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#11
July 13th 03, 01:10 PM
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#12
July 14th 03, 03:55 AM
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"Mark Houlsby"
wrote in message ... Tim Hanke wrote (to Mark Houlsby): (snipped) Even the Chinese are actually a patchwork of ethnicities, even though you may consider them all to be short yellow people with slanted eyes.... On the contrary, I believe that Mark Houlsby *is* aware of the existence of Yao Ming, a 226 cm (7'5") tall Chinese basketball star in the NBA. As one of my political science professors noted in college (I was at Harvard, but he was visiting for the term from MIT), many of the most successful and stable Third World countries are former British colonies which absorbed a semblance of British institutions. Stand up straight and take some pride in your own country, man, this is a compliment to your native culture. India may have benefited somewhat from British colonisation, since it still is a democracy. There remain, however, very serious problems both of population and of an ecological nature in that country. I am pleased to know number of Indians who, if they are typically resourceful and industrious, may indicate that India could solve its problems. I do hope so.... 'They left no noble monuments behind and no religion save a concept of Englishness as a desirable code of behaviour--of chivalry, it might be described, tempered by legalism.' --V.S. Naipaul (1964, An Area of Darkness, p. 201; on the British in India) Dear Mr. Houlsby, I hope so too. But I am afraid that I may have to disillusion you further about the historical record of British imperialism in India. "For many years, British books on India formed a small but precise genre of their own, involving the use of phrases like 'the heady smell of spices and woodsmoke', and descriptive invocations of cruel maharajahs, sly holymen, rebellious tribesmen and the heat of the Deccan, together with occasional appearances by tigers, missionaries, memsahibs, gymkhanas, Kipling and tiffin. This extended into histories of the edifice lately termed 'the Raj', and although it is now rare to find imperial dogma articulated so openly, a nostalgic subtext still hovers beneath the pages of many books, like a loyal native bearer lurking discreetly under the verandah of one of M.M. Kaye's bungalows. The subcontinental response to this British-imagined India has been richly impressive in the realms of fiction, but generally flimsy when it comes to historical or biographical writing. Too often, a narrow, obfuscatory nationalism has been the only way of facing the region's history, enabling the father of the nation--be he Jinnah or Gandhi--to emerge dressed in a spotless suit, sherwani or dhoti. There has been a consistent failure to recognise or acknowledge the real role of Indian politicians in what happened in the 1930s and forties. Although personally I believe that British rule in India had a primarily destructive effect, it does not follow that the ousters of the imperialists were therefore blameless, or that they do not share responsibility for what took place. Even at its height, the European presence in the subcontinent neer amounted to more than 0.05 per cent of the total population. British rule in India was always a joint venture, which depended heavily on collaboration. While it lasted, it was an effective but shallow way of governing, which may explain why all that remains of the Indian Empire half a century on is a handful of fine buildings, a stagnant legal system and bureaucracy, and a mutated language.... The British did *not*, as if often claimed, give India democracy, except in a primitive form at the level of provincial government. The decision to grant a universal franchise to the people of India (and from time to time to the people of Bangladesh and Pakistan) was made by the relevant elites *after* independence. The most durable legacy of the Indo-British encounter can be found in the British Isles, in the form of two million citizens of subcontinental descent--'the Asian community', as politicians say, although whether a Bengali Muslim and a Gujurati Hindu really belong to the same community must be open to question. The story of India's journey to independence and division remains a contentious and hugely sensitive area of history. In Britain it is viewed as an embarrassment, in Bangladesh as a betrayal, in India as a mixed blessing, and in Pakistan as a matter too tender even to be seriously discussed." --Patrick French (1997, Liberty or Death, xxiv-xxv) "'Right-wing' critics of liberalism in the Raj looked with satisfaction to the journalism of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, who in 1883 famously said that the Raj was 'founded not on consent but on conquest'....Once Indian nationalism became an even half-serious proposition, the Raj could not long endure. Racist, by any standards, it undoubtedly was; economically exploitative too, as nearly all modern historians wish to point out; but the British will to govern by force had its limits when consent was absent. The massacre of protestors at Amritsar by General Dyer--379 killed and 1200 wounded--on 13 April 1919, followed by a proclamation of martial law, was a disgrace from which the British Raj never recovered its semi-legitimate self-estimation for decency and justice. Thirty years before independence it sealed the Raj's fate..." --A.N. Wilson (The Victorians, pp. 500-1) "India, of course, was the greatest captive market in world history, rising from third to first place among consumers of British exports in the quarter century after 1870. 