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May 13 - June 4, 2023
monopoly over the means of legitimate violence is a necessary condition for a state’s existence—
This unremitting extraction of economic and social value from nonwhite workers is something political scientist Cedric J. Robinson called “racial capitalism.”
“Mwiteithia Niateithagio”—“Abandon hope all ye who enter here”—hung over the entrance to one of Kenya’s most notorious detention camps.53
Meant to herald a new era of control over the company in India, the act was in reality a justificatory fig leaf for a large-scale bailout. North facilitated a £1.4 million government loan to the company, not only to rescue it from impending bankruptcy but also to avert possible financial ruin for heavily invested MPs.
School-boys without tutors, minors without guardians, the world is let loose upon them, with all its temptations; and they are let loose upon the world, with all the powers that despotism involves.
It was a universalist project whereby individuals and societies could be reformed and transformed through such measures as free trade, education, and law.
that a mere good feeling, or upright intentions, are not sufficient to discharge a man, if he has not done his duty.”60
“The process taught me for life,” he later reflected, “the lesson that to be weak is to be wretched, that the state of nature is a state of war, and Vae Victis [woe to the vanquished] the great law of nature.”93
the establishment of the British concentration camps in South Africa represented the first time a single ethnic group had been targeted en masse for detention or deportation.
Relations between colonial ruler and ruled didn’t come under international law.
Hundreds of thousands of imperial subjects, particularly those from Africa, formed the backbone of Britain’s military carrier corps (or labor corps), and their death rates from malnutrition and disease were exceptionally high, often nearing 20 percent.
Churchill not only outmaneuvered his ailing foe but also declared his unyielding support for the rich and fertile White Highlands, located in central Kenya, to remain exclusively white-owned in perpetuity.
“hard-faced men who had little sympathy with lesser breeds without the vote.”
Later that day, in what would become one of the most spectacular reprisals, Tudor’s paramilitary squads drove into a Dublin Gaelic football match and opened fire into the crowd. They killed at least fourteen unarmed civilians and wounded scores of others.
He detailed the British forces’ widespread ransacking and looting of homes, summary executions, disappearances, denial of food and water to innocent civilians, rapes of women and girls, and destruction of livestock.
“new grassroots political infrastructure,” called for a general strike. “Alongside the national committees,” as the historian Charles Anderson points out, “there were committees for strike supervision, medical relief, financial support, provisioning, legal services, and the boycott of Jewish and British goods, as well as arbitration and conflict resolution bodies and a host of women’s and students’ groups.”
The Eighth Army, for example, was but a quarter British in late 1941. The rest of its members hailed from an empire and Commonwealth roll call: India, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Australia, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Ceylon, Cyprus, the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Palestine, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanganyika, and Uganda.
The war, notwithstanding the professions of statesmen, is certainly not one for Democracy. George Padmore, Pan-Africanist leader November 19391
The truth is that four-fifths of the British Empire is as much a dictatorship as the Fascist countries …. The democratic rights which we enjoy in the British Isles are due only to the oppression which is practiced within the British Empire.
They viewed fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism, global systems rooted not only in capitalist political economy but racist ideologies that were already in place at the dawn of modernity.”47
we regard the native as some one whom we must rule,” MacDonald wrote, “we are attempting the palpable impossibility of ruling democratically at home and despotically abroad.”
Britain was using its monetary policies to profit from the empire. This is the point we must keep in mind when considering the Attlee government’s postwar decision making.
Washington wrote down the Lend-Lease debt to $650 million, Britain walked away with a $3.75 billion loan, and the Americans set up a lengthy repayment schedule, with the clock starting in 1951 and ending in 2006. The
One of imperialism’s staunchest critics, Orwell knew the state was masterful at speaking with a forked tongue and at choreographing internal investigations that played to good governance and rule of law while avoiding accountability.
The Official Secrets Acts—Britain was the world’s leader in criminalizing what it believed was improper information flow—went a long way in silencing any would-be whistleblower.
The tunku and Lee Kuan Yew, who became Singapore’s first prime minister in 1959, retained the full panoply of Britain’s repressive powers, wielding local versions of legalized lawlessness to suppress political opposition and keep Communism at bay, much to the knowledge of officials in London.79
“racial capitalism,” the process of extracting economic and social value from brown and Black populations for the benefit of white ones.
“The Mau Mau oath is the most bestial, filthy and nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed …. [I have never felt] the forces of evil to be so near and so strong as in Mau Mau. As I wrote memoranda or instruction, I would suddenly see a shadow fall across the page—the horned shadow of the Devil himself.”
This would be so funny if it wasnt dripping with hypocrisy
White and Black agents of empire perpetrated horrific crimes in defense of British rule in Kenya. They used electric shock and hooked suspects up to car batteries. They tied suspects to vehicle bumpers with just enough rope to drag them to death. They employed burning cigarettes, fire, and hot coals. They thrust bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, sticks, and hot eggs up men’s rectums and into women’s vaginas. They crushed bones and teeth; sliced off fingers or their tips; and castrated men with specially designed instruments or by beating a suspect’s testicles “till
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Moral Rearmament, by then a global movement, also played a role in the camps. Its members espoused a kind of ersatz Christian faith, pushing a doctrine of personal justification through works alone and espousing four absolute standards: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love.
by the end of 1955, to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population—a feat that was unprecedented in the empire save for the Chinese population in Malaya.
Churchill who, in turn, handed off to Eden an empire whose expanse was held together with the familiar reliance on coercive measures and promises of development.
