Whatever they did, Europe's masters of their colonial empires knew they were
doing the right thing and that God was with them. The following is from
Patricia de Fuentes, ed. and trans., "The Conquistadors. FirstPerson Accounts
of the Conquest of Mexico".
". Cortés . After occupying Tenochtitlán . he and his troops had to fight their
way out of the city to sanctuary .. Years later . a former follower of Cortés
who had become a Dominican friar, recalled the terrible retreat .. "When the
Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox,
and there was a great pestilence in the city. . . ."
The history of colonialism is very cruel stuff. A few years ago I accessed
data that showed that the population of Guatamala fell from some 2 million in
1520 to about 200,000 by 1620. Black Africans were brought to the Americas as
slaves because the Amerindians that had been enslaved died off in large numbers
because of "virgin soil diseases" which Africans were not susceptable to.
It would seem that the British were no better in their own backyard than they
were in India. The following is from notes I made on a trip to Ireland a few
years ago:
August 9th, 2000, Tralee
We spent the night of the seventh at Clonacilty in a not bad, not too good
hotel infested by millions of children of all ages, along with their grumpy,
rather overwhelmed parents. The day before we had gone to Skibbereen in the
southwest corner of Ireland. We had parked the car and walked a very long way
to the old Abbeystrewery graveyard where, under a well tended lawn, some 9,000
victims of the great famine are buried. The burial place must have been a huge
pit perhaps seventy feet long by some fifty feet wide, and God knows how deep.
Probably, the last burials were pretty close to the surface.
Skibbereen, according to the local tourist literature, was the epicenter of the
great famine. From what I've read, there was a workhouse not far from the
graveyard. It would have been where many of the victims gathered in the hope
of getting some relief or something to eat.
It seemed that famine relief was tied to work. You don't work, you get no
relief. To get relief without working was, in the British view, against "the
natural order of things". The British believed that payment of any kind had to
be linked to work. God Himself had ordained it. If you were lucky, the
workhouse provided you with "public work" - probably fixing up roads, or
clearing away unwanted vegetation or digging ditches. All of these things may
have been useful, though probably unnecessary, and were likely very hard work
to people suffering the effects of famine. The men, women and children who
were doing them were paid a subsistence wage, and were probably continually
being reminded that they were a burden on society.
However, paying them was not the problem of the British government. The burden
was placed on the local (British) landlords, with each landlord being expected
to contribute in some proportion to the number of tenants he had. To reduce
their own burden, the landlords evicted many of their tenants, who were then no
longer entitled to help from the workhouse. To reduce their burden even
further, many of the landlords simply refused to pay their share. It wasn't
their problem that the Irish had far too many babies, and had become hooked on
potatoes. And it certainly wasn't their fault that the potato crop had failed.
Besides, the whole thing could be viewed as the "natural order" restoring
itself.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christoph Reuss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2008 3:28 PM
Subject: [Futurework] Early Free Trade
> http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1674478,00.html
>
>
> THE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUST
>
> GEORGE MONBIOT, GUARDIAN - In his book, Late Victorian Holocausts,
> published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed
> between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates,
> murdered by British state policy. When an El Nino drought destituted the
> farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice
> and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing
> should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of
> the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of
> wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to
> discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable
> Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment
> private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market
> fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was
> hard labor, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was
> turned away. In the labor camps, the workers were given less food than
> inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated
> to an annual death rate of 94%.
>
> As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarized
> campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The
> money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine,
> was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that
> had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like
> Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western
> provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in
> the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.
>
> Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of
> the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show
> how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in
> Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political
> rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently -
> against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of
> them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a
> million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned
> with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging
> until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight,
> and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a
> "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the
> time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his
> eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The
> soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they
> were black. . .
>
> These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and
> organized by the British government or British colonial settlers; they
> include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective
> punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in
> North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. . .
>
>
>
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