“So there was a shocking effort to destroy documentation—I wonder what horrifying and incriminating stuff was in that documentation.”
“So empire is a sick and violent business—the British were ‘skilled at hiding it’, but the truth is that the British engaged in all sorts of ‘depravities’ that it will take scholars a long time to unravel.”
“Nothing new, not even the rhetoric of benevolent intent.”
“So imperial history continues its repetitive and predictable course—there’s really no way to run an empire without thuggery and repression and violence, so you can expect thuggery and repression and violence.”
“Chomsky is correct that there’s no time for elite domination—history will cease soon unless people join activism and break the old patterns.”
Washington’s empire is grander—and more consequential—than any empire in world history. But the behavior and rhetoric is nothing remotely new in the history of empire—there’s nothing unique or exceptional or unusual about what Washington does or what Washington says.
The violence and brutality is really hard to get your head around sometimes, but it’s not like the violence and brutality is different from what other empires have done.
The British Empire
Growing up I heard a lot of rose-colored stuff about the British Empire—it’s fascinating that the British Empire’s hidden atrocities are now being exposed.
What hindrances did the British Empire erect against exposure? Lots of commissars contributed to an impressive and disciplined and industrious propaganda machine, but another major factor was destruction of evidence—just look at these notes that I took on a 26 October 2020 New Yorker piece from Maya Jasanoff:
“A March, 2020, poll found that a third of Britons believed that their empire had done more good than harm for colonies—a higher percentage than in other former imperial powers, including France and Japan.”
“On a showery Friday in August, 1947, citizens of the new nation of India crammed into the ceremonial avenues of New Delhi to celebrate their first day of independence. ‘Jai Hind! Jai Hind!’ they cheered as the new tricolor was run up the flagpole, and a rainbow broke over the clearing sky. But for days beforehand, it was said, a haze of smoke had blanketed the city: the British were burning government documents en masse, lest anything that might compromise His Majesty’s government get into the wrong hands.”
“In one colony after another, as the former Guardian journalist Ian Cobain details in his 2016 book, ‘The History Thieves,’ the British went down in a blaze of documents.”
“A reporter in Cairo during the Suez Crisis recalled standing on the lawn of the British Embassy ‘ankle deep in the ashes of burning files.’”
“Twelve days before Malaya’s independence, in 1957, British soldiers in Kuala Lumpur loaded trucks with boxes of records to be driven down to Singapore and, a colonial official reported, ‘destroyed in the Navy’s splendid incinerator.’”
“In 1961, recognizing that ‘it would perhaps be a little unfortunate to celebrate Independence Day with smoke,’ the Colonial Office advised the governor of Trinidad and Tobago to get an early start, and told him that he could also pack files into weighted crates and drop them into the sea.”
“In British Guiana, in 1965, two women hovered over a forty-four-gallon drum on the Government House grounds carrying out what their boss described as ‘the hot and wearing work’ of cremating files.”
“What colonial officials didn’t destroy, they hid.”
“In Nairobi, nine days before Kenya became independent, four packing crates of sensitive papers were hustled into a plane and flown to London Gatwick, where a government official supervised their transfer into storage.”
“These, along with thousands of other colonial files, ended up stashed behind the razor wire of Hanslope Park, in Buckinghamshire, an intelligence facility dedicated to communications security—that is, to keeping secrets.”
“By eliminating written evidence of their actions from the archival record, British officials sought to manipulate the kinds of histories that future generations would be able to produce.”
“Colonial officials in Uganda, rifling through their files to figure out what to destroy, came up with a name for the process of erasure. They called it Operation Legacy.”
“The secret stash at Hanslope Park was revealed only in 2011, during a lawsuit brought against the British government by victims of torture in colonial Kenya.”
“The case was based in part on oral testimony gathered by my Harvard colleague Caroline Elkins.”
“What came pouring out from the so-called ‘migrated archives’ were records of systematic, wide-ranging, stomach-churning abuse.”
“the reckoning continues”
“In 2018, it emerged that dozens of immigrants of the ‘Windrush generation’ (named for a ship, the Empire Windrush, which brought Caribbean migrants to the U.K. in 1948), who had legally settled in Britain between 1948 and 1973, had recently been deported by the Home Office because they couldn’t prove their status.”
