“You came, you conquered. The strongest takes the land. We accepted your rule. We lived under you. But not as dogs! If we are to be dogs it is better to be dead. You can never make the Amandabele dogs. You may wipe them out. But the Children of the Stars can never be dogs.”
– The words of Chief Somabulano of the Matabeleland (today’s Zimbabwe) in 1896 to the British.
When the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Mexico was already an oil producing country. The Mexican oil industry was owned by British and American investors. Oil was becoming more and more important in the world, because the Europeans, led by the British, the Germans, the French, the Italians, and so on, were converting their navies, as quickly as they could, from steam power to petroleum power.
At the time of World War I, which was fought from 1914 to 1918, navies were vastly more important than air power, which was primitive at the time. In fact, even in World War II, between 1939 and 1945, the navies, which included submarines, may have been greater factors in the outcome of the war than the respective air forces. Certainly in the beginning of World War II, the fight for control of the Atlantic Ocean was considered vital to the two main combatants – Great Britain and Germany. (The opinions in this paragraph are a layman’s opinions: I am not trained in military matters.)
When the Mexican Revolution began, it was not really a revolution: it was a dispute among the Mexican upper classes, because Porfirio Diaz had established a dictatorship which did not allow free and fair elections. An amount of the support which gathered around Francisco I. Madero, a member of the Mexican upper classes, included elements in the trade unions and the rural peasantry who had a more radical agenda than Madero.
When those elements of his coalition began bringing pressure on Madero, once he was elected president in 1911, for him to enact more worker-favorable legislation and make land available for the sufferers in rural Mexico, there was a reaction from the bulk of Porfirio Diaz’s privileged cartel, who had not gone into exile with him. The remainder of the Porfiriato, in conspiracy with powerful officers in the Mexican Army, organized the murders of Madero and his vice-president in 1913. This unleashed the real Mexican Revolution, which came basically from the workers and the peasantry.
It was in the middle of the Mexican Revolution that the Russian Revolution took place in 1917. This was planet earth’s first communist revolution: it was bloody and it destroyed the feudal monarchy which had ruled Russia. The ideas of the Russian Revolution influenced the Mexican Revolution to a substantial extent, so much so that a Mexican president named Plutarco Calles was elected in 1924 who was an atheist and a communist sympathizer. The Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, a conservative element of the society, led armed uprisings against the Calles government between 1926 and 1929. This was the Cristero War, also known as La Cristiada.
During the course of the Mexican Revolution, the oil industry remained a relatively stable sector of the Mexican economy. You can see the same thing happened today in Iraq and Syria, where there have been all kinds of violence going on, but the oil wells and refineries are prizes which are protected at all costs. It appears that recent air strikes by the United States are directed at some oil wells and refineries controlled by the Islamic State (ISIS) militants, but this is absolutely an emergency measure by the Americans. Violence in oil producing areas always drives up the price of petroleum, which harms the American economy and the economies of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in Europe. Oil is very, very big business. Belize is now an oil producing country. But, the people of Belize pay exorbitant prices at the pump for gasoline and diesel. How you figure?
If you listen to Ya Ya Marin Coleman questioning roots Belizeans on her “Two Cents Cam,” you will realize that the Belizean people are not educated. The Belizean people do not have basic knowledge of important issues. The schools in Belize are designed to produce high performance students from the elite classes. The schools in Belize were never intended to educate the masses of the Belizean people. That is a fact. You can’t deny this. The evidence is right in front of your damned eyes.
No real change in the oppressed status of the Belizean masses will take place without violence on their part. This is the abiding lesson of history. For only hinting at this reality in 1951, Leigh Richardson and Philip Goldson were arrested, convicted, and jailed in British Honduras. In 2014 in Belize, I can say what I said in the first sentence of this paragraph because the Belizean people proved in 1970 that they will defend my right to free speech.
I cannot encourage any such revolutionary violence, of course, and I am too old for that in any case. I am merely trying to expose the hypocrisy of the Pharisees in Belize’s educated classes who are on the payroll of the Americans and in the service of the British. Their job is to deceive and mislead the Belizean masses. By their fruits, ye shall know them. It is written.