Date: 5/18/05 5:40:28 AM Central Daylight Time
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Pheko's)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Lester Lewis), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (MOTSOKO PHEKO), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Buti Chakache-FSRDA), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (chen chimutengwende), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Graciela Rodriguez)
This is Inspiring!!
Mohau
Venezuelan workers defend socialism
By Roberto Jorquera, Caracas
Though no official estimates where given many of the organisers
speculated that over one million workers marched through the streets
of Caracas in defence of national soverignty, workers control and for
socialism. The rally organised by the UNT (National Union of Workers)
was a significant change in the political terrain of Trade Unionism in
Venezuela.
read the rest at
http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=60
< http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=60 >
Subj: Milne, Britain: imperial nostalgia
Date: 5/18/05 5:39:13 AM Central Daylight Time
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Pheko's)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Lester Lewis), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (MOTSOKO PHEKO)
NEW LABOUR, OLD BRITAIN
Britain: imperial nostalgia
< http://mondediplo.com/2005/05/02empire >
Britain not only conveniently still forgets the crimes of its imperial
past, but it has also again begun to romanticise its colonial
achievements and declare them a proper source of pride.
By Seumas Milne
BARELY a generation after the ignominious end of the British empire,
there is now a quiet but concerted drive to rehabilitate it, by
influential newspapers, conservative academics, and at the highest level
of govern-ment. Just how successful this campaign has already been was
demonstrated in January when Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer
and Tony Blairs heir apparent, declared in east Africa that the days
of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over (1).
His remark, pointedly made to the Daily Mail - which is leading the
rehabilitation chorus - in the run-up to Mays general election, was
clearly no heat-induced gaffe.
Speaking four months earlier at the British Museum, an Aladdins cave of
looted treasures from Britains former colonies, Brown insisted: We
should be proud . . . of the empire (2). Even Blair, who was prevailed
upon to cut a similar line from a speech during his first successful
election campaign in 1997, has never gone quite this far (3).
Browns extraordinary remarks passed with little comment in the rest of
the British media. But the significance of a Labour chancellors support
for what would until recently have been regarded as fringe rightwing
revisionism was doubtless not lost on his target audience. This is a man
who, despite his neoliberal enthusiasms and tense alliance with Blair,
has always liked to project a more egalitarian, social democratic image
than his New Labour rival. His imperial turn will have given an
unwelcome jolt to anyone hoping that a Brown government might step back
from the liberal imperialist swagger and wars of intervention that have
punctuated Blairs eight-year premiership. By the same token, his
determination (in advance of his own expected leadership bid) to wrap
himself in the Union Jack - dubbed the butchers apron by the Irish
socialist James Connolly - will have impressed sections of the
establishment whose embrace he is seeking.
Browns demand for an end to colonial apologies was part of an attempt
to define a modern sense of British identity based around values of fair
play, freedom and tolerance. What modernity and such values have to do
with the reality of empire might not be immediately obvious. But even
more bizarre is the implication that Britain is forever apologising for
its empire or the crimes committed under it. As with other European
former colonial powers, nothing could be further from the truth. There
have been no apologies. Official Britain put decolonisation behind it,
in a state of blissful amnesia, without the slightest effort to come to
terms with what took place. In the years following the British armys
bloody withdrawal from Aden in 1967, there was little public debate
about how Britain had maintained its grip on a quarter of the worlds
population until the middle of the 20th century.
That began to change in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Rehabilitation of empire was initially raised in the early 1990s
at the time of the ill-fated United States intervention in Somalia, used
by maverick voices in both the US and Britain to float the idealistic
notion of new colonies or United Nations trusteeships in Africa. The
Wall Street Journal even illustrated an editorial on the subject with a
picture of the British colonialist Lord Kitchener, who slaughtered the
Mahdis followers in Sudan a century before (4).
Under the impact of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the cause of
humanitarian intervention was increasingly taken up by more liberal
voices across the western world. While the liberal imperialism of the
late 19th century had been justified by the need to spread Christian
civilisation and trade, now it was to be human rights, markets and good
governance. At the height of the Kosovo war, Blair issued what amounted
to a call for a new wave of worldwide intervention based on a subtle
blend of self-interest and moral purpose. Within a year, he put this
doctrine of international community into practice in the former colony
of Sierra Leone, where British troops were sent back after a 39-year
absence to intervene in a protracted, bloody civil war.
But it was the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and the
subsequent US-led takeover of the former British imperial zone of
Afghanistan that finally outed into the political mainstream the policy
that had until then dared not speak its name. By spring 2002 Blairs
foreign policy adviser and Afghan envoy, Robert Cooper (now working for
Javier Solana at the European Union council of ministers), published a
pamphlet making the case for a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable
to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan views (5), while the prime
minister privately argued in favour of military intervention in the
former British colonies of Zimbabwe and Burma.
