It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do so few people know about them?
George Monbiot
Tuesday December 27, 2005
The Guardian
| Oboy! It's George Moonbat! |
In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist 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 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 that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.
| Turkey's the product of 500 years of Muslim culture preceded by most of 800 years of trying to fight them off. It's not going to overcome that heritage rapidly, even though Attaturk tried to slice the Gordian knot. The requirement of that slicing was an authoritarian state that would be willing to come down with both feet on the holy men when they tried to make their comeback, which accounts for the peculiar position of the army in Turkish life — a position the Euros demand it abrogate. Mr. Moonbat, of course, lacks any understanding of history that's not couched in dialectics of some sort, so he can't be expected to understand the implications. Turkey's refusal to own up to the slaughter of the Armenians is something they're going to have to work out, but I don't expect they'll be able to actually examine it anytime soon. And if they revert to being proper Islamists they never will. |
As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU 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.
| [Raises eyes to the heavens. Beats breast. Rends garment. Smears ashes on head.] Properly contrite, Mr. Moonbat continues... |
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 famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño 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 the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". 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. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than 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 militarised 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 that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.
Between 1769 and 1901 there were eleven documented famines in India, of which the author is discussing one, presumably because it was marked by a particularly stupid British administration. But in the 1769 great famine of Bengal, 10,000,000 people, one third of the population, are reported to have died. The British weren't in control then, were they? In 1790-1792, the Doji Bara, or skull famine, killed people in such numbers that they couldn't be buried. It extended over the whole of Bombay into Hyderabad and affected the northern districts of Madras. In 1861 famine killed a million people in Bengal and Orissa, and three years later a famine in Rajputna killed a million and a half. The 1876-78 famine is reported to have killed five million — Mr. Moonbat lumps the death toll from several famines into one to tell a scarier story.
India is susceptible to famine due to its dependence on the monsoons. The monsoons don't come, crops don't grow. The thousand years prior to the arrival of the British saw famines lasting for years. The Durga Devi, in the late 1300s, lasted for 12 years.
Lord Lytton seems to have been an idiot, who didn't realize the extent of the problem and who fiddled with things like price controls that made matters worse. The Banglapedia describes him thus:His years in India were eventful. A severe famine raged over most of south India including Madras, Bombay, Hyderabad and Mysore for two years from 1876-1878. In the second year the famine also struck parts of Central India and the Punjab, and a heavy toll of lives consequently perished. The relief measures cost over ten crores of rupees and due to the failure of crops there was great loss of revenue. Lord Lytton's government, therefore, appointed a famine Commission under Richard Strachey to enquire into the causes of the famine and relief measures taken to mitigate the sufferings of the people. On the basis of the commission report a famine code was drawn up which laid down certain regulations relating to famine measures in the future. The government efforts to save life proved inadequate yet the viceroy held a magnificent Darbar in Delhi in 1877, to celebrate the assumption of the title of the Empress of India by Queen Victoria Lytton was also the fellow who brilliantly declared war on Afghanistan. He was dumped and kicked upstairs, dying in Paris in 1891 as ambassador to France. Contrary to Mr. Moonbat's implications, though, Lytton's policies weren't British government policies. Gladstone removed him, and his successor reversed his more onerous measures, while keeping the ones that made sense. So I don't buy it as a holocaust, despite the directions Mr. Moonbat would try to twist it. |
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. Most of the remainder - more than 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". 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." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.
| I have a pretty hard time with anyone who objects to the lack of gentle treatment of the Mau Maus. Maybe that's because I read Robert Ruark novels when I was a young fellow, or maybe because they were vicious bastards who used to do terrible things to people, starting with each other. The war was the archetype for the anticolonialist revolutions in East Africa, and some (like Angola) in the west, complete with helpful commie advisors. The difference between the Kenyan experience and the others is that Jomo Kenyatta wasn't Bob Mugabe. This was back in the old days, when Euros, especially those who had settled in Africa, still fought back, and the tactics used against the Mau Mau were the same as the tactics the Mau Mau were trying to use against the settlers. They were not allowed to achieve victory in Kenya. Bewteen 1953 and 1957, when Dedan Kimathi was caught and hanged, they were pretty well exterminated. The official death toll was 11,503 Mau Maus. Britain then set about land reform and integrating the black Kenyans into the parliamentary system. Jomo was rehabilitated, much in the manner of Nelson Mandela, and Kenya remains the model for East African stability, despite its obvious faults. |
These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of 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, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.
| Nope. Sorry, George. I'm not feeling any guilt palpitations. I suspect our Brit readers aren't, either. Man's inhumanity to man is an old story — ask any Amalekite — and neither the Brits nor the Americans are egregiously guilty. |
In the Express we can read the historian 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" (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 coloured pink on the globe". (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 labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") 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 civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".
| Really galls you, doesn't it, George? You can look in all the corners and twist things every way you want, but somehow you can't quite come up with anything to match the most hideous crimes of the Europeans, much less those of the less civilized world. There aren't any pyramids of skulls. There aren't any people wiped from the face of the earth using fire and sword. |
There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, 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 ...
| Could it be that a country that sees itself as benevolent tries to live up to the standard it sets for itself? |
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".
| The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. But if you use evil intent you've got a six-lane speedway. |
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.
| [George hang head. Wipes tear. Blows nose loudly into blue bandana. The rest of us — those who've managed to read this far, anyway — wait expectantly for the punchline.] |
Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised 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 and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.
| Or perhaps Turkey should begin describing itself to itself as a benevolent nation that's learned from the mistakes of its past. Civilization, looked at from that angle, is all about self-image. |
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