'British rulers', writes Marcello de Cecco in his study of the Victorian gold standard system, 'deliberately prevented Indians from becoming skilled mechanics, refused contracts to Indian firms which produced materials that could be got from England, and generally hindered the formation of an autonomous industrial structure in India.' Thanks to a 'government stores policy that reserved most government purchases to British products and by the monopoly of British agency houses in organizing the import-export trade', India was forced to absorb Britain's surplus of increasingly obsolescent and noncompetitive industrial exports. By 1910 this included two-fifths of the UK's finished cotton goods and three-fifths of its exports of electrical products, railway equipment, books and pharmaceuticals. As a result, observes de Cecco, Britain avoided, 'having to restructure her industry and was able to invest capital in the countries where it gave the highest return'. Thanks to India, 'British financiers were not compelled to 'tie' their loans to British exports because the Imperial outlet was always available for British products.... But how, in an age of famine, could the subcontinent afford to subsidize its conqueror's suddenly precarious commercial supremacy? In a word, it couldn't, and India was forced-marched into the world market, as we shall see, by revenue and irrigation policies that compelled farmers to produce for foreign consumption at the price of their own food security....Between 1875 and 1900, years that included the worst famines in Indian history, annual grain exports *increased* from 3 million to 10 million tons: a quantity that, as Romesh Dutt pointed out, was equivalent to the annual nutrition of 25 million people. By the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain's wheat consumption as well as allowing London grain merchants to speculate during shortages on the Continent. But Indian agriculture's even more decisive contribution to the imperial system, from the East India Company's first *illegal* shipment of opium to Canton, was the income it earned in the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere.... Indeed England's systematic exploitation of India depended in large part upon India's commercial exploitation of China. The triangular trade between India, China and Britain had a strategic economic importance in the Victorian world system that transcended other far larger flows of commerce....By *forcibly* enlarging the Chinese demand for the narcotic and, thus, the taxes collected on its export, the two Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-58) and the punitive Treaty of Tianjin (1858) revolutionized the revenue base of British India. 'Opium', says John Wong, 'serviced the cost of imperial expansion in India.' Opium shipments from India reached a peak of 87000 chests in 1879, the biggest drug transactions in world history.... 'The sale of Bengal opium to China', Latham explains, 'was a great link in the chain of commerce with which Britain had surrounded the world. The chain worked like this: The United Kingdom paid the United States for cotton by bills upon the Bank of England. The Americans took some of those bills to Canton and swapped them for tea. The Chinese exchanged the bills for Indian opium. Some of the bills were remitted to England as profit; others were taken to India to buy additional commodities, as well as to furnish the money remittance of private fortunes in India and the funds for carrying on the Indian government at home.'... Britain's dominant role in Chinese foreign trade, built by Victorian narcotraficantes with gunboats, thus leveraged the whle free-trade imperium.... Moreover, China was *forced* at bayonet point to cede control over tariffs to the British inspector-general of the Imperial Maritime Customs Administration, a de facto imperial proconsul who 'came to enjoy more influence with the Foreign Office than did the British Minister in Peking.'" --Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 298-301) "...William Digby, principal chronicler of the 1876 Madras famine, prophesized on the eve of Queen Victoria's death that when 'the part played by the British Empire in the nineteenth century is regarded by the historian fifty years hence, the *unnecessary* deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument.' A most eminent Victorian, the famed naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, passionately agreed. Like Digby, he viewed mass starvation as *avoidable* political tragedy, not 'natural' disaster....how do we weigh smug claims