“Their landing cards—often the only record of their legal arrival—had been destroyed in a procedural culling of the archives in 2010.”
the “University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” has “compiled a database of every slaveowner in the British colonies at the time of emancipation, in 1833, and has wrinkled the sanctimonious tale of British abolitionism”
the “researchers have shown” that British policy has sustained “slaveowners’ privilege right down to the present” through “payouts to slaveowners following emancipation”—these payouts “seeded fortunes” that “generations of prominent bankers, writers, engineers, and politicians” then inherited
So there was a shocking effort to destroy documentation—I wonder what horrifying and incriminating stuff was in that documentation.
We’re seeing—finally—some exposure. Caroline Elkins’s 2022 book Legacy of Violence just came out—the book exposes various atrocities that the British Empire perpetrated.
I took the following notes on a 28 March 2022 New Yorker piece—from Sunil Khilnani—that discusses Elkins’s 2022 book:
at “the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass”—to “the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement”
“In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots.”
“The actions of a few European empires have invited harsh scrutiny, too—Belgium’s conduct in Congo, France’s in Algeria, and Portugal’s in Angola and Mozambique.”
“Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine.”
Elkins’s 2022 book “traces the Empire’s arc across centuries and theatres of crisis”—Elkins bases her book on archival materials from “a dozen countries over four continents”, on examination of “hundreds of oral histories”, and on “the work of social historians and political theorists”
as “the sole imperial power that remained a liberal democracy throughout the twentieth century, Britain claimed to be distinct from Europe’s colonial powers in its commitment to bringing rule of law, enlightened principles, and social progress to its colonies”—“Elkins contends that Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals” and that the “British were simply more skilled at hiding it”
“More than half a century after the British Empire entered its endgame, historians are nowhere near a full assessment of the carnage shrouded by its preacherly cant, and, later, by administrators’ bonfires of documents as they prepared for the last boat out.”
the “richest sense we have of the damage inflicted on colonies tends to come in regional silos”—“Elkins doggedly links them, moving from South Africa to India, Ireland to Palestine, and on to Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, revealing a pattern visible only in the long view”
as “military and police personnel crisscrossed the Empire, spreading techniques of repression far and wide, the higher-ups rarely checked such violence” and instead “gave it the full force of law” repeatedly in a way that sustained “more brutality still”
“the practice of blowing Indian sepoys from cannons after the 1857 uprising, the Maxim-gun slaughter of Mahdists in the eighteen-nineties, the use of concentration camps in the Boer wars, the massacre of peaceful protesters in Amritsar, reprisal killings and the sacking of civilian property in Ireland”—according to Elkins, “all this state-inflicted savagery was just the British Empire warming up”
according to Elkins, “the British paramilitary cadre” became “the basis of an increasingly violent ruling culture that sought to reassert control in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Empire needed colonial resources to rebuild a depleted economy and to bulk up a waning geopolitical status”
Elkins’s 2005 book Imperial Reckoning “probed one of the grimmest periods in British colonial history”, namely “the suppression of a nineteen-fifties uprising of a clandestine Kenyan nationalist movement, the Mau Mau”
“Elkins, working in British and Kenyan archives as a young scholar, noticed gaps in the record-keeping from this period which suggested that the British had culled the files”—some “incriminating documents had survived, though”
Elkins “started gathering evidence that the British had detained far more than the eighty thousand Kenyans they had previously acknowledged, and that among the tactics the Empire used against the Mau Mau was outright torture”—Elkins “began what she termed an ‘odyssey’ of research” that “ultimately brought to light the harrowing accounts of some three hundred survivors of the campaign against the Mau Mau”
in the 2005 book, Elkins describes “a British strategy of detention, beatings, starvation, torture, forced hard labor, rape, and castration, designed to break the resistance of a people, the Kikuyu, who, having been dispossessed by the British and then, during the Second World War, enlisted to fight for them, had plenty of reason to resist”
in 1957 “a British colonial governor informed his superiors in London that ‘violent shock’ was the only way to break down hard-core adherents”—this served as the justification for “a brutal campaign called Operation Progress”
“More than a million men, women, and children were forced into barbed-wire village compounds and concentration camps for reëducation in circumstances that the colony’s attorney general at the time called ‘distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.’”
“critics questioned her tally of the Mau Mau dead and missing”—Elkins said that the tally was “up to three hundred thousand”, but Elkins had “scant evidence” to support that
“aspects of her argument were vindicated in 2011, six years after publication, when her research helped make history”—in 2011, “London barristers representing the Kenya Human Rights Commission and seeking damages for elderly Kenyan survivors of torture introduced Elkins as an expert witness, along with the British historians David Anderson and Huw Bennett”
“During the discovery process, the British government was pressed to explain a memo detailing the airlift of documents from Nairobi.”
