[quote]TheG wrote:
invading iraq for oil… invading afganistan… selling arms to israel so they can anihilate a defenseless people… america is the most tyranical country in human history.
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Pots and kettles. You may want to research human history, and your own former empire’s part in it, before making absolute statements such as this.
What, doesn’t anyone read Kipling anymore? You do realize that Britain invaded Afghanistan and occupied it from 1838 to 1880, right? I suppose that you get tyranny points deducted from your score for getting your butts soundly handed to you by the Afghans, but the fact remains that you invaded first.
And what about India, the jewel in the Victorian crown? Britain certainly brought the blessings of Western civilization to the natives, but they brought plenty of suffering and death as well.
When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”.
The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices”. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought”. The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan.
Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies, like Stalin’s in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25 million died.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s.
Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in “enclosed villages”. Prisoners were questioned with the help of “slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes”.
British soldiers used a “metal castrating instrument” to cut off testicles and fingers. “By the time I cut his balls off,” one settler boasted, “he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one was hanging out of its socket.” The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked “provided they were black”.
Evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. 1,090 suspected rebels were hanged: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had “failed to halt” when challenged.
And as for Israel (which exists primarily thanks to the UK, by the way), while the United States is is clearly the largest exporter, Germany, France, and yes the United Kingdom also contribute to the “annihilation of a defenseless people,” as you so breathlessly put it. Britain’s contribution is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 million pounds sterling per annum.
In addition to mortars, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons, military explosives, and infrared and radar sensors, in 2003 Jack Straw authorized the export to Israel of leg-irons, electric shock belts and chemical and biological agents such as tear gas.
Most tyrannical? It’s a subjective term, to be sure, but in terms of actual area of real estate stolen, and number of subjects ruled, the United States can never hold a candle to the British Empire.
Sources:
Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis
Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins
Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson
Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis
http://www.caat.org.uk/publications/countries/israel-1002.php
