Imperialism revival (4)

Following my earlier posts here, here, and here questioning Gordon Brown's assertion that Britain should be proud of its colonial past, The Guardian yesterday reported on the release of previously secret government documents discussing army torture of suspected Mau Mau rebels in Kenya in the 1950s. A confidential letter from General George Erskine to the War Office, acknowledged that prisoners had been "beaten to extract information".

There is no doubt that in the early days ... there was a great deal of indiscriminate shooting by army and police. I am quite certain prisoners were beaten to extract information. It is a short step from beating to torture and I'm now sure ... that torture was a feature of many police posts.

Also in yesterday's The Guardian, there is a review of David Anderson's and Caroline Elkins' books on the British in Kenya in the 1950s (see previous posts). Extract:

One officer quoted by Anderson gives a taste of the impunity - and the hatred. Interviewing three enemy suspects he says: 'One of them, a tall coal-black bastard, kept grinning at me, real insolent. I slapped him hard, but he kept on grinning at me, so I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could ... When he finally got up on his feet he grinned at me again and I snapped. I really did. I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth ... And I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two (suspects) were standing there looking blank ... so I shot them both ... when the sub-inspector drove up, I told him the (suspects) tried to escape. He didn't believe me but all he said was "bury them and see the wall is cleaned up".'

No British official, military or civilian, has ever been investigated or prosecuted for what happened in the suppression of Mau Mau.

Also of interest is this transcript of a talk by Marxist historian Neil Davidson discussing 'Scotish Imperialism and National Identity'. Extract 1:

When I first suggested that there might a connection between the Scottish nation and the British Empire, four years ago in The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, the suggestion was met with outrage in some quarters of the left, on two main grounds. One was that the Scots had no special role in the British Empire and that, if we had, it was because the English made us do it: in other words, the `we were only obeying orders' defence, which, apart from being a lie, is not particularly flattering to the Scots. However, since my book appeared, two weighty tomes have been published - Michael Fry's The Scottish Empire and Tom Devine's Scotland's Empire - which, whatever else you might want to say about them, set out the facts fairly clearly. Far from being in any sense a victim of imperialism, Scotland was, as an integral part of the British state, a major component of one. Nor was it a `junior partner' - a thesis whose main function is to evade Scottish responsibility for the nature of the British Empire.

Extract 2:

What does this history mean for socialists in Scotland today? The attitudes fostered by our imperial role survive even though the Empire itself is largely - and thankfully - history. But the militarism, racism and xenophobia that so disfigure Scottish society - overlaid and strengthened by our very own traditions of Protestant bigotry - are not superficial aspects which can be discarded by the establishment of border posts along the Tweed. They are part, you might say, of our 'ethnicity'. I am not arguing that Scotland should not secede from England, incidentally - that is a decision which the Scots have every right to make if they wish - simply that it is complacency of the highest order to imagine that secession alone, without a deeper transformation of values, will remove the darker side of our national psyche: in a nation formed by Empire it could scarcely be otherwise. Against this, we have a reservoir of other traditions, radical and socialist traditions, upon which to draw; but we will have to draw on them, because we can be sure that the imperial legacy will not be expunged without our conscious intervention.