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The histories our governments create are one long chain of lies.
Lies designed to hide:
- Concentration camps, torture and killing in Kenya
- Massacres in Malaya
- Manufactured famine in Bengal
- The "deletion" of an entire indigenous group
My column: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
Lies designed to hide:
- Concentration camps, torture and killing in Kenya
- Massacres in Malaya
- Manufactured famine in Bengal
- The "deletion" of an entire indigenous group
My column: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
- Rape and torture in Cyprus
- Atrocities in Yemen and Aden
- The mass theft of land
- The mass theft of resources
- Debt peonage and the theft of labour
- The comprehensive burning and deletion of records, covering up God knows what.
This was all in the mid-20th Century
- Atrocities in Yemen and Aden
- The mass theft of land
- The mass theft of resources
- Debt peonage and the theft of labour
- The comprehensive burning and deletion of records, covering up God knows what.
This was all in the mid-20th Century
Go back further, and Britain's crimes multiply to the point at which they rank among the worst atrocities in human history.
- The 19th Century holocausts engineered by the British in India
- The starvation in Ireland
- The industrialisation of slavery and the slave trade
- The 19th Century holocausts engineered by the British in India
- The starvation in Ireland
- The industrialisation of slavery and the slave trade
British theorists were primarily responsible for creating the systemic racism and eugenic theories required to justify colonialism. This belief system was then exported to other European nations.
It then found its way to Germany
Yet, in my experience, the great majority of people in this country are completely unaware of these histories. This is not because Britain was the "virtuous colonist" that rightwing columnists proclaim, but because our histories have been comprehensively censored and airbrushed.
The scale of this undertaking is quite astonishing - highly impressive in fact. It involved the mass destruction of documents, the prosecution of officials who sought to keep records of what happened, and a massive, systemic campaign of lies to people and Parliament.
It reminds me of the premise in Robert Harris's novel Fatherland: that the Nazis won, then set about erasing all evidence of their crimes. I'm not saying British officials were Nazis, but that the cover-up is as huge and sinister as the one Harris imagines.
Mind you, the British attorney-general in 1950s Kenya did compare our crimes there (in which he was deeply complicit) to those of the Nazis. Not a massive leap when you discover what was happening in the Kikuyu concentration camps.
One of the camps (Ngenya) had the slogan "Labour and Freedom" over the gate: a hair's breadth away from Arbeit Macht Frei.
Almost as if it were a reflex.
Almost as if it were a reflex.
