Heart of smugness (This Cries Out For Refutation)

UK Guardian ^ | Tuesday July 23, 2002 | Maria Misra

[TwilightDog]

Heart of smugness Unlike Belgium, Britain is still complacently ignoring the gory cruelties of its empire

Maria Misra Tuesday July 23, 2002 The Guardian

So the Belgians are to return to the Heart of Darkness in an attempt finally to exorcise their imperial demons. Stung by another book cataloguing the violence and misery inflicted by King Leopold's empire on the Congo in the late 19th and early 20th century, the state-funded Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels has commissioned a group of historians to pass authoritative judgment on accusations of genocide: forced labour, systematic rape, torture and murder of the Congolese, around 10 million of whom are thought to have died as a consequence.

This is not the first time that the Belgian empire has been singled out for censure. Back in the Edwardian era, British humanitarians spilled much ink over its excesses and Conrad's novella was corralled into service to show Leopold's Congo as a sort of horrific "other" to Britain's more uplifting colonialism.

Complacency about Britain's imperial record lingers on. In the post-September 11 orgy of self-congratulation about the west's superiority, Blair's former foreign policy guru, Robert Cooper, and a host of journalistic flag-wavers were urging us not to be ashamed of empire. Cooper insisted empire was "as necessary now as it had been in the 19th century". The British empire was, we were assured, a generally well-intentioned attempt to inculcate notions of good government, civilised behaviour and market rationality into less well-favoured societies.

Is such a rosy view of British imperialism justified? Many argue that it is. After all, surely the British have less blood on their hands than the French and the Belgians? Wasn't the British addiction to the free market a prophylactic against the horrors of forced labour? And didn't those peculiar class obsessions make them less racist than the rest - silly snobs, but not vicious yobs? And isn't India not only a democracy, but, thanks to the British, one with great railways? Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in some of this, but there's also much wilful smugness. While the complex consequences of colonial economic policy require extended analysis, it is possible to dispel more swiftly the myth that the British Empire, unlike King Leopold's, was innocent of atrocities.

It has become a modern orthodoxy that Europe's 20th century was the bloodiest in history and that atrocities must be recorded and remembered by society as a whole. But while a Black Book of Communism has been compiled and everybody is aware of the horrors of nazism, popular historians have been surprisingly uninterested in the dark side of the British Empire. There are exceptions, such as Mike Davis's powerful Late Victorian Holocausts, but much else still lies buried in the academic literature. Davis and others have estimated that there were between 12 and 33 million avoidable deaths by famine in India between 1876 and 1908, produced by a deadly combination of official callousness and free-market ideology. But these were far from being a purely Victorian phenomenon. As late as 1943 around 4 million died in the Bengal famine, largely because of official policy.

No one has even attempted to quantify the casualties caused by state-backed forced labour on British-owned mines and plantations in India, Africa and Malaya. But we do know that tens of thousands of often conscripted Africans, Indians and Malays - men, women and children - were either killed or maimed constructing Britain's imperial railways. Also unquantified are the numbers of civilian deaths caused by British aerial bombing and gassing of villages in Sudan, Iraq and Palestine in the 1920 and 1930s.

Nor was the supposedly peaceful decolonisation of the British Empire without its gory cruelties. The hurried partition of the Indian subcontinent brought about a million deaths in the ensuing uncontrolled panic and violence. The brutal suppression of the Mau Mau and the detention of thousands of Kenyan peasants in concentration camps are still dimly remembered, as are the Aden killings of the 1960s. But the massacre of communist insurgents by the Scots Guard in Malaya in the 1950s, the decapitation of so-called bandits by the Royal Marine Commandos in Perak and the secret bombing of Malayan villages during the Emergency remain uninvestigated.

One might argue that these were simply the unfortunate consequences of the arrival of economic and political modernity. But does change have to come so brutally? There are plenty of examples of wanton British cruelty to chill the blood even of a hardened Belgian. Who, after all, invented the concentration camp but the British? The scandalous conditions in British camps during the Boer war, where thousands of women and children died of disease and malnutrition, are relatively well known. Who now remembers the Indian famine-relief-cum-work camps, where gentlemanly British officials conducted experiments to determine how few calories an Indian coolie could be fed and still perform hard labour? The rations in these camps amounted to less than those at Buchenwald.

There is Churchill's assiduous promotion of schemes to cut the costs of imperial defence in India and the Middle East by using aerial bombing, machine gunning and gassing for the control of rebellion, political protest, labour disputes and non-payment of taxes. There is the denial of free food to starving south Asians on the grounds that it would simply hasten a population explosion among India's "feckless poor". There is the extraordinary British justification for bombing Sudanese villages after the first world war: Nuer women were, officials claimed, of less value to their community than cattle or rifles.

These facts and figures are not easily culled from textbooks on empire. We don't have a dedicated museum of empire, but our nearest equivalent, the new Imperial War Museum North, would leave the impression that Britain's colonial subjects had been enthusiastic participants in its wartime crusades to rid the world of want and evil.

