The Real First World War
by Bhaskar Menon on 10 Aug 2014 19 Comments

Europe’s “Great War” of 1914-1918 does not deserve to be called the “First World War.” That title should go to the first real global conflict, Europe’s genocidal invasion of other regions that began in the final decade of the 15th Century. European historians have sought to downplay the ferocity, extent and significance of that earlier conflict by treating it as a diffuse historical process, but if we who were victims accept that view it disables our understanding of everything that has happened since then.

 

As few Indians are likely to know much about what actually happened, let me recount some salient points.   

 

A decade after Columbus landed on Hispaniola in 1492, its indigenous people were extinct. They had done nothing to deserve that fate; Columbus in a letter to his royal sponsors in Spain said they were “loving, uncovetous people,” with “good features and beautiful eyes,” who “neither carried weapons nor understood the use of such things.” Yet many were tortured to death in a vain attempt to get them to reveal non-existent hoards of gold and others worked to death or driven to suicide. Such gratuitous violence continued as Europeans extended their domains in the “New World.”

 

Many of the smaller tribes followed the Arawak of Hispaniola into extinction while the populations of larger groups fell by as much as 85 percent, victims not only of indiscriminate violence but of induced famines and new diseases to which they had no immunity. The spread of smallpox through blankets distributed free to Native Americans and the wanton slaughter of the great herds of bison on which the “Plains Indians” depended for food, clothing and shelter were the most outrageous cases of genocide. Estimates of the numbers killed range up to 100 million.

 

In South America, the Conquistadores engaged in a zestful mass murder that has no equivalent to this day. Bartolomeo de las Casas (1484-1566), a Spaniard who went to the New World for fortune but was driven by the atrocities he witnessed to enter the Church, left a vivid description in Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de la Indias (Short Report on the Destruction of the Indies):

 

“One time the Indians came to meet us, and to receive us with victuals and delicate cheer, and with all entertainment, ten leagues from a great city, and being come at the place they presented us with a great quantity of fish and of bread, and other meat, together with all they could do for us to the uttermost.” The Conquistadores put them all to the sword “without any cause whatsoever,” more than “three thousand souls, which were set before us, men, women and children,” committing “great cruelties that never any man living either have or shall see the like.”

 

“The Christians, with their horses and swords and lances, began to slaughter and practice strange cruelty among them. They penetrated into the country and spared neither children nor the aged, nor pregnant women, nor those in child labor, all of whom they ran through the body and lacerated, as though they were assaulting so many lambs herded in their sheepfold. They made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow: or they opened up his bowels. They tore babes from their mothers’ breast by the feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks. Others they seized by the shoulders and threw into the rivers, laughing and joking … They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords. They made a gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch the ground, and by thirteens, in honor and reverence of our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and burned the Indians alive. They wrapped the bodies of others entirely in dry straw, binding them in it and setting fire to it; and so they burned them. They cut off the hands of all they wished to take alive. They generally killed the lords and nobles in the following way. They made wooden gridirons of stakes, bound them upon them, and made a slow fire beneath: thus the victims gave up the spirit by degrees, emitting cries of despair in their torture.”

 

Casas, writing as the Bishop of Chiapas, estimated that just in the Caribbean his compatriots had killed some 15 million Indians, leaving “destroyed and depopulated” the large islands of Cuba, San Juan [Puerto Rico], and Jamaica, and some 30 smaller islands.

 

In Australia and New Zealand, the killing was less zestful but it was more comprehensive, and there was no Casas to call attention to what happened. The Anglican Church and British authorities looked the other way as settlers in Australia hunted the Aborigines like animals, poisoned their food and water, raped their women and savaged their children, all in a deliberate campaign to reduce the indigenous population. The Aborigine numbered about 750,000 at the end of the 18th Century and about 30,000 a century later; both figures are estimates for they were not included in Australian censuses until 1971.

 

Australian policies to “protect” and “assimilate” the Aborigines continued the oppression into the second half of the 20th Century. It inflicted prison terms on adults for “crimes” ranging from “cheeky behavior” to “not working” to “calling the Hygiene Officer a big-eyed bastard.” Government officials took infants from their parents and placed them in White families or orphanages. That “adoption” policy openly aimed at eliminating the Aborigines as a cultural group, the legal definition of genocide. In the face of mounting international criticism, the government discontinued the program grudgingly in 1970; it was not until 1997 that it noted the negative impact on the victims and their families.

