A thought struck after the last post (and I don’t mean the haunting bugle refrain). The four invasive protagonists directly mentioned – Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, Genghis Khan, and the Ottoman Empire – had one thing in common, and it’s something they share with others of similarly invasive persuasion. They’re all men. As were the Spanish Conquistadors, Napoleon, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on. Not a woman among them.last post
That makes sense, given the historical tendency of men to men hold all of the positions of power, while women stay home bearing children, and/or knitting scarves for the troops. So, what would happen if the softer, gentler, more conciliatory sex were to achieve the highest office in the land?
Five female leaders come immediately to mind…. the Amazons, Boadicea, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher. It’s interesting, and possibly instructive, to consider why.
Involved in wars, all of them. Now, the Amazons are debatably mythical, although there is significant evidence as to their historical existence. Stories of their physical and military prowess may be exaggerated, though. Accounts of their feats were described exclusively by men, who may well have had their minds addled by other factors. We will probably never know.
Boadicea certainly existed, but her history was also written by men, and her Roman enemies at that. History is always written by the victors and, despite a valiant effort by Queen Boa and her followers, in defiance of her husband’s capitulation to Rome, she eventually lost the lot, including her life,
So to the modern era…. Indira Gandhi (India) was a ruthless centralist who went to war with Pakistan, and fuelled other violent exchanges. Gold Meir (Israel), following the Munich Olympics massacre, ordered Mossad to hunt down and assassinate suspected leaders and operatives of Black September and PFLP. She also presided over the Yom Kippur war in 1973. Both of these can be construed as defensive operations where Israel was not the initial aggressor. And Margaret Thatcher (UK) was involved with the Falklands War. That, too, was a defensive effort. The Falklands Islands are thousands of miles/kilometres/whatever from the UK, so the place is geographically more Argentinian than anything else. However, the islands were uninhabited until colonised by France, and then by Britain in the 1760s, so Argentina had no political claim. Indeed, the inhabitants consider themselves British.
A couple of other national leaders of some note: Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan) oversaw constant modernisation of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, ostensibly as a deterrent to Indian aggression. She actively advised George HW Bush against getting involved with war and/or politics in Afghanistan. Aung San Suu Kyi, (Myanmar) apart from her attitude to the country’s Rohingya minority, is almost a model of non-violence, and is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.
These are probably the best known examples globally, but there are many more female heads of government, most of them largely unheard of. There have been 75 in fact, between Sirimavo Bandaranaike (Ceylon) in 1960, and Theresa May (UK) just a few weeks ago. They are well distributed across the globe, from Europe, North (Canada) and South America, African republics, the Middle East (Muslim and Jewish), to Australasia on both sides of the Tasman. And it looks like the US is next.
So, of 75 women who have headed national governments, only one can be said to be militarily aggressive. If that’s the case, how would the world look if it were governed by women? (One can only hope that Hilary Clinton follows that lead, and doesn’t fall into step with the military-industrial US juggernaut.)
There’s the time-honoured idea that women are biologically less inclined to violence than men. That makes a lot of evolutionary sense, given that women have historically had the role of loving and nurturing their boys so that they can grow up to be big, strong soldiers; and loving and nurturing their girls so that they can have more boys to nurture into soldiers……. If the cycle is broken, and there are no longer old men in power, sending young men off to die in wars……
We’ll take that line of thought only so far for the time being, because there are a few geopolitical areas where male political domination is probably a long way from being broken – East Asia, most of the Muslim Middle East, and the Russian Federation – where there are quite a few women in senior public service roles, but few with direct political influence. A majority of national government leaders being women, especially where it could make a less-war difference, may be a fair way off.
To change tacks a little, a strange thing about war (there are many strange things) is the concept of how it ends. Raising the invading country’s flag on a particular building seems to do the trick sometimes, as in the Presidential Palace in Saigon. Poor old South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh, who had only been in office for three days, was compelled to declare in a radio broadcast “the Saigon government…completely dissolved at all levels.” The concession of defeat.
At the opposite end of the process is the declaration of victory. George W Bush did that. See the banner here:
He didn’t actually say “mission accomplished”, but it was the nearest equivalent.
In the end, though, it’s the word of one person that marks the end of hostilities, just as it’s the word of one person that starts them in the first place. The thousands and millions who actually put their lives and bodies on the line in the conflict don’t get a say. The millions who stay at home and contribute to the “war effort” through higher taxes, rations and other deprivations don’t get a say. And the multitude of combatants and civilians who die most certainly don’t get a say.
The same oddity applied to past colonisation. There was a “rule” that finding a piece of territory not occupied by another equivalent (or thereabouts) power meant that any country could just stick a flag in the ground and claim ownership on behalf of their sovereign. That was the situation in Africa in the late nineteenth century, as western European countries scrambled to gain territory. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain all had outposts, most of them strategically placed on trade routes. Even the recently-formed Belgium felt it had to get into the act, and King Leopold II employed explorer Henry Morton Stanley (he of “Dr Livingston, I presume” fame) to help him lay claim to the Congo – the interior of the continent, and the only part that no other country was silly enough to colonise.
A century earlier, the same fate had befallen North America and what was to become Australia. Indeed, Australia is so vast that having significant settlements on the east coast was no guarantee that British ownership extended over its entirety. At one point there was concern to raise a flag and establish a colony on the west coast to extinguish perceived ambitions from France and Russia.
And before that was the tragedy of Spanish conquest of South America. In all cases, the raising of a flag was sufficient to take over control of every aspect of human life within the deemed area. Of course, the indigenous populations already living there didn’t understand the significance of a flag. In some cases they dared to resist, with bloody consequences. In others, they chose to ignore, or even co-operate with, the newcomers, and paid the price later as their entire civilisations were undermined and effectively destroyed.
The same applies to the conquests of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, where whole cultures were systematically wiped out. The Romans may have brought some benefits to their new subjects (for irrefutable proof, see Roman achievements ) but at the price of the veritable extinguishment of Greek philosophy schools, and all the advances that they may have wrought.
All this invasion and colonisation, as it has unfolded in recent history, has its upsides and downsides. The majority of former colonies have since attained independence, and the UN runs a decolonisation council to help the rest. (There are plenty of them left, mind you, but they’re virtually tiny islands, too small to be self-sustaining anyway, and/or they remain subject states out of choice.)
The major colonial powers have, over time, accepted migrants from their former colonies. The UK has a large population from the sub-continent and the West Indies, for instance. France has plenty from Mediterranean and Saharan Africa, Portugal is home to many a Brazilian, and Spain to Argentinians. That caused some issues initially, but given that the immigrants by and large had adopted the cultural values as well as the language of their host countries, they eventually became a part of the landscape.
The extra layer of difficulty has occurred more recently, when immigration into Europe from other parts of the world began mixing many cultures together. The European “natives” have a hard time picking the “good” dark-skinned people from the “bad” dark-skinned people, and some are tending once again to label all dark-skinned people as undesirable. Further, this surge in nationalism threatens to breed mistrust even between white nations. That was surely not foreseen by the advocates of colonialism. Oh, what problematic seeds we sow when seeking to exploit and control the affairs of others.