In an earlier speech at the Africa Centre I identified the key steps in British colonial strategy conceived as a long game (Note 1). This same strategy can now be seen as a template for the Ukraine war. This war was conceived strategically as:
- Isolate the target and physically surround it,
2. Inflict a superior technology of war upon it
3. Drain it of its financial viability by the continuous long war with economic sanctions,
4. Promote division and hostility among its neighbours and promote their military attacks on it
5. Use a ‘native’ population to do the actual fighting and dying
6. Develop a media strategy aligned to psywar that dehumanised the target
7. Rewrite history to remove them from the family of civilised nations
There was one important item omitted: targeted assassination. As Hilary Beckles has shown (Note 2), the UK state adopted a policy of targeted assassination of any leader who opposed their plans, in this case any political leader who wished to oppose the slave trade.
‘The murder of an African political leader in order to secure control of bodies for enslavement indicated the lengths to which English merchants were prepared to go in search of enrichment.’
Targetted assassination, which appears to some to be an Israeli policy, is, in fact, part of the grand imperial strategy, already adopted by Britain and continued by the US and not invented by Israel. Decapitation is a long held part of British imperial strategy and is a Brirish signature. We must recognise that an awareness of this underlying policy would be sufficient to confirm that attempts to assassinate Putin by Western forces can simply be taken for granted.
Note
- https://www.academia.edu/127828539/Ethiopia_and_Berlin_Keys_to_understanding_the_Ukraine_conflict
- Beckles, Hilary McD. “Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide “(Beckles’ Trio Book 3) (p. 60).