- More details from Newsinger... Archived Message
Posted by Ian M
on November 25, 2023, 6:29 pm, in reply to "Re: Bomber Harris, Dresden, Iraq & Palestine"
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https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/newsinger/2015/xx/hearts-minds.html 'Keeping the natives down An important pillar of the ideological support for the British Empire is the belief that British colonial rule was paternalistic, even kindly, and that however the French and the Germans might have behaved, when the British encountered “native” resistance or rebellion they responded with restraint. With this in mind, it is worth considering the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Osburn in his invaluable book, Must England Lose India?, published in 1930. He writes of how India was policed with: a strictness that would not be tolerated in any European country. The half-clad natives of Lahore submit to English-made police restrictions that would drive a suburb of London into revolt. Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus do not exist in India ... it must be remembered that any Indian may be thrown into prison and remain there indefinitely without trial, and even without being informed of what he is accused! Even a Labour government to everyone’s amazement, permitted this unjust and iniquitous practice. The police themselves were “the lineal descendants” of the Black and Tans and he recounts one European police officer boasting to him of how “after some of my punitive police have been stationed in a village for a few days the spirit of the toughest of the political agitators is broken”. His men would “help themselves to everything. Within 24 hours there will not be a virgin or four anna piece (about sixpence) left in that village.” There was “a sort of Black and Tan simplicity about this method of subduing those whose politics ... we do not approve of”. As Osburn remarks: “Bengal and Balbriggan are not as far apart as they look on the map.” [5] The methods the British used to suppress the great Palestinian revolt, the first Intifada, against British rule and Zionist settlement in the late 1930s also provides useful testimony in this regard. Indeed, the Palestine Police, established by the British soon after they occupied the country, actually included over 600 former Black and Tans brought over from Ireland. This great popular revolt necessitated the effective reconquest of Palestine which was accomplished with considerable violence and great brutality. According to one study of British policing methods in Palestine: “Suspects arrested for interrogation were now tortured as a matter of course; bastinado, suspending suspects upside down and urinating in their nostrils, extracting fingernails and pumping water into a suspect before stamping on him, became commonplace.” [6] The important word to note here is “commonplace”; not so long ago accusations of such behaviour were always dismissed as exaggerated and even when admitted they were put down to the misconduct of the rare “bad apple”, misconduct that was put a stop to as soon as it was discovered. On the contrary, as Matthew Hughes has argued, during the “pacification” of Palestine “punitive actions and destructive and brutal reprisals ... were central to British military repression after 1936 and constituted the core experience of Palestinians during the revolt ... destruction and vandalism were certainly a systematic, systemic part of British counter-insurgency operations”. Houses were demolished, whole villages were flattened, usually blown up, and sometimes the troops forced the Palestinians to destroy their own homes. The worst example of this policy occurred in Jaffa in June 1936 when over 200 houses were demolished, leaving some 6,000 people – men, women and children – homeless and destitute. In the words of one British officer: “That will fucking well teach them.” And when it came to conducting searches, the troops were ordered to wreck the houses they searched. Hughes reports one officer being ordered to carry out a search operation in Safad again because his men had left the houses “perfectly intact”. A senior officer showed them how to do it by wrecking the interior of one house with a pick handle after which the men went to work: “You’d never seen such devastation.” Hughes provides a grim catalogue of torture, murder and destruction. He recounts the beating to death of 12 Palestinian prisoners at Silwan in reprisal for the killing of two British soldiers, and how at al-Bassa some 20 Palestinians were packed onto a bus which the driver was then forced to drive over a mine, killing them all. And so on. He also elaborates on the methods of torture that the British made use of: “Prisoners were sodomised and boiling oil was used on them, as were intoxicants (morphine, cocaine and heroin). There was also electric shocks ... and mock executions.” [7] Both at the time and still today it was widely believed that this was not how British troops and police ever behave. But methods such as these were standard with the severity dependent on the scale of the resistance and the ethnicity of the resisters. What is really astonishing is the success with which this conduct was covered up at the time and the extent to which, even today, it remains largely unacknowledged.' (Worth reading in full for the other examples discussed, Malaya, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq, and possible future wars) |