= The blessings and peace of Allah on Prophet Muhammad, his Family, and his Companions. =
1.
Shortly after the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, Bush and his government (shown below) declared what they called called ‘the war on terror‘. As it was feared and and as it turned out it was a the war of terror.
Quoted:
The numbers are staggering. These statistics, nameless and faceless, attempt to quantify the costs of two decades of wars and interventions initiated by the United States after [ □ comment: after the alledged and by now refuted] al Qaeda’s stunning act of mass murder on Sept. 11, 2001. Statistics from watson.brown.edu Shortlink No Coincidence – NB: Sept. 11, 2001 was an inside job!
2.
HUMAN COST: OVER 929,000
The number of people killed directly in the violence of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere are approximated here. Several times as many civilians have died due to the reverberating effects of these wars.
PEOPLE DISPLACED: 38 MILLION
38 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanstan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.
U.S. BUDGETARY COSTS: $8 TRILLION
The vast economic impact of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere is poorly understood by the U.S. public and policymakers. This paper estimates the budgetary costs of war, including past expenditures and future obligations to care for veterans of these wars.
From 2018 to 2020, the U.S. government undertook what it labeled “counterterrorism” activities in at least 85 countries, in an outgrowth of President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror.” This map displays air/drone strikes, on-the-ground combat, “Section 127e” programs, military exercises, and operations to train and/or assist foreign forces.
3. The cost of the war of terror
The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terror will cost us $6.5 trillion in interest payments alone through to 2050. These wars are also called the ”Credit Card Wars”.
To consider:
Through Fiscal Year 2022, the United States federal government has spent and obligated $8 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the US economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors…
The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the US budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates…
Unless the US immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s.
Below 1 day after the attacks on New York and Pentagon, sep. 12, 2001:
Some of those war criminals responsible for the wars of terror
On Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001, from left, Secretary of State Colin Powell, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton attended a meeting with the National Security Council in the White House. (AP Photo/Doug Mills, File)
5. Related
United States Counterterrorism Operations, 2018-2020
[Quotes from the original article]
Israel’s seemingly never-ending drive to uproot Palestinians from their homes by force of arms and threat of imminent slaughter resulted in one of its bloodiest massacres on 29 October 1956 in the village of Kafr Qasem, on the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice (“Green”) Line.
In one of the worst massacres in Palestinian history, Israeli border police killed forty-nine residents of Kafr Qasem, including women and children
…
[ □ comment: Read this and realise how Zionist butchers cloak their killing project to give it the appearance of ‘legality’!]
Already living under military rule following Israel’s first wave of ethnic cleansing when it was created in Palestine in 1948, a curfew was imposed by the occupation state at 4:30pm on twelve Palestinian villages, including Kafr Qasem. Hundreds of villagers who had left home in the morning to go to work had no way of knowing that a curfew was in place. Soldiers tasked with enforcing the curfew were ordered to shoot and kill anyone seen outside after 5pm, making no distinction between men, women, children and those returning from outside the village.
Predictably, Palestinian residents returning to their homes after the 5pm deadline were stopped by the border police on the western side of the village. Soldiers forced them out of their vehicles and ordered them to dismount from their bicycles before shooting them at close range. In just under an hour 49 people were killed, including women and children.
According to Palestinian historians, the massacre at Kafr Qasem mirrored the typical Israeli blueprint of terrorising Palestinians into fleeing. In his book Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966, Dr Salman Abu Sitta lists at least 232 places where atrocities, massacres, destruction, plunder and looting were carried out by the Zionists between 1947 and 1956. Almost every one of thirty military operations were accompanied by one or two massacres of civilians. There were at least seventy-seven reported massacres, half of which took place before any Arab regular soldier set foot in Palestine during the 1948 Israeli-Arab war.
The pattern of expulsion was consistent, regardless of the region, date or the particular battalion involved in attacking a town or village. The imposition of a curfew was common practice prior to a massacre. Villagers would be gathered in the main square or nearby field in separate groups, while the village itself was surrounded on three sides, leaving the fourth open for escape or expulsion. The gap left open for Palestinians to flee in the Galilee region pointed towards Lebanon and Syria; towards the West Bank and Jordan in central Palestine; and towards Gaza and Egypt in the south.
.Remembering Israel’s Brutal massacre of Palestinian Civilians in Kafr Qasem
= Blessings and peace of Allah on Prophet Muhammad, his Family, and his Companions. =
This is a review of an article revising the general Western point of view of Africa when it is claimed that Africa had at the most a marginal significance for European and American economic development.
However the author shows that Africa eventually even enabled industrialisation itself (mainly through capital accumulation): ”The most important site of erasure (of Africa’s contribution) has been the minds of people in the rich world.” The chapter ’African Gold’ is from another article, worth a separate post.
