Legacy of Violence : A History of the British Empire

This book is about the legalized brutality of the British empire in India-Pakistan, Palestine, Kenya, South Africa, Cyprus, Ireland, and Malaysia (formerly Malaya) throughout the 20th century. The author is a foremost historian on the true, non-whitewashed history of British Imperialism and was an expert witness to a famous lawsuit filed in 2011 by the victims of the empire's regime in Kenya decades ago.

When I say “legalized brutality” I mean the most horrible brutality a government can do to a subjugated people. The author came up with an interesting term for it: “‘legalized lawlessness'—or the colonial violence that produced laws that, in turn, legalized extraordinary acts of coercion and suspensions of due process.”

Another critical term used was “Liberal Imperialism” meaning liberalism at home (free trade, generally free speech, electoralism, democracy, etc), and brutal, dictatorial regimes for the colonies.

To summarize, the MO of British imperialism in the 20th century consisted of
• declaring a state of emergency
• instating “legalized lawlessness” by passing authoritarian laws to crack down on descent: censor the press, outlaw assemblies, throw people in jail without a trial or right to appeal, search people and property without a warrant, torture and kill people, etc
• put anyone who disobeyed into a concentration camp to brainwash them into becoming a loyal subject of the crown, (they called it a ‘hearts and minds' campaign. Yeah they created that too)
• The colonized peoples would stage reprisals, the Brits would stage counter-reprisals
• then the Brit's retreat and be forced to let the country become independent because they're losers
• Then burn all records of their crimes against humanity so no one can prosecute them.

Rinse and repeat across the entire planet.

Here's one quote example from Palestine that sums up the same basic strategy:
“Necessity and legitimate violence—issues that had animated legal debates over state-directed violence in colonies like Demerara, Jamaica, Ireland, and India—would be resolved through an extraordinary regulatory measure in Palestine, where the high commissioner, and with him, all security forces, including the police and military, could do whatever they liked, which included punitive destruction of property and trial by military courts without right to appeal. Legalized lawlessness—ideologically rooted in the birthing of liberal imperialism, and having evolved over decades in various empire theaters and courtrooms, and at home under the Defence of the Realm Act—was now fully matured.”

Here's my book report:

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Everyone knew they were just like the Nazis.

The biggest theme from this book is that “Fascism is Imperialism come home”. This isn't like a philosophical thought experiment. It's just objective fact. The British Empire was incredibly similar to fascist dictatorships. But because their cruelty was done mostly to non-white people in distant colonies, we don't ever hear about it.

Often when people in the 21st century compare the evils of British imperialism to Nazi Germany, they're met with feigned shock and swift rebuttals like “By comparing them you're downplaying the severity of nazi war crimes” or “it's absurd to measure these past actions by today's standards” or some malarkey like that. But even the people at the time, in the thick of it, could very clearly see the parallels between what the British Empire was doing in real time and what the Nazis were doing/did.

1938 Palestine: “According to one British soldier, David Smiley, when Arab suspects refused to talk, the police turned one of them upside down and beat the soles of his feet ‘with a leather belt'; another applied ‘a lighted cigarette to his testicles' before they got him to spill the proverbial beans. At the time, Smiley observed that ‘this sort of thing savours of the Gestapo,' and his likening of British tactics to those of Europe's rising fascist regimes was not isolated. Such comparisons were also based on visual images of the police force who, according to Burr, ‘stuck large Swasticas' on the ‘fronts of [their] shields,' and when ‘passing one another in the street' gave the ‘Nazi salute.'”

“[Reginald] Sorenson was no stranger to imperial critique, having leveled charges at the Labour Party Congress in 1933 that ‘the operation of Imperialism in India is in essence no different from the operations of Hitlerism....We are appalled by what is happening to the Jews in Germany, but what has been happening in India is just as bad.'”

In 1937, “[Jomo] Kenyatta wrote a piece in the New Leader with the headline ‘Hitler could not improve on Kenya.' He lambasted ‘British Labour organisations' for being unable ‘to distinguish the difference between the imperialist forces and the anti-imperialists,' and pointed to the detention camps in Kenya as ‘similar to concentration or labour camps in fascist countries.'”