Such political adventurism has had to be at least temporarily reined as
a result of the political and human disaster of the Iraq war and
occupation. But the more favourable climate for this retro reactionary
chic created by western military interventions has been seized by
Britains conservative commentators and historians, such as Niall
Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, both to champion the cause of the new
imperialism and rewrite the history of the colonial past. Ferguson is an
open advocate of a formal US-run global empire and his defence of
British colonialism, notably in his book Empire (6), as the forerunner
of 21st-century free-market globalisation, was clearly echoed by Browns
praise of the traders, adventurers and missionaries who built the
empire. Roberts is an open advocate of the recolonisation of Africa and
insists that Africa has never known better times than during British
rule. When the South African president recently denounced Churchill and
the British empire for its terrible legacy in Khartoum, Roberts
blithely told the BBC that the empire had brought freedom and justice
to a benighted world (7).
It would be interesting to hear how Roberts - or Brown - balances such
grotesque claims with the latest research on the huge scale of
atrocities committed by British forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in
colonial Kenya in the 1950s: the 320,000 Kikuyu held in concentration
camps, the 1,090 hangings, the terrorisation of villages, electric
shocks, beatings and mass rape documented in Caroline Elkinss book
Britains Gulag (8) - and well over 100,000 deaths. This was a time when
British soldiers were paid five shillings (equal to $9 in todays money)
for each Kikuyu male they killed, when they nailed the limbs of African
guerrillas to crossroads posts. And when they were photographed holding
severed heads of Malayan communist terrorists in another war that cost
over 10,000 lives.
Even in the late 1960s, as veterans described in a recent television
documentary (9), British soldiers thrashed, tortured and murdered their
way through Adens Crater City; one former squaddie explained that he
couldnt go into details because of the risk of war crimes prosecutions.
All in the name of civilisation. The sense of continuity with todays
Iraq could not be clearer.
Such evidence is a timely corrective to the comfortable British
mythology that, in con-trast to France and other European colonial
powers, Britain decolonised in a peaceful and humane manner. Its not as
if these end-of-empire episodes were isolated blemishes on a glorious
record of freedom and good govern-ance, as Ferguson and other
contemporary imperial torchbearers would have us believe. Britains
empire was in reality built on genocide, vast ethnic cleansing, slavery,
rigorously enforced racial hierarchy and merciless exploitation. As the
Cambridge historian Richard Drayton puts it: We hear a lot about the
rule of law, incorruptible government and economic progress - the
reality was tyranny, oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of
countless millions of human beings (10).
Some empire apologists claim that, however brutal the first phase might
have been, the 19th- and 20th-century story was one of liberty and
economic progress. But this is nonsense. In late 19th-century and early
20th-century India up to 30 million died in famines, as British
administrators insisted on the export of grain (as they had done during
the Irish famine of the 1840s) and courts ordered 80,000 floggings a
year. Four million died in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943 - there
have been no such famines since independence.
What is now Bangladesh was one of the richest parts of the world before
the British arrived and deliberately destroyed its cotton industry. When
Indias Andaman islands were devastated by Decembers tsunami, who
recalled that 80,000 political prisoners had been held in camps there in
the early 20th-century, routinely experimented on by British army
doctors? Perhaps its not surprising that Hitler was an enthusiast,
describing the British empire as an inestimable factor of value, even
if it had been acquired with force and often brutality (11).
There has been no serious attempt in Britain to face up to this record
or the long-term impact of colonialism on the societies it ruled, let
alone trials of elderly colonial administrators now in Surrey retirement
homes. The British national school curriculum has more or less struck
the empire and its crimes out of history. The standard modern world
history textbook for 16-year-olds has chapter after chapter on the world
wars, the cold war, British and US life, Stalins terror and the
monstrosities of Nazism - but scarcely a word on the British and other
European empires which carved up most of the world, or the horrors they
perpetrated.
What are needed are not apologies or expressions of guilt so much as
education, acknowledgment, some measure of reparation and an
understanding that barbarity is the inevitable consequence of attempts
to impose foreign rule on subject peoples. Like most historical
controversies, the argument about empire is as much about the future as
the past. Those who write colonial cruelty out of 20th-century history
want to legitimise the new imperialism, now bogged down in another
colonial war in Iraq - just as those who demonise past attempts to build
an alternative to capitalist society are determined to prove that there
is none. If Brown really wants to champion British fair play, and create
a new relationship with Africa, he would do better to celebrate those
who campaigned for colonial freedom rather than the racist despotism
they fought against.
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs
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