Liberal Imperialism: A Tale of Two Stateless Peoples
--By Matthew Dunnyveg
President Trump has decided recently that there is nothing in Syria worth a single American life or a single American tax dollar. Not surprisingly, liberals are in hysterics over this most sensible of positions. Back when Bush II was president, war protestor Cindy Sheehan was the liberal darling du jour; she received saturation coverage. Proving that liberal motives are never humanitarian, when Baraq was elected, Sheehan coverage mysteriously went down the memory hole despite Baraq's continued prosecution of this war. Now that Trump wants to fulfill Sheehan's wishes to extricate the US from these wars, liberals are now demanding more blood. This is hardly the first time liberals are responsible for millions of Third World deaths.
President Trump has decided recently that there is nothing in Syria worth a single American life or a single American tax dollar. Not surprisingly, liberals are in hysterics over this most sensible of positions. Back when Bush II was president, war protestor Cindy Sheehan was the liberal darling du jour; she received saturation coverage. Proving that liberal motives are never humanitarian, when Baraq was elected, Sheehan coverage mysteriously went down the memory hole despite Baraq's continued prosecution of this war. Now that Trump wants to fulfill Sheehan's wishes to extricate the US from these wars, liberals are now demanding more blood. This is hardly the first time liberals are responsible for millions of Third World deaths.
When was the last time we heard about Biafra and what happened there? The name "Biafra" for most people no doubt invokes images of a cheesy elitist liberal masquerading as punk rocker Jello Biafra. This is because as many as three million people died there to protect liberal interests. Biafra is the name of a state the Igbo minority in Nigeria tried to set up (on the first map in red):
Problems started when the 1966 Nigerian election was contested by the Christian Igbo minority, who staged a coup and installed their own man. In retaliation, the Muslim north had another coup and installed their own man as president. When thirty thousand Igbo living outside Biafra were gratuitously slaughtered, Biafra declared its independence.
As with the Kurds, the Biafrans' curse was oil, which was discovered by Shell in 1956. Biafra has the lion's share of Nigeria's oil. Because Shell was at least nominally a British company, Britain supported Nigeria in this Civil War while the French supported Biafra because they had been shut out of the oil concessions. So, while Britain facilitated a blockade that starved to death at least two million Igbo, French liberals squawked about it and made some humanitarian gestures.
If we keep in mind that liberalism is where big business owns government, it becomes understandable why Britain had a Biafra policy that supported the aims of Shell Oil. Oil companies have to spend fortunes developing oil fields and the necessary infrastructure. Since Shell obviously didn't want this expensive infrastructure damaged by war, and since terms with the Nigerian government had already been arranged, the last thing Shell wanted was to have to replace its infrastructure or have to bargain with what likely would've been a very recalcitrant group. While the US sat out Biafra because of Vietnam, this is one of the first instances of a liberal power siding with Muslims against Christians to appease corporate interests.
It is understandable that big business should want to protect its interests. The question is why liberals think it impermissible for regular citizens to want to protect their own interests, including the interests of their peoples and countries. Exactly how many millions of people do liberals have the right to slaughter to make the world safe for big corporations? It's a question not asked, much less answered.
The Biafran civil war ended with a starvation blockade in 1970. Along with liberals' other African disasters in Rhodesia and South Africa, Biafra went down the liberal memory hole, the same place liberals no doubt would like to put their policy toward the Iraqi Kurds.
Here is a map of Kurdistan. The problem for the Kurds is that their people are scattered through numerous countries in the Mideast from eastern Turkey to western Iran:
Though there were a few scattered independent Kurdish principalities at the time of Sykes-Picot, the agreement by which liberals divided the Mideast between Britain and France in the wake of WWI, Kurdistan had long been divided between the Ottomans in the west and the Persians to the east.
As with Biafra, the real curse of the Iraqi Kurds is oil; Iraqi Kurdistan has a third of Iraq's oil reserves. This is why even back in Cindy Sheehan's heyday, we never heard about granting the Kurds their independence even though liberals criticized everything else about how Bush prosecuted this war. Big oil didn't want to have to replace expensive infrastructure or renegotiate their oil leases there any more than they did in Biafra. So, liberals didn't want an independent Kurdistan. The Kurds are another example of how the issue is never really the issue for liberals. Liberalism only has two real goals: To protect the existing wealth of the liberal elites, and to increase that wealth by any means necessary, including mass murder of those who dare stand in liberals' way.
This is not the case with the Syrian Kurds. Since oil deposits in northern Syria, where the Kurds are, are negligible, liberals are now agitating for independence for the Syrian Kurds since the only people that would be hurt would be the Turks; it's more cost-free morality for liberals. Unlike liberals, who have no loyalty higher than to self, the Turks are understandably concerned about what is good for their country. How much blood and treasure should Americans be willing to spend in Syria to salve liberal consciences guilty over their pusillanimous conduct in the Iraq War they so enthusiastically supported?
Since Americans have been ruled by a liberal elite class hostile to our interests since the Civil War, I find it hard not to sympathize with the nationalist aspirations of the Kurds. We know what it's like to have no voice in how our own country is run. History also teaches us Americans that sovereignty and independence are only for those willing to do what it takes to achieve these things. Because every people has to be willing to do what it takes to win their own independence, Americans can't grant Syrian Kurds or Biafrans their independence any more than these groups can grant Americans ours. This is why the best thing the US can do is to mind our own business and let the Kurds do the same. We should be thankful we now have a president who understands this point.
