How Britain Denies its Holocausts: The Atrocities Of Empire

[Karmadillo]

But our atrocities are necessary atrocities that lead to thriving market economies and progress and happiness for all. So it's best our atrocities be forgotten because otherwise, people get confused and stuff and will start questioning things like our illegal war in Iraq.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=9406

How Britain Denies its Holocausts
Why Do So Few People Know About The Atrocities Of Empire?
by George Monbiot

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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 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). 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 labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour 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 Lytton to fund his war 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 1.25m 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. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - 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.

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[bryant69]

1. what about our own atrocities

It's hard to get people to feel a national guilt over something that happened before they were born.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[EST]

4. The problem with promoting a sense of guilt,

at whatever remove, is that it never works-always backfires-always. Yet we never learn. If the person closest to us does something that offends us, we are highly tempted to whack them with a punishment - guilt. It's a weapon, not a useful technique, but we bang each other with it high and low, near and far, and what we reap is resentment.
The approach has to change such that the lessons, often blindly spouted now to support all sorts of behavior, are actually learned, at a level where they can influence behavior rather than be totally new history that has to be learned, every generation. We cannot change the past. We cannot even change the present or the future, but we can provide some input that may influence the future as it becomes the present, in a positive, conscious with a conscience, direction.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

5. I don't think "guilt" is the point.

I never feel guilty about anything except the results of my own actions, and I don't think anyone else should. Conversely, I think the notion of national pride is only slightly less dubious.

I do think that accurate history teaching is desirable in it's own right, and that teaching with the objective of fostering a sense of national pride needs to be combatted.

[malaise]

2. The Brits have reinvented their history

They killed millions in the name of empire and they still do. They had one policy..divide and rule and they have the nerve to discuss 'cruel and inhumane' treatment.

[DBoon]

3. The Nazis learned well from other European colonialists

Their innovation was to apply the same techniques to white Europeans. Otherwise they merely copied what the British and the French had done in their empires.