Better a Greater Middle East than the Colonial Hell of France

American Unawareness of Colonialism, and Illusion of Power

When J. F. Kennedy was wondered how a country like France, having the size of Texas, intends to pursue its own foreign policy and its own international aspirations, he proved to fail to correctly perceive the phenomenon of Colonialism. Colonial power rules today a large, very large and very unfortunate, part of the world. True, the colonial countries do not control their former colonies through direct military, political and administrative presence anymore. But is that truly important?

The Colonial powers found other ways to attach their former colonies to their own chariot of international policy, diplomacy and far-reaching (but certainly negative to the majority of this world’s people) targets of sophisticated, undetectable, and ‘unfelt’ world-domination. America did not understand clearly these subtleties, mendacities and treacheries or had other priorities before the collapse of the USSR. But the colonial rule of France and England has continued unchanged and unchallenged thus far.

Colin Powel may have faced this hard reality, when failing to obtain more than 4 votes out of 15 in the UN. Un-colonial and anti-colonial America, under Republican or Democratic influence, must truly focus on this subject. Rejecting a Republican President’s policies cannot become the way US Democrats help colonial structures endure in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. What is the point of opposing a Republican President to only promote deeply anti-Democrat principles and tactics. One may ask why.

The answer is that this is the main reason of the French opposition to America; Chirac did not want the end of the Colonial link of dozens of countries to France and England, because then France would truly and permanently be ‘a country at the size of Texas’. That’s why France keep opposing the ingenious ‘Greater Middle East’ plan of President Bush. That’s why French, supposedly democratic, diplomats dare say that the Middle East does not need ‘Missionaries of Democracy’. How close to US Democrats’ ideals is this approach?

The criminal approach, attitude and deeds of France and England in the Middle East continue unaltered. The colonial countries just cannot afford to allow real local development, and regional political changes towards democracy; their existence hinges emphatically on the continuation of the prevailing barbarism forever.

For America, the disillusion has a name: September 11th! The terrible and inhuman event can however turn to the profit of the entire Mankind, and more particularly to benefit of the USA and the various oppressed Middle Eastern peoples, ethnic, linguistic and religious groups, if American legislators, statesmen, diplomats, academia and intellectuals truly become conscious of the existing colonial structures, and work hard on a plan aiming to let Middle Eastern peoples cooperate with the American effort of bringing Light where Colonial Darkness and French-promoted barbarism prevailed for more than 200 years. What has been the obstacle to America’s correct evaluation of its own real power in the world?

Quantitative Approach: a major impediment for America

To correctly evaluate US global impact, Americans must avoid several erroneous approaches that any administration may pursue in respect with the evaluation of situations. Hereby, I will rather focus on the American quantitative approach of evaluating almost anything! There lies the fundamental mistake of the US incorrect evaluation of the American power.

Whenever it comes to an evaluation or even simple enumeration, Americans are used to stress, inclined to demonstrate, that they represent something quantitatively great! Go to Yahoo Education; you will find that almost half of the world’s universities are in the US! Refer to military expenses; you will find that the US spends for defense as much as the following 8 or 9 most spending countries of the list! Pick up economic performance stats, and check the GDP; America (300 million people) produces more than China and India combined (more than 2.4 billion people!) ? or as much as Japan, Germany, France, England, Italy, Canada, i.e. all the rest member states (more than 410 million people) of G 7, the group of the world’s most developed countries!

These realities are undeniable, but they do not represent an absolute truth; even more so, there are other realities, unable to be dressed in figures and clothes that are even more decisive.

Statistics, if placed within historical context, are almost valueless! The entire world is full of examples that ‘numerically strong’ or ‘economically rich’ means / can mean just ‘nothing’!

Cyrus the Achaemenidian was far ‘poorer’ than Nabunaid’s Babylon, but Babylon fell to Iran!

No one doubts that Alexandria, Constantinople, Caesarea, Edessa of Osrhoene, and Antioch (in the Eastern Roman Empire), Ctesiphon, Istakhr, Praaspa and Jond-e Shapur (in the Sassanid Empire of Iran) had greater, better, and more advanced academic establishments, research centers (corresponding to the needs of the Sciences as practiced in the Antiquity) and libraries than the mediocre, quasi-inexistent educational resources available in Mecca and Medina at the times of the Prophet Muhammad and the first Khalifas! But yet Islamic armies entered these cities of the Iranian and the Eastern Roman empires!

