Nobel prize winner Elie the Weasel strikes again.
Our Heart of Darkness
Rahul Mahajan
Caroline Elkins’ book, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, is a remarkable piece of revisionist history. Spending the last ten years studying the Mau-Mau uprising and the British counterinsurgency campaign, poring through old British colonial records and supplementing her research with extensive interviews of hundreds of Kenyan survivors, she has completely overturned the conventional, widely-accepted story of horrific Mau-Mau savagery and civilized British restraint.
Even the old official figures hardly support the widespread feeling that the Mau-Mau was among the most barbaric uprisings of the 20th century. Officially, the Mau-Mau killed fewer than 100 British, and 1800 collaborators, while the British killed 11,000 of them and detained 80,000 in prison camps.
The truth, however, is far different. Among Elkins’ first discoveries was that, although, like the Germans, the British kept extensive files on their activities, most of them had been destroyed decades ago. The pattern of destruction, she says, is that “any ministry … that deal with the unsavory side of detention was pretty well emptied of its files, whereas those that ostensibly addressed detainee reform, or Britain’s civilizing mission, were left fairly intact.”
Reconstructing that history, she finds that, in fact, the British detained or confined, at one time or another, about 1.5 million people, nearly all of the Kikuyu, the tribe that took the Mau-Mau oath. British colonial policy, though it made the occasional nod toward bringing the light of Christianity to the heathen, was comprised of enforced starvation, squalor, and disease, forced labor, routine torture, castration, rape, and murder and savage beatings both by deliberate policy and at the whim of settlers who enforced a reign of terror. Elkins believes, although nobody will ever know for certain, that many tens of thousands and quite likely hundreds of thousands were killed by the British; certainly, if one includes the collateral effects of disease and starvation, the higher numbers are quite likely.
The cruelty and savagery, the sheer despair visited on 1.5 million people, most of whom never even picked up a weapon, takes hundreds of pages really to do them justice; it’s not possible to do that here.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the whole sordid affair is the constant description of the Mau-Mau as representing some sort of elemental evil. Their oaths of resistance, accompanied by traditional Kikuyu rituals, were routinely described as subhuman degradation on a scale that poor civilized Westerners could not even fathom.
The colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, wrote, “The Mau Mau oath is the most bestial, filthy and nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed … [I have never felt] the forces of evil to be so near and so strong as in Mau Mau. … As I wrote memoranda or instruction, I would suddenly see a shadow fall across the page – the horned shadow of the Devil himself.”
And this was a man who knew as well as any what the British were doing to the Mau Mau.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Denunciation of perceived enemies in terms that draw more from Christian demonology and visceral fears of moral contagion than from rational analysis, while we simultaneously inflict on them far worse damage than they do on us – sounds familiar, no?
The Israeli occupation of Palestine is one obvious parallel. Readers of the New York Times could on Sunday see an op-ed by Elie Weisel decrying the Palestinians’ lack of sympathy for the suffering of the Jewish settlers in Gaza. It is hard even to communicate how disgusting this is. But what’s really important is not the extreme moral bankruptcy of Weisel but his uncritical acceptance as some sort of universal spokesman for the moral conscience of humanity – and, conversely, the Mau-Mau'ing of the Palestinians.
Another is the so-called “war on terrorism.” No decent person could do anything but condemn the nihilistic and cruel London bombings, but there was something truly nauseating about the chorus of calls for Muslims and Islamic societies to admit their evils coming from people who would never dream of understanding the evils of Britain or the West.
One of the imperatives for the antiwar movement right now is to use the failed occupation of Iraq to shake the blind faith in the moral supremacy of the West in general and the United States in particular that is shared even by most critics of the war. |
