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The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying
past atrocities
It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our
empire. So why do so few people know about them?
By
George Monbiot
12/27/05 "The
Guardian" -- -- 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.
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.
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 Niņo 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.
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.
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.
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".
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 ... 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". 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.
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.
www.monbiot.com
Copyright: The Guardian.
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