Henry Mountbatten-Windsor, known to fans of the British monarchy as “Prince Harry”, has casually admitted that he killed 25 people when he piloted an Apache attack helicopter in Afghanistan. He didn’t, he wrote in his new autobiography, sparetreat them as “people”.
The war in Afghanistan, launched by the United States, is an illegal war. Estimates of the number of casualties due to the US-led invasion, supported by NATO, range from 176 000 to 360 000. The lower estimate is divided as follows: 52 839 opposition fighters, 69 095 military and police and 46 319 civilians.
The US and its allies in NATO, including Britain, have been responsible for millions of deaths since the end of World War II. There are reliable estimates of the death toll from the US-led invasion of Iraq that exceeds a million people, most of them civilians. The war in Vietnam took more than two million lives. Again, the majority are civilians.
Even Human Rights Watch, a pro-Western organization, has acknowledged the many civilian causes of NATO’s 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 behind by the US is not just a matter of lives lost to bombs and guns. The US uses sanctions as its main weapon in geopolitical contestation and, around the world, many lives have been lost due to lack of access to food, medicine and other essential goods due to sanctions.
The US is also indirectly responsible for the loss of many lives through its support for brutal regimes, such as the tyrannical states emerging from Tel Aviv and Riyadh. The US provided direct support to the regime in Jakarta during the mass killings of leftists in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 that left around a million dead.
The US also supported many bloodthirsty dictatorships during the Cold War, especially in Latin America and Africa. The US has organized a large number of coups against elected governments since 1945. The coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, after the semi-fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet was installed, is one of the most famous but there are many, many others. The US continues to organize and support coups today, such as in Bolivia in 2019.
The news that Mountbatten-Windsor took 25 lives from an attack helicopter has revived memories of the records of the Iraq war that Chelsea Manning leaked to Julian Assange from WikiLeaks. The footage shows civilians and journalists falling from the helicopter while some US soldiers laugh.
In light of the courageous video made public by Manning and Assange we cannot assume that the 25 people killed by Mountbatten-Windsor were all enemy combatants. There has been a general silence in the Western media about the appalling abuse Manning and Assange suffered at the hands of the US and UK.
The double standards in the Western media about the rivers of blood that come from the military and other actions by the US and NATO are almost unbelievable. The West is consistently portrayed as a moral force in global affairs and the taint of assassinations rarely clings to its leaders. George W Bush, who presided over the catastrophic war in Iraq, is reportedly an old man who enjoys a new hobby of painting watercolors.
When former United States secretary of state Madeleine Albright died last year, many obituaries described her as a trailblazer for women, as some feminist icon. In a 1996 television interview, he was asked the following question: “We’ve heard half a million [Iraqi] the child is dead. I mean, more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, what’s it worth?” Her response: “I think it’s a very difficult choice, but it’s worth it, it’s worth it.
One can only try to imagine how an African or Arab woman who has made similar comments about the death of white children would have been treated in the Western media.
All of this creates an unpleasant problem for South Africans. It is clear that the majority of our white compatriots have a very strong identification with the West, because they are a force for good and think South Africa should identify itself fully.
Of course, there are black people who share these pro-Western views but this is far from uniform and many black people sympathize with the victims of Western violence – from Palestine to Vietnam.
In our media, Greg Mills is often taken as an important voice in international affairs. Mills, who worked as a “special adviser” to the NATO commander in Afghanistan, runs the Oppenheimer family’s foundation, the Brenthurst Foundation. The board includes the former chief of defense staff in the UK and the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the US. The Brenthurst Foundation can hardly be aligned with NATO and the US and UK militaries.
Not surprisingly, as Clayson Monyela has noted, the foundation is very concerned with the war in Ukraine, where the US and NATO are involved as proxies, but does not have the same concern for the war in Yemen or the ongoing oppression of Palestine. We can add that there is a similar silence about the war in Ethiopia.
There is no way that a commentator similarly embedded in the military of a non-Western country would be considered, like Mills, a credible independent commentator.
Disturbingly, however, the bias towards the West evident in Mills’ work is evident in much of our media. We are an African country, but the wars in Ethiopia and Yemen, which cost more lives than the war in Ukraine, are ignored. The lives of people in Ethiopia and Yemen are clearly not considered much for our media.
Robert Sobukwe of the Pan-Africanist Congress, one of our great intellectuals, hopes that the future of Africa will not be a matter of skin color. Now, this vision of the future seems like a romantic dream. Not only are many, if not most, white people pro-Western, but critics of the West are often seen as irrational and disrespectful, even as disrespectful supporters of non-Western regimes who cannot, for example, be critical at the same time. USA and Russia.
This has made a serious dent into the making of our nation because many whites, in terms of political identity, are permanent settlers who identify as part of the West. Very few identify with Africa and the wider non-Western world.
The news of Mountbatten-Windsor’s “killing count” was very painful. How will our white friends 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, an enlightened force to which we must all pledge our allegiance?