newsFor war victims around the world – Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ else to lose
A victim of a bombing raid in Afghanistan – This child in a wheel-chair might – or might not – recover to live a normal life.
By Guest Writer of the month – Dr. Derek Summerfield
Following Herr Trump’s denigratory remarks last week, there has been much in the newspapers in deference to the 457 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan about their ‘sacrifice’ for ‘freedom.’ For whom was this ‘sacrifice’ and whose ‘freedom’ exactly was at stake? The freedom the Western political order feels it has to bomb whomever they want, to start wars and to invade far-off foreign countries who were not threatening us? Since WW2 Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Serbia,, Yemen, Somalia, Syria . . . spring to mind. ‘Forever‘ wars.
Some of the 457 British soldiers who died in Afghanistan
There were179 British military personnel killed in the invasion of Iraq in 2002. Estimates for Iraqi deaths, largely civilians, depending on how computed, but some figures are above one million. This may include the the knock-on effects within Iraqi society and more widely in the region. Foreign occupations typically produce schisms within the occupied society – in Iraq’s case the 2003 invasion provoked a Sunn i-Shiite civil war. Remember WW2, there were civil wars in Greece and Italy immediately following the end of German occupation. What have these millions of deaths weighed on the scales by which the Western order measures its interests. One million are as light as a feather (like the 100,000 in Gaza), Chomsky wrote that there is ‘us’ and there is the ‘in-people. whose ‘sacrifices’ and ‘freedoms’ don’t count.
179 versus one million captures the essence of a colonial dynamic that can be dated back to the First Crusades and then globally in 1492, et seq. The ages of Empire and slavery. And commonly, holocaustic declines in population following the White Man’s arrival. By 1800 the population of Africa is estimated to have been half of what it would have been without the several hundred years of slavery on an industrial scale.
Aimee Cesaire – Martinican poet and politician who founded the movement of Negritude
Regarding Western imperialism and colonisation, Aimee Cesaire (who influenced Franz Fanon) put it best: “They talk to me about progress, about ‘achievements,’ disease cured, improved standards of living. I am talking of societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.’
Can we detect any real note of embarrassment or mortification, never mind shame, in the West about what we have inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraqi societies by invading, bombing and occupying by mass murder? I can’t, Western self-esteem is undentable, our self- absorption totalising.
About the author:
Dr. Derek Summerfield grew-up in then then colonial Rhodesia and later studied medicine at St Mary’s Hospital, London. He was a government medical officer in the last stages of the war which created Zimbabwe in 1980. He was a strong supporter of the Sandinista socialist revolution in Nicaragua from 1979. He had three spells of field work out there with peasant victims of US-supported Contra guerillas, and studied war disabled men from both sides. He was principal psychiatrist at the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, London, in the 1990s and a consultant to Oxfam during the Bosnian war and in the Far East whilst a research associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. The last third of his clinical career was in HIV at Maudsley Hospital London. He has written and campaigned on Israel-Palestine since 1992, in particular concerning the complicity with torture by Israeli doctors in defiance of all international ethical codes.