Thread: Historical British torture and misconduct in Kenya Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.
To visit this thread, use this URL:
http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=70;t=030208
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
In Canada and in some other countries, there is a push to deal with past wrongdoings by settlers toward aboriginal peoples, with already billions in settlements and more lawsuits and inquiries underway. It's not exactly parallel because we're still in Canada and the British have left Kenya, but I wondered if this is a thing in the UK.
I came across this today: The British in Kenya, Mau Mau, torture and reparations. quote:
Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated.
quote:
...found thousands of records relevant to the case: more evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution technique” used to break hardcore detainees.
Is this news in the UK? Do you support your government making reparations and taking responsibility for torture? Has anyone from government apologised yet?
Posted by ExclamationMark (# 14715) on
:
Well we could start with the UK Government's oppression of the poor within the UK.
Slavery was abolished within the Empire in the 1830's but was pretty de rigeur in England until 1947 and remains in isolated pockets still
[ 24. August 2016, 06:51: Message edited by: ExclamationMark ]
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Regrets have been expressed by the UK government and reasonably substantial sums have been handed over.
I don't have a purely UK perspective on this, but given that what happened was systematic and perpetrated by the UK government in living memory then I think reparations are justified.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
Well we could start with the UK Government's oppression of the poor within the UK.
Why does that compete with the torture and misconduct committed in Kenya?
(By the way I feel some of the criticism of Elkin's book is justified - it is a little over the top in places and the faux-naivety is a bit much, but the bottom line is that the book exposes history that was previously swept under the carpet and most of the abuses recorded are likely accurate.)
Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on
:
The CofE is our official mouthpiece for apologies.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Not in this occasion it wasn't.
Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on
:
This story was in the news some years ago - when the case reached the Royal Courts of Justice in 2011 and each time decisions were made, including the reparations. There were several broadcast interviews with people who were in Kenya at the time, discussing what happened and the Mau Mau rebellion. There were even Radio 4 plays about the Mau Mau rebellion.
I knew about the torching of the records and that some had survived. I even remember Hanslope Park being involved, but I knew about Hanslope Park having lived near there as a child and being told it was top secret.
There are novels describing British colonial efforts in a range of countries, from a number of authors and the violence is there. As a child, I overheard accounts from people who started their careers in the Colonial Office - men who started off as District Officers in the 1950s and 1960s, who returned to the UK when the various colonies became independent.
It is well known that the British invented concentration camps during the Boer Wars, which ended in 1902.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
It is well known that the British invented concentration camps during the Boer Wars, which ended in 1902.
Started them in 1902 and still going strong in the early 60s in Kenya.
Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on
:
Used them in the Boer War, but I recall having been told in an evening class that something not dissimilar was used in the US Civil War.
Not to excuse the vile behaviour in Kenya and other places. I would like to know at which level in the hierarchy the orders originated, and if any of the lower ranks objected.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Not to excuse the vile behaviour in Kenya and other places. I would like to know at which level in the hierarchy the orders originated, and if any of the lower ranks objected.
The communications that we know of between the attorney general and the governor at the time make it clear that the orders originated at quite a high level - and indeed that they recognized that what they were doing would be seen as barbaric even then (to those who want to make the excuse that the past is a different country).
Repentance in this case should consist - in part - of releasing all documentation still available about the acts perpetrated by the outgoing administration (and should probably also encompass documents from all the colonies more generally).
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Churchill was PM at the time. Although his view on empire and the dignity of foreign nationals are rather beyond the pale, apparently the correspondence at the time from him suggested that he was urging the colonial office to take more of a negotiating stance and view the colony in Kenya as a liability. Apparently he was unwell and distracted with other matters and so didn't really enforce his view. (Which also seems uncharacteristic for him to be honest, no matter how ill he was).
I don't know if any recently released documents challenge that cover story.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
British colonial and post-colonial actions and policies were a pretty mixed bag. How could they be otherwise?
In some places, like Malaysia, despite some brutality and even a massacre or two, the British tried to implement a 'hearts and minds' approach to deal with insurgency.
In Kenya they took a more draconian approach.
I'm not sure it helps to make comparisons with other colonial powers - the French in Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo ...
There's a baleful litany of mistreatment and exploitation of native peoples right across the board, the Portuguese, Australia, the USA, the Germans in Namibia and elsewhere, the Dutch in Indonesia ...
None of that excuses any of this, of course.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I'm not sure it helps to make comparisons with other colonial powers - the French in Algeria
Agreed. Even for the French there was quite a difference in outcomes comparing Algeria with Senegal, for instance.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
There's a baleful litany of mistreatment and exploitation of native peoples right across the board, the Portuguese, Australia, the USA, the Germans in Namibia and elsewhere, the Dutch in Indonesia ...
I agree that this was the general rule. From Columbus to General Custer, white people seem to have this common historic trait.
By contrast, my English grandmother, who was born in the 1880s in South Africa, liked to tell stories of English gallantry during the Boer War. She had a good friend who was Dutch, of the De Beers family. During the war the British came and took possession of everything that they had. But when the war was over it was all given back, with not a thing missing.
Grandma was proud to belong to a country that behaved so fairly in war. ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
Any discussion of a war or other is actually not comparable. The difference between that and colonial brutality is that the colonials want to occupy, exploit and have the local inhabitants as second class on a longterm, subservient basis. The Brits wanted to keep control of Kenya. There was no war. The term "cultural genocide" is current in Canads. Probably because we are still doing it.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Actually David Anderson's book "histories of the hanged" carries a lot of evidence that the Mau Mau rising was actually a civil war waged among the Kikuyu. The injustices of colonial occupation were the proximate start of the conflict, and the way the British used factions among the Kikuyu led to the civil war, but once the conflict got going the vying for power and influence among the Kikuyu and settling old scores was a major part of it.
There may be a parallel between the 2nd Gulf War leading to the current Sunni vs Shiite conflicts in Iraq and Syria.
Posted by ExclamationMark (# 14715) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
I agree that this was the general rule. From Columbus to General Custer, white people seem to have this common historic trait.
[/QB]
That's incorrect. Some white people may have been like that but not all.
Posted by ExclamationMark (# 14715) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
There's a baleful litany of mistreatment and exploitation of native peoples right across the board, the Portuguese, Australia, the USA, the Germans in Namibia and elsewhere, the Dutch in Indonesia ...
And on our own doorstep in the UK. It wasn't that log ago that paying farm workers less if they were considered to be "mentally subnormal" was abolished. The tied cottage system - with lesser rights than any other tenants - still exists.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Sure, I don't doubt that, ExclamationMark. It wasn't particularly rural where I grew up but we could walk out into the countryside very easily - either 'up the mountain' or else in the opposite direction out into the rolling countryside towards 'the Middle of Monmouthshire' which was more Anglicised in feel.
Most stories of rural exploitation I heard of dated from the early 1900s and had been perpetrated on the parents of old people I knew, but I'm sure it went on a lot longer than that in more rural areas or out in the Fens and in Lincolnshire and so on.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Do you support your government making reparations and taking responsibility for torture? Has anyone from government apologised yet?
Referring my previous reply back to the OP. I do not consider what the government has done so far to be an apology - essentially they dissimulated until it was no longer possible to do so, at which point paltry compensation was handed out to a bunch of aging individuals, afaict the majority opinion has always been that if they continued to draw things out eventually the problem would go away - which is what they tried to do.
As I said, I think a true apology would also have to include complete openness as to the scale and scope of the problem and cover-up.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
I think that is a harsh but entirely fair characterization of the response.
At one point there was a stance that the Kenyan Government had inherited the liabilities of the previous colonial administration and therefore they should pay the compensation. I thought that was quite unimpressive.
Posted by ExclamationMark (# 14715) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Sure, I don't doubt that, ExclamationMark. It wasn't particularly rural where I grew up but we could walk out into the countryside very easily - either 'up the mountain' or else in the opposite direction out into the rolling countryside towards 'the Middle of Monmouthshire' which was more Anglicised in feel.
Most stories of rural exploitation I heard of dated from the early 1900s and had been perpetrated on the parents of old people I knew, but I'm sure it went on a lot longer than that in more rural areas or out in the Fens and in Lincolnshire and so on.
Into the 1970's in my experience. Possibly longer but I'd moved away by then - anecdotally (in East Anglia), it has never gone away especially amongst the many Eastern Europeans still employed.
Gangmasters are regulated - that they exist at all is a sign of abuse that ould never be permitted in any other industry/circumstances. I don't know any church weeping for that exploitation and abuse.
Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by chris stiles:
paltry compensation was handed out to a bunch of aging individuals
The "ageing individuals" were the ones actually affected by what had happened. Who else would compensation be paid to?
And do you seriously consider nineteen million quid to be "paltry"?
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
For rounding up 1.5M people and interring them without trial and torturing a fair proportion of them I think £19M counts as a cut-price bargain.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
I agree that this was the general rule. From Columbus to General Custer, white people seem to have this common historic trait.
That's incorrect. Some white people may have been like that but not all.
Good point. Yes, most white people are very nice. I am white myself.
But I haven't seen the list of peoples worldwide who rejoice in their history of fair treatment at the hands of the white man.
Maybe that brings up the question of whether any peoples anywhere rejoice in their fair treatment at the hands of any other group or nation. ![[Disappointed]](graemlins/disappointed.gif)
Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
I agree that this was the general rule. From Columbus to General Custer, white people seem to have this common historic trait.
That's incorrect. Some white people may have been like that but not all.
Good point. Yes, most white people are very nice. I am white myself.
But I haven't seen the list of peoples worldwide who rejoice in their history of fair treatment at the hands of the white man.
Maybe that brings up the question of whether any peoples anywhere rejoice in their fair treatment at the hands of any other group or nation.
FWIW the white man himself has hardly been the problem. The establishments and institutions put into place by and for the white man have, IMNSHO, caused all the trouble and tragedy.
Naturally, when an institution has been found at fault, it's very difficult to hold any individuals to account.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
FWIW the white man himself has hardly been the problem. The establishments and institutions put into place by and for the white man have, IMNSHO, caused all the trouble and tragedy.
Naturally, when an institution has been found at fault, it's very difficult to hold any individuals to account.
Interesting point of view.
So you don't think that individual greed, drunkenness, violence, or the inclination to seek sexual satisfaction outside of marriage, are really the issue?
Posted by Rosa Winkel (# 11424) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Used them in the Boer War, but I recall having been told in an evening class that something not dissimilar was used in the US Civil War.
Not to excuse the vile behaviour in Kenya and other places. I would like to know at which level in the hierarchy the orders originated, and if any of the lower ranks objected.
The term concentration camp started with the Spanish reconcentrados (reconcentration camps) in Cuba during the 1868-78 and 1895-98 wars. The British used that term for the Boers, as mentioned, followed by the Germans in what is now Namibia. As Domenico Losurdo has pointed out, what concentration camps were later to be more associated with have colonial roots.
Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
FWIW the white man himself has hardly been the problem. The establishments and institutions put into place by and for the white man have, IMNSHO, caused all the trouble and tragedy.
Naturally, when an institution has been found at fault, it's very difficult to hold any individuals to account.
Interesting point of view.
So you don't think that individual greed, drunkenness, violence, or the inclination to seek sexual satisfaction outside of marriage, are really the issue?
Yes, they do play a part but to my mind the greater harm was (and continues to be) done by the institutions and those institutions facilitated or at any rate didn't do much to prevent the individual wrongs.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
quote:
Originally posted by chris stiles:
paltry compensation was handed out to a bunch of aging individuals
The "ageing individuals" were the ones actually affected by what had happened. Who else would compensation be paid to?
Firstly you are missing off the context of that statement, which was "they dissimulated until it was no longer possible to do so". The point I was making was that the government had delayed and obfuscated to the point where there were few survivors remaining. [and to your point - yes, there was probably a case for compensating more than just those individuals who had been in the camps themselves - including widows, orphans and so on].
quote:
And do you seriously consider nineteen million quid to be "paltry"?
Yes absolutely. It amounted to around £3000 for each individual affected, £3000 pounds for a life blighted by torture.