 

In New Zealand, a country larger than Britain (103,738 sq mi to 94.526 sq miles), the first British settlers in the mid-1800s found a tribal population said to be around 100,000 – almost certainly an underestimate, for the newcomers were soon engaged in a series of “Maori wars” to expropriate tribal land. By 1896 the number of Maoris was down to 42,000.

 

In Africa and Asia the death tolls were far larger.

 

The slave trade out of Africa began with the first Portuguese explorations down the African coast in the 14th century and continued into the 19th. By the time it ended, slavers had taken an estimated 25 to 35 million Africans across the Atlantic and killed an equal number during capture and conveyance.

 

Within Africa too, wherever Europeans settled, they displaced and often enslaved the local population. The “Orange Free State” established by Belgium’s King Leopold II in the Congo reduced the native population from an estimated 20 million to 8 million. Under the pretext of “civilizing the natives,” his regime established a reign of terror, mandating wild rubber collection quotas for each village and punishing unmet targets by lopping off the arms of workers. Supervisors were required to bring in baskets of limbs to show they were implementing policy rigorously.

 

In Namibia, the Germans massacred the Herero. In Kenya, the British ran the Kikuyu off the best agricultural land in the country, pushing over a million people into lasting poverty. A movement to reclaim the land in the 1950s resulted in a second displacement as the colonial regime hunted down, tortured and killed over 100,000 “Mau Mau terrorists.”

 

In South Africa, the British slaughtered the Zulu to get at the diamonds and gold in their land and the Boers (descendents of Dutch settlers) imposed racial segregation on the whole country in 1948, as India’s independence heralded the end of the era of European world domination. The system stayed in place until 1994.

 

Asia saw the highest death tolls of the colonial era, and as K.M. Panikkar noted in Asia and Western Dominance (1959), the violence began with Vasco da Gama. On his second voyage to India, he came upon an unarmed Arab vessel and, “after making the ship empty of goods” he “prohibited anyone from taking out of it any Moor” and then ordered it to be set afire.

 

A commentator in Portugal justified that as follows: “It is true that there does exist a common right to all to navigate the seas and in Europe we recognize the rights which others hold against us; but the right does not extend beyond Europe, and therefore the Portuguese, as Lords of the Sea, are justified in confiscating the goods of all those who navigate the seas without their permission.”

 

That “strange and comprehensive claim,” commented Panikkar, was “one which every European nation in its turn held firmly, almost to the end of Western supremacy in Asia. The principle that the doctrines of international law did not apply outside Europe, that what would be barbarism in London or Paris is civilized conduct in Peking, and that European nations had no moral obligations in dealing with Asian peoples, was part of the accepted creed of Europe’s relations with Asia.”

 

In India, the first of the “man-made famines” under British rule occurred in the decade after the 1757 fall of Nawab Siraj ud Dowlah in Bengal; it killed seven million people, a third of the population. The last famine the British created, also in Bengal, occurred in 1942-1943; it killed between 3 and 4 million. In all, the total of such deaths has been estimated at several hundred million; the Gandhian Dharampal calculated the total number of Indian deaths from all causes under British rule at 500 million.

 

China was never under colonial rule, but Britain fought two “Opium Wars” in the 19th century to force it to import the drug. By the first decade of the 20th Century a quarter of its population was estimated to be using the drug.     

 

This litany of European depredations in the global South is not a mere scratching at old scars. It is, in fact, essential to understanding the “Great War” of 1914-1918. German disaffection at not having enough colonial “lebensraum” (elbow-room) was perhaps the most important factor that drove its competition with Britain that turned into war. In that sense, it was a direct karmic consequence of the Real First World War.    

User Comments Post a Comment
Mr Menon,
What an article. It was so timely against the peace posturing by those very powers that you mentioned.

The notion " the world for Europe" was planted in the 14 to 15 th centuries. It was thought that the Church was behind it. But the greedy kings of Europe smelt the size of the booty and the plan changed.

