The Council on Foreign Relations maintains an online Global Conflict Tracker. According to an analysis of the tracker by Visual Capitalist, most of the violent conflicts in the world today are not between different nations but uprisings within nations. In fact, even some of the disputes they do list as territorial are actually uprisings within a single nation, such as the insurrections in Turkey and Israel.
Thou shalt respect thy neighbor's borders
Invasions of recognized nations are increasingly met with economic isolation, as with Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and occasionally with international military action, as with Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Such invasions are thus increasingly rare. Even the Ukraine war may be nothing more than a staged conflict designed to drain taxpayer funds and arms from the West, as described in “Proof of controlled conflict in Ukraine.”
In particular, wars between superpowers have become a thing of the past.
Such a reduction in conflicts is not the case, though, with so-called “wars of national liberation” led by minority ethnic groups against their host country.
Independence for all?
Pat Buchanan describes the philosophy to carve new, smaller nations out of existing nations as “secessionism” and refers to the frequency of the birth of new nations as “epidemic”:
Where does this phenomenon, this continuing unraveling of old and proliferation of new nations, this epidemic of secessionism, end?
Indeed, independent nationhood for every separate ethnic group would require the members of the UN General Assembly to hold their meetings in a large stadium, according to data from infoplease.
Papua New Guinea has hundreds of ethnic groups and 839 spoken languages, many of which are completely unrelated to the others. Not bad for a population of 9.5 million.
With a population of more than 55 million people, Tanzania has more than one hundred ethnic groups.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has 81.6 million people who comprise 200 ethnic groups that speak 242 languages.
Wikipedia's partial "List of contemporary ethnic groups" extends from the Abagusii in Kenya to the Zuni (Pueblo peoples from the Zuni River valley), in western New Mexico, who still speak their own language, Zuni, at home. The Zunis, like many of the thousands of distinct ethnic groups worldwide, do not seek an independent nation. Which ones do?
Wars of National Liberation
No choice
In some instances, minority ethnic groups are treated so poorly that independence movements form naturally without any coercion. Such is the case with the Kurds, who have suffered massacres at the hands of the Turks and Iraqis. In Syria they cannot vote or own property or businesses. Unable to live freely and safely, they have formed their own military with dedicated soldiers.
Provoked
In other cases, minority groups enjoy the same legal rights as the majority and live in safety, but nonetheless feel like outsiders, lacking connections for government jobs and other opportunities and sometimes subjected to discrimination on an individual, though not governmental, level.
Socialists often seize the opportunity presented by this tension to advance their interests in overthrowing conservative governments. The socialist Sinn Féin party thus exploited Catholic-Protestant tensions in supporting the revolutionary, paramilitary Irish Republican Army's revolt against British rule in mostly Protestant Northern Ireland following its split from the mostly Catholic Irish Free State in the 1921 partition.
Even in the absence of any ethnic or religious differences, socialists attempt to find a source of tension, as communist Fidel Castro did in recruiting rural peasants to drive landowners out of the Cuban country side and help Castro's guerrilla army close in on Havana. Little did those peasants know to what they lent a hand. The New York Times — which ironically declared to the world in 1957 that Castro was to be trusted to bring a “new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist” — published prison memoirs in 1986 of a Castro supporter who was nonetheless arrested for speaking against communism:
"The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.''
That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly awoke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest. Illness and disease were a constant.
Coerced
Socialists may even exploit potential tensions where they don't yet exist, turning Sunni Muslims against their Shi'ite brothers, Muslims against Christians or Hindus, workers against employers and so on. Of course, such differences have in fact led to wars in the past, and in some places they continue to result in violence. But socialists will resurrect such conflicts when dormant where possible.
In Israel, for example, the Arab minority is not only not discriminated against in education and employment but actually benefits from affirmative action, such that an Arab-Israeli with lower grades than a Jewish-Israeli can be the one offered a university placement or job. According to the Syrian-Lebanese American founder of WorldNetDaily, Joseph Farah, life is indeed good for Arab-Israelis:
Arabs in Israel vote. They elect leaders to the Knesset [Israeli parliament]. They have their own political parties. They have their own newspapers. They have full rights to citizenship. They are free to speak their minds.
As an Arab-American journalist who has spent a good deal of time covering the region, I can tell you there is more freedom for Arabs in Israel than in any Arab state.
In fact, when Arab-Israelis marry Arabs from Arab nations, they generally choose to live in Israel, not the Arab nation of the spouse. Israel grants citizenship to spouses of Israeli-Arabs when requested. Almost all Arab-Israeli spouses are the result of voluntary Arab immigration to Israel, as Arabs have voted with their feet on the quality of life in Israel. Arabs even report their preference to live under Israeli jurisdiction to Arab media:
An overwhelming majority – some 93% -- of Arab residents of east Jerusalem prefer to live under Israeli governance than that of the Palestinian Authority [PA], a new poll from the Palestine News Network shows. The survey asked respondents whether they supported continued Israeli control of the city or a transfer of it to the Palestinian Authority.
Of the 1,200 Arab residents queried, 1,116 said that they preferred the former. Only 84 respondents answered that they would prefer the city to be under the responsibility of the PA, although they also noted that they would refuse to give up their Israeli identity cards and/or residency documents. Only five respondents said they would prefer to carry PA identity cards.
In such circumstances, even with the displeasure some Arab-Israelis may have initially felt with the Israeli victories against invading Arab armies in the early days of the newly formed Jewish state, there was no support for a general uprising. Scientist and strategic analyst Bryan Ellison, educated at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that socialists therefore resorted to outright coercion of Arabs.
PLO founder Yasir Arafat, a life-long socialist who served as a representative at the Communist World Festival of Youth, used his guerrilla fighters to employ the coercion scheme. According to Ellison, Arafat's henchmen poured acid on the faces of young Arab men as one of the seven steps socialists use to promote so-called “wars of national liberation” to overthrow or weaken capitalist countries' governments.
Step 5) As in any Communist revolution, the PLO must use terrorism against the very people it claims to be liberating, in order to create an illusion of popular support for the intifada. For many years, the PLO had already been directing many of its terrorist attacks against palestinians and Arabs in general . . .
“Palestinians live in daily terror of these squads. Some common murder techniques are beheading, mutilation, gouging out eyes, cutting off ears or limbs, and pouring molten plastic or acid on a victim’s face.”
Often the victim is shot or stabbed in broad daylight, in full view of palestinian bystanders. Merchants who fail to close their shops when a strike is called, or who do not pay taxes to the PLO, have their shops burned to the ground; buses that carry palestinians to work in Israel are also burned, keeping the workers from earning the money to feed their families. Some one thousand palestinians have been killed by the terror squads, and many others injured.
Check back as we lay out all seven steps of the socialists' Wars of National Liberation.