And as I allude to above, it amounted to a pay off. A true apology would have consisted of letting the truth be heard.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
Yes, they do play a part but to my mind the greater harm was (and continues to be) done by the institutions and those institutions facilitated or at any rate didn't do much to prevent the individual wrongs.
That makes sense.
Just trying to get at what we mean by the institutions.
I think that you are saying that the very fact that the British, American, or whatever, government, mining interest, fruit company, oil industry, etc. was there at all, doing what these companies do for the sake of their own nation, investors and customers, is what causes the problem.
In other words it is the set-up itself, quite apart from the actual good or bad behavior of the individuals involved, that victimizes the locals. Even the most conscientious, kind and well-meaning participants perpetuate the harm.
I'm sure that is right.
My grandmother was very proud that her grandfather was the first British general to train native troops in India. She felt that this was a fine thing to do and reflected well on Britain. I always thought that she was missing the fact that England really had no business to be ruling India in the first place.
Posted by ExclamationMark (# 14715) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
I agree that this was the general rule. From Columbus to General Custer, white people seem to have this common historic trait.
That's incorrect. Some white people may have been like that but not all.
Good point. Yes, most white people are very nice. I am white myself.
But I haven't seen the list of peoples worldwide who rejoice in their history of fair treatment at the hands of the white man.
Maybe that brings up the question of whether any peoples anywhere rejoice in their fair treatment at the hands of any other group or nation.
My relatives are white. Owing to their social status they had no voice in determining how anyone was treated in other parts of the world. Badly treated by other "whites" themselves they were nonetheless keen to help others - even welcoming German Pow's into their homes in WWII.
I find it hard not to take great exception to your blanket condemnation of white people, particularly when the oppression was mediated through the actions of a very few. Yes Churchill and Eden, I do mean you.
[ 25. August 2016, 21:12: Message edited by: ExclamationMark ]
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
I find it hard not to take great exception to your blanket condemnation of white people, particularly when the oppression was mediated through the actions of a very few. Yes Churchill and Eden, I do mean you.
I apologize. You are so right that blanket condemnations do no one any good.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
I'm sure I've heard several times that British workers went on strike in support of the Indian Independence movement during one of Gandhi's visits, although I can't find any reference to it searching online just now.
The labour party and the British press rallied to the cause of Kenyan independence. In fact "Britan's Gulag", the title of Elkin's book, was taken from a (?Telegraph?) headline that did much to pressurize the government to withdraw from Kenya. Amazingly even Enoch Powell spoke movingly in favour of Kenyan independence during the parliamentary debate.
Posted by MrsBeaky (# 17663) on
:
I am a child of the colonial era having lived in Kenya whilst my father commanded a British regiment stationed there.This was post Mau Mau but in the run up to independence there were a few hairy situations.
On one occasion my father refused to follow instructions from London as it would have led to loss of civilian life. He bravely talked down a group of Kenyan mutineers by standing in front of his vehicle, alone and completely unarmed. He was appalled by what he'd been ordered to do.
Fast forward to now. I've just finished four years as a mission partner in Kenya and encountered a whole range of reactions to the colonial legacy.
Many people can see the positives (schools, hospitals etc) and are able to forgive the horrors- one of them is a good friend of ours and his father suffered atrocities in one the Mau Mau camps. I was astonished at the grace that so many people were able to extend.
Other people from that era and also their descendants are still angry and whenever we were in dialogue with them my husband and I would listen to their stories and apologise on behalf of our ancestors.
There are many valid claims for recompense. There are also as another of our Kenyan friends (a priest) would tell you many people with an eye to the main chance who would love to cash in on anything coming their way regardless of the validity of their claim.
Yet another Kenyan friend of ours would tell you that what was perpetrated post independence by Kenyans upon Kenyans was sometimes far worse than in colonial times- I always felt that we hadn't helped with what we'd modelled during those years and that the powerful had gone on to replicate our own colonial behaviour.
So in summary, this is very, very complicated. It requires hours of listening, a willingness to own behaviour and apologise and finally wise people to discern validity and then to administrate any plan for recompense.
It's not a quick fix situation and will require a long term commitment to seeing justice done and the building of healing and reconciliation and in all honesty I'm not sure how many of us are really up for that!
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by MrsBeaky:
So in summary, this is very, very complicated. It requires hours of listening, a willingness to own behaviour and apologise and finally wise people to discern validity and then to administrate any plan for recompense.
Thank you for that description and summary. What a thing to have lived there in the 1950s!
My own experience is with West Africa, specifically Ghana, Togo and the surrounding countries. In forty years of visits and friendship with numerous Ghanaians and other West Africans I have encountered very little feeling at all about the colonial era. By the 1970s, when I arrived to live in Togo for several years, the British were well out of it in neighboring Ghana, and there seemed to be few broad based feelings of animosity about them.
Somewhat in contrast, the French were frequently reviled at Togolese political rallies and by government communications. This did not seem to extend, however, to many specific demands, or reference any particular misconduct. But the Western presence in Togo was so low key that you seldom saw whites at all.
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
Amazingly even Enoch Powell spoke movingly in favour of Kenyan independence during the parliamentary debate.
The "Rivers of Blood" speech was such a notorious error that it has become almost the only thing anyone knows about him (and, to be clear, that's no one's fault but his own).
However, if that's the low point of his life and shines a light into his soul (absent the argument that he was issuing a pessimistic warning that he was naive enough to not appreciate would be a call to arms for nutters), then the Hola Camp speech is one of the finest moments in post war parliamentary history, and deserves to be remembered as such.
For the record, even in the 1940s Enoch Powell was arguing that Indian independence logically meant we had no right to be anywhere other than the British Isles and should withdraw from the empire in its entirety.
The point of his Hola Camp speech essentially boils down to "a man is a man is a man" and we can't treat people by different standards according to who they are - the standards we want to be treated by as Britons are the only possible standards by which to calibrate our treatment of others.
I've always thought that there's an air of John Stuart Mill about Powell (Mill famously said he'd been raised to be a dessicated calculating machine). Powell had a tendency to see the world with (what he saw as) a relentless logic and act and speak accordingly. To his own detriment and to the detriment in particular of race relations in the Woverhampton speech. But on other occasions, he soared to the heights.
That's not in any way to defend him, but just to round out the picture of a deeply odd man.
Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
For rounding up 1.5M people and interring them without trial and torturing a fair proportion of them I think £19M counts as a cut-price bargain.
What would you say is a fair price? Can any price be fair for such a thing?
Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by chris stiles:
Firstly you are missing off the context of that statement, which was "they dissimulated until it was no longer possible to do so". The point I was making was that the government had delayed and obfuscated to the point where there were few survivors remaining.
They were wrong to do so. But ISTM that they have now accepted that they were wrong to do so.
quote:
[and to your point - yes, there was probably a case for compensating more than just those individuals who had been in the camps themselves - including widows, orphans and so on].
Perhaps. I wonder if their claim was discussed during the meetings that were held about it?
quote:
quote:
And do you seriously consider nineteen million quid to be "paltry"?
Yes absolutely. It amounted to around £3000 for each individual affected, £3000 pounds for a life blighted by torture.
It's a bit more once you factor in the difference in cost of living. But even then, what would you say is a fair price to have paid?
quote:
And as I allude to above, it amounted to a pay off. A true apology would have consisted of letting the truth be heard.
Which part of the truth do you think is still being silenced?
Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Which part of the truth do you think is still being silenced?
Principally that in files long destroyed. HMG is rather good at that.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Backing up a bit, whilst I don't for a moment doubt what EM says about the treatment of indigeneous rural workers in the UK up to very recent times - and the current issues around low-paid and often exploited workers from Eastern Europe and elsewhere in Lincolnshire and so on ... I'm not sure what churches weeping and wailing about that could achieve.
Yes, I think churches should be involved with social action and the alleviation of unjust conditions - and that would apply to the current state of play with gang-masters in Lincolnshire and things like zero-hours contracts and so on - but I'm not sure how bewailing what happened to agricultural workers in the past helps anything today.
I'm not saying we ignore that or air-brush it out, but I'm not sure how far it gets us.
I mean, whilst it's been fascinating - in a grim kind of way - to learn how my brother-in-law's brother's primary research has corroborated his mother's almost folk-tale style account of how her father, as a young man, had been beaten up by troops sent to quell the riots in Tonypandy in 1910 - even though he only had one arm (due to a mining accident) and wasn't participating in the rioting and looting himself - I'm not sure what would be gained by churches making a big deal out of that.
That doesn't diminish what happened, but I'm not sure what could be gained if churches were to make a big deal of it.
In the case of the industrial unrest in the South Wales coal-field in 1910/11 there was a dark side to it in that Jewish families and businesses were targeted by some of the rioters - so these things are rarely clear-cut good guys versus bad guys things.
Although the issue, as Sioni Sais has indicated, is more to do with institutionalised problems and injustices rather than what this, that or the other individual got up to.
I can see how some restitution could be made to individuals in Kenya and elsewhere but not sure what could be done in the case of agricultural workers exploited in the UK - unless we were to find all their descendents and families and compensate them in some way - but that ain't going to happen.
It's a bit like the conditions in old-fashioned mental asylums. When my mother first worked in the mental health sector in the 1970s there were still people who were shut away in institutions because they didn't fit in for whatever reason, or they'd been unmarried mothers or even because their families wanted them out of the way for whatever reason - even though there was nothing particularly 'wrong' with them mentally as it were.
She can tell of instances of perfectly 'sane' people who'd been shut away and who'd become institutionalised and gone mad because they were incarcerated in hospitals and asylums surrounded by people who were mentally ill.
People who'd been shut away like this in the 1930s and 1950s were still alive in the 1970s - even though the regimes and modus operandi in these places had changed markedly during the later '60s and early '70s.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
For rounding up 1.5M people and interring them without trial and torturing a fair proportion of them I think £19M counts as a cut-price bargain.
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
What would you say is a fair price? Can any price be fair for such a thing?
That would explain why criminal justice systems don't bother with long sentences for murder or rape charges, since nothing could really be fair compensation for the murder or rape.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Which part of the truth do you think is still being silenced?
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
Principally that in files long destroyed. HMG is rather good at that.
Well also at the time that the "apology" was being made HMG was sitting on files that would have shed more light on what actually happened and vindicated some of the more contested accounts made by Elkin and others.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Backing up a bit, whilst I don't for a moment doubt what EM says about the treatment of indigeneous rural workers in the UK up to very recent times - and the current issues around low-paid and often exploited workers from Eastern Europe and elsewhere in Lincolnshire and so on ... I'm not sure what churches weeping and wailing about that could achieve.
It might be good to know what the victims think about that. Notwithstanding that apologising is not the same as "wailing and weeping", language into which it is easy to read dismissiveness along the lines of "let bygones be bygones". These things cast long, long shadows:
[quote]Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. -Exo 34: 7[quote]
Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Which part of the truth do you think is still being silenced?
Principally that in files long destroyed. HMG is rather good at that.
If the files have been destroyed then how do you propose the government should go about letting that truth be heard?
Posted by Marvin the Martian (# 4360) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
For rounding up 1.5M people and interring them without trial and torturing a fair proportion of them I think £19M counts as a cut-price bargain.
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
What would you say is a fair price? Can any price be fair for such a thing?
That would explain why criminal justice systems don't bother with long sentences for murder or rape charges, since nothing could really be fair compensation for the murder or rape.
I note you haven't answered my first question: what would you say would be a fair price/sentence?
Posted by Gramps49 (# 16378) on
:
I had a friend who identified as Mau Mau. He was a young boy when his village was attacked by British troops and he was shot in the leg. He said the village was defenseless. Sammi eventually became the head of a university counseling program in Kenya but as long as I knew him he still had PTSD issues.
While this thread has talked about Kenya and India, I think Britain has to acknowledge the history of oppression in Ireland as well.
Then too, there is the oppression of Palestinian peoples by the Israelis. The Israelis continue to violate the human rights of people in the occupied territories. All of this has happened because of the support of the US and the tacit backing of members of the EU--Britain again included.
Yes, I know the history of the US with Native Americans is not one to be proud of. Even today there is a confrontation between the Lakota Nation and the US over a pipeline that the US has permitted to go through Lakota land without the approval of the tribe.
You would think, though, we should learn from our common history and not repeat these mistakes over and over again.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
I note you haven't answered my first question: what would you say would be a fair price/sentence?
A million each would be good. Of course the UK government doesn't have 5B dollars. We should at least heading towards 100k per victim. 3k each is derisory.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Gramps49, what makes you think the British haven't acknowledged our poor colonial record in Ireland?
We do that all the time.
I've seen some bloody stupid accusations levelled by Americans on that score - that Britain deliberately started the Potato Famine, for instance. Really? One could just as easily claim that the US did as the blight seems to have arrived on US ships - and perhaps the British also started the contemporaneous Potato Famines in Belgium and Germany too ...
Now, clearly the British government of the time did very little of any value to alleviate the problem - but it's not true that they didn't try.
Some clown I encountered online even insisted that Cromwell had personally massacred 30,000 Irish people in Drogheda - despite the fact that there were nowhere near that number of people in the town at that time.
None of which diminishes Britain's poor record in Ireland nor lets Cromwell off the hook for the massacre - some 2,500 or so of the garrison (many of them English rather than Irish) and perhaps 700 to 800 civilians.
Yes, the Anglo-Norman and later English and subsequently UK suppression of the Irish was appalling. No-one pretends otherwise.
And as you've said yourself, it's not as if the US has a clean record. Not only with the indigenous peoples but also in the way it's interfered with lots of other places around the world - be it Chile, Nicaragua and all sorts of other places where its poked its nose in.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gramps49:
You would think, though, we should learn from our common history and not repeat these mistakes over and over again.
The mistakes will be repeated until the sense of "otherness" is gradually washed out through the long process of globalization that the world is experiencing.
An older gentleman once explained to me that in some parts of the world the cultural differences in the past were so extreme between Europeans and locals that they simply could not be overcome.
Those days are long gone. People everywhere are really very similar, and there is every reason to believe that the old prejudices will someday disappear as well.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
The mistakes will be repeated until the sense of "otherness" is gradually washed out through the long process of globalization that the world is experiencing.
An older gentleman once explained to me that in some parts of the world the cultural differences in the past were so extreme between Europeans and locals that they simply could not be overcome.
Those days are long gone. People everywhere are really very similar, and there is every reason to believe that the old prejudices will someday disappear as well.
That's assimmilationist. In fact, this idea, that everyone is similar, is seem as the reason the majority has been able to violate laws, human decency and impose their cultural values, norms and expectations on the minorities. The reason in well-functioning nations that we have the rule of law and recourse to courts to protect minorities from the majority (even if democratically elected), such that even if the majority wants to impose on the minority. The majority doesn't always get to rule in a functioning democracy. Internationally it works a little differently. Those with military and economic power say things like in your post, but they really mean, in practice, that they want other countries to be "just like us". It shan't be allowed.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I've seen some bloody stupid accusations levelled by Americans on that score - that Britain deliberately started the Potato Famine, for instance. Really? One could just as easily claim that the US did as the blight seems to have arrived on US ships - and perhaps the British also started the contemporaneous Potato Famines in Belgium and Germany too ...
Now, clearly the British government of the time did very little of any value to alleviate the problem - but it's not true that they didn't try.
Try somewhere in between. Britain did more than fail to respond properly, it set the stage for the famine. By marginalising the Irish and forcing food production to supply Britain, it left the native population to reach for an alternative: the potato. When the blight arrived, the government managed the response poorly, to put it mildly.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
That's assimmilationist. In fact, this idea, that everyone is similar, is seem as the reason the majority has been able to violate laws, human decency and impose their cultural values, norms and expectations on the minorities.
Yes. Absolutely. That's why burkinis are outlawed in France.
But I don't think that the forces of globalization are necessarily the forces of assimilationism.
Tolerance and appreciation of differences is not the same thing as the expectation that minorities will assimilate the values and norms of the majority.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
Tolerance and appreciation of differences is not the same thing as the expectation that minorities will assimilate the values and norms of the majority.
Yes, but in practice the minorities get swamped by the majorities. The theory of respect of differences is only a theory. One can get a McDonald's hamburger everywhere it seems.
Hence the protection of French and indigenous cultures in Canada, and the protectionism against cultural things more generally here from, mainly, America. Economic domination is a problem, because with it comes culture.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Yes, but in practice the minorities get swamped by the majorities.
I can't deny it. This is what is going on all over the world.
This is globalization, the flattening of the earth. It has its good side and its bad side.
The bad side causes people to root for Trump.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
They were wrong to do so. But ISTM that they have now accepted that they were wrong to do so.
Only in the sense that they lost the court case, and decided to appeal. They still hold to the principle that they were not responsible for the events that occured.
quote:
It's a bit more once you factor in the difference in cost of living. But even then, what would you say is a fair price to have paid?
I would question your reasons for asking that question, I think it's sufficient to say that it is too low. Perhaps a fair basis for getting a realistic figure may be to factor in the loss to earnings over a lifetime, and add on a figure for any medical treatment (including psychiatric help) that has either been incurred already, or is yet to be incurred - that would yield a starting figure greater than £3000 pounds typically. In any case, nothing like this kind of exercise has been done - the 19m figure was plucked out of the air. [and no - considerations of family members who may have been affected was not on the table].
quote:
Which part of the truth do you think is still being silenced?
quote:
If the files have been destroyed then how do you propose the government should go about letting that truth be heard?
As mdjon points out at the point at which the case was settled HMG were sitting on additional files that could have been helpful to uncover the scale of the problem.
One set of documents that the FCO refused to release essentially amounted to an index of all the documents pertaining to the period in question. The evidence that the FCO have been in possession of much more material than has been released, and has sought to obfuscate and avoid a full picture being built up is easily available.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Sure, LilBuddha but no-one in Whitehall woke up one morning and thought to themselves, "I know, let's deliberately set in chain a state of affairs that will lead to famine in Ireland. What a hoot ... And then when it starts we'll do bugger all about it, mwa ha ha mwa ha ha ha ..."⅝
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
The bad side causes people to root for Trump.
Not just. The bad side also causes lawsuits within countries to assert minority rights and forcing of gov'ts to resist external pressures to "open up markets" or let countries exploit resources of others. Often we see failure, and the result being one country's economy serving another's. Which is of course is the reason for colonialism in the first place. The difference today is that trade as enforced by supranational organizations (WTO, WMF, various freetrade agreements) have taken the place of concentration camps and gunboats.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
Clearly globalization is a not entirely comfortable or fair process that claims its share of victims as well as beneficiaries.
Posted by Gramps49 (# 16378) on
:
Gamaliel
I know full well the Brits did not start the potato famine. The potato crops failed over several years, but there were other crops that did not fail. The grain crops thrived, and all the grains were shipped to England. The Irish were an occupied people but they did not have access to the crops they were forced to ship to the Crown. If they tried to steal any grain they would likely be forced to go to the Penal colonies.
There is still a lot of anger for that.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Of course, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but what I do remind some of the more right-wing Americans is that British failure to alleviate both the causes and effects of the Potato Famine was a failure of the kind of 'small government' approach they themselves advocate and not the 'big government' approach they are so keen to criticise.
My point is that the UK government did bugger all to curb the rapacity of absentee landlords and other abuses and took a rather censorious 'Protestant' attitude towards the RC peasantry they considered indigent and lacking in enterprise.
I am not letting the British off the hook, simply pointing to a wider problem in the underlying ideology.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
I think there is a legitimate comparison to be made to the Holodomor in Ukraine. In both cases, a disastrous economic policy was allowed to continue because nobody gave a shit about the victims, at the expense of millions of lives.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Of course, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but what I do remind some of the more right-wing Americans is that British failure to alleviate both the causes and effects of the Potato Famine was a failure of the kind of 'small government' approach they themselves advocate and not the 'big government' approach they are so keen to criticise.
and you could say much the same thing about the famines in India under British rule - especially the famine in 1876 - where the british administration believed that the free market would solve the problem of famine.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Sure, it was a combination of rampant free market economics and not giving a shit.
I'm not trying to exonerate anyone here.
Simply backing up a point Sioni Sais made earlier about systemic issues and systemic abuses.
To say that there was (or is) systemic racism in the Metropolitan Police, say, is different from alleging that each and every single police officer in the force was (or is) racist.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
I find it hard not to take great exception to your blanket condemnation of white people, particularly when the oppression was mediated through the actions of a very few. Yes Churchill and Eden, I do mean you.
I apologize. You are so right that blanket condemnations do no one any good.
This morning I was listening to the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. One of the participants, Casper, said something that seemed to me to explain my surprise at Mark's response here.
Casper said that as an English person living in the United States for the past four years he observed a basic difference in the national conversation. He said that in England many conversations revolved in some way or other around class, whereas in the US the same conversations revolved around race.
I don't know if Casper's observation is anything close to accurate, but it helped me see why my comment did not sit well.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Perhaps belabouring the point now, but the ships carrying grain from Ireland to the UK (and elsewhere) weren't doing so 'for the Crown'. The Queen wasn't importing Irish grain.
What was happening was that rampant free-market capitalism was in full swing against the best interests of the Irish people.
To hear some Americans talk - and I include you at this point Gramps - anyone would think that nothing happened (or happens) in the UK without the monarch having some kind of personal 'say' in the matter ...
No, these things are more complicated than that.
The Irish Potato Famine occurred during a Whig or Liberal government's term of office.
Yes, it would nice and convenient to blame the nasty old Tories or Queen Victoria but it wasn't as clear cut as that.
What you had was a belief in deregulated free-markets with a minimum of State interference allied with a somewhat censorious Protestant attitude towards the benighted Catholic Irish and a reluctance to interfere with the 'rights' of absentee landlords and others to do what the hell they liked irrespective of the harm it was causing to the Irish peasantry.
That's just as shitty. But it's shitty in a different way to how many Americans understand it - who have been just as - and continue to be -guilty of shittiness in the way they handle fiscal and other relations with the wider world - only perhaps without the starkly obvious effects that we saw in mid-19th century Ireland.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
He said that in England many conversations revolved in some way or other around class, whereas in the US the same conversations revolved around race.
There's some truth in that, although conversations about race are common in the UK as well. I would hope that blanket condemnation by race or by class could be argued to be a bad idea on both sides of the Atlantic.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
I would hope that blanket condemnation by race or by class could be argued to be a bad idea on both sides of the Atlantic.
As ought to be true of almost any kind of blanket condemnation.
Still, I had thought that blaming the white man in general for the sins of the colonial period and its modern equivalents was safe enough. I guess not. ![[Hot and Hormonal]](icon_redface.gif)
Posted by Nick Tamen (# 15164) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
To hear some Americans talk - and I include you at this point Gramps - anyone would think that nothing happened (or happens) in the UK without the monarch having some kind of personal 'say' in the matter ...
Perhaps there is some of that, Gamaliel. But sometimes, I think "the Crown" is being used by Americans as a metonym for the government as a whole. Whether that is correct usage or not....
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Sure, and the Irish sometimes use the term that way too ... and the British themselves in certain contexts.
I stand to be corrected, but my understanding is that it wasn't 'government' ships taking the grain from Ireland but privately-owned ones - free enterprise.
Sure, the British government supported that and I've heard stories of troops on duty to stop starving Irish people from trying to rush the ships and grab the grain.
My point isn't that the British Government is free of 'blame' - but we're talking about culpable neglect rather than some kind of active attempt to starve the Irish in some way.
That said, what the Government allowed to happen to the Irish wouldn't have been tolerated in Surrey, Sussex or even Sunderland or Strathclyde - even though, at that time, the Irish were as much British citizens (or subjects if you prefer) as anyone else living on these islands.
ExclamationMark has already made the point that rural workers were pretty shabbily treated throughout the British Isles. One imagines that things got even worse the further north or west you went ... but then, the London poor also had a pretty raw time of it in those days.
