What Is Gaza All About?

Near as I can tell, there have been 82 episodes of sustained mass violence since we got our asses kicked out of Viet Nam in 1974. These events ranged from our quick and easy 1989 invasion of Panama which cost some 900 lives, to the six-year civil war in Ruanda which resulted in some 500,000 fatalities, or the almost 20 years of civil strife in Uganda with more than 125,000 deaths, or the intermittent fighting in Syria where so far nearly 300,000 have died.

The human toll of this violence has for sure surpassed 5 million killed, plus at least twice that many injured and God knows how many people have been physically displaced.

Incidentally, I’m not counting the current violence in Gaza or Ukraine, where together we might be shortly approaching another 50,000 fatalities, and everyone knows what the physical devastation looks like in both those zones.

What do most of these terribly destructive events have in common? Perhaps as many as 70 of 80+ countries where this violence has occurred were British colonies created at some point beginning in the 19th Century and then losing their colonial status during and after World War II.

Here’s a map of what the British colonial system looked like in its greatest extent: