{news} Fw: USGP-INT The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale

[Justine McCabe]

> The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous
> fairytale
> 
> Neocon ideologues are being given free rein by the media to
> rewrite the history of Britain's empire and whitewash its
> crimes
> 
> By Priyamvada Gopal
> 
> June 28, 2006, Guardian (UK)
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,1807642,00.html
> 
> A resurrection is haunting the British media, the bizarre
> apparition of "benevolent empire". It takes the form of
> documentaries and discussions steered towards the conclusion
> that colonialism was not such a bad thing after all and that
> something of a celebration is in order. Trouble is, to get
> there, some creative reworking of the facts is needed. After a
> recent brouhaha about Britain's imperial history on Radio 4's
> Start the Week - in which I took part - the presenter Andrew
> Marr worried that the debate had been "pretty biased" against
> empire: there was a lot of enthusiasm and a "warm nostalgia"
> for empire, he suggested in the subsequent phone-in, even in
> former colonies, "still something there, absolutely".
> 
> Only the desire to recover some imaginary good from the
> tragedy that was empire can explain the elevation of the
> neoconservative ideologue Niall Ferguson to chief imperial
> historian on the BBC and now Channel 4. His aggressive
> rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the
> American right, is being presented as a new revelation. In
> fact, Ferguson's "history" is a fairytale for our times which
> puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic
> action. Colonialism - a tale of slavery, plunder, war,
> corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured
> labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced
> resettlement - is rewritten into a benign developmental
> mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.
> 
> Soundbite culture thrives on these simplistic grand
> narratives. Half-truths and fanciful speculation, shorn of
> academic protocols such as footnotes, can sound donnishly
> authoritative. The racism institutionalised by empire also
> seems to be back in fashion. The book accompanying Ferguson's
> current Channel 4 series on 20th-century history, The War of
> the World, tells us that people "seem predisposed" to "trust
> members of their own race", "those who are drawn to 'the
> Other' may ... be atypical in their sexual predilections" and
> that "when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances
> are relatively high ... that only the first child they
> conceive will be viable." Not far from the pseudo-scientific
> nonsense that once made it possible to punish interracial
> relationships.
> 
> Behind such talk and the embrace of the broadcasters is the
> insistence that we are being offered gutsy truths that the
> "politically correct" establishment would love to suppress.
> This is the neo-conservative as spunky rebel against liberal
> tyranny. Yet Ferguson peddles nothing more than the most
> hackneyed, self-aggrandising myths of empire, canards once
> championed by old imperialists such as Macaulay and Mill and
> rehashed now by the Bush administration: western imperialism
> brings freedom, democracy and prosperity to primitive
> cultures. The myth decorates US and British foreign policy
> spin while trendier versions have also emerged in platforms
> such as the Euston Manifesto. By anointing Ferguson and his
> fellow imperial apologists such as Andrew Roberts as semi-
> official historians, the British media are colluding in a
> dangerous denial of the past and lending support to
> contemporary US imperial propaganda .
> 
> The evidence - researched by scholars such as Amartya Sen,
> Nicholas Dirks, Mike Davis and Mahmood Mamdani, Caroline
> Elkins and Walter Rodney - shows that European colonialism
> brought with it not good governance and freedom, but
> impoverishment, bloodshed, repression and misery. Joseph
> Conrad, no radical, described it as "a flabby, pretending,
> weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly". Good
> governance? More famines were recorded in the first century of
> the British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including
> 17-20 million deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone. While a million
> Indians a year died from avoidable famines, taxation
> subsidising colonial wars, and relief often deliberately
> denied as surplus grain was shipped to England.
> 
> Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict
> ethnic/religious identities and governed through these
> divisions. As with the partition of India when 10 million were
> displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries between "tribes" in
> Africa resulted in massive displacement and bloodshed. Freedom
> and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers
> appropriated 12,000 square miles and pushed 1.25 million
> native Kikuyus to 2,000 restricted square miles. Resistance
> was brutally crushed through internment in detention camps,
> torture and massacres. Some 50,000 Kikuyus were massacred and
> 300,000 interned to put down the Mau Mau rebellion by peasants
> who wanted to farm their own land. A thousand peaceful
> protesters were killed in the Amritsar massacre of 1919.
> 
> A collective failure of the imagination now makes it difficult
> for us to think about the globe before European and American
> domination. Greed and violence are hardly exclusive to one
> culture. But colonialism destroyed or strangled possibilities
> and potential for progress, such as Mughal Emperor Akbar's
> "sul-e-kul" or "universal good" which underpinned his
> governance. The scale of European imperialism inaugurated a
> new chapter in the history of greed which still shapes all our
> lives. Natural resources - cotton, sugar, teak, rubber,
> minerals - were plundered in gigantic quantities. The Indian
> textile industry was the most advanced in the world when the
> British arrived; within half a century it had been destroyed.
> The enslaved and indentured (at least 20 million Africans and
> 1.5 million Indians) were shipped across the globe to work on
> plantations, mines and railroads. The stupendous profits
> deriving from this enabled today's developed world to prosper.
> 
> The point isn't for Europeans to feel guilt, but a serious
> consideration of historical responsibility isn't the same
> thing as a blame game. Forgetting history is tempting but
> undermines a society's capacity for change.
> 
> Among the many facile assumptions encouraged by these imperial
> apologists is that those who criticise colonialism are
> absolving tyrants and bigots in Asia and Africa from
> responsibility for their crimes. Of course it is possible and
> absolutely necessary to condemn both. Indians must acknowledge
> their culpability for atrocities during the partition, for
> example. But that in no way exonerates the British Raj from
> its pivotal role in the tragedy that led to over a million
> deaths.
> 
> A wilful ignorance of other people's cultures and histories
> encourages the notion that freedom, democracy and tolerance
> are intrinsically western. As Amartya Sen has argued, the
> subcontinent has long been home to traditions of free-thinking
> and debate. Participatory governance was not Britain's gift
> (recall Gandhi's indigenous village republics), even if
> parliamentary democracy as an institutional form was adopted
> in some ex-colonies. Free trade is another mythical western
> contribution to world history. Amitav Ghosh has reconstructed
> the forgotten history of a vibrant trade culture between
> medieval India and Africa. When the Portuguese arrived, they
> demanded that the Hindu ruler of Calicut expel Muslims,
> "enemies of the Holy-Faith", from his kingdom. He refused and
> was subjected to two days of bombardment.
> 
> Indeed, one legacy of European colonialism that we all reckon
> with is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the "clash of
> civilisations". The claim that east and west are bound to come
> into conflict is merely an extension of imperial practice
> which found it useful to seal off porous cultures into fixed
> categories. This tragic "lie of the colonial situation", as
> Frantz Fanon called it, rebounds on us tragically in the
> terror unleashed in the name of Islam and Bush's "war on
> terror". If we are to undo the destructive legacies of empire,
> it won't do to invest celebratory falsifications with
> credibility. To make sense of a shared present and look
> towards a more humane future, we need to start with a little
> informed honesty about the past.
> 
> [Priyamvada Gopal teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge
> University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India:
> Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence]
> 
> ____________________________________________
> Julia Willebrand, Ed.D
> Co-chair, International Committee, United States Green Party
> Co-president, Federation of Green Parties of the Americas (FPVA)
> 212 877-5088--