Anyway, in terms of colonial legacies, how far back do we want to go? Wales was arguably England's first colony and there was a time when Welshmen weren't even allowed within the walls of some of the 'new towns' the English planted for their own and for Flemish settlers. There was a policy of allowing Flemings to settle in West Wales for instance in order to dilute potential Welsh resistance by having other settlers there ... and the line of demarcation between English and Welsh speakers - the Landsker - can still be detected in Pembrokeshire to this day.
Heck, even now you hear the old urban myth that it's still on the statute books that it's permissible to shoot with a longbow any Welshman found within the walls of Chester after midnight.
A similar story persists about Scotsmen in Carlisle.
None of which detracts from the horror of the Potato Famine of course nor the evils of colonialism in Africa, India and elsewhere.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
I would hope that blanket condemnation by race or by class could be argued to be a bad idea on both sides of the Atlantic.
As ought to be true of almost any kind of blanket condemnation.
Still, I had thought that blaming the white man in general for the sins of the colonial period and its modern equivalents was safe enough. I guess not.
Well, kinda yes and kinda no. The colour of one's skin does not impart behaviour, but colour was used during that time period to oppress.
I do take exception the Exclamation Mark's comments that "very few" people were the problem, however. The few we point to were abetted by the more who participated and the many who said nothing.
ETA: I've said "white people (this)" and "white people (that)" as shock value to make a point. It is problematic, however. In that it loses people who might have been amenable to the follow-up.
[ 27. August 2016, 17:08: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
The few we point to were abetted by the more who participated and the many who said nothing.
That's how I see it.
But I also see the point that this is only true in a society where people feel empowered to say anything. This would support the class-consciousness comment I quoted above.
I don't know if other Americans feel this way, but I feel culpable for the perceived bad behavior of the USA, if any.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Likewise with British bad behaviour ...
Or Western bad behaviour in general.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
:
Very little seems to be said about the nastiness of some- much?- of what the Mau Mau did. In a way that doesn't matter: the atrocities of one side do not excuse the atrocities of the other. As Enoch Powell said in the Hola debate, one can't claim that it was more acceptable for British forces to behave badly in Africa than at home because it was in Africa, and we quite rightly expect better behaviour from those who claim to be a disciplined force operating under legal authority than we do from rebels. But to read a lot of what gets printed about it now, you'd think that the Mau Mau were just simple clean cut patriots standing up for national aspirations. That's not the picture you get from, say Graham Greene's contemporaneous writing about and from Kenya, and he was no apologist for empire, British or otherwise. It would round out the picture just to have that acknowledged every now and then.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
we quite rightly expect better behaviour from those who claim to be a disciplined force operating under legal authority than we do from rebels. But to read a lot of what gets printed about it now, you'd think that the Mau Mau were just simple clean cut patriots standing up for national aspirations.
I think that this is a fairly typical pattern. Native Americans certainly committed atrocities, and I would be surprised if there was any part of the world where local peoples did not at some point do gruesome things to colonials.
An important point here is that it is human nature to defend your land from people you perceive as invaders, especially if there is provocation.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
and we quite rightly expect better behaviour from those who claim to be a disciplined force operating under legal authority than we do from rebels. But to read a lot of what gets printed about it now, you'd think that the Mau Mau were just simple clean cut patriots standing up for national aspirations.
Except that what seems to have happened is a collective punishment of an entire community because a minority committed atrocities, and this is the context in which these things are being discussed (the majority of the victims of the abuse were not perpetrators of the atrocities but were 'processed' through the camp system because the community at large was thought to harbor revolutionary tendencies).
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
[
An important point here is that it is human nature to defend your land from people you perceive as invaders, especially if there is provocation.
This all happened quite a long time after Kenya had been colonised.
My point is, I suppose, that as is always the case, the terms of this engagement with the past - what is seen as important, what is remembered, what is forgotten, what is excused or held to be inexcusable- say as much about how we see the world now as about what happened then. In the 50s we prided ourselves on how superior we were to these savage blacks: now we pride ourselves on how superior we are to our savage parents and grandparents. So the world turns.
I've only had a chance to skim the article referred to in the OP but from what I could see it was actually a good deal more nuanced and complex than the typically simplistic Guardian headline might suggest.
[ 30. August 2016, 20:20: Message edited by: Albertus ]
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
An important point here is that it is human nature to defend your land from people you perceive as invaders, especially if there is provocation.
This all happened quite a long time after Kenya had been colonised.
Yes it did. The victims of colonization often hold on to resentments for decades.
quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
My point is, I suppose, that as is always the case, the terms of this engagement with the past - what is seen as important, what is remembered, what is forgotten, what is excused or held to be inexcusable- say as much about how we see the world now as about what happened then.
I agree.
I think that the way we see the world today makes us question what the British were ever doing in Kenya in the first place.
The same line of thought asks the same question about many places worldwide. It also asks other questions, like what right Europeans had to draw borders in places like Africa and the Middle East.
These kinds of questions are natural given our current awareness of the problems that these things have caused. But this is because of the era that we live in, as you point out.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
But to read a lot of what gets printed about it now, you'd think that the Mau Mau were just simple clean cut patriots standing up for national aspirations.
The memory of Mau Mau is very mixed in Kenya and is not all that prominent in national dialogue, partly because there are so many victims of Mau Mau and children of Mau Mau victims still alive, and partly because many view it as a brutal and terrible nightmare that they'd rather forget.
Nevertheless the reason Mau Mau became such a terrible civil war in Kenya is because the British deliberately divided the community and used other Kikuyu to fight Mau Mau.
This isn't a conflict with two sides - Kenya vs UK - but rather an occupying force mishandling various internal and internal vs external conflicts in a way that caused great bloodshed, and then the occupying force taking part in systematic abuses of human rights including torture.
This also comes on the back of 30/40 years of the most lurid propaganda in the UK regarding Mau Mau and the genesis of it with all sorts of crackpot theories about the psychological defects of Africans that lead them to become irrational and violent.
There are lots of parallels with Iraq.
Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
I think there is a legitimate comparison to be made to the Holodomor in Ukraine. In both cases, a disastrous economic policy was allowed to continue because nobody gave a shit about the victims, at the expense of millions of lives.
Comparisons with the Holodomor are strained and tenuous, to say the least.
The Irish Famine involved a neglectful and callous response to an unforeseen natural disaster.
Stalin might not have set out to deliberately starve Ukrainians, though there is every likelihood that he relished the opportunity to exterminate both the kulak memntality in general and Ukrainian independence in particular.
What is not in question is that he set out to get agricultural products he needed to sell to finance his industrialisation programme, and that he was prepared for up to 7.5 million Ukrainians to die as a result if that is what it took.
Commentators such as the late Eric Hobsbawm thought that was fair enough, but most of us would view it a trifle less nonchalantly.
And the Protestant Ascendancy didn't claim to embody a revolutionary egalitarianism with the welfare of the Internationale's "wretched of the earth" in their hearts.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
The Irish Famine involved a neglectful and callous response to an unforeseen natural disaster.
If you use involved to mean included, then yes. If you mean it was the cause, then not quite.
quote:
Comparisons with the Holodomor are strained and tenuous, to say the least.
Not completely analogous, perhaps, but not strained or tenuous. Both were cause by the diversion of a people's food supply to the benefit of others.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
The Irish Famine involved a neglectful and callous response to an unforeseen natural disaster.
The potato blight was natural. The unnatural part was the total dependency of so many Irish people on the potato, which was a consequence of the way absentee Irish landlords had subdivided their lands. There was no English potato famine because although potatoes were grown in England, they were not usually anyone's sole crop.
Also, given that potato blight was known to exist, and one doesn't need to be an agronomist to work out what happens if the population is dependent on a single crop which fails, I would argue that the potato famine was entirely foreseeable.
Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
There was no English potato famine because although potatoes were grown in England, they were not usually anyone's sole crop.
It severely affected other parts of Europe, including Scotland.
It was not unique to Ireland.
quote:
Also, given that potato blight was known to exist, and one doesn't need to be an agronomist to work out what happens if the population is dependent on a single crop which fails, I would argue that the potato famine was entirely foreseeable.
As far as I am aware, it was unprecedented in Ireland.
Any way, I am not interested in defending English rule in Ireland, just in pointing out that the Famine, for all its horrors, was different both quantitatively and qualitatively from the Holodomor.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
Regarding Scotland, I didn't think Scottish landlords were models of social responsibility either, witness the Highland Clearances. But AIUI there was a difference in that the introduction of the potato into Scotland allowed land that could not previously have been cultivated to be sown with potatoes. So Scottish dependency on the potato was more 'natural' than Irish dependency.
Regarding Ireland, there had been previous outbreaks of potato blight but not on the same scale.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
I agree.
I think that the way we see the world today makes us question what the British were ever doing in Kenya in the first place.
The same line of thought asks the same question about many places worldwide. It also asks other questions, like what right Europeans had to draw borders in places like Africa and the Middle East.
These kinds of questions are natural given our current awareness of the problems that these things have caused. But this is because of the era that we live in, as you point out.
I'm with you there. I can't for the life of me see why anyone thinks that it's acceptable just to wander into a place where someone else is living and tell them that from now on you're running the place. And that is a view that was being expressed by some people- maybe not enough- at the time: you get a bit of it in heart of Darkness and if you go back 250 years it;s exactly what Dr Johnson was saying about European colonisation in N America. Much better if everyone stays at home and minds their own business.
But I suppose that if you do have some kind of belief in your own enlightenment you might think that it will work out in the interests of all concerened if you take over; and as far as I can tell there were people in the age of Empire who genuinely believed that, odd though that may seem to us now. But then we are looking at it from the other side of some pretty big fuck-ups, and they weren't. It's because I can see the flaws in past generations' assumptions of their own superiority that I'm sceptical about similar assumptions in our own generation.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Thing is, it doesn't defend or exonerate the UK authorities by observing that they weren't deliberately setting out - like Stalin - to exterminate or even actively oppress an entire people - although the end result of liberal, free-market laissez-faire economics in Victorian Britain did lead to a similar end result ...
Nor does it defend Britain's colonial record in Kenya if we acknowledge that the Mau Mau committed some pretty outrageous atrocities - both on other Kenyans and on British settlers.
Sure, some of the accounts of Mau Mau initiation rites and so on are pretty lurid - but come on, some of these guys did chop up women and kids with machetes and also carried out genital mutilation on some of their female victims before despatching them ...
![[Ultra confused]](graemlins/confused2.gif)
That doesn't let the British off the hook, of course but the Mau Mau certainly weren't the sort of people you'd want to meet on a dark night.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Thing is, it doesn't defend or exonerate the UK authorities by observing that they weren't deliberately setting out - like Stalin - to exterminate or even actively oppress an entire people - although the end result of liberal, free-market laissez-faire economics in Victorian Britain did lead to a similar end result ...
Yes, up to a point. Except that at the point of the last famines in India the same thing had happened multiple times - laissez-faire economics had been relied upon with predictable results - so it isn't as if the authorities didn't know what was coming.
quote:
but come on, some of these guys did chop up women and kids with machetes and also carried out genital mutilation on some of their female victims before despatching them ...
That doesn't let the British off the hook, of course but the Mau Mau certainly weren't the sort of people you'd want to meet on a dark night.
Again, this misses the point that what was done amounted to a form of collective punishment (large numbers of the Kikiyu population were interned because the Mau-Mau were Kikiyu, the torture wasn't even particularly targeted).
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Sure, some of the accounts of Mau Mau initiation rites and so on are pretty lurid - but come on, some of these guys did chop up women and kids with machetes and also carried out genital mutilation on some of their female victims before despatching them ...
They killed 32 settlers. Around 50-300k Kikuyus died (no-one bothered to count properly) and no-one has clear figures on how many where militants rather than "collateral damage" but no-one is in a position to argue that the majority were. The British presided over exactly the conditions that produced the civil unrest/ insurgency/ terrorism activity and the fact that it was bloody and violent is to further condemn the British administration rather than a counter-balance to their crimes.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
I didn't say the British didn't create the conditions that led to the Kikuyu vs Mau Mau civil unrest. Nor did I claim that hundreds and hundreds of settlers were killed.
Nor did I say anything that could possibly exonerate the British authorities at the time of the Irish Potato Famine or the various famines in India.
Read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.
I don't see how anything I wrote in any way shifted blame nor mollified what happened.
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
All I'm saying is that whether it's 32 people killed or 50,000 people killed, when you're dead, you're dead.
It'd be a bit like saying that bombings, assassinations and terrorist outrages carried out by Irish Republican terrorists in the 1970s were perfectly justifiable given the way Ireland was treated by successive British governments.
That's no compensation to innocent people blown up in Belfast, Birmingham or Brighton.
Nor is it any justification to say, 'Ah, well, Loyalist terrorists killed people as well ...' or 'The British Army and RUC also shot people ...'
If you were the missionary victim of the Mau Mau who had her clitoris cut off before she was murdered then someone saying, 'Well, she shouldn't have been there in the first place ...' or 'It's a shame, but it was collateral damage due to British colonial policy' isn't really an adequate reaction.
None of that justifies what the British did in the camps and that's not what I am saying either.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
If you were the missionary victim of the Mau Mau who had her clitoris cut off before she was murdered
I don't think such a thing ever happened. You'll say they did terrible things that were just as bad. That is probably true, certainly if you include the Kikuyu Mau Mau victims. Nevertheless repeating propaganda circulated by the British to justify their indiscriminate and brutal response is best avoided.
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
If you were the missionary victim of the Mau Mau who had her clitoris cut off before she was murdered
I don't think such a thing ever happened. You'll say they did terrible things that were just as bad. That is probably true, certainly if you include the Kikuyu Mau Mau victims. Nevertheless repeating propaganda circulated by the British to justify their indiscriminate and brutal response is best avoided.
Assuming that it's just an atrocity tale, I wonder if there's a connection between that story and the fact that Jomo Kenyatta had previously gone on record defending female circumcision.
Not that Kenyatta's arguments justified making up fake stuff, just curious if the British propagandists might have been inspired by what he had written.
[ 02. September 2016, 17:46: Message edited by: Stetson ]
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
I hadn't thought of that link before. It is possible since female circumcision was a really huge controversy among the Kikuyu, and the first major political issue that the colonial administration involved itself in. Also Kenyatta famously defended female circumcision in a debate in London (I think at SOAS) where he was opposed by Louis Leakey, a famous colonialist. The story goes that they both became so angry that they ended the debate shouting at each other in Kikuyu, excluding most of the audience from the discussion.
Louis Leakey was a big proponent of various crack-pot theories regarding the psychological defects in the Kikuyu that made them susceptible to the Mau Mau disease so a link is not impossible.
That said most of the propaganda about Mau Mau savagery doesn't focus on female genital mutilation. And I should acknowledge that too much savagery (i.e. any at all) was actually true.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
It did happen.
It isn't just British propaganda.
I don't have the source to hand bit it was a reputable one.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Why the assumption that it had to be British propaganda?
These things are rarely clear-cut goodies versus baddies issues.
We're dealing with historical events here, not Hollywood cowboy movies.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Why the assumption that it had to be British propaganda?
These things are rarely clear-cut goodies versus baddies issues.
We're dealing with historical events here, not Hollywood cowboy movies.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
The British were the baddies, full stop.
Understand this and process this. It isn't a zero sum thing. The British were the baddies regardless of anything the Mau Mau did.
Do you understand my point here?
BTW, the Cowboys were also the baddies, full stop.
[ 02. September 2016, 20:01: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Yes, settlers cut Mau Mau suspects'balls off and raped Kenyan women.
British security forces also committed war crimes.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
I'm quite prepared to acknowledge the evils of colonialism, but that doesn't condone or excuse the murder of the Ruck family for instance - with the six year old son hacked to death with pandas - nor the hundreds of Kikuyu murdered by the Way Mau.
It was all wrong.
The estimates of over 300,000 deaths have been challenged by historians. What does seem to be the case is that 12,000 insurgents and others were officially killed by British regular forces and auxiliary units - probably 20,000+ all told.
Yes, the British were the baddies because they shouldn't have been there in the first place but the uprising was a dirty war with fucking awful things done by both sides.
We should condemn the atrocities equally, regardless of who committed them.
Yes, one can excoriate the colonial authorities more for acting in ways that would not be expected from a liberal democracy, but that in no way lets the Mau Mau off the hook.
Both sides did bastardly things.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
BTW, the Cowboys were also the baddies, full stop.
Reminds me of a joke in our pastors office. Our church secretary, head pastor, and myself were discussing the fact that we are all of partial Native American descent. A third pastor chimed in that this meant that he was our natural enemy, since his ancestors were cowboys.
Yes, they were bad.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Sorry - 'pangas' not 'pangas'.
I still don't see how anything I've written let's the colonial authorities off the hook. Why should it?
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
None of that justifies what the British did in the camps and that's not what I am saying either.
I'm struggling to see what you are saying apart from bad things happen. And if that's all you are saying, I'm not sure why you would phrase things in quite this way:
quote:
but come on, some of these guys did chop up women and kids with machetes and also carried out genital mutilation on some of their female victims before despatching them ...
That doesn't let the British off the hook, of course but the Mau Mau certainly weren't the sort of people you'd want to meet on a dark night.
Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on
:
I was conceived (TMI) and spent my early years in Kenya (I was of course taught to pronounce it "Keenya" to avoid the polluting influence of that nasty man™ Kenyatta ) and Ghana. I grew up believing a narrative that said the British were fine, moral upstanding guardians of All That Was Right And True. My father was a railways engineer who had helped spread the lines across the pink nations on the globe. My parents were in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising and I was taught, as you would imagine, to see this as a passage of bastardry on the part of upstart and ungracious natives who deserved a good spanking for their lack of respect.
It wasn't until I was an undergrad and began to read Chinua Achebe, Ng̃ug̃i wa Thiongo and others, and then James Cone, Allan Boesak and other black liberation theologians, that I began to find new lenses. I had to do a lot of soul searching, penitence (in my own heart) and rediscovering of history. It hurt but I have never regretted it.
Interestingly (and for me literature has always been the main means of discovery) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has in more recent years given me a more nuanced, more balanced vision of the rights and wrongs of euro- and afro-centricity, and I tend to abhor all forms of nationalism and racial self-satisfaction. I do however maintain a bias to the stories of the victims, and the stories that come out of Indigenous and other colonized peoples still hold for me the greatest ring of truth.
[ 02. September 2016, 20:33: Message edited by: Zappa ]
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
I hope so, Freddy - but for fuck's sake. lilBuddha, the Nazis were the baddies in WW2. Does that mean that the carpet bombing of German cities and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German non-combatants was justifiable?
No. Of course not.
Any more than female genital mutilation is justifiable or the hacking to death of six year old boys.
I mean, for crying out loud ...
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
Growing up in the shadow of WW2, we accepted without reservation that Nazi atrocities were exceptional. History is being retold now, by historians whose parents hadn't the experience of that. Which allows us to discuss other misbehaviour as comparable. I found this startling when first realized it.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
Gamaliel
When an atrocity is being discussed and someone says, but they were meanies as well implies a balance of responsibility for the atrocity. There is none in this case.
[ 02. September 2016, 21:22: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
No. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Yes, the settlers in Kenya were in the most racist anywhere in the British Empire at that time. They were twats. I don't have any fucking time for them whatsoever.
The bastards took full advantage of 'the emergency' to rape and torture those detained by the authorities. Some boasted of what they had done.
I still don't see how that exonerates the Mau Mau for carrying out the Lari massacre of Loyalist Kenyans, even though twice as many alleged insurgent sympathisers were massacred by the authorities in retaliation.
Sure, as Auden famously wrote, in relation to Nazi Germany for goodness sake, "I and the public know/What all the children learn/That those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return."
So yes, the savagery of the Mau Mau attacks, like those of the sepoys in the India Mutiny or those of Irish Catholics against Protestants in 1640, was born out of oppression and decades of repressive treatment.
But that doesn't excuse murder.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
The British were the baddies, full stop...
When people say things like that, the 'the' usually implies a binary: that is, it suggests that the others weren't.
I'm not sure whether or not that's what you mean- i think on balance it probably isn't- but that is the view you'd get from some of the current reporting of compensation claims in e.g. The Guardian. Mrs Beaky's account, which is actually from Kenya, doesn't deny or minimise the bad things the British did, but it doesn't portray it as (forgive me) a black and white question in the way that some people over here seem to do.
That attitude- that, broadly, colonial history is always a matter of beastly colonialists and heroically suffering/ resisting colonised- is a curious one and seems to me to be based on a deep assumption which is itself racist. By denying that colonised people could behave badly, it's declining to recognise that they have the full range of human agency- in a way that is a strange and distorted echo of those stories of cheerful, loyal, essentially dumb and childlike natives that used to be put around not so many decades ago. An odd attitude for self-proclaimed believers in equality to take, really.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
So, no. You are wrong LilBuddha. Completely and utterly wrong. As wrong as wrong can be.
Even the Daily fucking Mail and Tele-bastard-graph admit the British authorities committed dreadful atrocities in Kenya for goodness sake.
No-one is disputing that.
But I don't see how that leaves the Mau Mau off the hook any more than British misrule in Ireland justifies the Birmingham pub bombings or sectarian killings during The Troubles.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Ever.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Adam Foulds's remarkable book-length poetry sequence, 'The Broken Word' is a stunning recent treatment of the Kenyan 'Emergency' and doesn't shy away from the horrors perpetrated by the settlers and auxiliaries with the connivance of the colonial authorities.
I can recommend that, even though it takes a strong stomach to read it.
I think we are all agreed that the response to the 'Emergency' was disproportionate - nearly 11,000 insurgents or sympathisers killed in action officially - and perhaps as many as 25,000 all told.
The 300,000 figure is surely way too high and would represent a significant proportion of the male population. The census figures don't show any significant impact.
The Mau Mau killed nearly 2,000 Kenyans and relatively low numbers of the security forces - between 67 and 200. Only 32 European settlers were killed.
But gruesome deaths are gruesome deaths, whoever perpetrated them.
Human life is human life.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I still don't see how that exonerates the Mau Mau
.. but I don't see anyone in this thread exonerating them?
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
I'm not exhonerating any atrocities. I'm saying that your phrasing is generally used to soften the actions of the party being discussed. You might not mean to do this, but your words imply it.
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
I'm not exhonerating any atrocities. I'm saying that your phrasing is generally used to soften the actions of the party being discussed. You might not mean to do this, but your words imply it.
Isn't it generally true that the party who is defending their own land, or who is native to that land, is judged less harshly in the eyes of history?
The French resistance did some inexcusable things during WWII. History has not judged them harshly.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
quote:
Isn't it generally true that the party who is defending their own land, or who is native to that land, is judged less harshly in the eyes of history?
The French resistance did some inexcusable things during WWII. History has not judged them harshly.
It sometimes takes awhile. Ask a North American indigenous person. We are just getting around to admitting how terrible colonists and settlers were/are. Though in Canada moreso than USA because proportionally there are more here.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
I'm not exhonerating any atrocities. I'm saying that your phrasing is generally used to soften the actions of the party being discussed. You might not mean to do this, but your words imply it.
Isn't it generally true that the party who is defending their own land, or who is native to that land, is judged less harshly in the eyes of history?
Yes, and it is both right and wrong. If you are defending yourself, retaliation is the burden the attacker/oppressor must bear.
However, atrocity is something else. But even that is somewhat subjective.
I do not think horrible things should be overlooked. But I balk at using them as a balance or excuse.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
But isn't that exactly what you are doing, LilBuddha?
Mau Mau atrocities against white settlers or against fellow Kikuyu suspected of being pro-colonial - justifiable.
Atrocities by security forces and settlers against the Mau Mau and suspected insurgents - unjustifiable.
I'm saying that each were reprehensible.
Of course, there's a sliding scale with all of us. Had the Mau Mau restricted themselves to police or military targets then perhaps you'd find me cutting them more slack than I have here.
Had the authorities not responded to the Lari massacre by massacring twice as many alleged Mau Mau sympathisers in retaliation then you might find me cutting them more slack.
I'm not minimising or excusing either.
The Mau Mau sliced open pregnant women in Lari.
Settlers cut off the balls of suspected insurgents in the detention camps.
Is the first justifiable and the second not? The second justifiable and the first not?
Or are both equally reprehensible and shitty?
I incline to the latter view. That doesn't mean I'm tacitly supporting colonial actions in Africa for pity's sake.
Enough of this binariness already.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Another binary problem is the British vs Mau Mau idea. It really wasn't like that. Mau Mau were not very organized and were not a single entity.
There were Kikuyu who took part in oathing ceremonies and under orders from a Mau Mau general killed people.
Then there were those who got involved with a mob or a riot, or who took advantage of the chaos to steal, rape or exact revenge for previous wrongs. There were land issues that pitted Kikuyu against Kikuyu, and where loyalty to the colonial administration or an alignment with Mau Mau were strategies to get the upper hand.
The state of emergency was as much a civil war among Kikuyu with confusing delineation of sides as a war against the British.
The Lari massacre was probably motivated as much by a land dispute more than independence. It is often characterized as Mau Mau killing loyalists. Actually many of those killed weren't in the home guard or families of the home guard. Likewise the retaliatory killings are said to be of Mau Mau. But they included women and children.
The British had policies that deliberately fostered disputes among Kikuyu because that was essential to having a wage-dependent work force and acquiring land, and was essential to having a home guard willing to put down the mau mau rebellion.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
But isn't that exactly what you are doing, LilBuddha?
No.
quote:
Mau Mau atrocities against white settlers or against fellow Kikuyu suspected of being pro-colonial - justifiable.
Except I never said this. I've said the opposite.
What I am saying is that none of what the Mau Mau did justifies the actions of the British forces.
The Mau Mau bear responsibility for their own atrocities.
The British bear responsibility for their own atrocities.
The British bear responsibility for the conditions which led to the uprising.
The British bear the responsibility for usurping the countries of others in the first place.
These are not parts that equal a whole. That isn't how life works.
The British bear responsibility for their own atrocities.
[ 03. September 2016, 06:27: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]
Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on
:
Every single land people or Country that has sought expansion of interest leading to empire building bears the responsibility of oppression. You could probably take this back as far as the modern Homo Saps moving North from what is now South Africa.
Our wonderful and glorious Great Britain is , without a doubt, a Country that has exploited and oppressed other peoples, including it's own.
Were there a court of law over such matters then it would be hard to not find Britain guilty along with Rome, Mongolia, Portugal, Spain, France..... right up to modern day America, Russia and China.... along with all the others inbetween. The scale of it is of course not a justification, or reason to excuse it.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Sure.
I'm not excusing it.
LilBuddha has clarified his position and it's one I'm comfortable with, as is mdijon's.
I still feel there is a danger of binariness, although blame has ultimately to lie with the colonial authorities.
Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I still feel there is a danger of binariness, although blame has ultimately to lie with the colonial authorities.
Indeed. We often find blame in history to be a fluid thing.
For example it is looking like the longer time goes on the more TB will be held solely responsible for the Iraq war, or things like Dr. Crippen being a serial killer when in fact he only murdered his wife.
I do not know the full details of British involvement in Africa other than it was clearly extensive. If there are records of British atrocities and witnesses to the effect then in theory an historic case could be made. Unfortunatly for those seeking recompense it probably has as much chance of getting off the starting grid as the Westminster abuse scandal.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy:
Isn't it generally true that the party who is defending their own land, or who is native to that land, is judged less harshly in the eyes of history?
The French resistance did some inexcusable things during WWII. History has not judged them harshly.
To some extent, but I think there's usually a judgement about the rightness or wrongness of the cause involved, too. I wonder whether we would be more censorious of wartime or immediate postwar atrocities by Italians, Germans, or Japanese against Anglo-American invaders or occupiers, if any were to come to light?
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
To some extent, but I think there's usually a judgement about the rightness or wrongness of the cause involved, too. I wonder whether we would be more censorious of wartime or immediate postwar atrocities by Italians, Germans, or Japanese against Anglo-American invaders or occupiers, if any were to come to light?
Yes, that is how I see it too.
Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on
:
This sort of thinking can become pretty messy.
Upthread there was mention of the Holodomor.
To many Ukrainians, their land had been occupied by Russians, more particularly by Bolsheviks, and most particularly by Jews, because Jews were then over-represented in the Party (and even if they were in reality few in number, the Ukrainians perceived them as dominanat, and according to current PC orthodoxy, the validity of putative victims' interpretation of their plight must always be accepted without question).
After 1941, many Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews in retaliation for the events of 1932-3 (to further complicate matters, there was of course an existing tradition of anti-Semitism in the region which predated the Holodomor).
So, if the principle that a subjugated people can be excused for avenging themselves on their oppressors (more than this, according to Franz Fanon, their psychological wellbeing requires it), then Ukrainians were justified in co-operating with the Holocaust in response to the Holodomor.
Really?
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
No, not really. You have made a case that no one else presented. Nice try, though.
Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
No, not really. You have made a case that no one else presented.
The second sentence is irrelevant to the first.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
I'm not gainsaying any comments here on a 'PC' basis nor an 'anti-PC' basis, I'm simply concerned that in all debates of this kind we get some kind of balance.
I once had a humdinger of an online argument with an Irish-American who insisted that Cromwell had personally massacred over 30,000 Irish people at Drogheda, for instance. What a load of baloney. That would have represented a significant proportion of the Irish population at that time.
It isn't letting Cromwell off the hook by pointing out that the actual death-toll was closer to 2,500 of the garrison - many of them English or Scottish, not Irish - and around 700-800 civilians who were killed either by way of 'collateral damage' or indiscriminately by the Parliamentarian troops going on the rampage. Yes, Jesuits and other RC clergy and religious were deliberately slaughtered too.
It doesn't diminish Cromwell's culpability by suggesting that the rules of engagement at that time 'allowed' a besieging force to massacre a garrison if it failed to surrender once a breach was made in the defences.
No, he was culpable all right and could easily have shown clemency or stopped the violence from escalating until it became a general massacre. When the same thing happened at Wexford, it does cast doubts on the 'fog of war' thing ...
No, what bothers me about the tone of some of the posts here is that it can sound as if Mau Mau atroctities are being minimised because the official colonial response was so outrageously out of proportion. Which it was.
My brother in South Wales knew a bloke who'd served in Kenya during 'The Emergency'. He was assigned to The King's African Rifles alongside a white sergeant who was armed to the teeth with all manner of unofficially issued weaponry - including a pump-action shotgun. According to this chap, the regular African troops were armed with standard issue Lee Enfields but the British officers and many of the auxiliaries had non-standard Thompson submachine guns as well as stens and all sorts of nasty weaponry which they didn't hesitate to use.
He told my brother that they'd been shown photographs of Mau Mau atrocities against both Europeans and Kikuyu and this ensured that their 'blood was up' for when they encountered Mau Mau units in the bush. They rarely took prisoners and even then purely for interrogation purposes. He told my brother that he'd lost count of the number of Mau Mau he'd seen shot out of hand, summarily executed or simply picked off one by one by the sharpest shots of the King's Own African Rifles as they fled into the bush. Apparently, those with stens and Thompsons would flush the Mau Mau out of hiding or use shot-guns at close range and the African troops would be deployed to pick them off at leisure as they tried to escape.
If they tried to surrender they were simply lined up an mown down.
It was a vicious, dirty war on both sides.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
It was a vicious, dirty war on both sides.
It wasn't a war with two sides. I mentioned this earlier.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
:
Kaplan, the Ukrainian alliance with the Nazis was not about retaliating for Stalin's genocide. It was about gambling that the Nazis would win and wanting to be well positions. Romania and Bulgaria did similar. But were better organized pre-war than Ukraine so had their own government buffer between themselves and the German government and army. Ukraine is caught somewhere between being Russia's Ireland and Scotland.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Ok - yes, you're right, mdijon, as you've already pointed out it wasn't a clear-cut British vs Mau Mau thing ...
What I should have said was, 'it was a dirty war on all sides.'
All sides were dirty.
The colonial authorities had the fire-power and resources to do dirty stuff on a bigger and wider scale, but it was still dirty all ways round.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I'm not gainsaying any comments here on a 'PC' basis nor an 'anti-PC' basis, I'm simply concerned that in all debates of this kind we get some kind of balance.
IMO, balance is the wrong word. It implies a proportionality that is is simply inaccurate in this case. And many others.
That everyone was nasty does not then balance then blame for the situation.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
:
Let us say then context, or even more neutrally, breadth of picture.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Ok - 'balance' was the wrong word.
But I think you know what I was getting at.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
:
Oh, I know. But then I'm with you on this.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
All sides were dirty.
Sorry to sound pedantic but I don't think they were. There were some groups of Kikuyu that I'm sure would rather have just been left in peace but needed to organize to protect themselves and their communities from the nightmare that was all around them.
And there were many innocent victims who weren't particularly on anyone's side.
Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Kaplan, the Ukrainian alliance with the Nazis was not about retaliating for Stalin's genocide. It was about gambling that the Nazis would win and wanting to be well positions. Romania and Bulgaria did similar. But were better organized pre-war than Ukraine so had their own government buffer between themselves and the German government and army. Ukraine is caught somewhere between being Russia's Ireland and Scotland.
I was not referring to collaborationist entities such as the ULA, but to grassroots anti-Semitism without which, according to some historians, the Nazi near eradication of the Ukraine's Jews would not have been possible.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
That is pedantic mdjon.
Of course there were people, whether Kikuyu, other Africans, Asians, British, other Europeans, who simply wanted to co-exist and who played no part in the violence - or if they did, purely in self-defence.
The point I was making, of course, was that the dirtiness wasn't restricted to any one group of participants.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Only if you lump people as being on one "side" simply based on the fact of being Kikuyu. I'm not at all happy with that view.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
I wasn't doing that, mdijon.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Then don't use the phrase "dirtiness wasn't restricted to any one group of participants" immediately after listing "Kikuyu, other Africans, Asians, British".
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Bloody hell, mdijon - then you might as well upbraid me for listing 'British' as if that was a homogenous group. You really are being pedantic.
All I was saying was that various groups involved were guilty of 'dirty-war' behaviour. All I did was list some of the groups there were.
It'd be like me saying, 'They've got lots of different curries on the menu at my local Indian restaurant ... Marsala, bhuna, vindaloo ...' and you upbraiding me because I'd left some out. I was being indicative.
That's all.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Let me spell this out for you.
If I'm Kikuyu and my village and family got organized to try and defend itself against either the homeguard or mau mau (hard to tell which at times), but some of them got arrested by the British for possession of firearms... then implying that the group "Kikuyu" was into dirty-war is going to make me upset.
This isn't about leaving curries out in a list (fantastic choice of illustration by the way), the problem is using ethnicity as a label for a group collectively responsible for crimes. It isn't the right way to look at it.
The British state was a single entity and carries culpability, that doesn't generalize to every UK resident.
[ 07. September 2016, 07:06: Message edited by: mdijon ]
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
No, I get that, mdijon, and wouldn't claim that Kikuyu defending themselves against attack by Mau Mau, home-guard or any one else were guilty of 'dirty-war' - any more than I would claim that a settler who fired a shot gun out of a window as his killers approached was 'dirty' either.
If, however, that settler survived the attack and then went down to the nearest detention camp to rape, abuse and torture suspects, then yes, they would be guilty of 'dirty-war'.
Or if the Kikuyu in your example retaliated to the attack by subsequently hunting down and torturing suspected Mau Mau sympathisers, or else attacked a village where home-guard families were said to live, then yes, that would count as 'dirty-war' too.
I've already made it clear that I blame the colonial authorities for creating the climate for these things to happen and for allowing gross breaches of human rights protocols to take place, as well as a disproportionate response in the way suspected insurgents and sympathisers were mown down out of hand or subject to depraved tortures and summary execution.
