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| Outgoing empires sow destruction: US follows in Britain's footsteps | |
| 2023-03-17 | |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Dmitry Kosyrev [RIA] Global empires seriously commit atrocities not when they conquer countries and peoples, but when they leave from there: this may be the answer to the questions posed the other day by a colleague. We are talking about the author's material called "The West will not give a quiet life to Russia's neighbors."
And this last insight is helped by a book that came out in the United States just in time (less than a year ago): the author - Caroline Atkins, is called "The Legacy of Violence." This, in fact, is about the last years of the British Empire, but who in the USA does not know that when another book is published there about the decline of Rome or the collapse of colonial Britain, then there will always be a comparison with the current state of America itself . And this is not to mention the fact that Pax Americana is the direct heir to the British Empire in many ways. The story with Atkins' book is this: ten years ago, the author received the Pulitzer Prize for excavating a little-known story about how the British suppressed the uprising in their colony - in Kenya : 230 thousand people in concentration camps and so on. And that was in the 1950s. Documents on this topic were safely hidden in the safes of the British Foreign Office, but a lawsuit in London pulled them out. And then Atkins found documentation on similar cases in 37 more former colonies there (her mentioned book is about that). The first thing that can be seen here is, okay, still bloody or treacherous, creeping seizure of territories. Here you somehow expect atrocities (and not in vain). But the Atkins documents are mostly from the 20th century, many from after World War II. Suppression of partisans in Malaya (with cutting off heads and other things). Operations in Palestine and Cyprus. Mentioned Kenya. Well, earlier episodes throughout the great empire. And we are in amazement: why? India has already left , it is already clear to everyone that there will be no more empire, because all the others follow. In the end, at least 45 trillion of today's dollars were pumped out of India over two centuries, at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries they caused 165 million "premature deaths" (not to mention the famine of 1943, when three to four million specifically died from what the British pumped out of Indian food). And that's enough. Why get involved in local tribal and other infighting in the 1950s when it is already clear to everyone that the nations themselves will deal with the consequences of British rule? So, the main value of the book by Caroline Atkins is that she analyzes the psychology of the Anglo-Saxon - both controlling other peoples and losing their magical power. And we read in her about the traditions of behavior of the imperial power with its self-deception and established mythology, with the racist complacency of "liberal imperialism". That is, with the stubborn idea that "backward" societies should be improved and transformed by the forcible imposition of free trade and appropriate education. And those who are dissatisfied should be regularly reminded of all this. And the managerial elites were not able to doubt the accumulated reflexes in time - they were not taught that way. Is this about the British Empire? Or is it about the American one? The Americans, by the way, learned well the lessons of the failure of their predecessors and tried to create their empire without direct control of the colonies, but only on trade, education and values ​​- which we are seeing along the perimeter of Russia. Control technologies are different, but the basic reflexes are the same. Well, the last. The book "A Legacy of Violence" evoked such a response that some US thinkers couldn't help but deflect the blow by saying that the book hints that the Ukrainian events are a Russian post-imperial syndrome. But the fact of the matter is that Russia has watched for three decades as the former Soviet republics are trying to be part of the American empire. At first, by the indicated methods - business, education, ideology. It came to widespread outbreaks of violence, when the heirs of the British Empire found that their monopoly on world power began to crumble. | |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 Eh? Don't forget... French Africa |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2023-03-17 08:09 |