Does it matter that the British are smug about their imperial past, that British atrocities have been airbrushed from history? One can't help thinking that Jack Straw's pious missions to India to broker solutions to the Kashmir crisis might have more credibility if the British had the good grace to apologise for such imperial crimes as the Amritsar massacre. But a more worrying symptom of this rosy glossing of the imperial past is the re-emergence of a sort of sanitised advocacy of imperialism as a viable option in contemporary international relations.

The point of cataloguing Britain's imperial crimes is not to trash our forebears, but to remind our rulers that even the best-run empires are cruel and violent, not just the Belgian Congo. Overwhelming power, combined with a sense of boundless superiority, will produce atrocities - even among the well intentioned. Let's not forget that Leopold's central African empire was originally called the International Association for Philanthropy in the Congo.

· Maria Misra is lecturer in modern history at Keble College, Oxford. Her history of modern India will be published by Penguin next year.

anna-maria.misra@keble.ox.ac.uk

[propertius]

God, I hate the Guardian. Only read first two paragraphs but stomach churning so much I had to take a break. Right, deep breath, hold my nose and back to immersing myself in this writer's bile.

[TwilightDog]

Looks like I'm going to make a project of this article. Sheesh, I'm so not in the mood to bother...

[TwilightDog]

Looks like I'm going to make a project of this article. Sheesh, I'm so not in the mood to bother...

[propertius]

Notice how the first half of the article is spent repeating time and time again how evil the British Empire was. But the evidence she offers is pretty thin. First of all she offers no sources for her numbers.

Then she points to the millions who died in the Indian famines of the 19th centuries. Famines happened and still do happen. I want to see proof that this was an evil attempt to kill lots of Indians. As far as I remember the huge response of the British people and the swift emergency procedures put in place by the administration saved many lives.

Yes, people died in the building of the railways though I doubt in such large numbers. But any large building project at that time claimed lives, if only because people died much more easily in those days. Many succumbed to fever that they would have caught regardless of whether they ad been working on the railway or not. In projects that take over a decade to complete, deaths are inevitable.

And as for the brutal suppression of colonial uprisings, what rot. The Mau Mau was a ghastly, bloodthirsty rebellion waged by savages who had to kill a member of their own family and drink his/her blood to join. They dismembered, hack to death or buried alive thousands of black Kenyans who remained loyal to the British.

I remember talking to one Guardian correspondent who came to Africa full of hatred and shame over Britain's past in the continent. When he left three years later he conceded "I cannot help but realise that the British Empire in Africa was a benign influence and an incredible force for good."

For two millennia the peoples of Africa have been colonised by wave after wave of savages who destroyed the precious little they ad. The British built up infrastructure, introduced the rule of law, improved standards of living, introduced schools and elongated lives by decades through the introduction of modern medicines and doctors.

Since they left most of what they built has been left to rot by indolent, corrupt, self-indulgent black politicians who hate their own people they murder them in millions, rape their children and burn down their homes.

As a Briton, I'm not ashamed of my colonial heritage, I concede it wasn't perfect and we made mistakes but overall I'm hugely proud of it.

[swilhelm73]

In comparison there is no question the the UK was the most human of the colonizing powers. Germany and France were notable for their atrocities, but the Belgians were singularly horrific. The author tries to muddle the difference in this article which is revisionist BS.

The Belgians, who are amusingly noted for their moral smugness, butchered millions and also set the grounds for the Rwandan genocide even though it was so many years later.

[propertius]

I know. Sometimes what these people write is so ridiculous it seems like time ill-spent to refute their nonsense. But, in the face of ignorance, we do have to keep plugging away, I suppose.

[Don W]

it is possible to dispel more swiftly the myth that the British Empire, unlike King Leopold's, was innocent of atrocities.

Is this not the definition of a "straw man" argument: set up said straw man and then push him over?

No one that I have ever read has denied that there were atrocious acts performed by the Brits. What isn't mentioned here is that most of those guilty of such deeds were usually excoriated. (The South Africa/Boer War being the exception that proves the rule...)

The hurried partition of the Indian subcontinent brought about a million deaths in the ensuing uncontrolled panic and violence.

So it's England's fault that the moon-worshippers went on a killing spree?

This is all I have the stomach for right now. I'm trying to eat a snack.

Revisionists are vile, loathsome creatures who try to bring what little nobility that exists down to their level.

[BillSharp]

Famines caused by free market ideology? ROFLMAO!!!

[TwilightDog]

Thanks all. I'm going to make a special project of this article and post it later.

Right, truly loathsome revisionist historiography. The class of lie-mongers poisoning the public discourse is surely going to create endless employment for those that have the stamina to deal with it.

Yeah, Muslims on a killing spree, which is typical of their 13 centuries of history. Blame someone for them going on one of their typical killing sprees. Gag...

[Bogolyubski]

About the only thing that can be said to a self-rigtheous leftist Euro Kool-Aid drinker like this author is: Hope you enjoy lving in dhimmitude under the tender mercies of the oh so civilized Imams and Muftis who are already proliferating in your decayed shell of a country. You deserve it.

[Hugin]

The point of cataloguing Britain's imperial crimes is not to trash our forebears, but to remind our rulers that even the best-run empires are cruel and violent, not just the Belgian Congo.

