The West managed to build its wealth, including the social nets, on plunder, deception, slavery and countless holocausts on all continents of the world. Its citizens are ignorant about these facts. Their standards of living are outrageously high, but they demand more. There is no “Left” in the West, anymore, because true left means internationalism and solidarity.
Standing in front of the Italian Parliamentarians at the elegant House of Representatives in Rome, I felt suddenly slightly dizzy. I am used to speaking at countless government venues, at the universities and television stations.
But this time, it was different.
After all, this was one of the powerhouses of the West’s political establishment. Yes, of course, on the surface, many people here were ready and willing to attack, even destroy NATO. Most of those who gathered here were antagonistic to the Empire and its crimes committed all over the world. But still, this was the Parliament of Italy, protected by the state’s security apparatus, as “official” a place as it gets anywhere in Europe.
On the stage, on my left side sat a Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan from Belfast, and on my right, an Italian MP, Alessandro di Battista, a renowned politician from the “5-Star Movement”.
[ms-protect-content id=”544″]I was asked to deliver a speech, approximately 20 minutes long, exposing countless crimes that the NATO has been committing all over the world.
This itself was an unexpected occurrence. And the fact that I was allowed to say exactly what I had on my mind, and say it here in Europe (which I consider to be one of the most censored parts of the world) was just short of a miracle.
I began, speaking about two tiny girls that I encountered in the middle of freezing Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, near the Syrian border – two Syrian refugee girls suffering from malnutrition.
I told my audience about horrific crimes against humanity first performed by Europe, and then by its bellicose offspring – the United States. I threw in some numbers that I used when writing my book, On Western Terrorism – From Hiroshima to Drone, with my friend Noam Chomsky, a book that was just recently translated into the Italian language. The numbers came from my work with several renowned statisticians: the West murdered, directly and indirectly, between 40 and 50 million people, between 1945 and now. Those who died were almost exclusively from the neo-colonies, countries destroyed by the Empire, simply because they dared to stand on its way to the total domination of the world.
The West slaughtered several hundreds of millions of people in its colonies, and one of my statistician friends actually believes that the accumulative number for the entire history stands near one billion.
As I spoke, on several occasions I was interrupted, not by a barrage of rotten eggs, but by loud applause. That I found bizarre, almost incomprehensible!
Wherever I was lately delivering my speeches, be it in Rome, at the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing or in Moscow, I had been repeating the same thing, at least once: I am against free medical care, free education and those lavish social benefits given to the citizens of the European Union.
It is not because I am against the social benefits as such – far from it!
I am for either the universal system of social benefits, or for the benefits disbursed in the countries that are not plundering the rest of the world; countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, China, Vietnam or Iran.
Europe loots, murders and destroys beyond its borders, and then rewards its citizens with millions of tons of tasty carrots. First, of course, it gives the best pieces to its corporations, but there is plenty left for the common folks, too. They don’t think it is plenty, they want more and more, but there is really an abundant amount of them!
In Europe, and in the West in general, there is that eerie certainty that the white race and the Western culture are exceptional, that the people inhabiting both Europe and North America have actually some unquestionable rights given to them to destiny, to demand and expect more than other people should, and that if the enormous number of things and benefits are not delivered to them flawlessly, then they have right to take them by force.
It is by all means a religious, a fundamentalist concept, and it is hardly ever challenged or analysed; it is just taken for granted.
And under it, under this concept, billions of “un-people” (to borrow from the Orwell’s lexicon) are being squashed, robbed and enslaved. Billions are being exploited. The pain of “un-people” that is reflected in their shouts is hair-raising, but the Western media and indoctrination/control system makes sure that their voices are hardly ever heard. And the Western public is happily hiding its head in the sand. “Not to know,” means that the plunder can continue, and the booty can flow uninterrupted into those insatiable nations and individuals of the West.
Only those who really dare to face the truth can hear and see. But it is not safe. They have to come very, very close. If they come too close, if they cross the line, they die.
This is of course nothing new.
Europe is built on corpses – on hundreds of millions of them.
It would take one entire multi-volume encyclopedia to compile and describe all crimes against humanity committed by the West.