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I've already made it clear that I blame the colonial authorities for creating the climate for these things to happen and for allowing gross breaches of human rights protocols to take place, as well as a disproportionate response in the way suspected insurgents and sympathisers were mown down out of hand or subject to depraved tortures and summary execution.
This is where I've been thinking of an interesting sideline (I've been puzzling on this for years as part of an aborted doctoral thesis). Who are "the colonial authorities" in this case?
I'd strongly argue that it doesn't *exactly* equal "the British."
The development of "British" rule in Kenya is exceptionally (even bv the standards of imperialism) complicated. To an extent it is possible to question whether the Union Jack and Whitehall's writ in that land was ever much more than a flag of convenience.
Kenya (or British East Africa as it was first known) came into the empire late, almost entirely unplanned, and in a fashion where the settlers were in almost permanent conflict with Whitehall. The only reason it didn't actually become another Rhodesia, as opposed to just getting pretty damn close to it, was that the numbers of people actually settling there remained small.
The settlers in Kenya were agitating for self-governance from something like 1906, and there was actually a settler rebellion early on where they almost beat Rhodesia to UDI by 40-odd years. Britain actually spent most of the 20th century (pre independence) fighting a bolshy gang of settlers from all over Europe and the States - Gamaliel has hinted earlier in the thread about how far to the extreme Kenyan settlers went - about the direction of the colony and how it was supposed to be managed.
Until the Legislative Council in Nairobi got its way, for example, the trajectory from the start was supposed to be the same as Uganda - which was managed (however much this might seem strange) on the basis of paramountcy of the "native interest" over settlers. There were just enough settlers in Kenya to tip the balance in favour of the settlers, and not enough of them to create, as was the case in Rhodesia, de facto dominion status.
The Colonial Office actually spent an awful lot of its time wrt Kenya tearing its hair out and trying to control the settlers. Short of martial law and deporting them all, before running down the flag and leaving the locals to get on with it, however much we might wish that they had done, there wasn't a great deal more The British could have done in the first 4 decades of the 20th century.
So then we got to the 1950s. The settlers council under the Governor called for help from the UK in ending the uprising. Britain couldn't really say no (absent the Indian subcontinent the age of decolonisation hadn't really got going at the time), and sent in forces. Then it got out of hand. Ironically it came to an end militarily when The British told the settlers that they couldn't maintain this sort of war any longer because British public opinion wouldn't wear it.
None of this is to excuse "The British", but it's a little more complicated than that because to a very great extent the settlers were calling the shots. It should never have got to that point in a Crown Colony, rather than a dominion (and Kenya and Rhodesia are the exceptions that prove the rule to an extent), but having spent years reading the history of Kenya, you can sort of see why/how it did.
The British government is culpable for incompetence (although they were up against a bad lot of settlers), and then involvement in a nasty war that got out of hand very quickly, but I'd argue that it was through negligence rather than malice (for all the difference that makes). Certainly before Mau Mau.
The settlers, on the other hand? Well, there were some innocent ones, and a lot of others that weren't, and who had been treating the place as their own private fiefdom for the best part of half a century. British when it suited them (and when they needed something), otherwise, Whitehall could keep their noses out of Kenyan affairs thanks very much...
Anyway, I thought that digression might be of interest to some...! My own view is that we shouldn't have been there and it shouldn't have happened, but it's not quite as straightforward as just "nasty Britain wages brutal war of oppression." Certainly not out of a clear blue sky, anyway.
That Britain did it is bad enough, but it can be seriously questioned how much Britain wanted to do it, even at the time. Felt they had to do it, on the other hand (however appalling that sentiment is in itself - certainly from the perspective of the 21st century - and, as noted above, it was near the knuckle of what would be tolerated even at the time) is probably closer to the mark.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
Interesting, Betjemaniac.
'Incompetence' is certainly the right term.
My wife's grandfather settled temporarily in Kenya in the 1920s. He'd served as a despatch rider in WW1 and won the Military Cross at the Battle of Loos. A year later he was nearly killed by shrapnel on the Menin Road and spent a year in hospital.
After the war, he took advantage of a scheme designed for injured or demobbed servicemen for them to settle and farm in Kenya. It was a disaster, poorly organised, with no planning, preparation, training or advice. You were simply allocated some land and expected to get on with it.
Things didn't work out, so he returned to the UK and resumed his pre-war career as a gas engineer and married my wife's grandmother - who was 20 years his junior. He engaged in crack-pot money-making schemes all his life - even trying to set up a silk-worm operation from his suburban house.
So, what you had in Kenya, and I'd imagine plenty of other colonies, were ill-prepared and incompetent farmers and settlers moving in and floundering around - so it's hardly surprising they developed a callous disregard for the indigeneous peoples or a cavalier attitude towards authority.
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
So, what you had in Kenya, and I'd imagine plenty of other colonies, were ill-prepared and incompetent farmers and settlers moving in and floundering around - so it's hardly surprising they developed a callous disregard for the indigeneous peoples or a cavalier attitude towards authority.
That's the interesting thing really - there were so few settler colonies:
Australia, NZ, Canada, South Africa, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia (not really Northern), Kenya is about the lot.
All the others (ie the overwhelming majority of the empire, including India) were essentially commercial colonies with agribusiness, mining, etc. The ones where people like your relative emigrated to for good (in theory) can be counted on fewer than the fingers of 2 hands.
If you look at the above list, the thing that always strikes me is the role of timing in all this....
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
by the way, if he won the MC, he wasn't (at least at the time) a dispatch rider. Officers only for that one. He might have won the MM as an other rank.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
I think I mentioned earlier that there was a story that Winston Churchill felt the settlers were a liability and out of control and ought to be negotiating to hand over power but either through sickness or distraction didn't pursue it.
The Governor, though, was a government appointee and could have taken a decision to do things differently before the militarization of the conflict had got to operation anvil levels.
Evelyn Baring was very much the settler's man and by a combination of supplying misinformation to the UK government and identifying supporters in the colonial service managed to stick to an uncompromising course of action. Having said that he seems to have become Sir Evelyn Baring so presumably not all of the UK government was immediately regretful regarding his conduct.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
And I nearly forgot the infamous quote of the last Governor of Kenya - Malcolm Macdonald - who described Jomo Kenyatta as the leader to take Kenya "unto darkness and death".
Not exactly the words of a repentant colonial power, humbled by its wrongs and supportive of a newly independent government.
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
Not exactly the words of a repentant colonial power, humbled by its wrongs and supportive of a newly independent government.
.. and as I mentioned above, 'true repentance' should surely also allow for a true accounting of what actually took place - and yet it seems that the government continues to oppose the effort to do this.
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
Not exactly the words of a repentant colonial power, humbled by its wrongs and supportive of a newly independent government.
no, the words of one man, who happened to be in the hot seat, at the point his job came to an end.
worth noting that after that point the UK was generally better at putting "transitional" appointees in place - culminating of course with Chris Patten whose brief was pretty much keep the seat warm in Government House until the new owners come (see also Lord Soames in Rhodesia 1980).
Colonial governors of Kenya, up to and including the last one, seemed to go native to an extent rarely seen elsewhere - it was the only way to get anything done with the settlers. Worth noting also that the settlers had a track record of getting rid of governors they didn't want, regardless of what London thought.
The worm really turned when some of the Grand Old Men of Kenya colony went over to the cause of universal suffrage.
The aforementioned Ewart Grogan, who was one of the leaders of the settler rebellion that nearly ended in UDI in the early 20th century, and who had been in and around LegCo from the moment LegCo had been set up, became not only an advocate of Kenyan independence under majority rule, but a friend of Kenyatta.
My whole point is that in Kenya the governor, regardless of what he may or may not have said, was just one man. The power was with the settlers. Most governors of Kenya recognised that and bent to their will accordingly.
The history of British governance in Kenya is really, to paraphrase a great man, that it might have been worth giving it a try...
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
@Betjemaniac - he was an officer at the time he won the MC. He volunteered in the first week of the war and took his own motorbike to France and within a few days was being pursued by German motorcyclists through country lanes ...
By the time of the Battle of Loos he had trained as part of an auxilliary corps of motorcycles and sidecars which were meant to scuttle about the battle-field to provide support for the infantry. The bloke in the sidecar has a fixed machine gun.
It never really worked out as the conflict had developed into full-on trench warfare by that stage, but he did see action at Loos and I've seen copies of his summons to the Palace to receive the MC. My wife's uncle has photos and documentation but we can't find any citation - I'm told this is because it was an auxilliary unit. I'm also told he was Mentioned in Despatches and by Field Marshall Sir John French in his summary of the action at Loos. I've not been able to find this, nor has my wife's uncle who has done a fair bit of research.
By the time he was injured he was acting as a despatch rider and ferrying officers around from place to place. Apparently, he had a comrade with him in the sidecar when he was struck by shrapnel on the Menin Road and this poor chap was killed. But I don't know in what capacity he was travelling in the sidecar.
If you can shed any light on the historical/military aspects of all this then I'd be interested.
Meanwhile, @everyone else - yes, the British authorities were pretty crap when it came to recognising Kenyatta.
I don't see anyone here who is attempting to deny that nor to deny that the British authorities, the settlers nor anyone else acting in a position of influence at that time was acting in anything other than a pretty shameful and incompetent manner.
I've certainly not attempting to exonerate them in any way nor has anyone else I've seen posting here.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
So, what you had in Kenya, and I'd imagine plenty of other colonies, were ill-prepared and incompetent farmers and settlers moving in and floundering around - so it's hardly surprising they developed a callous disregard for the indigeneous peoples or a cavalier attitude towards authority.
That's the interesting thing really - there were so few settler colonies:
Australia, NZ, Canada, South Africa, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia (not really Northern), Kenya is about the lot.
All the others (ie the overwhelming majority of the empire, including India) were essentially commercial colonies with agribusiness, mining, etc. The ones where people like your relative emigrated to for good (in theory) can be counted on fewer than the fingers of 2 hands.
If you look at the above list, the thing that always strikes me is the role of timing in all this....
Er, there's one missing.
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
So, what you had in Kenya, and I'd imagine plenty of other colonies, were ill-prepared and incompetent farmers and settlers moving in and floundering around - so it's hardly surprising they developed a callous disregard for the indigeneous peoples or a cavalier attitude towards authority.
That's the interesting thing really - there were so few settler colonies:
Australia, NZ, Canada, South Africa, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia (not really Northern), Kenya is about the lot.
All the others (ie the overwhelming majority of the empire, including India) were essentially commercial colonies with agribusiness, mining, etc. The ones where people like your relative emigrated to for good (in theory) can be counted on fewer than the fingers of 2 hands.
If you look at the above list, the thing that always strikes me is the role of timing in all this....
Er, there's one missing.
The US? I meant the second age of British imperialism*, which is usually dated from 1776. Rightly or wrongly, it's difficult to see how it's Britain's problem after that!
*there's a whole academic argument about the extent to which Britain would have bothered with most other places had it not lost the US (at least to the extent that it eventually achieved), or whether it was that loss which put the boosters under India and everywhere else.
[ 07. September 2016, 15:24: Message edited by: betjemaniac ]
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
My whole point is that in Kenya the governor, regardless of what he may or may not have said, was just one man. The power was with the settlers. Most governors of Kenya recognised that and bent to their will accordingly.
Bullshit apologist nonsense. The "settlers" would not have been allowed to behave as they did if it hadn't been against Africans or some other group that were seen as lesser.
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
My whole point is that in Kenya the governor, regardless of what he may or may not have said, was just one man. The power was with the settlers. Most governors of Kenya recognised that and bent to their will accordingly.
Bullshit apologist nonsense. The "settlers" would not have been allowed to behave as they did if it hadn't been against Africans or some other group that were seen as lesser.
I'm not entirely sure how what you've written contradicts what I've written, and certainly not the bit you've quoted...
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Bullshit apologist nonsense. The "settlers" would not have been allowed to behave as they did if it hadn't been against Africans or some other group that were seen as lesser.