1938, The New Leader magazine published: “We have done this because there is a great danger at present time that our hatred of the tyranny of Fascism may cause us to forget the tyranny of imperialism. Our pages show that the barbarities which Mussolini and Hitler practice in Italy and Germany are being practiced constantly within the British Empire....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.”

Hitler greatly admired the British Empire, writing in his famous book “No people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword, and later ruthlessly defended them, than the English nation.”

The Bengal Famine of 1943 in India was caused by the British Empire and was exacerbated by the white supremacist Winston Churchill. “At the time, Secretary for India Amery accused Churchill of having a ‘Hitler-like attitude' toward the entire lot, though he himself insisted that the famine was the result of some kind of Malthusian dilemma and refused to send relief.” 2-4 million people died.

Operation Anvil, 1954, Kenya — “Observers described the operation as ‘Gestapolike,' and by the time Erskine declared it a success, his forces had packed over twenty thousand Mau Mau suspects into caged-in trucks for transit to Langata Camp.”

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Concentration camps

Concentration Camps — South Africa
The Brits invented the concentration camp during the Boer War in present-day South Africa, 1899-1902.

“British troops also razed homesteads, poisoned wells, and corralled into concentration camps Afrikaner women and children as well as African laborers.“

“[Herbert Kitchener] designed concentration camps, about one hundred in all, as punitive hostage sites. Women and children of active guerrillas endured harsher treatment with smaller rations as Kitchener sought to ‘work on the feelings of the men.' [...] As far as Milner and Kitchener were concerned, the Afrikaners in the camps were ‘verminous,' no doubt emaciated from meager rations and poor sanitation's effects. Kitchener's forces had to either capture the “infested” Afrikaner population or kill them.”

‘Verminous'...'infested'...concentration camps...where have I heard this before?

That was just some of the many war crimes committed by the empire during that war. After the war, the Africans had to pay the Brit's reparations and then the Brit's oversaw the rise of apartheid. Cool and good country.

Concentration Camps — Ireland

They put the Irish in concentration camps too. The MO wouldn't change country to country. But funnily enough the colonies started learning more from each other too so they'd be better at fighting their oppressor.

“In the wake of the Easter Rising, the British government detained fifteen hundred men without trial under Regulation 14B. Largely held in the Frongoch internment camp, a crude conglomeration of huts and an abandoned distillery on the Welsh coast, detainees like Michael Collins took the lead in transforming their incarceration into a recruitment opportunity. [...] Collins and others gave lessons in revolutionary ideology and guerrilla tactics, which included those deployed in South Africa.”

The Irish also helped radicalize Indians.
“Arguably, it was Dan Breen's ‘My Fight for Irish Freedom' that had the greatest impact on Bengali revolutionary activity. Published in 1924 and translated into Hindu, Punjabi, and Tamil, the book was the first memoir by an Irish Republican Army member. It quickly became a how-to manual for rebellion and outlined the necessity of taking out “Irish ‘traitors,' police, informants, and high government officials.” Bengali revolutionaries referred to the text as ‘one of our bibles.'” Beautiful.

Concentration Camps — Malaya

• British Malaya's concentration camps and forced migration: “In total, officials displaced and relocated approximately 650,000 workers into the “labour lines,” which brought the overall forced migration and resettlement of British subjects and alleged aliens to nearly 1.2 million.”

• The terrorist campaign against Chinese civilians in Malaya was the first example of a “hearts and minds campaign.” Just like all subsequent attempts, it did not go well. “No analysis bears out any kind of full-scale socioeconomic reform effort in the midst of government-sponsored terror, intelligence gathering, hit squads, deportations, mass resettlements, and detentions.“

Concentration Camps — Kenya

• “Kenya's minister for defense assessed the colony's works camps where labor was ostensibly voluntary and paid, remarking, ‘We are slave traders and the employment of our slaves are, in this instance, by the Public Works Department.'”