about the life-saving benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets when so many millions, especially in British India, died alongside railroad tracks or on the steps of grain depots?" --Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 8-9) "(Sir Richard) Temple's perverse task was to make relief as repugnant and ineffective as possible. In zealously following his instructions to the letter, he became to Indian history what Charles Edward Trevelyan...had become to Irish history: the personificatin of free market economics as a mask for colonial genocide. In a lightning tour of the famished countryside of the eastern Deccan, Temple purged a half million people from relief work and forced Madras to follow Bombay's precedent of requiring starving applicants to travel to dormitory camps outside their locality for coolie labor on railroad and canal projects. The deliberately cruel 'distance test' refused work to able-bodied adults and older children within a ten-mile radius of their homes. Famished laborers were also prohibited from seeking relief until 'it was certified that they had become indigent, destitute, and capable of only a modicum of labour'.... In self-proclaimed Benthamite 'experiment' that eerily prefigured later Nazi research on minimal human subsistence diets in concentration camps, Temple cut rations for male coolies, whom he compared to 'a school full of refractory children', down to one pound of rice per diem *despite* medical testimony that ryots--once 'strapping fine fellows'--were now 'little more than animated skeletons...utterly unfit for any work'. (Noting that felons traditionally received two pounds of rice per day, one district official suggested that 'it would be better to shoot down the wretches than to prolong their misery in the way proposed'.)...In the event, the 'Temple wage', as it became known, provided *less* sustenance for hard labor than the diet inside the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp and less than half of them modern caloric standard recommended for adult males by the Indian government.... Temple meanwhile proclaimed that he had put 'the famine under control'. (Digby sourly responded that 'a famine can scarcely be sid to be adequately controlled which leaves one-fourth of the people dead'.)...Exactly as medical officials had warned, the 'Temple wage' combined with heavy physical labor and dreadful sanitation turned the work camps into *extermination camps*.... Post-mortem examinations, moreover, showed that the chief cause of death... was textbook starvation, with full-grown men reduced to under sixty pounds of weight.... Temple's ferocious response to reports of mass mortality in the camps was to blame the victims...'Nor will many be inclined to grieve for the fate which they brought upon themselves, and which terminated lives of idleness and too often of crime.'" --Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 37-41) During the Second World War, there was a great famine in Bengal, which caused a few million deaths, toward which any British relief was much too little and too late. "Jinnah stated in the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi that the British were 'irresponsible' and 'incompetent' to have allowed the famine to develop, and pointed out that Churchill's administration would not have remained in office for twenty-four hours if people had been dying of starvation in their thousands every week on the streets of Britain....Wavell wrote that he considered the Cabinet's stand over food imports to Bengal to be nothing short of 'scandalous', and threatened resignation if nothing was done to halt the deaths from starvation....Under pressure from Wavell and Amery, Churchill asked Roosevelt if he could borrow US ships to bring wheat from Australia.... The Americans refused to assist, for fear of damaging their own war effort.... In February 1944, when the worst of the crisis had passed, Wavell sent a telegram to Amery which read: 'Bengal famine was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation here...is incalculable. Atempt by His Majesty's Government to prove on the basis of admittedly defective statistics that we an do without help demanded would be regarded here by all opinion British and Indian as utterly indefensible...'" --Patrick French (Liberty or Death, pp. 182-3) 'Heart of Smugness' by Maria Misra (23 July 2002, The Guardian): 'Unlike Belgium, Britain is still complacently ignoring the gory cruelties of its empire.' http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...761626,00.html Here are some reviews of 'Late Victorian Holocausts': http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...424896,00.html http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...436292,00.html 'I was born to destroy this evil government.' --Mohandas Gandhi (1930, on the British Raj in India) --Nick
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#14
July 16th 03, 01:38 AM
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#15
August 5th 03, 04:45 AM
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Chapman billy wrote in message m...
