@@ The British way of denying Genocides! @@
- From: "Arash" <A7000@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2005 23:42:06 -0500
Guardian UK
December 27, 2005
The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities
It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do
so few people know about them?
By George Monbiot
In reading the reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orhan_Pamuk), you are struck by two things.
The first of course is the anachronistic brutality of the country?s laws. Mr. Pamuk,
like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for ?denigrating
Turkishness?, which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide
(http://www.armenian-genocide.org) in the first world war and the killing of the
Kurds in the past decade.
The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action
which could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial
of the country?s foremost novelist for mentioning them.
As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other
members of the European Union have found a more effective means of suppression.
Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their
homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in
Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most
British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of
which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story
of the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. (1) These people were,
he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy.
When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan) there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in
India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export
to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a
record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve,
government officials were ordered ?to discourage relief works in every possible way?
(2). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bulwer-Lytton%2C_1st_Earl_of_Lytton
The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited ?at the pain of imprisonment
private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain
prices?. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labor, from which
anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labor camps,
the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly
mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched ?a militarized campaign to collect
the tax arrears accumulated during the drought?. The money, which ruined those who
might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lord Lytton to fund his war in
Afghanistan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_influence_in_Afghanistan
Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the government?s export policies,
like Stalin?s in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces,
Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three
years, at least 1.25 million died.
Three recent books ? Britain?s Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by
David Anderson and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis ? show how white settlers and British
troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising
Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikuyu) started to organize ? some of them violently ?
against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into
concentration camps(3). Most of the remainder ? over a million ? were held in
?enclosed villages?. Prisoners were questioned with the help of ?slicing off ears,
boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who
were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes?. (4) British soldiers
used a ?metal castrating instrument? to cut off testicles and fingers. ?By the time I
cut his balls off?, one settler boasted, ?he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right
one, I think, was hanging out of its socket?. (5)
The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked ?provided they were black?.
(6) Elkins?s evidence suggests that over 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed by the
British or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the
hanging of 1090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. (7)
Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had ?failed to
halt? when challenged.
These are just two examples of at least twenty such atrocities overseen and organized
by the British government or British colonial settlers: they include, for example,
the Tasmanian genocide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_Aborigines), the use
of collective punishment in Malaya
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsular_Malaysia), the bombing of villages in Oman,
the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia). Some of them might trigger a vague,
brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I?m
talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our ?relative lack of
interest in Stalin and Mao?s crimes?. (8) But at least we are aware that they
happened.
In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts) arguing that for ?the vast majority of
its half millennium-long history, the British Empire was an exemplary force for good.
.... the British gave up their Empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to
educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative
institutions? (9) (presumably by locking up their future leaders).
In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that ?the British empire delivered astonishing
growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be colored pink on the
globe?. (10) (Compare this to Mike Davis?s central finding, that ?there was no
increase in India?s per capita income from 1757 to 1947?, or to Prasannan
Parthasarathi?s demonstration that ?South Indian laborers had higher earnings than
their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial
security?. (11))
In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that ?the empire became in its last years
highly benevolent and moralistic.? The Victorians ?set out to bring civilization and
good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In
almost every country, once colored red on the map, they stuck to their resolve?. (12)
There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be
ignored, denied or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of
thought in Britain ?promotes one key concept that underpins everything else ? the
idea of Britain?s basic benevolence. ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly
possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show ?exceptions? to, or
?mistakes? in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence?. (13) This idea, I fear, is
the true ?sense of British cultural identity? whose alleged loss Max laments today.
No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply
commission the stories they want to read.
Turkey?s accession to the European Union, now jeopardized by the trial of Orhan
Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits
its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of
the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say
what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Desmond) and the Barclay brothers
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_and_Frederick_Barclay) to buy up its newspapers,
and the past will never trouble it again.
References:
1. Mike Davis, 2001. "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of
the Third World" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1859843824).
2. An order from the lieutenant-governor Sir George Couper to his district officers.
Quoted in Mike Davis, ibid.
3. Caroline Elkins, 2005. "Britain?s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya"
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022407363X).
4. Mark Curtis, 2003. "Web of Deceit: Britain?s Real Role in the World"
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0099469723).
5. Caroline Elkins, ibid.
6. Mark Curtis, ibid.
7. David Anderson, 2005. "Histories of the Hanged: Britain?s Dirty War in Kenya and
the End of Empire" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393059863).
8. Max Hastings, 27th December 2005. This is the country of Drake and Pepys, not
Shaka Zulu. The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1673892,00.html
9. Andrew Roberts, 13th July 2004. We Should Take Pride in Britain?s Empire Past. The
Express.
http://www.express.co.uk
10. Andrew Roberts, 16th January 2005. Why we need empires. The Sunday Telegraph.
http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/01/16/bolal16.xml
11. Prasannan Parthasarathi, 1998. Rethinking wages and competitiveness in
Eighteenth-Century Britain and South India. Past and Present 158. Quoted by Mike
Davis, ibid.
12. John Keegan, 14th July 2004. The Empire is Worthy of Honor. The Daily Telegraph.
http://www.news.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/07/14/do1401.xml
13. Mark Curtis, ibid.
* George Monbiot (http://www.monbiot.com) is currently visiting professor of planning
at Oxford Brookes University. He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at
the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele
(politics) and East London (environmental science). In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented
him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement.
He has also won the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize for his screenplay The
Norwegian, a Sony Award for radio production, the Sir Peter Kent Award and the
OneWorld National Press Award.
During seven years of investigative journeys in Indonesia, Brazil and East Africa, he
was shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked and stung into a poisoned coma
by hornets. He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in
Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria.
In Britain, he joined the roads protest movement. He was hospitalised by security
guards, who drove a metal spike through his foot, smashing the middle bone. He helped
to found The Land is Ours, which has occupied land all over the country, including 13
acres of prime real estate in Wandsworth belonging to the Guinness corporation and
destined for a giant superstore. The protesters beat Guinness in court, built an
eco-village and held onto the land for six months.
He is the author of the best selling books "The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new
world order" and "Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain"; as well as the
investigative travel books "Poisoned Arrows", "Amazon Watershed" and "No Man?s Land".
He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1673895,00.html
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