Certainly another aspect of European meddling in Africa, was the greed for gold. Gold was naturally valued in the African kingdoms, f. ex. by the Mali Empire or the Songhai empire, but in their case it did not lead to this scale of oppression (Atlantic slave trade) or destruction (colonialism).
”Things took a turn for the worse in 1471 CE when a Portuguese fleet, sponsored by the Lisbon merchant Fernão Gomes, sailed around the Atlantic coast of Africa and established a trading presence near the gold fields of southern West Africa.”
.The Gold Trade of Ancient & Medieval West Africa
”African gold was indeed so famous worldwide that a Spanish map of 1375 represents the king of Mali holding a gold nugget.”
.The Trans-Saharan Gold Trade (7th–14th Century)
A 1375 CE illustration of Mansa Kanku Musa who ruled the Mali Empire in West Africa. (Public domain)
What We Were Told
We have heard of C. Columbus, maybe also Vasco da Gama, the adventurous discoverers of ’new worlds’.
And we learned that there was the Atlantic slavery, more or less accepted by the European elites, irrespective of humanistic or religious considerations. Its consequences are with us today.
Questions
• From were did Columbus, sailing for the Spanish crown, start his voyage across the Atlantic, and why is this important?
• What is the significance of African workforce for the economic development of Europe?
• Beginning with the late 1600s, what ”was worth more than the metal exports of all of Spanish America?”
• Was the often-professed belief of ”European unique ingenuity and inventiveness” the real reason for Europe’s domination of world trade and of capital accumulation, with the ensuing industrialisation in the 1800s?
On the Real Foundation of the Rise of Europe
”The rise of Europe was not founded on any innate or permanent characteristics that produced superiority.
It was built on Europe’s economic and political relations with [ □ comment: exploitation of ~ ] Africa – to a degree that remains unrecognised (in the public discourse). The heart of the matter here, of course, was the massive, centuries-long transatlantic trade in enslaved people who were put to work growing sugar, tobacco, cotton and other cash crops on the plantations of the New World.”
A fort in Elmina, Ghana, built by 15th-century European gold and slave traders. Photograph: David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
What Made the Development of the Americas Possible
”Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the West. African labour, in the form of enslaved people, was what made the very development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World are unimaginable.”
As ”Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe … wrote: ’No African trade, no negroes; → no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes [sic] etc; → no sugar etc, no islands, no continent; → no continent, no trade.’”
Check the original text Built on the bodies of slaves… for a more detailed description.
African Labour – European Sugar
"Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the west. African labour, in the form of enslaved people, was what made the very development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World are unimaginable."
"Through the development of plantation agriculture and a succession of history-altering commercial crops – tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, rice and, above all, sugar – Europe’s deep and often brutal ties with Africa drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy. Slave-grown sugar hastened the coming together of the processes we call industrialisation. It radically transformed diets, making possible much higher worker productivity. And in doing so, sugar revolutionised European society."
Some statistics on the human resource extraction from Africa in the 17- 19th century, i.e. Atlantic slave trade
”The impact of this warfare on Africa’s subsequent development, however, has been immeasurable. Nowadays, the consensus estimate on
→ the numbers of Africans brought to the Americas hovers about 12.6 million…
→ if ≈ 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, 1.8 mio did not!
→ how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000 = 3%!
→ another 6 million Africans were killed during the hunt for slaves
→ between 5% and 40% perished during brutal overland treks to the coast, or while being held, often for months, in barracoons, or holding pens, as they awaited embarkation on slave ships…
→ another 10% of those who were taken aboard died at sea during an Atlantic transit…” (≈ 1.1 to 1.8 million)
”When one considers that Africa’s total population in the mid-19th century was probably about 100 million, one begins to gauge the enormity of the demographic assault that the slave trade represented.”
Related
.How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.?
”The most important site of erasure, by far, has been the minds of people in the rich world.”
…
”It requires that we transform how we understand the history of the last six centuries and, specifically, of Africa’s central role in making possible nearly everything that is today familiar to us.”
”Nearly a century ago, WEB Du Bois had already affirmed much of what we needed to know on this topic. ’It was black labour that established the modern world commerce, which began first as a commerce in the bodies of the slaves themselves,’ he wrote. Now is the time to finally acknowledge this.”
.Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world
Related: The Resource Extraction From Africa Today
Another interesting chapter of course is the resource extraction from Africa after the colonial period still going on today.
An example here:
Africa: Rising for the Few
Africa was cheated out of US$11 billion in 2010 through just one of the tricks used by multinational companies to reduce tax bills, according to new Oxfam report, ‘Africa: Rising for the few,’ released today. This is equivalent to six times the amount needed to plug the healthcare funding gap in Ebola affected countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Guinea Bissau. Multinational companies cheat Africa out of billions of dollars | Oxfam International
Fairtrade is a global movement which addressees the injustices of conventional trade by supporting smallholder farmers and workers to secure better terms of trade, with specific focus on rural development.
.About Fairtrade – Fairtrade Africa