In article , says... ... The Narvik expedition started long after the Winter war was over. In the planning stages of Narvik the plight of the Finns was very much in the public eye. Here is what Churchill, or one of his aids, wrote in volume one of "The Second World War". "All the resentment felt against the Soviet Government for the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was fanned into flame by this latest exhibition of brutal bullying and aggression. With this was also mingled scorn for the inefficiency displayed by the Soviet troops and enthusiasm for the gallant Finns. In spite of the Great War which had been declared, there was a keen desire to help the Finns by aircraft and other precious war material and by volunteers from Britain, from the United States, and still more from France. Alike for the munition supplies and the volunteers there was only one possible route to Finland. The iron-ore port of Narvik with its railroad over the mountains to the Swedish iron mines acquired a new sentimental if not strategic significance." (volume I, p 429, Cassell 1948). "I sympathised ardently with the Finns and supported all proposals for their aid; and I welcomed this new and favourable breeze as a means of achieving the major strategic advantage of cutting off the vital iron-ore supplies of Germany. If Narvik was to become a kind of Allied base to supply the Finns, it would certainly be easy to prevent the German ships loading ore at the port and sailing safely down the leads to Germany." (page 430). Dear Simon, Here are some comments about Allied plans to intervene with regard to Finland: "On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union had invaded Finland. Public opinion displayed widespread sympathy for the 'plucky little Finns' whose initial military successes aroused admiration. This conflict had no bearing on the wider war, since Finland was not at war with Germany, and the Allies were not at war with Russia. In France, where anti-Communist feeling was strong, many people convinced themselves that hitting at Russia by helping the Finns also represented an oblique way of weakening Germany. The Northern Department of the Foreign Office, which was quite anti-Soviet, shared this view on the grounds that Germany was receiving considerable economic aid from Russia. Generally, however, in Britain, where anti-Communism was less intense than in France, such arguments had less appeal, and the idea of intervening on behalf of the Finns would have gone no further had it not also offered the prospect of undermining Germany's war economy by cutting off its imports of iron ore from Sweden. In the winter months, when the Baltic froze, most of those exports went via the Norwegian port of Narvik. From the start of the war, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had wanted to play mines in the waters off Narvik. This proposal had been rejected by the British War Cabinet, but it was now overtaken by an even more ambitious proposal, namely to send an expedition to Scandinavia. Its *pretext* would be to assist the Finns, but the *real objective* would be to seize the Swedish iron ore fields en route. At an SWC meeting on 5 February, the British rejected what Cadogan described as France's 'silly scheme' for an expedition to the Finnish port of Petsamo, on the grounds it would bring the Allies into direct conflict with the Soviet Union, but they did accept an alternative French plan for an expedition to Narvik, having first requested the approval of neutral Norway and Sweden.... Not surprisingly Norway and Sweden, desperate to preserve their neutrality, refused their consent. The British assumed that this meant the operation could not proceed. The French claimed it had been agreed to go ahead regardless. Daladier became increasingly incensed at British procrastination." --Julian Jackson (The Fall of France, 2003, Oxford University Press, p. 81) Military expeditions have a habit of proceeding no matter what the change in circumstance.... "Meanwhile Daladier's own position became more precarious as the situation of the Finns worsened. At the start of February, without consulting the British, Daladier recklessly and desperately promised Finland 100 planes and 50000 men by the end of the month, without having any idea where they would come from. After the signature of the Soviet-Finnish armistice, Daladier was unable to avoid a parliamentary debate. His speech in Parliament on 13 March contained some remarks so wild that they were struck off the record; it was rumoured that he had been drinking....On 20 March, Daladier called a motion of confidence. Although he won by 239 votes to 1, there were 300 abstentions. These included members of both the pro- and anti-war factions. Daladier felt that he had no alternative but to resign." --Julian Jackson (The Fall of France, p. 124) --Nick
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#16
August 10th 03, 01:14 AM
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(Sigvaldi Eggertsson) wrote in message . com...
