The great imperialism revival (3)

Two miss-the-point letters in the Guardian today in response to Paul Gilroy's article on Harry, Nazis and Empire (discussed in an earlier post). Historian John MacKenzie writes:

"Something odd is happening in American academia these days (Why Harry's disoriented about empire, January 18), explained in terms of denial. Despite being critical of the British experience and having no truck with Harry's fancy-dress set, I find Paul Gilroy's views absurd. There is absolutely no evidence to connect British attitudes towards Nazism with their own guilt about empire nor is there the moral equivalence which Gilroy implies.

"Throughout the imperial period, there was always an exceptionally healthy scepticism about empire, not to say fierce criticism of its methods, among British politicians, in the press, and within missionary, humanitarian and academic lobbies. So far as the specific case of Kenya and Mau Mau is concerned, contemporary anxiety about British methods was always present. In any case, the Mau Mau fighters killed very many more Africans than they did whites and the result of the British realisation of error was decolonisation not only in Kenya, but ultimately in the rest of east and central Africa.

"By contrast, criticism of the effects of US imperialism in Chile, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq has been strikingly muted. Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, not to mention the scandal of the domestic adherence to the death penalty (placing the US in a club with China and Iran), produce so little in the way of press, political or academic critiques that Bush and his administration are re-elected. Gilroy and the rest of the group known as the post-colonialists are as severe a case of denial as you could find."

OK except:
1) Paul Gilroy is British
2) I can think of no contemporary thinker on race issues who has written more (and more seriously) about fascism and the Holocaust - i.e. the last person who would want to get into a colonialism v Nazism pissing contest

MacKenzie could be forgiven for not knowing the above but why did the Guardian bother to print his letter? I must also say that the suggestions that firstly British imperialism was OK because lots of people at home were 'anxious' about it and that secondly nobody criticises US imperialism are both spectacularly wide of the mark. Many Brits are in denial about the history of British foreign policy and a focus on those beastly yanks can just be another way of perpetuating this. Who taught the Americans how to suppress the peasantry of South Vietnam? Ans: British military advisors fresh from Malaya.