February 2005

Barbarity is the inevitable consequence of foreign rule

By Seumas Milne
Thursday January 27, 2005
The Guardian

Perhaps Gordon Brown is preparing for that day after the next general election when Tony Blair is expected to offer him the choice of the Foreign Office or the backbenches. Or maybe he just thinks that if he can't beat the Blairites, he might as well join them. But the chancellor's declaration in Africa that Britain should stop apologising for its colonial history must give an unwelcome jolt to anyone hoping that a Brown government might step back from the liberal imperialist swagger and wars of intervention that have marked Blair's leadership. Far from being some heat-induced gaffe, his latest imperial turn follows an earlier remark that we should be proud of those who built the empire, which had been all about being "open, outward-looking and international". Even Blair, who was prevailed on to cut an "I am proud of the British empire" line from a speech during the 1997 election campaign, has never gone this far.

Apparently it is meant to be part of an attempt by the chancellor to carve out a modern sense of British identity based around values of fair play, freedom and tolerance. Quite what modernity and such values have to do with the reality of empire might not be immediately obvious. But even more bizarre is the implication that Britain is forever apologising for the empire or the crimes committed under it. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been no apologies. Official Britain put decolonisation behind it in a state of blissful amnesia, without the slightest effort to come to terms with what had taken place. Indeed, there has barely been a murmur of public reaction to Brown's extraordinary comments and what public criticism there is of the British imperial record has increasingly been drowned out by tub-thumping imperial apologias.

The rehabilitation of empire began in the early 1990s at the time of the ill-fated US intervention in Somalia, used by maverick voices on both sides of the Atlantic to float the idea of new colonies or UN trusteeships in Africa. But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, what had seemed a wacky rightwing wheeze was taken up in Britain with increasing enthusiasm by conservative popular historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, as the Sun and Mail cheered them on. The call for "a new kind of imperialism" by Blair adviser (and now senior EU official) Robert Cooper brought this reactionary retro chic into the political mainstream, and Brown's endorsement of empire has now given it a powerful boost. The outraged response to South African president Thabo Mbeki's recent denunciation of Churchill and the empire for a "terrible legacy" was a measure of the imperial torch-bearers' new confidence. The empire had brought "freedom and justice", Roberts blithely informed the BBC.

It would be interesting to hear how Roberts - or Gordon Brown for that matter - squares such grotesque claims with the latest research on the large-scale, systematic atrocities carried out by British forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya during the 1950s: the 320,000 Kikuyu held in concentration camps, the 1,090 hangings, the terrorisation of villages, electric shocks, beatings and mass rape documented in Caroline Elkins' new book, Britain's Gulag - and a death toll now thought to be over 100,000. This was a time when British soldiers were paid five shillings for each African they killed, when they nailed the limbs of Kikuyu guerrillas to crossroads posts and had themselves photographed with the heads of Malayan "terrorists" in a war that cost 10,000 lives. Or more recently still, as veterans described in the BBC Empire Warriors series, British soldiers thrashed and tortured their way through Aden's Crater City - the details of which one explained he couldn't go into because of the risk of war crimes prosecutions. And all in the name of civilisation: the sense of continuity with today's Iraq could not be clearer.

But it's not as if these end-of-empire episodes were isolated blemishes on a glorious record of freedom and good governance. Britain's empire was built on vast ethnic cleansing, enslavement, enforced racial hierarchy, land theft and merciless exploitation. As the Cambridge historian Richard Drayton puts it: "We hear a lot about the rule of law, incorruptible government and economic progress - the reality was tyranny, oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of countless millions of human beings." Some empire apologists like to claim that, however brutal the first phase may have been, the 19th- and 20th-century story was one of liberty and economic progress. But this is nonsense. In late 19th and early 20th century India - the jewel of the imperial crown - up to 30 million died in famines as British administrators insisted on the export of grain (as in Ireland), and courts ordered 80,000 floggings a year; 4 million died in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943. There have been no such famines since independence.

Modern-day Bangladesh was one of the richest parts of the world before the British arrived and deliberately destroyed its cotton industry. When India's Andaman islands were devastated by the tsunami, who recalled that 80,000 political prisoners were held in camps there in the early 20th century and routinely experimented on by British army doctors? Perhaps it's not surprising that Hitler was an enthusiast, describing the British empire as an "inestimable factor of value" even if, he added, it had been acquired with "force and often brutality".

But there has been no serious attempt in Britain to face up to the record of colonialism and the long-term impact on the societies it ruled - let alone trials of elderly colonial administrators now living out their days in Surrey retirement homes. Instead, the third in line to the throne thinks it's a bit of a lark to go to a "colonials and natives" fancy dress party, while the national curriculum has more or less struck the empire and its crimes out of history. The standard GCSE modern world history textbook has chapter after chapter on the world wars, the cold war, British and American life, Stalin's terror and the monstrosities of Nazism - but scarcely a word on the British and other European empires which carved up most of the world between them, or the horrors they perpetrated.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk
Note from editor,JB:
Jeffrey Tucker has written about all modern armies being essentially totalitarian enterprises. "Once you sign up for them, or are drafted, you are a slave. The penalty for becoming a fugitive is death. Even now, the enforcements against mutiny, desertion, going AWOL, or what have you, are never questioned."