I'm not entirely sure how what you've written contradicts what I've written, and certainly not the bit you've quoted...
I suppose lilbuddha's point - and mine - would be that to narrate in the way you did suggests a lack of agency on the part of the British government in that they were mostly just neglectful, but those wicked settlers would have their way.
In that context it is right to point out that the only reason neglect was even acceptable was because Africans (and others) were seen as somewhat less than white.
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by chris stiles:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Bullshit apologist nonsense. The "settlers" would not have been allowed to behave as they did if it hadn't been against Africans or some other group that were seen as lesser.
I'm not entirely sure how what you've written contradicts what I've written, and certainly not the bit you've quoted...
I suppose lilbuddha's point - and mine - would be that to narrate in the way you did suggests a lack of agency on the part of the British government in that they were mostly just neglectful, but those wicked settlers would have their way.
In that context it is right to point out that the only reason neglect was even acceptable was because Africans (and others) were seen as somewhat less than white.
Ok, although I've been bending over backwards in every post to record the fact that I find the whole thing abhorrent. For the sake of clarity, and accusations of bullshit, I'm not for one moment denying the agency of the British government, nor, as you entirely correctly identify, the reason why they felt they could act as they did.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
he fact that I find the whole thing abhorrent. For the sake of clarity, and accusations of bullshit, I'm not for one moment denying the agency of the British government, nor, as you entirely correctly identify, the reason why they felt they could act as they did.
I'll accept that you mean this; but can you understand why it might appear differently?
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
FWIW, I didn't read Betjemaniac's contribution as 'apologist' rather a case if providing some background and context - certainly not an attempt to polish a turd and let the British authorities of the time off the hook.
If someone were to point to the impact of the punitive reparations on Germany after the Treaty of Versailles on the emergence of the Nazis, it wouldn't make them an apologist for Hitler, would it?
Was their institutional racism as well as culpable neglect? Yes, of course. Should the British authorities kicked the settlers up the arse and clamped down on their racism and abuse? Yes.
Is acknowledging Mau Mau atrocities as well as colonial ones or drawing attention to the particular difficulties and nuances the British faced in dealing with the settlers a form of mollification? Not necessarily. It depends on the intention.
Reds
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
'Reds'? Where did that come from? A typo. Wasn't meant to be a comment on anyone or their posts.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
If someone were to point to the impact of the punitive reparations on Germany after the Treaty of Versailles on the emergence of the Nazis, it wouldn't make them an apologist for Hitler, would it?
It would depend on the context, just as this subject does.
quote:
Was their institutional racism as well as culpable neglect?
Oh, see? It was not "culpable neglect". The government created the situation in the first. And not by accident. They participated too, though sometimes passively.
quote:
Is acknowledging Mau Mau atrocities as well as colonial ones or drawing attention to the particular difficulties and nuances the British faced in dealing with the settlers a form of mollification? Not necessarily. It depends on the intention.
It also depends on the presentation. and, IMO, some of the presentation here has been lacking to the point of obscuring stated intent.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
My whole point is that in Kenya the governor, regardless of what he may or may not have said, was just one man.
I don't think there's much doubt that he said it. Governments don't speak, individuals acting on behalf of governments speak and the governor was that individual. I think there's a lot in what you say about the settlers driving British policy, and evidence that the highest levels of government back home in the UK were frustrated with the situation as well.
However it seems to me there is something more as well - that there must have been some support for the Governor's stance in the colonial service, some collusion in suppressing information going to the cabinet and some ability to continue getting pro-settler governors appointed to Kenya.
(By the way I don't see a difference of opinion about the balance of power and political causes within the colonial structure as a moral argument, just historical interest really.)
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
he fact that I find the whole thing abhorrent. For the sake of clarity, and accusations of bullshit, I'm not for one moment denying the agency of the British government, nor, as you entirely correctly identify, the reason why they felt they could act as they did.
I'll accept that you mean this; but can you understand why it might appear differently?
I can, to an extent, although I am extremely heartened that Gamaliel understood exactly what I was saying, so clearly it wasn't that open to misinterpretation. However, if that's what you took from it then I could obviously have made it clearer.
It does raise 2 points with me though. Firstly, the implication that after nearly 900 posts and 3 years a regular shipmate would find it plausible that I would suddenly break cover as an apologist for racism is not something that crossed the wildest shores of my imagination.
Secondly, that I'm possibly too close to the subject for a generalist discussion board. I've been studying the 20th century experience of British colonialism in Kenya and Rhodesia in and out of academic institutions at postgrad level for over 10 years, and spend holiday time burrowing away in archives, etc.
In trying to add context and nuance to 3 pages of discussion yesterday I was trying to be careful to get something into each post to indicate that I wasn't celebrating/apologising for or advocating what I was saying. Clearly that didn't go far enough, so sorry.
However, one would have thought that there are some truisms which should be taken as read when having a conversation about imperialism, and which you really shouldn't have to keep saying if there's a reasonable expectation that people might get where you're coming from:
1) it was bad
2) it had its roots in racism (else why is it acceptable to go and take someone else's land?)
3) the government of each imperialist nation bears most culpability for the imperialism and for the events that take place in each imperial territory
I would hope that no one disagrees with any of that?
What I was trying to do though *within that framework* is put flesh on the nuances, whys and wherefores, because when arraigning someone/a nation for something, I would prefer to do it for *exactly* what they were guilty of, rather than just racism = evil. No one, again I would hope, is denying that for a second. But the nuances might suggest that there were other things that they were guilty of *as well.*
Also, and perhaps its just the historian in me, I want to understand the whys and wherefores as well as simply condemn.
With that in mind then, and the 3 points above overarching the framework, I came to the reasonable supposition a few years ago that there were some other questions that needed to be asked too:
1) the British empire was massive, how far was it monolithic?
2) was the intent uniform across every territory?
3) did intent change as time went on?
4) how far were governance arrangements one size fits all?
the conclusions I reached, FWIW are:
1) not at all
2) absolutely not
3) in some places, and in some places more than others
4) not remotely
Within that, I then got fascinated by the idea of "settler colonies" especially the ones that ultimately failed in the 20th century (Kenya & Rhodesia are my focus, but you could of course put South Africa in there too) and what they tell us about imperialism, racism, etc. And also what light the experience of them trying to "build a nation" in the full glare of relatively modern media and tv news can shed on what it was like for the ones that got away with it by virtue of doing it all before the 20th century - Canada, NZ, Australia, USA.
Fundamentally, does anything more than chronology separate the white Kenyans and Rhodesians from those other countries, and, if so, what?
You might have to wait for the book on that one!
A couple of posts up from this someone said I was reducing Kenya to something like "Britain didn't want it to happen, but the wicked settlers would have their way." For most of the years leading up to Mau Mau, bluntly, I wouldn't disagree with too much of that.
Kenya had been acquired in a fit of absent mindedness because it was there, it wasn't even a colony until 1920, and you can get some idea of the priority Britain gave to it initially by the fact that it was administered as a territory of India from Delhi, not even from London.
So the settlers got up to whatever they wanted. Was racism at the root of it? Of course it was, but it was enabled *in Kenya's unique circumstances* by the fact that the place was such a low priority that London found it less trouble not to really intervene too much.
Of course, that was merely storing up trouble for the future, and in many ways makes it even worse. That's why I'm a little concerned that anyone could read what I wrote as apologist, and heartened that other people didn't in fact do that.
The one thing that all the reading has taught me is the uniqueness of each colonial experience, and it concerns me that as we move further from those times the nuances from territory to territory get lost in the blanket condemnations. Not for a moment because those nuances act as any kind of excuse, but because not to understand them leaves the door ajar for bits of them to escape, and for the same mistakes to be made in the future.
But I suppose that's why books have several hundred pages, and internet discussion posts can struggle with the nuance, waft and wend (apparently)
I must admit, finally, that while I was reading this thread every day I was staying out of it by and large entirely for this reason. Yesterday I made the mistake of cracking...
But, lest there be any doubt remaining, I'd like to make it clear that I wasn't trying to defend anyone at all, but explore why what happened happened - beyond simply the racism that had led to acquisition of the territory in the first place. I also explicitly wasn't dealing with Mau Mau itself (where the military actions can be condemned out of hand), but the years leading up to it - how did we get there, etc.
Anyway, I hope that helps?
Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
My whole point is that in Kenya the governor, regardless of what he may or may not have said, was just one man.
I don't think there's much doubt that he said it. Governments don't speak, individuals acting on behalf of governments speak and the governor was that individual. I think there's a lot in what you say about the settlers driving British policy, and evidence that the highest levels of government back home in the UK were frustrated with the situation as well.
However it seems to me there is something more as well - that there must have been some support for the Governor's stance in the colonial service, some collusion in suppressing information going to the cabinet and some ability to continue getting pro-settler governors appointed to Kenya.
(By the way I don't see a difference of opinion about the balance of power and political causes within the colonial structure as a moral argument, just historical interest really.)
Yes, I agree with every word of this - although I might amplify the fact that you might be able to decouple the colonial office operating on official inertia and institutional memory from official government policy and public opinion. Back to the old turning an oil tanker analogy.
My immensely long post, with which yours crossed, perhaps clarifies that as you intimate I am operating very much in "historical interest" although I do think there are lessons to be drawn on morality from that (while the overall moral question remains the same).
Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
Firstly, the implication that after nearly 900 posts and 3 years a regular shipmate would find it plausible that I would suddenly break cover as an apologist for racism is not something that crossed the wildest shores of my imagination.
Just as a clarification (as you quote me summarising you later in this post); I wasn't accusing you of being an apologist for racism. I have heard variants of the argument you put forward, used *IN ISOLATION* to excuse the behaviour of the British government, and as a result feel that it should be placed - as a subordinate clause to the wider discussion. I would not disagree substantially with the wider description as laid out in your post.
quote:
And also what light the experience of them trying to "build a nation" in the full glare of relatively modern media and tv news can shed on what it was like for the ones that got away with it by virtue of doing it all before the 20th century - Canada, NZ, Australia, USA.
Fundamentally, does anything more than chronology separate the white Kenyans and Rhodesians from those other countries, and, if so, what?
I think this is an important question; and I suppose I would see the shadow of WWII as looming large over anything happening in the decades after the war. There was a fairly wide understanding that arguments based on racial superiority were either wrong, or just wouldn't wash, and many of the critics of the governments actions couched their criticisms in just this manner. [As an aside; the mass detentions amounted to collective punishment - which would have been a war crime in different circumstances].
quote:
The one thing that all the reading has taught me is the uniqueness of each colonial experience, and it concerns me that as we move further from those times the nuances from territory to territory get lost in the blanket condemnations. Not for a moment because those nuances act as any kind of excuse, but because not to understand them leaves the door ajar for bits of them to escape, and for the same mistakes to be made in the future.
Absolutely, and as you say in your subsequent post it is also important to factor in the official inertia as well as examining the impulses behind that inertia. The continued reluctance to reveal material relating to this era is a good example of this; there are probably a tiny minority of people who are animated by variants of 'my country, right or wrong', and a greater majority who just have a general reluctance to do something rather than nothing and who may be tangentially motivated by some level of real-politic.
[ 08. September 2016, 10:40: Message edited by: chris stiles ]
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by betjemaniac:
It does raise 2 points with me though. Firstly, the implication that after nearly 900 posts and 3 years a regular shipmate would find it plausible that I would suddenly break cover as an apologist for racism is not something that crossed the wildest shores of my imagination.
After over 13,000 posts and 8 years, I am still accused of supporting things I have a record of being against. Not that I offer this as an excuse, it is rather a peeve of mine that this happens.
However it was the government I was referencing more than racism. chris stiles put it better, so I will defer to his post about "my country, right or wrong".
Thank you for the broader post.
Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on
:
We do seem to have reached some kind of agreement and consensus here.
The one remaining quibble I might have is with Kaplan's accusation of PC-ness at work. I find that rather reductionist.
© Ship of Fools 2016
UBB.classicTM
6.5.0