Divide et Impera

From: Washington's Long War on Syria

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Mass movements can be organized around different aspects of personal identity such as race, class, religion, sect, ethnicity, language, sex, and position within the international division of labor. The great imperialist powers often justified their domination of other countries and people based on race. They presented themselves as superior races destined to rule over the “inferior” peoples of the world. One such “inferior” people, in the view of Europe’s imperialists, was the Arabs, who occupied a territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. The Arabs had made signal contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, architecture, navigation, horticulture and philosophy, and had established great civilizations. But from 1516 to 1918 they were subjected to the rule of the tri- continental Turkish Empire. During WWI, the British fanned the flames of Arab aspirations to nationhood, promising to support Arab independence in return for aid in toppling the Turks. Britain maintained hegemony over its vast, globe-girding empire by deepening existing religious and ethnic differences among subject populations, and even creating new ones. London then stepped in as arbiter to manage the conflicts it had deliberately intensified or created, presenting itself as indispensable to containing the feral passions of the savage and brutal locals. The British viewed the societies they colonized in ethno-religious terms, always emphasizing the differences within them, and presenting colonized people as combustible agglomerations of competing and hostile collectivities which were forever at odds with each other. And if subject populations weren’t locked in struggle, the British machinated to ensure they became so. Whereas Arab nationalists emphasized the commonalities among Arab speakers, the Great Powers emphasized the differences among them, as they did in connection with all the peoples they subjugated. The British denied that nations were coterminous with the territories they ruled, contending that countries were simply geographical expressions marking the territory of many antagonistic nations. The oversight of a rational, dispassionate, and civilized power was therefore essential and indispensable to keeping communities portrayed as riven by “ancient animosities” from tearing each other apart.

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