Thank God, the July 9-11 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) conference in Washington declared China and not India as “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine,” and demanded that Beijing halt shipments of “weapons components”.
This NATO criticism was confined to China because economic and strategic compulsions compelled the Western allies not to drag the name of New Delhi. But two days later, a US official on July 12 said, “India must play a constructive role in ensuring peace in Ukraine”.
The United States was upset by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to Moscow which almost coincided with the NATA Summit—not to speak of India’s decision to import Russian oil and continue to buy its weapons.
Before lecturing India on its policy towards Vladimir Putin the United States must recall its inglorious past when the then Democratic Party administration as well as some other Allied powers had established diplomatic relationship with the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government after the fall of France in the summer of 1940. This inconsistency of Washington in its policy in the initial years of World War II and
recognition of Hitler’s puppet regime in France strained the relationship between the US and UK.
The ‘neutral’ United States got dragged into World War II after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 6-7, 1941, and subsequent declaration of war by Germany against Washington on December 11.
Post-colonial Frustration of West
Though the NATO get-together on the occasion of 75 years of its completion, ended up announcing billions of dollars of military aid to Ukraine what they failed to appreciate is that in this era of ‘www’ there is little room for declaring any inter-imperialist war
as WW or World War.
In the post-colonial era, the West can’t drag the rest of the world into conflict between Russia and Ukraine. As independent countries, many of them good friends of the West, are not prepared to toe its line on all disputes. This happened in the case of NATO operations against Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other regions.
The Western frustration is understandable as there is no scope to forcibly recruit millions of Indian soldiers and throw them into various battles in Europe, Africa, Gallipoli (Turkey), Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and South-East Asia as the British did in the two World Wars.
Lakhs of them perished and got injured or maimed in these battles while tens of millions others died of Spanish Flu, the virus that the returned soldiers brought to India after the end of World War I. The so-called civilized British masters would publicly flog Indian soldiers in the name of disciplining them.
In the same way, today North Africa is not a colony of Western imperialist powers were the Allied and Axis (Germany-Italy) armies fought a desert war in the early 1940s. The US and UK-backed General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces launched its attack from here as Algeria was already a French colony. Like Indians Arab Muslims became the cannon fodder of this battle and suffered enormous material and human losses for no cause of their own.
In the Eastern Theatre the lone non-West imperialist, Japan, was wreaking havoc in the entire East Asia massacring crores of Chinese, Koreans, and other people of Asia Pacific. Here again, the soldiers of the Indian sub-continent were used to checkmate the Japanese
expansion, though it is also a fact that the Indian National Army of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose joined hands with Germany and Japan to liberate India from British imperialism. Some three to four million Indians died in famine deliberately caused by the British rulers in Bengal.
Myth of Soviet design
When NATO was formed in Washington on April 4, 1949 the Communist Soviet Union was not as powerful as it was being made out. It was still recovering from the savagery of war fought between June 22, 1941 (the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union) and May 8, 1945 (the
day World War ended in Europe). True, the Soviet forces ultimately managed to win the war against Germany and occupied the entire East Europe and a vast portion of East Germany yet it had to pay the heaviest price. About 2.70 crore of its military personnel and civilians lost their lives in this butchery which reduced the population of the Soviet Union.
This is not to speak of those who suffered injuries or were maimed. In contrast, the mainland of the United States was hardly devastated by the war.
At the same time, when NATO was formed on April 4 the Soviet Union was not a nuclear power–it became so five months later on August 29, 1949.
It was in response to NATO’s re-militarization of (West) Germany that on May 14, 1955, the Soviet Union and seven other Communist countries of East Europe signed the Warsaw Pact. This security agreement finally ended in mid-1991 that is a few months before the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in December.
Thus, NATO was formed in response to the emerging post-colonial world where there was no one to fight on behalf of these imperialist masters–though the bogey of Communism was certainly raised to justify its existence. Mind it, the communists took over the reign of power in China on October 1, 1949, that is six months after the formation of NATO.
Creation of Israel
Just before NATO’s birth, Israel was created on May 14, 1948, as a military outpost in the heart of the Middle East. The campaign to create a Jewish state in the middle of the Ottoman Empire started in the 19th century itself, though many Jews, especially Ultra-Orthodox stoutly denounced any such move. They warned the secular atheist Jews of the
conspiracy of Western powers and Zionist Christians to pitch them against the Muslim Ottoman Empire, with whom Jews had a perfect relationship and where they held high posts.
Prominent among those who strongly criticized the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which called for the Jewish homeland, was the then Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montague (of Montagu-Chelmsford Reform fame), the only Jewish minister in the then British
cabinet.
Montague called Zionism “a mischievous political creed” and dubbed any such move to create a Jewish homeland as an anti-Semitic act. He was critical of British policy towards Turkey.
It needs to be remembered that both Prime Minister David Llyod George (1916-22) and his foreign secretary Arthur Balfour were Evangelists and Christian Zionists.
On the other hand, the Orthodox Jews then used to claim that Jews can be brought to the Promised Land only by a Messiah and not by any imperialist power. They would consider the creation of a Jewish state as a sinful and blasphemous act. Some other community elders warned their fellow Jews that the homeland would be “a mouse trap”. It is another thing is that after the Holocaust the Western powers shipped all these Jews from Europe to Palestine and helped them create Israel.
So, what is happening in Gaza is also an extension of NATO’s game plan, though the latest Washington conference of 32 countries hardly made any mention of it.
The irony is that during the Cold War period between 1945 and 1991, NATO and the Soviet Union did not fight any direct war. It is after the collapse of Communism in Moscow and East Europe that the self-proclaimed spymaster of the Soviet era, Vladimir Putin, is posing such
a threat. Today almost all the countries of the Warsaw Pact have been inducted into NATO and Russia has been virtually encircled.
About eight decades later efforts are being made to expand the ‘Western World’ War (WWW) into World War III. But the West is struggling to do so. The era of CENTO and SEATO is also over though
efforts are on to extend NATO to the eastern world.
Soroor Ahmed is the author of the book, The Jewish Obsession published in 2004.
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