Thursday, October 25, 2012

The Real "Bond Girls"

Malala Yousafzai struggling to recover from a Taliban assassin’s bullets is the latest real life “Bond Girl.”

She is one of the many millions of women and children who have been victims of those “licensed to kill” for Britain.

The linkage is direct. The Taliban was created by Pakistan’s ISI, which was established by British Military Intelligence in 1948 and has been its proxy ever since.

Ian Fleming, who invented the fictional serial killer James Bond, was a psychological warfare expert of British Military Intelligence.

Fleming tarted up murder with sex and fancy gadgetry and conjured up a series of bizarre villains, but underpinning the fiction was the grim reality of officially sanctioned murder of anyone who stood in the way of British “interests.”

The Taliban proxies of MI6 protect the $60 billion British interest in the drug trade out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. To keep that trade going it is necessary to keep the region as the badlands of Empire; Malala had to go. Similarly, protecting the diamond monopoly of DeBeers from post Cold War Russian and Arab mafias required a reign of terror in African producing countries; in Sierra Leone the job was taken in hand by former British special ops soldier Foday Sankoh, who persuaded locals not to deal with outsiders by cutting off hands, legs, ears and noses of thousands of people, including six month old babies.

During the heyday of the British Empire, London’s “interests” required the elimination of entire peoples. In such situations imperial agents killed without a qualm. In Tasmania, British settlers hunted the local people like animals until they were extinct. Winston Churchill even justified such policy to a parliamentary committee on Palestine, saying he did not “feel sorry” for the American Indian or the Australian aborigine because they were replaced by a “superior” race.

In colonial India, the killing was also on genocidal scale. At a conservative estimate, the British killed about 100 million Indians from the time they took control of Bengal (1757) to the imperial sunset turned ruddy by the deaths of over a million people in the assiduously engineered Partition "riots" of 1947.

There was also much targeted killing, the kind 007 is “licensed” to execute. The string of prominent Indians who died sudden and often premature deaths stretches from Raja Rammohun Roy, who was almost certainly poisoned, to Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi.

Gideon Polyna, an Australian academic who has made a specialty of counting up the cost in human lives of the British Empire, estimates that from 1950 to 2005 the "excess deaths" in the British Commonwealth numbered a staggering 700 million. Included in that number were the 100,000 or so Mau Mau rebels killed in Kenya, many by the most gruesome torture. (In July three survivors of that period learned that their effort to sue the British government would be allowed to go forward.)

It is amazing that the editors of Indian “elite” media do not see the dark reality behind the meretricious glamour of James Bond. It is one thing for Judi Dench, the porky British actress who has the role of “M,” the head of MI6, to burble about how “endearing” she finds the character of Bond; for Indian reporters to evince similar sentiments is like a Jew being starry-eyed over Adolf Eichmann or Josef Mengele.

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