(PJDBAD) wrote in message ... The spin on the Finns is that they weren't allies of Germany but cobelligerents against a common enemy, the Soviet Union. I'm willing to buy into the idea that there is a difference between the two. When the Finns, in the late summer of 1941, stopped upon reaching the old border, most people were ready to buy the idea, but when they went on to more conquests (dreams of "Greater Finland" etc.) few considered them to be more than mere allies of the Nazis. Dear Mr. Eggertsson, Your post was interesting. When you wrote that "*few* considered them to be more than mere allies of the Nazis", to which people(s) did your "few" refer? As far as I know, there remains much sensitivity in Finland today about its participation in the Continuation War (1941-44). Naturally, the Finns prefer to place as much distance as possible between their objectives and those of Hitler during that war against their common enemy, the Soviet Union. My impression is that there were some Finnish nationalists who dreamed of annexing East Karelia, but I am not certain of how influential they were in determining Finland's national policies. As far as I know, during the Continuation War, the military collaboration between the Finns and the Germans was substantial, though not quite complete. Finland declined the German invitation to join a direct assault on Leningrad, but the Finnish forces were an integral part of that city's terrible blockade. The Finns provided logistical support for the German attempt to capture or to interdict Murmansk, a vital Soviet seaport for convoys from the United Kingdom. Finnish and German units often fought alongside in combined operations, and individual Finnish and German soldiers tended to work well together. And some Finnish volunteers fought in the Waffen-SS, under direct German command. Although the Finns (apart from those in the Waffen-SS) were not generally motivated by the Nazi ideology that tended to dehumanise the Soviet peoples as vermin, given their bitter memories of the Winter War (1939-40), the Finns also tended to fight the Soviet soldiers ruthlessly and to treat the Soviet civilians who were suspected of aiding partisans with hardly any more mercy than the Germans. In Axis-occupied territories, Soviet civilians feared military reprisals from the Finns as well as those from the Germans. In fairness to the Finns, it was difficult for them to adopt a more independent position because they depended nearly completely, apart from reusing captured Soviet arms, on the Germans to supply their heavy weapons. For example, late in the war, the Germans finally agreed to provide the Ilmavoimat (Finnish Air Force) with some modern Messerschmitt Bf-109G fighters, which the veteran Finnish pilots then proceeded to fly with much success. Of course, Finland's most important achievement of the Continuation War--at the cost of many lives and some territory (vis-a-vis the 1939 border)--was simply in preserving its national independence. "The cruelty of memory manifests itself in remembering what is dispelled in forgetfulness." --Naguib Mahfouz --Nick
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#17
August 12th 03, 05:32 AM
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Chapman billy wrote in message m...
