During the period known as the Cold War, the two major powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, fearful of facing and fighting each other directly, engaged in nasty little proxy wars, which raged all around the world. During the many years of this so–called Cold War, it was only cold between the U.S. and the USSR.
Between the small countries, many of which were armed by either side, the war was very real, and it was hot indeed. These wars, fueled by great power paranoia and fear, caused almost countless deaths in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Hot, tropical, colored deaths, largely used as signals to be sent to Moscow in Washington.
Vietnam was a proxy war, ostensible fought between its Communist North and its anti–communist South, it was a war armed by both sides, with most of the dying done by Vietnamese peasants. While Americans built dark foreboding monuments to the 60,000 soldiers who perished in Vietnam, these numbers reflect only Americans.
We neither care nor really want to know how many Vietnamese died in that Asian holocaust. Given this lack of wanting to know, even the numbers are woefully imprecise: between two and three million people. Million. The history of Latin America is bright and red with the real blood of proxy wars, claimed under the so–called Monroe Doctrine as little more than an “American backyard”, the numbers sacrificed to the whims of the rich, cruel, blanco elites are not worthy of our reckoning.
Their generals were taught torture in U.S. military schools, and given graduate classes in coups. The infamous U.S. Torture Academy, once known as the School of the Americas, is known by Latin Americans as ‘escuela del golpes’, school of coups. The one thing that sent the mad dogs out of their barracks was the slightest whiff of democracy. To their eager–blooded students, this was just a code for communism. And thus came the U.S. green light–money, guns, and torture manuals to be unleashed upon the workers, the students, priests, and nuns.
And even though the Soviets are no more, proxy war remain, as evidenced by the madness in Iraq. The U.S. handpicked leaders there, seen as illegitimate by native Iraqis, are wholly unequipped to inspire the people and build anything remotely like a real, national army. That’s because the U.S. doesn’t really want an authentic Iraqi army. They want a heavily armed national police force to protect their puppets and U.S. oil wells. They don’t want any force remotely capable of thinking about fighting them. As it Iraq isn’t enough–and it ain’t–there are other proxy wars in the witch’s brew. Somalia, ravaged after generations of earlier proxy wars, is one of the latest puppets used to soothe American war lust and worries.
This time, Ethiopian troops, given military aid and backed by U.S. State Department people, are unleashed against Somalis, reportedly because of ties to Al–Qaeda. Villages have been raped by helicopter gunships, and innocent Somalis by the score have been shot and killed, reportedly because of the “possible presence” of three alleged Al–Qaeda people.
When innocents are killed, when men, women, and babies are killed, isn’t that terrorism? But one forgets: this is but a proxy war, where Somalia is just another front. Black and Muslim, their side has already been chosen in this latest quasi war, a war of words, a war of lies, meant to discipline the nation and the world into this macabre new world order.
There is something wholly unholy about proxy wars, where poor people fight and die for rich people’s half–baked theories and ideas. Like the crusades that wrecked Europe for centuries, it is yet another false war based on myths, fears, ghosts, golems. Ain’t it time for such an obscenity to end?