More powerful military machine does not guarantee victory either, and some striking examples that are very well known in history, are Alexander the Great battling in Granikos, Issos or Gaugamela, Caesar with limited resources in Alexandria, Marc Anthony’s navy in Actium!

The colonial powers can in this regard give a lesson or two to America; Britain maintained its presence in Egypt with very limited military resources, whereas in France ‘le parti colonial’ could not possibly demand a sizeable number of soldiers overseas, since the bulk of the French military had to be assigned to defense tasks against Germany in the period 1871 - 1914!

Why is the quantitative approach mistaken?

The answer here is simple; it is the human mind, the perplexity of a political, military, intellectual or economic machination - not the material volume - that truly creates power. And at this level, the Americans seem to be left far behind – or to put it better, to have never reached the Anglo-French trickery, treachery and mendacity perplexity! It took America four years after the ‘victory over Saddam’ to realize that the US truly speaking did not win over anybody, and a lot is still at stake! America has by now very limited chances to impose a final peace in Iraq.

Certainly America overthrew a tyrannical dictator who was ruling based on a tribal minority! But this is not a big deal! The British did better in Egypt, already in 1914! Without declaring any war, they overthrew the Khedive (Regent) Abbas Helmi, who was in Istanbul ready to coordinate with the Sultan an alliance with imperial Germany! They used political leaders in the form of nationalistic / besotted puppets and easily manipulated, and definitely besotted, royal family members on this purpose, not their own soldiers.

Present day real challenges for America

What are challenges Americans are facing? Certainly not the Shia and Sunni revolution in Iraq! American army can make them silence; it could take just one butchery more in History! Nothing new! But then, another problem will come to surface, and then another, and so on! It will never end! Why?

The answer lies in the real understanding of the Modern History of the Middle East, and more particularly in the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, as carried out by the British and French.

It would be very wrong to assume that this event happened at the aftermath of the First World War! This ‘event’ took no less than 120 years to be completed! It started with Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt in 1798! It just ended in 1918!

All the stages of the event, if studied correctly, give us the key to understanding what the Colonial Powers targeted, what they achieved, what the field situation is, and what can be expected as a plausible development(s) in this area.

The real essence of Colonialism

The main link among that vast area’s numerous and diverse elements was not Islam, but the Islamic Caliphate. This was well understood by the colonial administrations, and their present day academia do their ingenious best to either hide or deny it. In fact, this link was ultimately broken down and destroyed. Then, a multitude of otherwise unconnected peoples, languages, cultures, and religions, all expanded over a great variety of natural landscapes, was left as colonial prey in a particular situation that genuinely prevents either a sort of merger or an eventual use by another power.

First, there is no authority to link even two neighboring regions, let us say Iraq and Syria, or Lebanon and Palestine. That is why all the efforts deployed by the tenets of Pan-arabism in the 50s and the 60s have manifestly failed.

Second, no other power can truly take profit or make use of the implemented colonial structures. Soviet Union at its best was not truly able to obtain in these lands the ideological / political control it did in various other parts of the world! And in this way, America will fail exporting here its own model that the US exported successfully in Colombia, Zambia, Korea or Singapore.

The reason for this conclusion lies in the ideological, cultural, educational and political developments that took place in this part of the world, according to plans machinated and executed by France and England. At the end of the day, one could truly ask the following question:

- If the rise of the Neo-Turks and Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk in Turkey corresponded to French and English political / ideological choices, why the two Colonial Powers did not leave the entire Ottoman empire intact, so that they facilitate the imposition of the Western concepts of society and life throughout its surface, from Palestine to Oman and from Yemen to Turkey? If modernization and democratization were sought after, Ataturk modernists would implement their changes throughout the empire’s regions, preventing theocracies, tyrannies, and terrorisms.

Colonialism means Division imposed on misinformed and disoriented elites and governments, and on peoples deprived of identity and even of access to it

The answer is simple; if the entire Ottoman empire from Yemen to Turkey and from Palestine to Oman turned out to be a united modern state run by the same ideals and principles as modern, laic, secularist Turkey, it would soon become a power far stronger than the Ottoman empire itself, and certainly stronger than France and England!

