposition fighters, 69 095 soldiers and police and 46,319 civilians.
The United States and its NATO allies, including the United Kingdom, have been responsible for millions of deaths since the end of World War II. There are credible estimates of the number of deaths resulting from the US-led invasion of Iraq that exceed one million people, mostly civilians. The Vietnam War claimed more than two million lives. Once again, the vast majority were civilians.
Even Human Rights Watch, a very pro-Western organization, has admitted numerous civilian casualties of the NATO bombing campaign in Libya. Up to 20,000 civilians have also been killed in US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen.
Of course, the trail of destruction left by the US is not just a matter of lives lost to bombs and weapons. The United States uses sanctions as a key weapon in its geopolitical dispute, and around the world, numerous lives have been lost due to lack of access to food, medicine, and other essential items as a result of the sanctions.
The United States is also indirectly responsible for the loss of vast numbers of lives through its support of brutal regimes, such as the tyrannical states that operate out of Tel Aviv and Riyadh. The United States provided direct support to the Jakarta regime during the left-wing mass murders in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 that left around a million people dead.
The United States also supported numerous bloodthirsty dictatorships during the Cold War, especially in Latin America and Africa. The United States has organized a large number of coups against elected governments since 1945. The coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, after which the semi-fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet was installed, is one of the most notorious, but there were many, many others. The United States continues to organize and support coups today, like the one in Bolivia in 2019.
The news that Mountbatten-Windsor claimed 25 lives from an attack helicopter has revived memories of the Iraq war footage Chelsea Manning leaked to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The footage shows civilians and a journalist being killed from a helicopter while some US soldiers laugh.
In light of the videos bravely released by Manning and Assange, we cannot assume that the 25 people killed by Mountbatten-Windsor were all enemy combatants. There is a general silence in the Western media about the horrific abuse Manning and Assange have suffered at the hands of the US and UK.
The double standards in the Western media about the rivers of blood that stem from military and other actions by the US and NATO are almost unbelievably stark. The West is consistently portrayed as a moral force in global affairs and the stain of murder is rarely attached to its leaders. George W. Bush, who led the catastrophic war in Iraq, appears as a kind old man who enjoys his new hobby: painting watercolours.
When former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright died last year, numerous obituaries described her as a trailblazer for women, as a feminist icon of sorts. In a 1996 television interview, she was asked the following question: “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] the children have died. I mean, it’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is it worth the price? His response: “I think it’s a very difficult choice, but we think the price is worth it.”
One can only try to imagine how an African or Arab woman making a similar comment about the death of white children would have been treated in the Western media.
All of this poses an uncomfortable problem for South Africans. It is clear that most of our white compatriots have a very strong identification with the West, they see it as a force for good and they think that South Africa should fully identify with it.
Of course, there are black people who share these pro-Western views, but this is far from the uniform case and many black people’s sympathies lie with the victims of Western violence, from Palestine to Vietnam.
In our media, Greg Mills is often taken as a major voice in international affairs. Mills, who worked as a “special adviser” to a NATO commander in Afghanistan, runs the Oppenheimer family’s foundation, the Brenthurst Foundation. His board includes the former Chief of the Defense Staff in the UK and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US. The Brenthurst Foundation could hardly be more integrated with NATO and the US and UK militaries.
As Clayson Monyela has pointed out, unsurprisingly, the foundation is deeply concerned about the war in Ukraine, in which the United States and NATO are involved by proxy, but it does not share the same concerns about the war in Yemen or the oppression in course of the Palestinians. We might add that there is a similar silence about the war in Ethiopia.
There is simply no way that a commenter similarly embedded in the military of a non-Western state would be treated, as Mills is, as a credible independent commentator.
But disturbingly, the Western biases evident in Mills’s work are evident in much of our media. We are an African country and yet the wars in Ethiopia and Yemen, which have claimed more lives than the war in Ukraine, are largely ignored. The lives of the people in Ethiopia and Yemen clearly don’t count for much to most of our media.
Robert Sobukwe of the Pan Africanist Congress, one of our great intellectuals, hoped for a future in which being African was not a matter of skin colour. Today, this vision of the future seems like a romantic dream. Not only are many, if not most, of our white compatriots stridently pro-Western, but critics of the West are often treated as irrational and immoral, even supporters of hateful non-Western regimes, as if one could not, for example, be critical at the same time. from the states of the USA and Russia.
This opens a serious gap in the making of our nation, since it appears that many whites are, in terms of their political identities, permanent settlers who identify as part of the West. Very few identify with Africa and the broader non-Western world.
The news about the Mountbatten-Windsor “death count” is deeply sickening. How will our white compatriots respond? Will there be evasion or even justification? Or will there be some kind of acceptance that the West is not, as it claims to be, the enlightened force to which we must all swear allegiance?