By the 16 th century all the colonial powers were naked pirate nations on the high seas. Mr Parag Tope , in his monumental book, "Operation Red Lotus" vividly describes how , on one hand they posed as a democratic nation, the same England, was a notious high sea pirate and a narcotic smuggler. English govt backed trading houses were set up and they were let loose on unsuspecting populations and while the actual governments feigned innocence.

But, what is so amusing is that a spate of philosophers also were born in succession right in the same period of the global holocaust.. Francis bacon( 1561-1626), Spinoza(1632-1677), Voltaire ( 1694-1778), Kant(1724- 1804),Scopenhauer (1788- 1860), Nietsche(1844- 1900).

These people supposedly meant the renaissance in Europe. These philosophers were safety valves for the guilty Europe which was a worldwide murderer. Europe's sudden prosperity without any Industry had a lot of questions to answer. England's drug peddling, gun running, and the British loot of India , French slave trading, the Dutch slave - diamond trade all needed to be balmed by some philosophers.

It all started from Aristotle who nudged his semi barbaric student Alexander to wage wars on countries like Persia and Beyond for the simple reason that he despised them . Even now, the UN, NATO and WTO exist just to protect Europe from an energing Asia. They know fully well that the Asian juggernauts , once awake will make a mincemeat of Europe in all departments.

India , Japan and China must put their firm foot forward to strip Europe down to their actual face of the pirates.
Venkat
August 10, 2014
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Venkat, what a brilliant summation - right on the mark
Sally
August 10, 2014
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I agree with the article's historical account and as well the comments from some of the viewers.

However, this nice cosying up between India,China and Japan may remain a pipe dream, since China is not to be relied upon. Indeed, their continuing supply of mega nuclear reactors to Pakistan and their long history of supporting Pakistan (against India) is an indication of their ongoing hostility towards India.

Even while Sushma Swaraj was visiting China the border incursion continued quite blatantly.

China's great power dream is still there. India has to be wary. Unfortunately, thanks to Jawaharlal Nehru's policy we lost a seat in the Security Council and even worse our land.

So, while keeping in mind the predatory policies of the West, we have no reason to believe that jihadism and Chinese policy are not to
be kept in mind.
Dr. Vijaya Rajiva
August 10, 2014
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Excellent article, uncovers the worst genocides in history
Krishnarjun
August 10, 2014
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"Mizoram for Christ" is the slogan given by Rahul Gandhi,where every single Hindu has been forcibly converted to Christianity.Those who resisted conversion,like the Brus,are living in ramshakle tents in Tripura.Yet,stupid Hindus allowed Sonia Gandhi to rule over them for more than two decades.
S.S.Nagaraj
August 10, 2014
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The "next great extinction on Earth" is the latest cry of the ecological and biodiversity conservationists. Rightfully so. But most of these folk also are " secularists" of the Congress design. They should study the last great extinction before they can with some understanding speak of the next one.

If the humans are also considered as another natural species, and their diversity as critical to its own healthy survival and the benevolent impact it has on this earth, then the greatest destruction of this diversity was perpetrated by the white christian west diing its colonial occupation of every continent.

Whole peoples were exterminated. Ways of living were exterminated. Languages were exterminated. Philosophies of life were exterminated. Food sources and variety was exterminated. Religions were exterminated. Modes of dressing was exterminated. Self sufficiency, pride, self confidence were all exterminated - - - - an endless list of exterminations. If their own "Satan" could have encapsulated his form and evil into a people, they would have been the white christian west.

A small proof: Just read the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Chrstian Discovery. Just google them, and enough information will pop out.

But, yes BUT, nations have to work out their Karma, just as individuals do. The number of deaths, amount of suffering that the white christian west has undergone in the two world wars and all the wars till now is not even a small percent of what is due to them. They will have to
work out the remaining Karma.

And ditto the Islamic crescent.

All this makes me truly afraid for our childten and the world that they are going to have to live through and with.

Chandra Ravikumar
August 11, 2014
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Who did all these barbaric atrocities? That's the billion dollar question.

Many believe it is christian missionaries. they dont know the fact that vatican church has been hijacked by the secret societies like illuminati, whose goal was more barbaric than the events that happened. One of the illuminati goal was to reduce the global population and it is they who has induced wars and genocides for the past three centuries.