Leaving all the rich resources of energy (suffice it to consider only the oil of combined Iraq, Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Emirates and Oman) in the hands of one typically Western modern government at Istanbul with an unmatched imperial tradition and diplomacy would be an act of suicide for France and England.

The demarcation lines, the borders-to-be, the shaping of the future states, the ‘tribal’ – ‘royal’ families supported, and the culture and ideology diffused in this part of the world were all planned in a way that would bring division, impotence, extreme frustration, severe complex of inferiority and despair.

It is essential to realize that the colonial powers did not wish to fully and properly westernize the populations and the societies on the confiscated Ottoman soil that was detached from Turkey.

Even today, one cannot compare the diffusion of French culture in Senegal and Madagascar with French culture propagation in Syria; English culture was diffused in South Africa, in Singapore and in India in much greater a dose or scale than in Iraq or Yemen. This has nothing to do with local peoples’ and communities’ receptiveness. At the very beginning, all peoples and communities of the Ottoman Empire rejected the French and English culture and Weltanschauung. It was humiliating for a 1830 Greek to be dressed in ‘frangika’, West European dress code.

Disproportionate diffusion of varied quality Nationalism

How can one truly measure these developments in an accurate way? It is simple; if one compares the diffusion - as emanated quasi-exclusively from France and England - of nationalist ideology in the education and the culture of two study cases - countries, one truly understands what was at stake, and up to what extent the colonial powers wished each colonized country to follow up, to pace with the ideological and cultural developments of the 19th and the 20th centuries, and to reach the colonizing powers’ social, educational and intellectual level.

Two examples of French inspired nationalism: Greece and Egypt

Greece and Egypt are two good examples in this respect; the two countries have been formed at the beginning of the dismemberment procedure of the Ottoman Empire. French and English, as well as other Europeans participating in the anti-Ottoman procedure,
1. excavated a evenly great number of archeological places in either countries,   
2. shipped illegally outside the country of origin a similar number of antiquities in both cases,
3. invested and controlled the burgeoning market economies of either countries to the same extent, and
4. were equivalently involved in directing and even ordering policies (of educational, cultural, politico-ideological, and socio-economic character) to both local governments.

A. Greece
But in the case of Greece there was more. The new elite that was formed in the Western capitals was taught to be overwhelmingly driven by the nationalist quest that set up a new, Modern Greek language and imposed it as such in the Primary and Secondary education in the small Greek state of the 19th century – on populations of Vlachian, Arvanitic (Albanian), Slavic, Latin and mixed origin.

The children were forced to learn an artificial, alien language that was not comprehensible to their parents, who were told by their own children that they were not speaking the correct language!

What one person spoke in a ‘Greek’ city in the Ottoman empire in 1780, let us say in Patras, and the prevailing language in that same Greek city one hundred years later are two shockingly different idioms.

In the former case, it was a mixture of Turkish, Albanian, Slavic and liturgical Greek (this for those who were Christians); in the latter case, it was the fabricated ‘neo-Greek’ language of Adamantios Korais, the pupil, puppet and ‘enfant gâté’ of the French academia.

This did not occur in Egypt, where - quite contrarily - Coptic was mercilessly obliterated, although it was still spoken at the times of Champollion, who learnt this language in order to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics!

A cultural, literary, philological, philosophical, educational, artistic, ideological and political archaeolatry and archaeomania was artificially developed to an unbelievable degree in 19th century Greece, to please the Freemasonic French guidance and to match the perverse plans of the apostate Grand Orient lodge.

The main concern for a Greek poet of those days was how to better imitate an ancient Greek rime or rhythm; the central issue for a 19th century Greek intellectual was how to deliberate about Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean and Stoic approaches to a topic; the ideal for a 19th century Greek architect was how to draw the most perfect neo-classicist achievement.

At the same time, the so-called ‘Greek’ politicians and statesmen were told that their success depended mainly on their studies on Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian, Demosthenes and Diogenes Laerce!

In the schools and the universities, pupils and students had to learn the epics of Homer and Hesiod, and the verses of Sophocles and Pindar by heart!

All this was first machinated in late 18th century Paris Freemasonic lodges, and then taught to Ottoman citizens turned traitors, and subsequently selected as ‘students’ to study in Paris and elsewhere; England imitated the process, which was consequently reproduced in other European cities, from Vienna to St Petersburg and from Rome to Amsterdam.

