Onwuchekwa Jemie
Hitler’s Drive for Lebensraum and How it was Stopped:
Just as Gadhafi wants to enlarge Arabia inside Africa, Hitler wanted to enlarge Germany within Europe by “the acquisition of a territory for settlement, which will enhance the area of the mother country, and hence not only keep the new settlers in the most intimate community with the land of their origin, but secure for the total area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude.” [Hitler 1971: 653]
Hitler looked east for Germany’s expansion in Europe. In Nazi ideology, Lebensraum meant the expansion of Germany eastward to conquer lands for Germans to settle and peoples for Germans to enslave. According to Hitler, the ideal war was one of conquest, extermination, and subjugation; the ideal area in which to conduct such a war was in the east, where the German people would win for itself the Lebensraum. The Nazi theory of Lebensraum became Germany’s foreign policy during the Third Reich.
A key element in Hitler’s plan for lebensraum was the idea of military expansion and the forced expulsion of the nations of Poland, Ukraine, Russia, etc. and their replacement with German settlers. The Lebensraum ideology was a major factor in Hitler’s launching of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. As the German armies moved eastward, the Nazis began to turn large areas of Soviet territory into German settlement areas. The biggest obstacle to implementing the Lebensraum further was the fact that by the end of 1942 the Sixth Army was defeated in Stalingrad. After the second big defeat in the tank battle at Kursk during July 1943 and the Allied landings in Sicily, all further Lebensraum plans came to a halt.
USA, Australia, Russia-Case Studies of Lebensraum:
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Faced, from the 16th century, with European invaders seeking lebensraum, the Native Americans in what became the USA failed to muster the necessary will and forces to defeat and drive the invaders away; as a result, these indigenous peoples were exterminated and lost their continent by the late 19th century. Bands of their remnants were herded into reservations and left to slowly die out. Similarly in the 19th century, the Australian aborigines failed to muster the necessary will and forces to defeat and drive away the invaders from Europe. They too were exterminated. In contrast, the Russians in the 20th century, under Stalin, mustered the necessary will and forces, defeated Hitler’s armies and chased them back all the way to Berlin and obliged Hitler to commit suicide.
As these contrasting examples make clear, seekers of lebensraum can only be stopped by decisively defeating and driving them away.
How did the Russians manage to do that? First of all, their leaders took quite seriously the Nazi talk of seeking lebensraum in Eastern Europe, and prepared for war. In Feb. 1931, Stalin predicted and warned his people: “We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10 years. Either we do it or they crush us.” And he drove his people with the proverbial whip and scorpion, and forced them to industrialize at a desperate pace. And Russia industrialized in 10 years flat! Which was just in time to be ready when Hitler unleashed his armies on Russia in June 1941. And by 1943, Hitler’s lebensraum project lay in ruins as his mighty armies had been defeated by Stalin’s armies. It took another two years of hard fighting for the Russians to drive Hitler’s armies all the way back to Berlin. Had they not done so, there would be no Russia or Poland or Ukraine, etc. today. All the land from Berlin to the Urals would have been taken over and settled by Germans. And any Russians not exterminated would have been enslaved as Hitler intended.
If Africans want to escape at Arab hands the type of fate that Hitler planned for the Russians, we need to learn from Stalin’s example. We need to build a megastate and industrialize it at breakneck speed into a modern power. And we need to defeat the Arabs and drive them back across the Sahara. The first step is to expel all Arab League countries from the AU, or better yet, to destroy this enemy-controlled AU and organize a Black World League of States to serve as the collective security outfit exclusively for the Blacks of the World.
The second step is to militarily discourage any further Arab expansion into sub-Sahara Africa. We must firmly bear in mind that lebensraum ambitions are effected by military action, as in Sudan’s war on the SPLM, and its use of Janjawid militias in Darfur and Chad. And we must also firmly bear in mind that such ambitions are destroyed only by military action. To think of any other way is suicidal foolishness. So Gadhafi’s ambition must be finally defeated militarily by African power, and the sooner the better for Africans.
Part II: The Challenge to Pan-Africanism:
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up for me.
–Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)
In the last 15 centuries, Arab invaders have grabbed one third of the African continent, and systematically enslaved, exterminated or arabised the blacks they met there. How?
I have already quoted examples from the mission statements of the anti-African leaders of the Arab expansionists since 1820 in Sudan. Let us now see examples of how they’ve gone about implementing their policy on the ground since 1956 while the OAU/AU Pan-Africanists determinedly looked the other way or buried their ostrich heads in the sand.
The following are instructive excerpts, about the events in al-Di’ein and Dar Fur, taken from “Islamisation and Arabisation of Africans as a means to Political Power in the Sudan” by Sudanese scholar M. Jalaal Haashim:
al-Di’ein 1987:
As its civil war with the SPLM/SPLA intensified, the Jellaba-Arabist Sudan government of al-Sadiq al-Mahdi (1986-1989) used the Baggara Arabs to punish those Dinka who lived on the border of Kordufan and Dar Fur, such as the Ngog, on the assumption that all the Dinka were SPLM/SPLA.
“The Baggara tribes in Kordufan and Dar Fur are nomadic Arabs who have been greatly influenced by the Nilotic tribes, especially the Dinka, from whom they have taken the cows for livestock and the color of blackness . . . . Until then the hostility between the two sides was relatively kept at bay due to their historical inter-relationship. Thousands of Dinka who fled the war zone came and lived with the Baggara. This is how in a certain village called al-Di’ein in Southern Dar Fur more than 6,000 Dinka people peacefully took refuge and lived with the Baggara.
“In 1987 the government of Sadiq al-Mahdi established the infamous Popular Defence Forces (PDF) as a pretext for officially arming the Baggara Arabs to fight the Southerners. Armed in this way, the marauding Baggara squads of PDF began making incursions into the South, raiding the Dinka villages. [These] naturally sought help from the SPLM/SPLA [who] came to the rescue . . . . In all aspects the Baggara Arabs were unequal to the SPLA. Suffering defeat after defeat, . . . the Baggara began nursing deep hatred towards the Dinka in general, [and finally directed their revenge on] the peaceful Dinka who were living with them at al-Di’ein . . .
“In one day in mid 1987 at least 1000 Dinka were massacred, 4000 were burned alive, and the survivors – around 1000 – were enslaved. The massacre began early in the day. At first the bewildered Dinka did not believe what was going on. When reality dawned on them, they fled into the houses of their hosts who were also their attackers. They were dragged by their feet like animals to be butchered outside the houses of their hosts. The Dinka took refuge in the Church; there they were killed along with the priest. Then they ran and took refuge inside the Police station, which was part of the railway station, but, alas, the Police turned out to be accomplices. They were killed there also.
“Whether in good or bad faith . . . they were ill advised to take refuge in the empty carriages of a standing freight train so they could be taken away from al-Di’ein. With the trustfulness usually shown by totally vulnerable and helpless people in their eagerness to cling to a straw, they hurriedly obeyed. Once crammed inside, they were locked in from outside. Caged in like animals they saw with their own eyes barrels full of diesel being rolled toward them. They were burnt alive, all of them.
“Only then, with the barbecue smell of that holocaust, did the Baggara come to their senses. The survivors were fortunate that they were only enslaved. Slavery was the common sense of that doomed day . . . . In the period 1989-1999 only God knows how many massacres like that of al-Di’ein took place.”
