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Post by dodger on Sept 7, 2013 15:42:17 GMT
This William Podmore review is from: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Paperback)
In this book of the TV series, Ferguson attempts to survey the British Empire's history and impact on the world. In the earlier chapters, he makes a reasonable job of telling the story truthfully, but when he reaches the 20th century, his imbecile political opinions wreck the narrative.
He depicts the Empire's bloody origins in piracy and theft. He shows how the British people bore the Empire's costs, how the Indian people paid for the Indian Army, while the Empire's gains accrued only to a tiny minority of bondholders, and how the export of India's riches led to the vast famines of the 18th and 19th centuries. He accurately describes the imperial slogan 'Commerce and Christianity' as theft and fundamentalism.
He praises the Empire's 'capital export to the less developed world', as if investment was about giving not taking. The investment should have been in British industry. He blames trade unions for the Great Depression - "Rising real wages led to unemployment" - unpardonable economic illiteracy from a Professor of Economics.
He blames World War Two on a 'descent into protectionism' rather than on the continuing rivalry between empires. He writes that the USA was the key to victory - so not the ally that destroyed 90% of Nazi forces? He writes that Britain "sacrificed her Empire to stop the German, Japanese and Italians keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?" (A strangely Catholic doctrine!) But Churchill thought he had saved the Empire, only to find that the USA nipped in and stole it! And the answer to Ferguson's question is still no.
He sneers that anti-imperialism is linked to anti-semitism, sneers about 'conspiracy theories' about oil, sneers about 'freedom fighters' (his inverted commas), sneers about the Soviet and Chinese achievements. As usual with reactionaries, he poses as bravely saying unpopular truths, while actually just retreading the hoariest, most discredited, clichés. He ends by calling ludicrously for the USA to set up a formal empire, a universal 'political globalisation'!
Book, TV series and author are as showy and shallow as was the Empire itself.
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Still at it --sees an Imperial arse just has to run over and stick his tongue up it....link below:
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/06/left-irrational-fear-us-intervention-syria
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Post by dodger on Sept 16, 2013 11:16:18 GMT
The Indian revolt of 1857 was violent, though nowhere near as bloody as its suppression. Ninety years later, India won its freedom...
1857: not a mutiny, but a fight for independence
WORKERS, APR 2007 ISSUE
One hundred-and-fifty years ago, the people of India fought for their national sovereignty and for independence from the British Empire.
The revolt was called a "mutiny", to define it as illegitimate. But it was the foreign rule that was illegitimate, because it denied India democracy and self-rule. As G. B. Malleson, Adjutant-General of the Bengal Army and the revolt's first historian, wrote, what was "at first apparently a military mutiny ... speedily changed its character and became a national insurrection." Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs all played a full part.
Imperialist imagery: a contemporary imagined scene of sepoys dividing up loot
Despotic
The Raj was a despotic regime dependent on military power. General Henry Rawlinson, India's Commander-in-Chief, said in 1920, "You may say what you like about not holding India by the sword, but you have held it by the sword for 100 years and when you give up the sword you will be turned out. You must keep the sword ready to hand and in case of trouble or rebellion use it relentlessly. Montagu calls it terrorism, so it is and in dealing with natives of all classes you have to use terrorism whether you like it or not."
In 1793, the Empire's rulers had imposed a 'Permanent Settlement' on India which privatised the land and dispossessed the peasants. The Empire took 50-60% of the peasants' income in tax, more than the Mughal Emperors had taken, forcing the peasants into debt and then to sell their land. India's wealth was pillaged and her agriculture starved, in order to rack up profit and rent. The profits went to British investors, the rents to the Empire's allies, the landlords and princes.
The Empire's rule was vicious. Governor-General Lord Dalhousie wrote in 1855, "torture in one shape or other is practised by the lower subordinates in every British province."
Charles Ball, a historian of the revolt, wrote, "in Bengal an amount of suffering and debasement existed which probably was not equalled and certainly not exceeded, in the slave-states of America." The Report of the Commission for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture at Madras, 1855, admitted "the general existence of torture for revenue purposes". Torture was also normal police practice.
The revolt of 1857 was violent, though nowhere near as bloody as its suppression. A British officer's wife justified killing all rebels, "Serve you right for killing our poor women and children who had never injured you." As if every single rebel was personally responsible for the very worst atrocities. Marx noted of Britain's newspapers, "while the cruelties of the English are related as acts of martial vigour, told simply, rapidly, without dwelling on disgusting details, the outrages of the natives, shocking as they are, are still deliberately exaggerated."
Vengeance
A British officer said, "We hold court-martials on horseback, and every nigger we meet with we either string up or shoot." Sir John Kaye wrote, "mothers and women and children ... fell miserable victims to the first swoop of English vengeance."
In a five-week rampage, Brigadier James Neill's Madras Fusiliers hanged every person they caught, some 6,000 people. Sir George Campbell wrote, "Neill did things almost worse than massacre, putting to death with deliberate torture in a way that has never been proved against the natives."
