By Dr. Shahridan Faiez
This article is also published in NST
The 20th century was the most violent in human history. Not because humans are naturally brutal, but because modern Western culture perfected industrialised slaughter. Its instinct to resolve conflicts through violence, its greed for wealth and resources, and its habit of dehumanising entire populations produced horrors that still echo today.
Two world wars killed tens of millions. But the signature act of Western violence remains the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima, a city of 350,000 civilians. Three days later, Nagasaki. Over 200,000 men, women and children were incinerated or died from radiation poisoning. The victims were mothers holding infants, schoolchildren, grandparents. Japan was already seeking surrender. The bombs were a demonstration: the West would annihilate entire non-western civilian populations to secure dominance.
That logic was rehearsed in the colonies long before it reached Europe.
Take Belgium in the Congo. Between 1885 and 1908, King Leopold II’s regime turned the Congo into a forced labour camp for rubber. Villages that failed quotas had their inhabitants’ hands chopped off – men, women, and children. An estimated ten million, or about half the population, died.
The Dutch followed the same playbook in Indonesia. For decades, the Cultivation System forced starvation rations on locals. During Indonesia’s independence struggle, Dutch “police actions” massacred over 100,000 civilians through scorched-earth tactics. Farmers were bayoneted in their rice paddies, and villages burned to ash.
Nor were the French any different. In Algeria, from 1954 to 1962, French forces tortured systematically, bombed civilian villages, and threw prisoners from hovering helicopters. Over one million Algerians died. While bodies floated in the Mediterranean, the world watched in silence.
Across the Pacific, the United States replicated the same cruelties in the Philippines. After seizing the islands in 1898, US troops invented the “water cure” – forcing gallons of salt water down prisoners’ throats until their stomachs burst. Concentration zones depopulated entire provinces. In Balangiga, American soldiers massacred hundreds of Filipino men, women, and children. The American occupation caused the deaths of more than two hundred thousand civilians.
These were not aberrations. They were the same logic of domination and resource extraction that later produced the world wars. Belgian, Dutch, British, French, American – all competed ruthlessly for territory and wealth. And whenever local populations resisted, the response was indiscriminate violence, collective punishment, and deliberate civilian slaughter.
That pattern did not end with decolonisation. It simply moved to new theatres.
Today, in the 21st century, we watch it unfold in Gaza. Israel’s military campaign, armed and funded by Western powers, has killed over 70,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – the vast majority civilians. Whole families erased from civil registries. Hospitals bombed. Journalists and aid workers killed. Although the UN Commission of Enquiry in 2025 has called it a genocide, Western governments continue to supply weapons and diplomatic cover to Israel. Palestinian lives are treated as expendable.
Worse, the nuclear threat has returned. During the current Israel-Iran confrontation, senior Israeli officials have openly discussed pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Iran. United States contingency plans reportedly include tactical nuclear options that would irradiate cities and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. The same logic that justified Hiroshima is being revived: when a Western-backed power faces a non-Western adversary, the ultimate weapon becomes conceivable.
We stand at a stark historical crossroads. Will the same Western powers – the United States, Israel, NATO – once again dictate the 21st century, sliding us back into world wars, genocides, and atomic annihilation? Or is there another path?
There is. It was articulated in April 1955, when 29 newly independent Asian and African nations gathered in Bandung, Indonesia. They represented more than half of humanity. They rejected colonialism in all its forms. They called for peaceful coexistence, mutual respect, non-interference, and economic cooperation among the Global South. The Bandung Conference gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement and a truly universal vision – one not based on Western individualism, competition, or the threat of force.
Bandung drew on deep civilisational foundations that the West abandoned. From Asia: Confucian harmony, Buddhist non-violence, Islamic justice. From Africa: Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – placing community above individual accumulation. From Indigenous America: seventh-generation thinking, deciding not for quarterly profits but for descendants unborn. These are not naive ideals. They sustained societies for millennia before Western colonialism shattered them.
The 21st century can still take the Bandung path – toward peace and shared prosperity for all. But that requires rejecting the Western playbook: hyper-individualism, short-term greed, the normalisation of civilian slaughter. And it requires embracing traditional values: community over competition, reciprocity over extraction, a truly universal vision of human dignity.
This is a call to action for the Global South. The nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific – who suffered centuries of colonial violence and now watch Gaza burn – you do not have to accept the Western script. Strengthen South–South cooperation through BRICS, the African Union, ASEAN. Build independent media that tells the truth about colonial violence. Demand accountability for war crimes without Western vetoes. Revive the spirit of Bandung for the 21st century: a new conference, a new declaration, a new commitment to non-violence.
The 20th century was the West’s century of blood and domination. The question before us is whether the 21st century will be the Global South’s century of peace. The victims of Hiroshima, of the Congo, of Algeria, of the Philippines, and now of Gaza deserve nothing less. The answer is ours to choose.
Dr. Shahridan Faiez is chairman of Citizens International, a Non-governmental Organisation based in Penang dedicated to internationalism, peaceful coexistence and global cooperation for a better world for all.