To that extent, the whole colonisation of world is NOT a british one, but by illuminatis who just used the british empire as a tool. Americas were deliberately cleared of inferior races to establish the new world government model, and for settling of superior white races. Christianity is just a front end for their goals.

People should understand the real enemy, who operate from behind various organisations.



illuminati
August 11, 2014
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@illuminati
Christian barbarism had been around for over 1500 years before the Illuminati (?) came on the scene. Dan Brown has given an escape route for the Missionary/Corporate nexus. Maybe Dan Brown was induced to create this escape route?

Even the most unbelievable horrors become believable acts from this monstrous team.
Chandra Ravikumar
August 11, 2014
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Jul 24, 2014 Berlin Woke Up, Now What About Your City?

In this video Luke Rudkowski travels to Berlin Germany to cover the expanding and growing resistance moment. This event took place on July 19th and brought together over 5,000 people from all over Germany. This is a video of the people there and the message they have to you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDu-REENQRQ
Agent of Freedom
August 11, 2014
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This article is well researched and incisive in its historical views. Barbarism was long a prominent aspect of empires and the recent European (and American) ones need to be viewed no less harshly than the Mongols, the Romans, the Assyrians, etc. Doubtless there are examples of Asian barbarisms in India, though my education doesn't identify or highlight them.

One revision is appropriate: Orange Free State was in South Africa, not the Congo and was a Boer entity, not the creation of the Belgians. I think the article meant to cite the CONGO Free State.
Leif Palmer
August 12, 2014
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After 600 years and 600 million deaths, Europe may find itself back to square one in next 60 years.History appears to be moving on to complete its circle.
Jitendra Desai
August 12, 2014
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@chandra ravikumar,

/** @illuminati
Christian barbarism had been around for over 1500 years before the Illuminati (?) came on the scene. Dan Brown has given an escape route for the Missionary/Corporate nexus. Maybe Dan Brown was induced to create this escape route?
**/

The christians did not have any scientific mind to invent navigation to travel in seas. all the technological advancements were provided by the illuminatis, and the barbaric christians were just a tool used by them.

Who owned the ships, and who were the beneficiaries of the gold loot? Think from a practical perspective.
illuminati
August 12, 2014
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Dear Sir/Madam,
Mr. Menon has been quite incisive in his assessment of Euro-American terminology of world wars.

I beg to state that the following may sound a little déjà vu to many a reader, however, the real WW-I might well be the conquest of the entire North and Central Africa, entire West Asia and Southern – Mediterranean Europe and later parts of South Asia and South East Asia by the Arabic – Turkish hordes riding the religion of Islam. Most of the conquests occurred within a few decades after the demise of the founder of Islam. This was more akin to the Nazi-Blitzkrieg of the early 1940s while the generic-Christian Euro-colonialism was akin to the systematic-meandering of a determined beast of prey going about marking and securing territories. There are no traces of any original religion and culture in any of the lands they conquered, be it Algeria or Egypt or Iran or Turkey or Arabia.

The generic-Christian European atrocities have been documented here and there as Mr. Menon had pointed out in the case of Bartolomeo de las Casas and by many European humanists, and to a certain extent in the documents of the official modern Euro-American history. The generic-Islamic-Arabian atrocities – service to God in their own words – lie buried in Arabic or Persian texts or in vernacular texts. Many have yet to see the light of the day.

The generic-Islamic Arabic-colonialists managed to successfully bury their sordid crimes of the past 14 centuries and to elicit sympathy too from many neutral and liberal observers by projecting themselves as victims of those they destroyed and by pious quoting that a merciful God had enjoined and justified all their acts.

The Reformation and rapid movements towards democracy and liberalism and finally the influence of the proletariat in their own lands exposed their own misdeeds elsewhere on many occasions. At the very least information was available to their public about their own misdeeds happening elsewhere on the globe, though they could not and did not do much about them.

Political and economic Marxism started out as a panacea for all the ills thrown up by exploitative systems in Europe. However, in its Russian and Chinese march of fury it consumed everything that it came across, good and bad without discrimination. Compared with the earlier genocidal systems, the havoc unleashed by the Marxism in the 20th century mainly in the erstwhile Soviet land and China appears only like a child’s play.

