Crimes Of Empire
Apr. 24th, 2012 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloGeorge Monbiot has a piece about the hidden crimes of the British Empire- with special reference to what we did in Kenya. I'm linking to it because I'm its target audience- a Brit who would really, really prefer not be told about this stuff.
Within a few years of the end of WWII we were treating a recalcitrant subject population exactly as the Nazis would have done: concentration camps, torture, mass executions. Afterwards we destroyed the evidence.
I remember the Mau-Mau. The BBC and the national press sold us a narrative about plucky white farmers being threatened by cruel sub-humans who wanted to cut them up with machetes. We had relatives who were white farmers- one of whom shot a man in disputed circumstances. He later moved to the States and ran some sort of spa hotel.
If I'd been a little older or National Service had lasted a little longer I too might have found myself out in the colonies with a beret and a gun and a bad case of racial superiority.
Within a few years of the end of WWII we were treating a recalcitrant subject population exactly as the Nazis would have done: concentration camps, torture, mass executions. Afterwards we destroyed the evidence.
I remember the Mau-Mau. The BBC and the national press sold us a narrative about plucky white farmers being threatened by cruel sub-humans who wanted to cut them up with machetes. We had relatives who were white farmers- one of whom shot a man in disputed circumstances. He later moved to the States and ran some sort of spa hotel.
If I'd been a little older or National Service had lasted a little longer I too might have found myself out in the colonies with a beret and a gun and a bad case of racial superiority.
