As French high-tech weapons of destruction take the lives of Libyans in 2011 in selfless inhumanitarianism, we remember the French massacres from 1954 through 1960 in Algeria, just a few kilometers away from where the French have been killing since Saturday.
As the beautiful sleek looking but deadly French Mirage fighter bombers fire missiles to impose an innocuous sounding “No-fly zone” Arabs remember the French use of murderous aircraft against the civilian population of French ‘Protectorate’ of Arab Syria,
As the French proudly bombard ‘protectively’ in a North Africa it once owned and exploited, we remember the triple genocide in French Indochina. First, during the brutal racist occupation of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; second, as the Vichy French Colonial Army running its colonies for the Japanese Imperial Army aided the confiscation of rice for export to Japan while a million Vietnamese starved to death; third, as fresh French troops, brought back into Vietnam in U.S. ships, murdered Vietnamese for eight years, beginning almost immediately after the joyous street celebrations in Paris as it was liberated from Nazi occupation.
We can also appreciate the past inhumanity of France thinking of the sad history of French genocide in Haiti five times over. Firstly, by the enslavement of Africans; secondly, by working them to death in Haiti to make France rich; thirdly, for the genocidal punishment of the Haitian slave revolution; fourthly, for the cruel life-costing reparations forced on Haiti; lastly, for French refusal to return that huge sum of extorted money even now as Haitians suffer earthquake devastation, poverty, U.S. exploitation and foreign occupation
Opportunist France, CNN and CIA have encouraged and aided rebellion in eastern Libya, which, until 1951, had a separate history as Cyrenaica*, France has led other paragons of virtuous political hegemony in hailing democracy as the right of those rebelling in Libya.
But democracy and even more important, freedom, was for centuries denied the non-white population of the world.
The once colonially occupied and still neo-colonially exploited billions of non-white human beings remember that while French and English people proudly practiced parliamentary democracy they denied freedom and democracy to all their millions of colonial subjects at gun point.
It is obvious to just about everyone that It is the petroleum deposits in Libya which are crying for freedom from African control. To free Africa of its wealth has always brought military intervention from industrialized and dehumanized nations.
Having control of their own oil wealth has enabled Libyans, along with neighboring Algerians, to enjoy the highest standard of living in Africa (South Africa has a wealthier but unevenly available standard),
Few are fooled by the French or any other of today’s now neocolonialist powers (which just happen to be basically white).
It is the oil in Libya which must be free — free from African control. Ergo the pretext of humanitarian goals.
* In 1934, Italy adopted the name “Libya” (used by the ancient Greeks for all of North Africa, except Egypt) for its colonies of Italian Cyrenaica and Italian Tripolitania, both having been run separately by Italian governors. Italy had conquered both from the Ottoman Turks in 1911. From 1943 to 1951, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were under British administration, while the French controlled Fezzan and the United States maintained the large Wheelus Air Base.