In India, the same Marxism did afford a powerful weapon to the Gandhis and Nehrus – metaphorically speaking – in whitewashing and glorifying the Arab-Islamic inflicted genocide first and the Euro-Christian inflicted genocide next. Thus, it is indeed an irony that a European system that was created to contain the two became a sustaining factor for the two inherently-genocidal systems.

India is now facing an existential crisis and an unenviable task of fighting its own WW-3 and more, to rid itself of all these three inherently-genocidal systems.

S.L.Narasimhan,
New York, NY, USA
August 12, 2014
S.L.Narasimhan
August 12, 2014
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@S.L.Narasimhan,

Well put. India has to rid itself of all 3 inherently genocidal systems.
The threat of jihadism and as well China's great power ambitions cannot be forgotten by India even while remembering the mass genocides hitherto in history.

These two are the immediate threats.
Dr. Vijaya Rajiva
August 13, 2014
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we all need to do our best to expose this hidden history
mpx
August 14, 2014
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Orange Free State? Congo? King Leopold? Belgium?
What else did you get wrong in this shoddy lie of a rant.
You skip over the role of India in the Sudan and against the Boers of South Africa with great ease I see. As handmaidens of the British the shameless Indians were as responsible for such much human misery as the rest. We will not mention India's everlasting disgrace, the caste system.
You are nauseating, to say the very least.
Elvira
August 16, 2014
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I was much pained to read Bashkar's essay on what I call post-Christian violence. From my perspective, this violence is essentially Western in origin. It bagan with the imposition of 'yasak', the fur tax, first on the people living in the region of ancient Byzantium, roughly the area round about the Black and Caspian seas. I cover these atrocious happenings in my blogs at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/2014/08/esos-chronicles-388-armageddon-war.html Interestingly, the current war in the region is a return of the serpent and finishing the 'job' of destruction by the head of the serpent seizing its tail.
Eso A.B.
August 18, 2014
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The so-called First World War was actually the Fourth World War -- meaning a war fought out all over the world. So far we have experienced five world wars, all of which originated in the rivalries amoth European powers. Basically start on the seam of Europe: the border between France and Germany.

The First World War was te War of Spanish Succession 1701-1714. As a result of it, France effectively conquered Spain

The Second World War was the War of Seven Years 1754-1763, which was a disaster for France. As a result Britain won Canada and India. Their control of India was very limited because the power of Mughal Emperor was very limited. Britain fought many other small wars to gain dominance in India.

The Third World War war the largest of these wars by far. It was the twenty-five year war caused by the French Revolution. Defeat in the War of Seven Years destabilized and bankrupted the French government. The French commercial class rebelled in 1789. French neighbors, especially Britain, Holland, Spain, Austria were terrified by the slaughter of the French royal family, and attacked France in response. An unknown corporal of the artilliary corps -- Napoleon Bonaparte -- rallied the French army and gained command of the country. He was defeated at Waterloo 25 years later.
Joel Clarke Gibbons
August 21, 2014
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If it is any consolation to Mr. Vani, the origin of these was the rivalry between France and Germany, for which Hindu history bears some responsibility. From very early times Europe was invaded by two "tribes," the Germanic poeples invading the north, from Russia, and the Latin tribe (and other Celtic people invading from India). The Celts were extremely warlike, and founded many old empires, most notably Persia, Athens, Rome. Spain, Portugal, France, and Russia. Like wise imperialists everywhere they had no desire to kill off the conquered people. They wanted them to work for them. The Germans were genocidal at times because they wanted to own the territory. The Slavs in the east, including especially the Russians, were also related to the Celts, and set about conquering their neighbors. The Germans, who were among those neighbors, were forced to move westward, which brought them into conflict with the celtic Latins. That conflict has defined European history for the last 2,500 years.

Some of this conflict could bescribed as genocidal, but your excessive use of that term obscures the real story. War is very violent and results in widespread death. The people on the receiving complain bitterly, and when history has allotted to them inferior weapons and technology, it seems that the conflict is monstrously unfair to them. That however is not evidence that the winners wanted to anihilate them. They wanted to WIN. One can say that everyone who wants to win is a promoter of genocide, but that only makes the term vacuous.

The world has been a very murderous place as competing tribes compete for turf. It is just one big gang war.
Joel Clarke Gibbona
August 21, 2014
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