In article , says... Simon, Thanks for writing. I appreciate your mentioning a fact that you thought that I had overlooked. Actually, I already knew that Scandinavia properly comprises Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, though in informal usage Finland has been included. Nick, Thank you for your response. It is a shame that so many contributors appear to be unclubbable men; Bourbon: Shame and eternal shame, nothing but shame! Let us die in honour: once more back again... --Shakespeare (Henry V) Dear Simon, Yes, I would like to encourage more women to contribute to these 'discussions', but this newsgroup's atmosphere sometimes has not been too welcoming. For example, NoMoreChess posted an apparent 'joke' about how to rape a woman: http://makeashorterlink.com/?G2EF21675 Evidently, there are some major differences among the writers here with respect to what conventions and norms--if any--should govern their behaviour. You and I (and many others) seem to be more or less in accord about the requirement for some basic rules of conduct. On the other hand, there are some writers who apparently believe: "This is Usenet--anything goes." For example, in the thread, "Will anybody who voted for Sam Sloan dare to to speak up?" (21 July 2003), Briarroot wrote to Mark Houlsby "...Rules of the newsgroup? ROTFLMAO Does little man want his mama?..." In the thread, "A new enemy of Lev Khariton" (9 July 2003), Briarroot wrote to me: "Now this I readily admit to. You deserve to be insulted, roundly and repeatedly. I consider it my duty to expose you..." Someone else has advised me: "That's why God created killfiles." so perhaps this is a cri de coeur for more soldiers of the monstrous regiment to trumpet in this group? I found it quite refreshing to enjoy a civilised discussion with you and Mr. Eggertsson here in this sub-thread. Anyhow, I don't see the harm in an occasional off topic post. We have been writing in an undeclared off-topic thread (created by Bill Smythe). Here's my view of some chess newsgroups: rec.games.chess.politics is a de facto USCF politics group, which I don't follow because I have no interest in USCF politics and minimal interest in the sociology/pathology of that part of United States political culture. Unfortunately, RGCP participants seem to cross-post too frequently here. rec.games.chess.analysis is the place for technical discussions of chess. rec.games.chess.misc is the place for general conversations, which need not be restricted to chess, that might take place at a chess club in real life. I thought it best to find out indirectly whether you were seeking to anneal the meaning of what Tim Hanke wrote, Tim Hanke is not a historian, and I don't take him seriously as a writer on history. What I write about history is not altered by whatever he writes. "The historian has much to answer for. History--that is, written history--has made and unmade States, given courage to the oppressed and undermined the oppressor, has justified aggression and overridden law." --C.V. Wedgwood (Velvet Studies, p. 154) or whether you were being careless in lobbing Nordic Finland into Scandinavia. Most people who have called the Finns Scandinavian that I have come across genuinely have been unaware of the inaccuracy; somewhat implausible in your particular instance, but then you usually take great pains to achieve your desired effect in your postings. Some of the effects of my posts have definitely not been desired or intended by me. I have been frustrated by some persistent misreadings of my posts. Yet thanks very much for expressing your recognition that at least I 'usually take great pains' in my writing to make my meanings clear enough to the able and willing reader. Within the limits of my time and space and knowledge and energy (I tend to be less attentive at the end of a long day), I attempt to be as accurate as practicable. Given those limits, sometimes I have to simplify a complex issue, and occasionally my memory falls short of perfection. (For instance, based on a collection of his best games, I once wrote that C.H.O'D Alexander had died in 1973, when he actually had died in 1974.) Also, I have been (and perhaps I still am) the target of a campaign of personal defamation from a few extreme right-wing Americans--Tim Hanke, StanB, and Briarroot--who apparently vehemently object on political grounds to my writing about history. They have made ludicrous attempts to distort my writings. For example, in the thread, "If chess pieces could talk" (5 August 2003), StanB wrote that my phase "*only* the most ignorant or prejudiced Americans" implies that I must be referring to "many Americans", which was his phrase. StanB then denounced me as an anti-American bigot. So I wondered why StanB believed that "many Americans" (his phrase) were included among "only the most ignorant or prejudiced Americans". StanB did not respond. I did not write that Finland is part of Scandinavia. My intention (which was understood by Sigvaldi Eggertsson in his response) was to suggest one reason why Sweden did not join the Allies. If Sweden had done that, then it would have gone to war against its neighbour, Finland, which would have been quite unwelcome to many Swedes. Finland has a substantial Swedish minority, and