Major Renaud of the Madras Fusiliers "was rather inclined to hang all black creation." A recent historian writes, "volunteer hanging parties were roaming the Benares area with one gentleman executioner boasting of the 'artistic manner' in which he had strung up his victims in 'the form of a figure of eight'." Major Anson of the 9th Lancers admitted that in Fatehgarh, "There were fourteen men hung, or rather tortured to death (some of them), in the town here yesterday afternoon." On one occasion, British officers stood and watched while their Sikh soldiers slowly burnt a prisoner to death. At Peshawar, 785 captives were executed. At Lahore, Frederick Cooper, the Deputy Commissioner of the Punjab, ordered 500 unarmed soldiers, the entire 26th Native Infantry, to be killed. At Basaund, British forces killed all 180 adult males. The Magistrate of Meerut justified the massacre – "A severe example was essential and the slightest mawkish pusillanimity in such a cause would have spread the flame of revolt throughout the district."
'Drunk with plunder'
The sacking of Delhi, Jhansi and Lucknow was barbaric: The Times described the British soldiers as "drunk with plunder".
Although the revolt was defeated, it did overthrow the East India Company's rule and its regime of robbery and corruption; the Company was wound up in 1874. After suppressing the revolt, India's British rulers used the old tactic of divide and rule to crush India's strivings for democracy and self-rule. The British state promoted Muslim separatism and set up separate electorates, a sure way to tear people apart politically.
In the Punjab, the British won over the Sikhs by reminding them of the injuries and insults they had suffered under the Mughal Emperors. Sir Henry Lawrence, Chief Commissioner of Oudh, spread false rumours that Muslim rebels had desecrated Hindu temples.
Justification for continued rule
The Empire then used the revolt's failure to justify continued rule. If Indians could not revolt successfully, they could not rule themselves. Besides, as an MP said, "if we were to leave...we should leave it to anarchy."
A century later, Winston Churchill said in Cabinet in 1940 that the Hindu-Moslem division had long been "a bulwark of British rule in India". The Times agreed: "The divisions exist and British rule is certain as long as they do." John Colville reported that in Cabinet, "Winston rejoiced in the quarrel which had broken out afresh between Hindus and Moslems, said he hoped it would remain bitter and bloody."
After the revolt, the Indian people continued to oppose foreign rule, winning their independence in 1947.
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Post by dodger on Sept 23, 2013 13:54:02 GMT
Fine study of the Bengal famine of 1943, 27 Sep 2011
This William Podmore review is from: Churchill's Secret War (Paperback) by Madhusree Mukerjee
Robert Clive had called Bengal `the paradise of the earth'. In 1757 Clive's forces conquered India. By 1770, there was a famine in which 3 million people died.
This brilliant book examines the 1943 famine in Bengal which killed 3.3 million people. British rule over India started and ended with a famine in Bengal.
Churchill did not mention the 1943 famine in his six volumes on the Second World War. He loved the Empire, but hated the peoples it ruled. As he wrote, "I therefore adopted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe ..." Churchill's private secretary John Colville reported that Churchill said, "the Hindus were a foul race" and wished that the head of Bomber Command would `send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them'.
Mukerjee observes, "During his 1930s campaign against Indian self-government, Churchill went so far as to warn of famine engulfing the United Kingdom if, `guided by counsels of madness and cowardice disguised as false benevolence, you troop home from India.' He feared that a full third of the English population would perish if the empire was lost."
In 1942 British forces arrested 90,000 Indians and killed an estimated 10,000. On 10 September 1942 Churchill broadcast the lie that the Indian National Congress had been helped by `Japanese fifth-column work'. In fact, as Churchill well knew, MI6 had been unable to find any evidence linking the Congress with the Japanese.
Viceroy Linlithgow told Bengal's elected Chief Minister Fazlul Huq in January 1943 that he "simply must produce some more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon even if Bengal itself went short!"
Mukerjee sums up, "Whereas India annually imported at least a million tons of rice and wheat before the war, it exported a net 360,000 tons during the fiscal year April 1, 1942, to March 31, 1943. ... On April 22, 1943, more than a month after it had been warned of famine, the Ministry of War Transport recorded with approval `continued pressure being brought to bear upon India to persuade her to release more than the previously agreed quotas of rice and, more recently, cargoes of wheat.' Between January and July of 1943, even as famine set in, India exported 71,000 tons of rice ..."
Throughout the famine, the British government rejected all international offers of aid. Significantly, there have been no famines in India since she won her independence, even with a growing population.
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Post by dodger on Dec 3, 2013 12:57:49 GMT
, Brilliant and revealing diaries, 21 April 2008
This Will Podmore review is from: "Chips": The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (Paperback)
Channon wrote one of the best insider's accounts of politics in the 1930s. He was a fanatical supporter of Neville Chamberlain and his policy of what is still called - all-too-politely - appeasement. He showed its true intent when he wrote, "let gallant little Germany glut her fill of the Reds in the East." This is a fascinating picture of the corruption and decadence of the British ruling class of the 1930s - little different from their heirs today.
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Post by dodger on Dec 25, 2013 23:30:10 GMT
History: at a glance............. 22 countries Britain has not invaded.
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Post by StalinistSpeaker on Jan 20, 2014 11:30:32 GMT
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