Noam Chomsky and I really tried.
And after I finished talking, writing and filming with him, I hit the road and for more than 3 years I travelled to all places of the world, from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania to Latin America, visiting almost each and every country where the West has been literally liquidating people, diverting and overthrowing brave revolutionary and patriotic movements.
The result is my 840-page book Exposing Lies Of The Empire.
The book weighs several kilograms; it is a meticulous and first-hand account of the global chaos and tragedy. It does not only make you cry and howl, it also makes you laugh (because of absurdity of the arrangement of the neo-colonialism), and it makes you swear.
The book represents only the beginning. I would be delivering new and new volumes, because the topic could never be fully exhausted.
Without compiling all horrors that the Western empires committed, no solution could be found for the humanity to move forward!
British crimes in Sub-Continent, man made famines that took tens of millions of human lives. Torture and humiliation, rape of both women and men on several parts of the world… African slave trade, conducted by both British Crown and the French!
Horrors of French colonialism and neo-colonialism performed in Africa, Asia, Caribbean and Oceania.
Belgian genocide in what is now the Dominican Republic of Congo. 10 million deaths, during King Leopold II… and now again!
Dutch plunder of what is now Indonesia.
German holocaust in Namibia, including cutting of heads and sending them to the University of Freiburg and several Berlin hospitals, to prove that Africans are inferior and therefore, dispensable.
All those “cultural institutions”; theaters, opera houses, train stations, museums, parks, hospitals and schools; all built on human corpses, amalgamated by vast oceans of dried human blood, accumulated throughout the centuries.
Same as churches, cathedrals and palaces housing bishops, cardinals, even ordinary priests. I saw them everywhere: from Samoa and Marshall Islands, to Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Honduras.
The looting of land of colonised people, brutal theft of natural resources, then slave labour or outright slavery, often even direct extermination campaigns, if it was convenient to the Western empires.
The list of crimes is endless. Ignorance in Europe and North America is stunning.
Now look at London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid or Washington – not one single mass demonstration demanding immediate return of the colonial booty. Not one protest, demanding respect for those who had been terrorised by the West, for long centuries, even millennia.
Nobody seems to have any appetite to comprehend who really created those “Muslim terrorists’, those monsters that Washington, London and Paris actually meticulously manufactured, in order to have some “big” enemy again, after they liquidated the Soviet Union.
Unless all past and present crimes of the West get calculated and remunerated, no permanent global solution and peace could be reached.
The West has been living, for hundreds of years, from stolen money, from deception and labour of the others. It had been applying destructive force, terrorising defenseless men, women and children all over the world.
Unless all this is exposed, unless the crimes stop, all global financial calculations and forecasts are simply grotesque, hypocritical, and even outrightly criminal. They are like some backroom calculations of a mafia clan, analysing its incomes from extortions and schemes, only worse, only on a much larger scale.
In Rome, I declared that the Western Left is finished; it died several decades ago.
True left is essentially internationalist, based on solidarity. If it only cares for its people and their welfare, it is as immoral as the colonial regimes.
Again, I received loud ovations.
But I don’t believe in them!
I know the same people who were publicly supporting my speech went later home, living their sheltered and fully subsidised lives. While the Syrians, Iraqis, Afghani and Libyan citizens, as well as the citizens of dozens of other nations, have been trying to survive horrors unleashed against them by the Empire.
Fortunately, now there are alternatives. The victims should immediately abandon hope and trust in all Western deceptive concepts, and join alternative political and financial institutions that are proposed and constructed by Russia, China, by the BRICS and Latin American countries.
Another world is definitely possible. This time it is not the world of some NGO’s and fragmented activist groups, but the world of strong governments and nations, united in their desire not to succumb to the Western banditry.
Colonialism can be finally defeated. But from “outside”, not from “within”. And it is clear that it could be defeated only by some powerful alliance forged by the victims. Definitely not by the Gandhi way, but by Russian, Chinese, Cuban or Venezuelan example!
About the Author
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: Exposing Lies Of The Empire and Fighting Against Western Imperialism. Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website (andrevltchek.weebly.com) or his Twitter(@AndreVltchek).
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