The results of the treacherous labours were implemented in 19th century Athens, leading the normal and human 18th South Balkan social conditions and environments to 19th century inhuman, excruciating dysmorphia of the worst sort.

It all ended up in the 20th century’s, yet endless, wars and the ensuing Balkan tyrannies.

B. Egypt
But in the case of Egypt, the leading European Egyptologists, from Mariette and Lepsius to Maspero, Flinders Petrie, and A. Erman, did not bother at all to ‘convince’ young Egyptians to embark on an effort similar to that of the contemporaneous ‘Greeks’! It may seem primarily odd that the 19th century French professors of ‘Egyptian’ ‘students’ did not apply to them the same method as their compatriots and colleagues tutoring ‘Greek’ ‘students’. Of course, the case can be illuminated through a close comparative study of the French consuls’ activities in Alexandria and Athens: the French consuls of Alexandria did not bother to send many ‘Egyptian’ ‘students’ to ‘study’ in Paris. Egypt would be an object of lower colonial use….

As a matter of fact, for almost the entire first century of Egyptology there was not a single Egyptian Egyptologist. Similar situation characterized other sectors of Orientalism, notably Assyriology, North-Western Semitic languages (involving Phoenician and Aramaic that would be the natural educational rudiments of the modern Phoenicians and Aramaeans, namely the populations of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq), Iranology to name a few.

The decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics had advanced enough so that let’s say in 1915 ‘Egyptian’ schoolboys study the Campaigns of Thutmosis III, the Expedition to Punt by Pharaoh Hatshepsut, the Adventures of Wenamun and the Amarna Pharaonic correspondence in the secondary education, in the same way as the ‘Greek’ schoolboys studied Herodotus, Pausanias and Strabo.

However, there was no particular motivating factor to push modern Egyptians to rudimentary self-knowledge and authentic national identity search, which is compulsory component of proper nation building plans. Actually, the targets and machinations of the colonizing academia and statesmen, diplomats and intellectuals for Egypt did not involve any real nation building plan; other calculations and machinations had already been made, and they aimed at shaping the Middle East in a way that would keep the local peoples permanently undeveloped.

In the case of Egypt, all that was needed was exactly the reverse of what was attempted in South Balkans. They Egyptians had to be diverted from their authentic Coptic – Egyptian identity up to the most execrable point of barbaric and dehumanizing metamorphosis of Arab nationalistic type.

For the gangster-like needs of the colonial machinations, the True (Coptic) had to turn False (Arab), and the False (non Greek, South Balkan métis / half breed) had to be depicted as true (neo-Greek). The vicious plans could not be more perverse!

Contrarily to what many assume, America today is about to find its Middle Eastern dream (‘Greater Middle East’) crushed on the terrible colonial rocks set by France and England in order to fit their exclusive permanent profit. The case of Iraq and its Mesopotamian, Aramaic, Turkish and Iranian streams of heritage, is quite indicative.

Putting a dead end to European colonial rule over, and entanglement in, the Middle East may be a demanding concept: America needs to understand the basic theoretical and behavioural systems that were either composed or manipulated by France and England in their effort to keep the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, the Safevid Empire of Iran, and the Mughal Empire of India permanently entrapped in Barbarism and Darkness, Underdevelopment and Poverty, plus an incommensurable sociopolitical complex of inferiority.

The exit of the Colonial Deeds would be an explosion of Extremism, Hatred and Terrorism. France and England either parented this situation or acting as Apprentice Magicians did not foresee it; in either cases, the American establishment has to conclude that the US will never achieve supremacy in the entire area, unless they decompose the colonial structures and they perceive as no 1 Enemy the Colonial Powers, and not their instruments.

Note:
The Colonial Elites’ Orientalist fallacies are best encapsulated in the famous painting of the Sphinx by the famous British artist David Roberts, who traveled throughout Egypt and the Holy land in the late 1830s; the sun never sets in the position it is depicted to set in this painting. Despite his personal experience on the Giza plateau, the British painter insisted on delivering a false, inexistent landscape, conditioning therefore irreversibly the early 19th century Brits’ idea about the Sphinx. Orientalist Art, Literature, Historiography, Philology and Political Sciences followed the same path.