What a tragic list. The list is actually much, much larger than the one I put here as the title of this thread, but the unifying theme is a simple one. It is a list of smaller national groupings that have cooperated in some way with major imperialist powers, usually with tragic results to themselves. It is a list of smaller cultural, racial, national groupings that have gotten historically used and buffeted by much larger powers, that themselves were acting in their own perceived interests within much larger world conflicts.

An interesting and poorly taught history, is the history of the conflicts between the Algonquin vs the Iroquois, French vs the British, then enter the Americans, too with their own internal conflicts. Much easier to teach are the fables of Pocahontas and that of ‘Thanksgiving’. How much brutal warfare for the Algonquin and the Iroquois as they tried to side with one group of Europeans against the other. Their efforts to survive were only minimally successful.

Then are the stories of the Hmong and Montagnards, who cooperated in one degree or another with the French and the US in their imperial efforts to dominate SE Asia. They did so in rebellion against their own domination within their regional societies by the more numerous Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer peoples. But as a result, they became soon ‘strangers in their own land’, so to speak. Many ended up in far away exiles in the US and elsewhere.

And look what has befallen the Pashtun, used by the US and the US allied Arab dictatorships to battle against the exSoviet Union which backed different Norht Afghan groupings of other national backgrounds. Much more complicated than just blaming it on the Taliban or ‘Muslim extremism’, as the idiot US Right Wing does so.

The Kosovars remain with 60% unemployment years after Clinton/ Gore’s war. What have they gotten by cooperating with US imperial interests against their neighbors, the Serbs? Little, it seems. Would ‘independence’ bring any better? It is doubtful, since Serbia is unlikely to easily forget such an evil alliance between Albanian and American. And the Bosnian Muslim? He faces a backing that now is in a religious war against the very same religion backed just yesterday.

The Kurds? They had certainly legitimate reason to rebel against Saddam Hussein and the his Arab Sunni grouping. But now they are linked irremediably to the CIA and Pentagon, even as those same sinister forces back Kurd oppression next door in Turkey. Iraqi Kurdistan is now the better off section of Iraq, yet what a dangerous situation for the Kurdish people long term.

And the Timorese? Half of Timor remains part of Indonesia, and the other half is now an impotent pseudo state, dependent on the UN, Australia, and the US for its semi-starvation bound existence. Its 1,000,00 people are divided into an incoherent number of language, tribal, ethnic, and cultural groups, whose only field of unity is that most everybody is of Christian religion, legacy of Portuguese imperialism.

US/ Australian imperialism split off a Christian portion of Indonesia and mainly to help control better the oil resources for themselves, and not the people being manipulated. There can be little independent and local economy in such a miniscule and divided half of an island. Meanwhile, Indonesian Timor has more population, more economic activity, and is not a society that is essentially a colony dependent on White racist Australia. It is part of the Indonesian archipelago of 17,000 islands, and not a colonialist split off.

How sad the results most always are, when small national, ethnic, and cultural groupings get picked up and carried along in the power plays by various imperialist world powers. What will happen to the Balkans, will they ever be able to restabilize themselves now that imperialism has reentered into their affairs in such a major way? What will happen to the Kurds, Shia, and the Sunni/ What about all the ethnic groups of Afghanistan and Pakistan? All now victims of US power plays.