Colonised
and Coloniser, Empire's Poison Infects us All
George Monbiot: The
Guardian, Monday 8 October 2012
Ideas that underpinned
Over the gates of
Last week three elderly Kenyans established the right
to sue the British government for the torture
that they suffered ¡V castration, beating and rape ¡V in the Kikuyu detention
camps it ran in the 1950s.
Many tens of thousands were detained and tortured in the
camps. I won't spare you the details: we have been sparing ourselves the
details for far too long. Large numbers of men were castrated with pliers.
Others were raped, sometimes with the use of knives, broken bottles, rifle
barrels and scorpions. Women had similar instruments forced into their vaginas.
The guards and officials sliced off ears and fingers, gouged out eyes, mutilated
women's breasts with pliers, poured paraffin over people and set them alight.
Untold thousands died.
The government's
secret archive, revealed this April,
shows that the attorney general, the colonial governor and the colonial
secretary knew what was happening. The governor ensured that the perpetrators
had legal immunity: including the British officers reported to him for roasting
prisoners to death. In public the colonial secretary lied and kept lying.
Little distinguishes the British imperial project from any
other. In all cases the purpose of empire was loot, land and labour. When
people resisted (as some of the Kikuyu did during the Mau Mau
rebellion), the response everywhere was the same: extreme and indiscriminate
brutality, hidden from public view by distance and official lies.
Successive governments have sought to deny the Kikuyu
justice: destroying most of the paperwork, lying about the existence of the
rest, seeking to have the case dismissed on technicalities. Their handling of
this issue, and the widespread British disavowal of what happened in
In his book Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven
Lindqvist
shows how the ideology that led to Hitler's war and the Holocaust was developed
by the colonial powers. Imperialism required an exculpatory myth. It was
supplied, primarily, by British theorists.
In 1799 Charles
White began the process of
identifying Europeans as inherently superior to other peoples. By 1850 the
disgraced anatomist Robert Knox had developed the theme into fully fledged
racism. His book The Races of Man asserted that dark-skinned people were
destined to be enslaved and then annihilated by the "lighter races".
Dark meant almost everyone: "What a field of extermination lies before the
Saxon, Celtic and Sarmatian races!"
Remarkable as it may sound, this view soon came to dominate
British thought. In common with most of the political class, W Winwood Reade,
Alfred
Russell Wallace, Herbert Spencer, Frederick Farrar, Francis
Galton, Benjamin Kidd and even Charles Darwin saw the extermination of
dark-skinned people as an inevitable law of nature. Some of them argued that Europeans
had a duty to speed it up: both to save the integrity of the species and to put
the inferior "races" out of their misery.
These themes were picked up by German theorists. In 1893
Alexander Tille, drawing on British writers, claimed
that "it is the right of the stronger race to annihilate the lower".
In 1901 Friedrich Ratzel argued in Der Lebensraum that
I believe that the brutalisation of empire also made the
pointless slaughter of the first world war possible. A
ruling class that had shut down its feelings to the extent that it could
engineer a famine in
Nor have we wholly abandoned them. Commenting on the Kikuyu
case in the Daily Mail, Max Hastings charged that the plaintiffs had come to
So, in the eyes of much of the elite, do welfare recipients,
"problem families", Muslims and asylum seekers. The process of dehumanisation,
so necessary to the colonial project, turns inwards. Until this nation is
prepared to recognise what happened and how it was justified,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/08/empire-torture-kenya-catastrophe-europe