”And this April, as skyrocketing energy prices added more urgency to an already devastating crisis, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said it would be “silly” for the government to provide more help to struggling families now. Despite households across the country facing an average £700 ($879) increase in their gas and electricity bills immediately after April, with another 50 percent spike expected in October, Sunak – whose family is worth more than £700 million ($879 million) – said he won’t act before “knowing what the situation will be in autumn”
”Despite households across the country facing an average £700 ($879) increase in their gas and electricity bills immediately after April, with another 50 percent spike expected in October, Sunak – whose family is worth more than £700 million ($879 million) – said he won’t act before “knowing what the situation will be in autumn”.
Rishi Sunak will become the wealthiest ever prime minister of the U.K., with his family’s personal fortune surpassing even that of the royals.
Sunak, 42, is breaking plenty of ground as he becomes the country’s third premier in under two months. He’s the U.K.’s youngest leader since 1812, as well as the first person of color to serve in the role.
But Sunak’s personal wealth is also grabbing outsized attention, especially as he takes the helm at a time the U.K. is facing an economic crisis he described as “profound” in his first address as prime minister. Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty are worth a combined $837 million (or 730 million pounds), according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
Before her death, Queen Elizabeth was estimated to have a personal net worth of $424 million (370 million pounds), according to the Sunday Times.
Sunak and his wife will become the wealthiest residents of No. 10 Downing Street, the residence of the prime minister, surpassing that of the previous record holder. That was Edward Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby, who served as prime minister three times in the 1800s and was worth about $509 million in today’s dollars, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Source of wealth
Sunak’s grandparents immigrated from India to East Africa, where his mother and father were born — in Tanzania and Kenya, respectively — according to Encyclopedia Britannica. His parents met in England after they immigrated there in the 1960s, his father becoming a doctor and his mother a pharmacist.
Born in 1980, Sunak attended the exclusive boarding school, Winchester College, where he was the editor of the school newspaper and the “head boy,” which is a leadership role for students in the U.K. He then went on to college at Oxford University and, after graduating, worked at Goldman Sachs for several years.
Sunak left Goldman to pursue an MBA at Stanford University, where he met his wife, the daughter of billionaire Narayana Murty, the cofounder of Indian technology services company, whose worth Forbes pegs at $4.5 billion.
After Stanford, Sunak held roles with various hedge funds. His assets are greatly buoyed by his wife’s almost 1% stake in Infosys, which has a market value of about $77 billion.
Tax, green card issues
Sunak and his wife earlier this year aroused public scrutiny over their taxes, when reports surfaced that his wife held a “non-domiciled” status that allowed her to avoid U.K. taxes on foreign earnings.
Murty changed her tax status, but Sunak was dogged by another issue: He held a green card to work in the U.S. while serving as an MP and later as Chancellor of the Exchequer under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Critics suggested he was keeping his options open, portraying him as unpatriotic. Sunak gave up the green card in October 2021, according to reports.
At a recent event, Sunak said he didn’t believe people should hold his wealth against him.
“I think in our country, we judge people not by their bank account, we judge them by their character and their actions,” he said, according to Reuters. “And yes, I’m really fortunate to be in the situation I’m in now, but I wasn’t born like this.”
I grew up watching my parents serve our local community with dedication. My dad was an NHS family GP and my mum ran her own local chemist shop. I wanted to make that same positive difference to people as their Member of Parliament and I was first elected to represent this wonderful constituency in 2015 and re-elected in 2017 and 2019. I live in Kirby Sigston, just outside Northallerton.
I have been fortunate to enjoy a successful business career. I co-founded a large investment firm, working with companies from Silicon Valley to Bangalore. Then I used that experience to help small and entrepreneurial British companies grow successfully. From working in my mum’s tiny chemist shop to my experience building large businesses, I have seen first-hand how politicians should support free enterprise and innovation to ensure our future prosperity.
My parents sacrificed a great deal so I could attend good schools. I was lucky to study at Winchester College, Oxford University and Stanford University. That experience changed my life and as a result I am passionate about ensuring everybody has access to a great education. I have been a school governor, a board member of a large youth club, and have always volunteered my time to education programmes that spread opportunity.
I have been lucky to live, study and work internationally. I met my wife, Akshata, in California where we lived for a number of years before returning home. We have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka, who keep us busy and entertained.
In my spare time I enjoy keeping fit, cricket, football and movies.
In July 2019 I was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury, having entered Government service as the Minister for Local Government in January 2018. In February 2020, I had the honour to be appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position I held until July 2022.
On October 25, I was honoured and privileged to be appointed UK Prime Minister.