OK. So are non-empires. Face it, as Dennis Prager says, "the world stinks". There is nothing unusual about cruelty, slavery, oppression and murder. It is the norm, not the exception in every civilization throughout history. What should be noted is what makes western civilization different from the rest of the world, not what it has in common. That would be our values that have given us freedom, democracy, economic and scientific advancement undreamed of by the rest of humanity.

[TwilightDog]

Thanks all for giving the article some thought in dealing with it. I'll deal with it more somehow.

[driftless]

Let's get this straight from an American who is glad we rebelled against the Brits in 1776: British colonization was the best thing that ever happened to the world before 1776 and for many years after that. What does one expect from The Guardian an avowed far-left rag? Does this hack think that in all those third world countries no violence or starvation would have happened if the Brits hadn't have come in? I mean look what's happening in Africa since the Brits pulled out. Nothing but chaos. British law and customs help civilize most of those benighted countries and lift them out of their medieval past. In fact I wish the Brits would go back into Africa. They won't, but it'll be the Africans who suffer without their presence.

[TwilightDog]

This article is the essence of a nihilistic, revisionist historiography. As the past is the context that the present is set in, one cannot accurately understand the present without having an undistorted understanding of the past. Also, it serves to promote the notion of moral relativism and a false sense of moral equivalencies amongst human societies. This in turn philosophically demoralizes people and keeps them from taking the measures necessary to save their societies.

Most of the famine deaths in India were the result of a suddenly burgeoning population, caused by British public health measures. Subtract these and you don't have much. As for famine in India in 1943 - Britain was then fighting for its life and effectively cut off from India insofar as shipping food was concerned.

Concentration camps were invented by General Weyler of Spain in the Cuban rebellion of the early 1890s, not the British. The British did use concentration camps in the Boer war a few years later, but that was a brief episode involving relatively few people, and the prisoners were white men of Dutch descent, not third world natives.

The British navy almost singlehandedly ended the slave trade in the nineteenth century.

"Also unquantified are the numbers of civilian deaths caused by British aerial bombing and gassing of villages in Sudan, Iraq and Palestine in the 1920 and 1930s." Considering the primitive nature of aircraft and bomb sights in those years, this could not have amounted to much.

" The hurried partition of the Indian subcontinent brought about a million deaths in the ensuing uncontrolled panic and violence." This was entirely the fault of Moslem fanatics, retaliatied against by Hindu extremists who on their own would not have started killing anyone. Here the Leftist Guardian is damning the British for giving up an Imperial possession; had they retained it they would be damned for doing that.

"The brutal suppression of the Mau Mau and the detention of thousands of Kenyan peasants in concentration camps" was well justified by the atrocities of the rebels and the mess they made of the country when they violently took it over. Civilized black Kenyans knew that they needed only wait as Britain was giving up its empire anyway. Britain had an obligation in the meantime to maintain order against terroristic thugs bent on undemocratically seizing power by violence.

"The Aden killings of the 1960s." --same reasoning.

"The massacre of communist insurgents by the Scots Guard in Malaya in the 1950s," was justified by the consideration of what would have become of Malaya had those mass-murdering totalitarians been allowed to succeed. Think of cambodia, where such communist maniacs murdered two million people. Instead, Malaysia is today stable, prosperous and independent.

"Who now remembers the Indian famine-relief-cum-work camps, where gentlemanly British officials conducted experiments to determine how few calories an Indian coolie could be fed and still perform hard labour? The rations in these camps amounted to less than those at Buchenwald." This seems very hard to believe, what with all the reform and uplift societies active in Victorian England. Does not pass the smell test.

"Churchill's assiduous promotion of schemes to cut the costs of imperial defence in India and the Middle East by using aerial bombing, machine gunning and gassing for the control of rebellion, political protest, labour disputes and non-payment of taxes." and "bombing Sudanese villages after the first world war." Again, aerial attacks could not have killed many people in pre-1935 days.

"There is the denial of free food to starving south Asians on the grounds that it would simply hasten a population explosion among India's "feckless poor". This is a repeat of a previous charge above. The leftist writer is reaching for any stick to beat the capitalist/imperialist dog with. Even Marx and Engels knew that the British Empire was a "progressive" historical phenomenon.

[swilhelm73]

Again, aerial attacks could not have killed many people in pre-1935 days.

I think you are probably right in that Guernica - where Germans allied with the Spanish Nationalists - is where the first incidence of terror bombing that I am aware of occured in 1937.

And the European reaction was one of shock and horror. Over one million French were in the street protesting the bombing four days later. Until the early phases of WWII terror bombing was widely believed to have the capacity to destroy civilization, in much the same manner modern Europeans view nuclear war.

Had the UK, and presumably the other colonial powers, been engaged in terror bombing to suppress colonials prior to this certainly the reactions and views of it would have been so incredibly fearful.

[swilhelm73]

Had the UK, and presumably the other colonial powers, been engaged in terror bombing to suppress colonials prior to this certainly the reactions and views of it would have NOT been so incredibly fearful.