Singapore 1941: What it tells Us about Afghanistan, 2010

A very famous Canadian politician (I don’t want to use this name because that would sound like bragging) once told me he never more than glanced at the news media. (Okay. It was Pierre Trudeau.)

I thought it was because he didn’t trust them. And that would be reasonable because the news media lie constantly, and they simply don’t report what their bosses don’t want reported. For example, when a Baltimore paper discovered about 1980 that the US army had a torture manual, and had been issuing it for years, nobody picked up the story. On March 10, 1999, President Clinton publicly apologized for American government involvement in the murder of over 200,000 Guatemala native people. The apology only made page twelve in the New York Times. Almost all other media in North America completely ignored it. But that wasn’t Trudeau’s reason for ignoring the media.

It was because he had a pretty solid knowledge from observation and from history of how people and governments behave. Once you have that, you can understand the day’s news with nothing more than a quick glance.

You want to know what’s going on in Afghanistan? Forget the news. Go to Youtube and search for the video clip on Singapore, 1942. That was the place and the time that marked the end of the Western Empire. It marked it as clearly as the sacking of Rome in 410 marked the end of another empire.

The Western Empire began in 1492. It was made possible with the development of ships capable of long voyages and large cargoes; and it was made possible by advances in navigation so that a course could be maintained and duplicated no matter how far from land.

That made the empire possible. What made it necessary in 1492 was a Europe with too many aristocrats and knights for the available land, and the lack of enough serfs to work it. And it was made necessary by kings who needed wealth to make themselves more powerful. That, more than the spices that the history books chatter about, was what Columbus was all about.

Spain and Portugal gave birth to the western empire immediately Columbus returned. They learned that even tiny armies, sometimes barely over a hundred men, could bring down whole nations into slavery to toil on uncountable acres of fine land. As for the kings, well, that tiny investment in ships and men returned a thousand thousand times its cost with the gold and silver looted from South America. That is where the King of Spain found the wealth to build his great armada.

Navigation and sea going ships made it possible for England and France to expand – to North America, to India, to China. The invasions were cheap and quick. Clive took India’s 50 million people and their land with an army of two thousands British soldiers. It was relatively tiny British, French and American armies that alternately slaughtered, enslaved, and then penned up the native peoples of North America. It was cheap; and it was immensely profitable.

British capitalists converted huge estates in India to growing poppies with cheap, Indian labour. It was soon obvious that the best market for the opium they could produce was China. But opium was forbidden by the Chinese government. It took two wars in the mid-nineteenth century and fifteen thousand soldiers to change its mind. But that was a small price to pay for a market of 200,000,000 people – and a guarantee that if the Chinese did not buy enough opium each year, the Chinese government would have to pay for any surplus left to the estate owners.

The dominance of the western empire shifted over the years – from Spain to France to Britain to the United States. But there was room even for the smallest western powers, as The Netherlands scooped up Indonesia, and tiny Belgium got approval to plunder the Congo at a cost of millions of African lives, a plunder that still goes on after more than a century with help from, among others, Canadians. The dominance shifted. But the base was always the same – west European nations (and their American offspring), with superior ability to move troops and goods over long distances.

As important as navigation and shipbuilding was a superior western understanding of how to go to war. The Europeans were always fewer than the conquered, but far superior in the crafts of war – strategy, tactics, logistics, concentration of power, discipline, transport. So it was that on the eve of World War Two, the Western Empire either owned or controlled the greater part of the world.

Transport, navigation, and military superiority….that’s where the wealth came from to industrialize the west, even to the building of the railways of Canada. Keeping others poor gave us ever cheaper goods and ever more powerful weapons. That is, it did until 1942.

On New Year’s day of 1942, Singapore was the economic and military symbol of British power in the world. Just weeks later, it collapsed into humiliation. It was taken by the Japanese, one of the “lesser breeds” as Kipling called them. The Japanese took Singapore even though its British, Australian and Indian Army defenders actually outnumbered them. That was the beginning of the end not only for the British Empire, but for the whole Western Empire.

From that day on, wars against the lesser breeds became longer, harder, stunningly expensive, and usually losers. Britain was the first to realize it was over. It began withdrawing from empire in 1945, and completed the job within a generation. France lost long and brutal wars in North Africa and Vietnam. The Dutch were forced out of Indonesia, and the Belgians out of Congo. The Americans lost in South Vietnam. Even the base of the American portion of the Western Empire, Latin America, was shaken when Castro established himself in Cuba – and got away with it. Castro was a turning point. Since then, the idea of liberation from the Western Empire has flared across the continent.

The wars are are losers, and very expensive losers, too. The US became a debtor nation in the Vietnam war, and has plunged deeper ever since. The once despised lesser breeds have not only caught up to western principles of war; they have improved on them so that guerillas in sandals can defeat the most expensive and advanced weaponry in the world.

There’s no need to read the newspapers to understand what’s going on in Afghanistan. At a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of dead on our side and nobody knows how many dead in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we are losing to a relatively small and poorly armed opposition in one of the world’s most primitive countries.

The empire that began in 1492 is over. There are only two questions left.

Will we adjust to the new reality?

Or will we, as outlined in the neoconservative “Project for the New American Century”, go on making unimaginably destructive (for everyone) and losing attempts to bring back the world of Rudyard Kipling?

While you’re thinking what the choice will be, consider these points. The current leader of the Western Empire is the United States. It’s most popular news service is Fox TV. Among the most popular leaders of public opinion are people like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Robertson. Congress is pretty much owned by banks, oil companies, and the health and defence industries.

And few of those have ever even heard of the fall of Singapore.