The Kettle calling the Pot black

[Thai Dyed]

By comparison, Pol Pot looks more saintly every day. I think he made his big mistake by not hiring British historians and public relations men. It seems you can do anything at all if you put the right spin on it.

http://exiledonline.com/wn-day-25-monty ... kuyu-skit/ (http://exiledonline.com/wn-day-25-monty-python-burning-kikuyu-skit/)

I'll bet the Brits, if their whole sordid story were revealed, put Pol Pot to shame in the genocide department. And as for the Yanks, they're still working on their merit badges in this department.

"Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary, and have become so familiar to us." -Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From the Underground, Part I; VII

Bill Rubin, London: Oliver Kamm recites the usual justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the deaths of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians prevented many more deaths that "with a high degree of probability" would have occurred if the US had invaded Japan's home islands. In an age when the key threat is terrorism - the deliberate targeting of civilians to achieve a political objective - this justification loses much of its appeal. One great challenge in eliminating terrorism is to convince those who have what they consider to be legitimate grievances that deliberately targeting civilians is never justified. The fact that, at the time, most people did not judge Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be war crimes should not prevent us from doing so now.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... topic=6554 (http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6554)

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ ... 217a1.html (http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20080217a1.html)
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/myths/myths

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/levine/bomb/bottles.gif
Melted bake bottles, Hiroshima. By courtesy of Truman and Churchill

Maria Misra: Heart of smugness. Unlike Belgium, Britain is still complacently ignoring the gory cruelties of its empire

It has become a modern orthodoxy that Europe's 20th century was the bloodiest in history and that atrocities must be recorded and remembered by society as a whole. But while a Black Book of Communism has been compiled and everybody is aware of the horrors of nazism, popular historians have been surprisingly uninterested in the dark side of the British Empire. There are exceptions, such as Mike Davis's powerful Late Victorian Holocausts, but much else still lies buried in the academic literature. Davis and others have estimated that there were between 12 and 33 million avoidable deaths by famine in India between 1876 and 1908, produced by a deadly combination of official callousness and free-market ideology. But these were far from being a purely Victorian phenomenon. As late as 1943 around 4 million died in the Bengal famine, largely because of official policy.

These facts and figures are not easily culled from textbooks on empire. We don't have a dedicated museum of empire, but our nearest equivalent, the new Imperial War Museum North, would leave the impression that Britain's colonial subjects had been enthusiastic participants in its wartime crusades to rid the world of want and evil.

Does it matter that the British are smug about their imperial past, that British atrocities have been airbrushed from history? One can't help thinking that Jack Straw's pious missions to India to broker solutions to the Kashmir crisis might have more credibility if the British had the good grace to apologise for such imperial crimes as the Amritsar massacre. But a more worrying symptom of this rosy glossing of the imperial past is the re-emergence of a sort of sanitised advocacy of imperialism as a viable option in contemporary international relations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/ju ... go.comment (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/23/congo.comment)


Owen Bowcott: Kenyans sue UK for alleged colonial human rights abuses

The full extent of Britain's knowledge and authorisation of torture only emerged recently after historians from Harvard and Oxford gathered detailed testimonial evidence and conducted extensive research of public and court records.

"In response, the government claims that the current Kenyan government is legally liable for abuses which took place under the British colonial administration. In our view, this represents an intolerable abdication of responsibility."

Key documents uncovered during research into the claims show that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office made a calculated decision not to hand over any of its colonial era files to the Kenyan government.

A letter dated 7 November 1967 stated that it was general practice at independence not to hand over any files that "might embarrass HMG or other governments" or "members of the police, military forces, [or] public servants".

The FCO letter continued: " тАж The moment we return any records whatsoever there is the danger that we should find ourselves under constant pressure to make good other gaps тАж in the record of the Kenya government. "тАж

The fact that it has always been British policy to withdraw or destroy certain sensitive records prior to independence has never been advertised "

The Kenyan government at the time was requesting the return of files relating to the Mau-Mau Emergency and other topics.

The Foreign Office will have to argue that the Kenyan government is responsible for pre-independence human rights abuses despite the fact that it did not then exist and was subsequently denied access to files revealing what actually occurred during that period.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ap ... hts-abuses (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/05/kenyans-sue-uk-colonial-human-rights-abuses)

[springco]

This is some amazing information. In light of all this, Thai Dyed was right when he suggested that Pol Pot lacked good public relations guys to write about him. When compared to the British, he pales into insignificance. And now the Americans are trying to play catch-up in the global slaughter house. And so many of the English have the gall to walk around with their holier-than-thou attitudes regarding their own hypocritical past. And the Americans have now appointed themselves as the latter day saviours of the world. What a bloody laugh!