“After decades of denial, the government acknowledged spiriting masses of files out of Kenya—and, it emerged, out of thirty-six other former colonies.”
the “files had been stashed in a high-security storage facility, in Hanslope Park, that the Foreign Office shared with British intelligence agencies”—documents “were now unearthed which confirmed key aspects of both Elkins’s account and that of the Mau Mau survivors”
“In a landmark reparations case, fifty-two hundred Kenyans who were brutalized during the insurrection were each awarded around thirty-eight hundred pounds, and the U.K. government publicly acknowledged using torture in controlling its empire.”
Elkins’s 2022 book—like her 2005 book—“shuttles between horrific details and historical and thematic contexts”
“some of what she recounts is devastating, including the story of how British dark arts were distilled in interwar Palestine” in a way that took “the grisliness of liberal imperialism to another level”
“a revolt was under way in Palestine” by the late 1930s—the British “policing apparatus” grew “to twenty-five thousand men” and included “two Army divisions”
Elkins “shows how imperial tactics converged in that fighting force”
“From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines.”
“As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, ‘If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.’”
“Other practices seem to have been homegrown by the British in Palestine: night raids on suspect communities, oil-soaked sand stuffed down native throats, open-air cages for holding villagers, mass demolitions of houses.”
while “perfecting such tactics on the Palestinians, Elkins suggests, officers were gaining skills that were put to use when they were later dispatched to Aden (in the south of present-day Yemen), to the Gold Coast, to Northern Rhodesia, to Kenya, and to Cyprus”—“Palestine was, in short, the Empire’s leading atelier of coercive repression”
“British troops and police” were “free to operate ‘virtually without restraint or fear of prosecution,’ Elkins writes”—“these guides to imperial impunity would become models for future campaigns” just like happened “with the repertoire of torture and suppression”
according to Elkins, Britain’s “vital legacy” for its colonies wasn’t the rule of law but was instead “emergency provisions that abrogated the rule of law”—insecure local leaders “struggled to govern polities in which colonial policy had sharpened social divisions” and “readily turned to colonial emergency codes and legal sleights” in order to “stifle political opposition”
“Ghanaian leaders, shortly after their country became independent, in 1957, cribbed from British preventive-detention laws the right to detain citizens for five years without trial.”
“In the nineteen-sixties, Malaysian officials, building on British models, enacted laws permitting suspects to be detained indefinitely.”
“In the seventies, Indian leaders used colonial emergency powers embedded into their constitution to censor the press, jail political opposition, clear urban slums and even sterilize their residents.”
“the legacy of imperial violence was most enduring” in “post-Mandate Palestine”—what Britain did there underwrote “the cycles of violence and repression ahead”
“Not long after a 1947 United Nations vote divided the Mandate into Jewish and Arab states, Israeli security forces began emulating British methods, from killing civilians to flattening whole villages.”
“In 1969, when Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir asserted that ‘there was no such thing as Palestinians,’ she was, in a way, asserting an erasure of recognition and rights which the British Empire had set in motion half a century before.”
Elkins’s 2022 book details “the depravities of empire”
So empire is a sick and violent business—the British were “skilled at hiding it”, but the truth is that the British engaged in all sorts of “depravities” that it will take scholars a long time to unravel.
Picking Up Where Britain Left Off
Noam Chomsky has a fantastic new interview that everyone should definitely read:
I took the following notes:
it “is surely a mistake to carry out a sadistic assassination of a journalist for the Washington Post, particularly one who was hailed as ‘a guardian of truth’ in 2018 when he was chosen as Person of the Year by Time Magazine”—that’s “definitely bad form, particularly when done carelessly and not well concealed”
Washington’s “relations with the family kingdom called ‘Saudi Arabia’ have always proceeded amicably, undisturbed by its horrifying record of human rights abuses, which persists”—Washington “has regularly provided strong support for murderous tyrants when it was convenient”
Washington “is simply following in the path of its imperial predecessors”
regarding how Washington compares to empires of the past: “Nothing new, not even the rhetoric of benevolent intent.”
regarding Saudi Arabia: “We wish they were more polite, but first things first.”
for Biden’s visit, “first things presumably include renewed efforts to persuade MBS to increase production so as to reduce high gas prices in the U.S.”—a better way to deal with high gas prices in the US would be “a windfall tax on the fossil fuel industries that are drowning in profits” with “the revenues distributed to those who have been gouged by the neoliberal class war of the past 40 years”
the windfall tax can’t happen because elites are opposed—elites are still more opposed to “feasible measures” that would try to “cut off the flow of these poisons” and “stave off catastrophe”, but “those who have some interest in leaving a decent world to their children and grandchildren” can decide to fight for decarbonization
“Time is short.”