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Notable ware crimes and massacres worth a google:

• “Jallianwala Bagh massacre” AKA the “Amritsar massacre”. Winston Churchill tried to justify this horrible massacre. Winston Churchill is a piece of shit.

• Hola Massacre - massacre of hundreds of people in the Hola Concentration Camp in Kenya.

• War Crimes in Iraq: “Iraq became a playground for weapons testing. In late 1922, London's Air Ministry circulated a “Forms of Frightfulness” memo in which it considered smoke bombs, aerial darts, tear gas, phosphorus bombs, war rockets, long-delay “action” bombs, tracer ammunition, man-killing shrapnel bombs, “liquid” fire (the precursor to napalm), and crude oil to pollute water supplies.”

• “According to [Desmond] Woods, his men put ‘Arabs from the cage [a temporary holding pen]' in commandeered taxis to lead army patrols, which was a form of human mine sweeping that left Arabs blown to bits. When taxis filled ‘with Arabs, the naughty boys' weren't heavy enough to detonate the mines, the Ulster officer recalled that ‘we got hold of buses and we used to fill them with Arabs and send them down the road in front of our patrols and that did the trick.'”

• A 1947 report from the UK-run Bad Nenndorf torture facility: “With several detainees dead, and the overwhelming corroborating evidence of physical and psychological torture, malnutrition, humiliation of various kinds, the use of Nazi-era instruments such as shin screws, and routine use of prolonged solitary confinement, Hayward's report made for disturbing reading.” Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens was court-martialed for overseeing the torture but was ultimately set free. “He would soon reemerge in the empire as part of MI5's operations clamping down on nationalists who threatened Britain's imperial resurgence efforts.”

• Other torture facilities & concentration camps include “Camp 020”, Langata Detention Camp,

• Operation Anvil (1954), Operation Shark (1946)

• The Brits inspired Apartheid: “It was for good reason that South Africa's Afrikaner Broederbond looked to the British Empire for cultural inspiration and legal guidance. In the early 1950s, the apartheid state's prime minister, D. F. Malan, praised Kenya for having ‘given him an example of how to treat discontented Africans.'”

• Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa - The UK-backed government running the same exact playbook as their former imperial overlords

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Indoctrination & Consent Manufacturing

In order for Britain to do all of these horrible crimes, they needed to indoctrinate their people into believing what they were doing was right. Indoctrination is critical to maintain control, and they had it down:

“School textbook publishers similarly peddled a civic pride in the empire and provided teachers with history and geography texts that extolled Britain's civilizing mission and reminded Britain's youth of ‘native savagery.' Whether in or out of the classroom, generations of British schoolchildren were weaned on a triumphant imperial narrative that depicted their nation as waging a moral battle to defend civilization while also bringing light.”

They pretended to have a “free press” but just like the US's corporate media, their press stood on the side of empire and manufactured consent for the empire's brutality. They didn't even pretend to hide it like the US's news does:

“Alfred Harmsworth, declared that the raison d'être of his newspaper [The Daily Mail] was to stand ‘for the power, the supremacy and the greatness of the British Empire.‘”

“Here again the fourth estate, including The Daily Chronicle, echoed the government's right to repression as well as its nationalist demonizings and ever-elusive search for moderates who understood the civilizing, if forceful, ways of their colonizer.”

“The mainstream press cleaved to a positivist reporting style and preferred not to run a story if it meant contravening government-ready facts with the slimmest of suggestive evidence—evidence that the press could rarely verify given its limited access to the camps and villages as well as to security forces, who seldom broke rank.”

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Numbers Game

This is a side note tangent not directly related to this book...

Those who have been indoctrinated by Capitalist propaganda often repeat some wildly absurd number of killed under Communism. Ignoring the laughable and blatantly falsified calculus used to come up with such numbers, no one ever seems to look at the other side of that balance sheet, what are the death tolls in the black book of Capitalism? Here's a good one: the Capitalist British Empire killed 1.8 BILLION people in their colony India. Give that number a google.