the Swedes traditionally have felt close to the Finns. For example, with the approval of their government, many Swedes volunteered to fight for Finland in its 1939-40 'Winter War' against the Soviet Union. And most Swedes seemed sympathetic toward Finland in its 1941-44 'Continuation War' against the Soviet Union. You are being very delicate in not mentioning that Finland was once part of the Swedish empire, along with a large chunk of the Baltic... Sweden's King Charles XII conquered much Russian territory until his decisive defeat at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. For further reading: "The Battle of Poltava: the Birth of the Russian Empire" by Peter Englund The Finns had to wait until the Russian Revolution before being able to slip their moorings and begin their voyage as an independent state; unfortunately not without a vicious civil war. During the Winter War (1939-40), the Soviets hoped to divide the Finns by exploiting any lasting bitterness from Finland's civil war. But the solidarity of Finnish nationalism was too strong to be subverted. It is my impression that the Norwegians bear the brunt of the Swedes' "Irish" (for want of a better word) jokes... Yes, as I recall, there's one about a Norwegian who uses sandpaper as a map. All in all Finland has an impressive record as an independent state: you doubtless recall the bilateral trade agreements with the Soviet Union, and the potentially disastrous impact upon the Finnish economy when that empire collapsed. Yet the Finns managed to pull themselves round. Yes, it was already impressive that Finland--unlike Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--was able to preserve its national independence during the 1940s. Of course, another reason why Sweden did not join the Allies was that Hitler never got around to invading Sweden. As long as Germany was assured of adequate supplies of iron ore and ball bearings from Sweden, Hitler did not believe that there was a strategic necessity for invasion. "Lire et relire l'histoire; c'est la seule philosophie." --Napoleon --Nick
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#18
August 13th 03, 06:09 AM
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-remove- (Mhoulsby) wrote in message ...
From: (Nick) Date: 14/07/03 02:55 GMT Daylight Time Message-id: (snipped) "For many years, British books on India formed a small but precise genre of their own, involving the use of phrases like 'the heady smell of spices and woodsmoke', and descriptive invocations of cruel maharajahs, sly holymen, rebellious tribesmen and the heat of the Deccan, together with occasional appearances by tigers, missionaries, memsahibs, gymkhanas, Kipling and tiffin. This extended into histories of the edifice lately termed 'the Raj', and although it is now rare to find imperial dogma articulated so openly, a nostalgic subtext still hovers beneath the pages of many books, like a loyal native bearer lurking discreetly under the verandah of one of M.M. Kaye's bungalows." --Patrick French (1997, Liberty or Death, xxiv) Dear Mr. Houlsby, I did not intend to imply that you were ignorant about the historical record of British imperialism in India. Yet books are still being published that tend to present a highly idealised narrative of British imperialism, such as 'Empire' by Niall Ferguson (2002), a companion book to a British television series. "'Right-wing' critics of liberalism in the Raj looked with satisfaction to the journalism of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, who in 1883 famously said that the Raj was 'founded not on consent but on conquest'....Once Indian nationalism became an even half-serious proposition, the Raj could not long endure. Racist, by any standards, it undoubtedly was; economically exploitative too, as nearly all modern historians wish to point out; but the British will to govern by force had its limits when consent was absent. The massacre of protestors at Amritsar by General Dyer--379 killed and 1200 wounded--on 13 April 1919, followed by a proclamation of martial law, was a disgrace from which the British Raj never recovered its semi-legitimate self-estimation for decency and justice. Thirty years before independence it sealed the Raj's fate..." --A.N. Wilson (The Victorians, pp. 500-1) 'Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.' --Hilaire Belloc On 8 July 1920, Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons to denounce General Dyer. Notwithstanding a vote of support in the House of Lords, General Dyer was forced into early retirement, though he would be consoled by a fund of more than 26000 pounds (a fortune in 1920), which had been donated on his behalf by Britons who approved of what he had done at Amritsar. On 13 March 1940, the Amritsar Massacre was partially 'avenged'. Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who, as the Governor of the Punjab, had fully supported General Dyer's bloody actions, was assassinated in London by Udham Singh, a Sikh who reportedly had been among those Indians who were fired upon in 1919. (Udham Singh might have been intimately connected with one of those killed.) After being convicted for murder, Udham Singh was hanged on 31 July 1940. In 1975, Udham Singh's exhumed remains were returned to his homeland. In 1996, a college of Punjab Technical University was named in Udham Singh's honour. Some Irish nationalists approved of Udham Singh's deed. "The same article (in a British newspaper) refers to the Indian hero Udham Singh who was executed in London in 1940 for the shooting of Sir Michael O'Dwyer who had been governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar Massacre. We are proud to have the name of this Indian hero linked with those of Dunne and O'Sullivan (two Irishman who had been executed for killing a British Field Marshal), even though the intention in linking them was to defame them. Our only regret in the incident is that it should have been an Irishman who had sold himself to our national enemy, who had by his part in the butchery and oppression of the Indian people so richly deserved the punishment meted out to him by Udham Singh." --Ant Eireannach Aontaithe (United Irishman) (July-August 1949) During the Second World War, there was a great famine in Bengal, which caused a few million deaths, toward which any British relief was much too little and too late. "Jinnah stated in the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi that the British were 'irresponsible' and 'incompetent' to have allowed the famine to develop, and pointed out that Churchill's administration would not have remained in office for twenty-four hours if people had been dying of starvation in their thousands every week on the streets of Britain....Wavell wrote that he considered the Cabinet's stand over food imports to Bengal to be nothing short of 'scandalous', and threatened resignation if nothing was done to halt the deaths from starvation....Under pressure from Wavell and Amery, Churchill asked Roosevelt if he could borrow US ships to bring wheat from Australia....The Americans refused to assist, for fear of damaging their own war effort.... --Patrick French (Liberty or Death, pp. 182-3) As a child in Bengal, Amartya Sen witnessed the wartime famine. Today, Amartya Sen is the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University. 'There are Englishmen who reproach themselves with having governed the country badly. Why? Because the Indians show no enthusiasm for their rule. I claim that the English have governed India very well, but their error is to expect enthusiasm from the people they administer.' --Adolf Hitler 'I have never left room for any doubt of my belief that the existence of this (British) empire is an inestimable factor of value for the whole of human cultural and economic life. By whatever means Great Britain has acquired her colonial territories--and I know that they were those of force and often brutality--nevertheless, I know full well that no other empire has ever come into being in any other way, and that in the final resort it is not so much the methods that are taken into account in history as success, and not the success of the methods as such, but rather the general good which the methods yield. Now there is no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon people have accomplished immeasurable colonizing work in the world. For this work I have a sincere admiration....' --Adolf Hitler (28 April 1939, speech to the Reichstag) 'Heart of Smugness' by Maria Misra (23 July 2002, The Guardian): 'Unlike Belgium, Britain is still complacently ignoring the gory cruelties of its empire.' http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...761626,00.html "If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947. Indeed, in the last half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 percent....Moreover in the age of Kipling, that 'glorious imperial half century' from 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent, a deterioration in human health probably without precedent in the subcontinent's long history of war and invasion." --Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, pp. 311-2) "Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as great historical interest." --Amartya Sen (winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics) Here are some reviews of 'Late Victorian Holocausts': http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...424896,00.html http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...436292,00.html "He seemed to appeal for protection in the insult that had befallen him, and they, in instinctive homage, rose to their feet. But every human act in the East is tainted with officialism, and while honouring him they condemned Aziz and India. Fielding realised this, and he remained seated. It was an ungracious, a caddish thing to do, perhaps an unsound thing to do, but he felt he had been passive long enough, and that he might be drawn into the wrong current if he did not make a stand." --E.M. Forster (A Passage to India) --Nick
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#19
August 13th 03, 05:39 PM
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Because
All this about english being spoken correctly... it's the sort of
stuff up with which I can not put.
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#20
August 15th 03, 10:34 PM
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Because
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