Biden “surely” wants to “firm up Trump’s one great geopolitical achievement”, namely “the Abraham Accords, which raised tacit relations among the most brutal and criminal states of the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region to formal alliance”—not everyone is “delighted” with the accords
the Sahrawis were “handed over to the Moroccan dictatorship to secure its agreement to join the accords”—“the U.S. and its allies” support this “violation of international law”
“Sahrawis can join Palestinians and Syrian Druze, whose territories have been annexed by Israel in violation of the unanimous orders of the Security Council, now endorsed by the U.S.”—they “can also join other ‘unpeople,’ not least the Palestinian victims of Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation in areas not officially annexed”
regarding Biden’s visit to Israel: “As in the Khashoggi case, the handling of Abu Akleh’s killing was bad form.”
this journalist was “quite likely” assassinated—it’s “not wise, in front of TV cameras, to allow the IDF to attack a funeral procession and even the pallbearers, forcing them to almost drop the coffin”
the “brazenness of the assault is a revealing illustration of the drift of Israel to the right and the confidence that the boss will accept virtually anything”—the “confidence is not entirely misplaced, particularly after the four Trump years of lavish gifts and kicking Palestinians in the face”
it’s “an open question how much domestic capital Biden will win with his expected professions of eternal love for Israel”—that “stance has become less popular among his liberal base than it used to be as Israel’s criminal behavior becomes harder to gloss over”
all-out “support for Israel has shifted to Evangelicals and the right, sectors of which believe Biden is not the elected president and a substantial contingent of which believes Biden and other top Democrats are grooming children for sexual abuse”—there “will still probably be some domestic gains”
“it will show the hawkish elements that run foreign policy that he’s committed to containment of Iran by an Israel-Saudi alliance, to borrow prevailing doctrine”—“Biden may hope to firm up the alliance”, but “they scarcely need his help”, since “the alliance has been firm since 1967” despite the rhetoric
there was in 1967 “a sharp conflict in the Arab world” between “Saudi-based radical Islam and Egypt-based secular nationalism”—like “Britain before it, the U.S. tended to support radical Islam, seeing it as less of a threat to imperial dominance”
“Israel settled the matter for the time being by handing the victory to Saudi Arabia”—at that point “U.S. support for Israel took the extreme form that has since prevailed, as part of a Middle East strategy based on” the “three pillars” of “Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran (then under the Shah)”
the three pillars were technically at war, but they were in reality “tacit allies” and “very close allies in the case of Israel and Iran”—the “Abraham Accords raise the alliance to a formal level”, but “now with a slightly different cast of characters”
it “seems to be proceeding well on its own on the basis of shared interests”—it’s “not clear that Biden can do much beyond expressing U.S. support, which in any event is hardly in doubt”
“Palestinian hopes may lie in the United States”, even though it “may seem strange to say this” in “the light of the colossal and unprecedented U.S. support for Israel since its demonstration of its military strength in 1967”—there “are cracks in the formerly solid support for Israeli actions”
liberal “opinion has shifted toward support for Palestinian rights, even among the Jewish community”—the “increasingly brutal torture of the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza’s open-air prison has had particularly dramatic effects”
these “shifts have not yet influenced policy, but they are likely to become more pronounced as Israel continues its drift to the right and the almost daily crimes become harder to conceal or explain away”—if “Palestinians can overcome their sharp internal divisions and effective solidarity movements develop in the U.S., changes can come, both at the people-to-people level and in government policy”
Israel made in the 1970s “a fateful decision to choose expansion over security, rejecting opportunities for peaceful settlement along the lines of a growing international consensus”—that decision “compelled reliance on the U.S.”, which meant “submission to U.S. demands” that Israel “has to obey” however “reluctantly”, though only the pre-Obama presidents made such demands
significantly changing US policy “cannot fail to influence the array of policy options for Israel” and “could be a path toward the elusive goal of a just peace in the former Palestine”
significantly changing US policy could even lead to “regional accords” that would reflect the interests of the region’s population, which has “repeatedly struggled for a more decent fate”—this would be a departure from regional accords that “merely reflect the interests of repressive power structures”
So imperial history continues its repetitive and predictable course—there’s really no way to run an empire without thuggery and repression and violence, so you can expect thuggery and repression and violence.
Chomsky is correct that there’s no time for elite domination—history will cease soon unless people join activism and break the old patterns.