Additionally, there's the propaganda about famines. But no one ever talks about the famines caused by the Capitalist British Empire. Namely:
• The Great Bengal Famine of 1770, and the Bengal Famine of 1943 in India
• The Irish Potato Famine (1840's). Yeah. Bet ya didn't know that whole potato thing was actually caused by Britain.

That's 3 different famines caused by 1 country.

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Human Rights and the United Nations

One of the book's most interesting points is the rising tide of international human rights campaigns that came to prominence after WW2 and how the British Empire saw these efforts as a threat to their colonies. They knew their evil acts would be thrown into question, so they sabotaged and undermined the humanitarian end goals in order to prevent their nefarious actions in their colonies from getting international scrutiny.

This is because Britain had a different ideology around human rights compared to US progressives: “Churchill processed the language of rights in a different register than Roosevelt did. Britain and its empire—and all modern European nations and their empires—did not regard rights as universal. Rather, they were something that a state created and bequeathed to its citizens.” Hey Fuck Winston Churchill btw.

• UN Charter — Article 73 was written to legitimize the existence of the British Empire's colonies. “Under the charter, League mandates would become Trust Territories, and the new International Trusteeship System—as opposed to an International ‘Partnership' System—differed little from the former Permanent Mandates Commission except for the fact that it was even more attuned to issues of sovereignty and was explicitly aligned with great power interests.”

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — Unenforceable thanks to the Brit's efforts to decouple the declaration (which Britain signed) from the legally binding covenants with its colonies. “In the words of the Colonial Office, Articles 13, 21, and 25 of the declaration—freedom of movement, right to participation in government, and right to basic standards of living—‘may be extremely difficult to reconcile' in the empire.” The empire refused to publish its contents or make reference to it in colonial papers. Why would they? Telling colonized people about the UDHR might make them revolt!

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 — Common Article 3 “rendered the conventions applicable to noninternational armed conflicts. Its initial draft reached not only into domestic state matters but into imperial ones as well.” The British and French empires successfully watered down the definitions in this article to make its not applicable to their ongoing global imperial terrorism. “Britain and France put up all sorts of fuss, and they were either individually or collectively behind the removal from the conventions of any reference to ‘colonial wars' and the elimination of the preamble with a ‘blanket' mention of ‘human rights.'” Since they had the power and they wrote the rules, they could do whatever they wanted to their subjugated peoples.

The European Convention on Human Rights — Article 15 was specifically designed as “an out clause for liberal imperialism's unrestrained use of force.” Article 63(3) “enabled Britain to ratify the convention in 1951 ‘without immediately committing the dependent territories,' according to one official.”

In the 1950's, the Brits obstructed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from providing humanitarian relief in Kenya, claiming Common Article 3 didn't apply.

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The Cover-Up

There is already a laundry list of evil things the British Empire has done listed above, but one that I want to call out specifically is their efforts to cover up the crimes.

Every time they had to abandon a colony, they would burn as much of the documents as they could. These documents showed the cold, hard evidence of their war crimes. They knew how bad it would make them look, so they burned every file they had.

Why this angers me so much is that it destroys history, erases the true legacy of British Imperialism, and allows them to manufacture their own history of being “righteous stewards to uncivilized children”. Truly truly evil.

“British practices of systematized violence were to be expunged from the imperial record. Plumes of document ashes littered India's independence day ceremonies, but they would recede in future end-of-empire exits. [...]like the violence they inflicted on local populations, they became better at covering them up. [...] British officials around the globe embarked on processes of document removal and destruction that reflected an increasingly secret Cold War government and further shaped the myths of British imperial benevolence and triumph.”

“In [1956] Malaya, colonial officials began sorting, culling, transferring, and burning files. Much like interrogation systems and those created for deportation, resettlement, and detention, those spawned for document sifting and destruction had evolved from haphazard processes, such as those in India and Palestine, to ones that were increasingly bureaucratized”

Operation Legacy — “The document-purging process, called Operation Legacy in some parts of the empire, drew on systems of destruction that had unfolded in Malaya and India.”

Anyway, moral of the story is: British Imperialism is as evil, if not more evil, than US Imperialism.