Dear Reader,
 
The Greek Alexander the Great colonised big parts of Asia, including the present Iraq. Later the Huns invaded Europe. But the great days of colonialism started after the Middle Ages when Western countries conquered the rest of the world.
http://jahtruth.net/horse.htm

Colonialism has been with us for a long time.  

Colonised people resisted foreign invaders. Holland, my country, once wiped out the whole population of some islands in the Indonesian Moluccas because the inhabitants refused to grow spices for the occupiers. They were simply replaced by more obedient people.
 
In the last century we have seen a rise in anti-colonial wars. The West withdrew its military forces and replaced occupying colonialism by economic colonialism. The USA now tries to reverse history by again invading weak countries by military force.

But resistance is changing.

In the past resistance was restricted to the occupied territory. The colonised Africans, South-Americans or Asians never attacked the colonial homeland. All violence took place in the own massworld were only masspeople from the colonising country as well as from the colonised country died in the struggle. Colonised people did not have the possibility to extend their struggle to the heartland of the coloniser.

The Irish IRA systematically carried out actions in the colonising country by letting bombs explode in England. In 1979 they killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India. In 1973 the ETA blew up the Spanish first minister Carrero Blanco. Direct attacks on the elite remained however rare. Most actions continued to take place in the massworld, where masspeople were dying in struggles that only benefited the old colonising elite and the new elite that later should lead the freed colonised countries.

On the contrary colonial occupiers often attacked members of the elite of colonised countries. Allende, Lumumba, Noriega, Saddam Hussein were only some leading people that were killed. And Israelis are killing leaders of the Palestinian resistance.
 
But in the last part of the last century mass transport and better education created the possibility to extend the struggle to places outside the own country. Advanced weapons ? one of the means by which a relatively small occupying force could dominate a nation with numerous inhabitants - came also available for the resistance. Technique once more changed history. But most fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Chechnya and elsewhere still takes place in the own country.

  A few attacks took place in the rich countries though again nearly only against masspeople. Therefore I reject these actions. But I applaud that actions at last are moving in the direction where the real culprits are living. Western masspeople should not be afraid of these attacks but should add their knowledge and skill to the struggle. And make the suppressed people clear that actions must be carried out against the real oppressors, the powerful Western elite. This elite refuses to give all people equal status because then it will lose its own elevated status, its position in which it always has more then the rest of humanity.

  Terror is terrible when it is directed against other masspeople. Terror is not terror when it is directed at people who are guilty that in the Iraq War  thousand American masspeople and fifty thousand Iraqi masspeople have died, that in the Chechen War a few thousand Russian masspeople have died together with many tens of thousands Chechen masspeople.
 
According to official Western figures about 5500 people died in the last three years from terror attacks. In the same period more than hundred thousand people died from attacks ordered by the Western elite. Only masspeople died. The slaughter of masspeople has to stop.
The only way to achieve this is by transferring any struggle to the quiet and safe eliteworld.

 
Yours truly, Joost van Steenis