Momentary romanticism over ‘being seen’ will not save us from Britain’s cost-of-living crisis, presided over by a prime minister wealthier than the king
Britain last week welcomed a new prime minister, not elected by the people. Yes, you read that right: a select few from the Conservative Party lent their backing to Rishi Sunak, constituting enough support to replace Liz Truss.
Yet, the general public’s attention was not so much on a new Tory leader who the people did not elect, but on the background of the new prime minister. This is, allegedly, a historic moment being compared to former US President Barack Obama’s win – although he won via the mandate of the people, not a select few.
The events of the past few days should force us to ask some urgent questions. How is representational politics, based solely on sharing the same heritage as someone, a helpful measure of political consciousness? What does it mean for economically marginalised citizens to have the wealthiest MP as our prime minister? It has been duly pointed out that Sunak is richer than King Charles III, with an estimated fortune of £730m ($845m).
Indeed, this moment will not necessarily entail any form of tangible economic change to help those in dire need during a massive and widespread cost-of-living crisis. This momentary lapse of asserting that we are in a post-colonial, post-racial world is little more than denial, exposing how racecraft is understood through acquiring higher positions of power. It shifts the focus away from political deceit, deepening inequalities and social breakdown that will take decades to rebuild.
Sunak, in this sense, represents his class – those at the very top. Class is a variable that stratifies Britain in a multitude of ways; a form of social engineering that none of us can escape. His presence as the country’s leader is what I would call a mythic racial nightmare.
The merging of economics with race here is an acute way of emphasising how the leader’s aesthetics mark a cosmetic change, while the same fiscal policies are retained, benefiting those in the same economic position as Sunak. Just this year, Sunak gave a speech in Tunbridge Wells where he boasted of diverting public funds from “deprived urban areas” to more affluent constituencies.
Easing white anxiety
Sunak is committed to the Rwanda plan, wherein refugees arriving on the shores of Britain are deported to Rwanda to have their paperwork processed. He has also expressed his desire to widen the definition of extremism, targeting those who “vilify Britain”.
This is an intriguing point. A day before Sunak accepted his premiership following a meeting with the king, he articulated how he wanted to give back to the country to which he owed so much. He thus not only declared himself the leader of the country, but also asserted that he is not a danger, emphasising his utmost loyalty. Such a public admission exculpates him of being the “Other” and eases white anxiety.
Sunak as the grateful immigrant who remains deferential to the metropole of empire is the only way to reassure the insecure, affirming the notion that Britain cannot possibly be racist. The making of the servile sahib with access to the head of the table is not an unknown tactic.
Amid Britain’s colonisation of India, the famous “Minute on Education” speech was delivered by Thomas Macaulay in 1835. He shared his ambitions on how to advance the British empire, noting: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”
Expansion of capital
I would propose that things are no different today, albeit without the British Raj. A similar machine is at play: the expansion of capital within the upper echelons of society, with the crumbs littered among those at the bottom, the working class.
Sunak’s ascension has been hailed as an advance for other South Asians in Britain, despite their immensely different experiences. Unlike the vast majority of South Asians in the UK, Sunak’s personal migration story is often referred to as one of the “twice migrants”. Originally from Gujranwala (in today’s Punjab in Pakistan), his family moved to Kenya before migrating to the UK in the 1960s.
The belief that most South Asians in Britain, who are working class, will somehow feel elated at seeing someone who “looks like them” in power – that this should be sufficient to reduce their economic anxieties – amounts to a subtraction of race from economics. This is what I call abject politics: a politics incapable of critiquing state actors, because representational politics is weaponised as a distraction.
The South Asians who had already settled in Britain before the arrival of East African Asians forged politically radical movements that fought vehemently against assimilationism and encouraged pushback against those in power.
A momentary romanticism of “being seen” will not save us from the cost-of-living crisis. Indulging this moment obscures and erases the damage that the Conservative Party has done to the country for 12 years.
Now is the time to build collectively from the ground up. It is time to smash the egregious policies passed by government actors and stop masking the violence of those in power simply because they “look like us”.
END OF THE ARTICLE
”“By trying to dump asylum seekers in Rwanda, the UK government is shirking its international responsibility under the Refugee Convention to protect people in need of asylum,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s Director for East and Southern Africa.”
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
RWANDA: COMMONWEALTH LEADERS MUST OPPOSE UK’S RACIST ASYLUM SEEKER DEAL
Commonwealth leaders must take a firm and clear stand against the UK’s racist and disgraceful asylum seeker deal with Rwanda, Amnesty International said today ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) scheduled to take place in Kigali between 20 – 25 June 2022.
“By trying to dump asylum seekers in Rwanda, the UK government is shirking its international responsibility under the Refugee Convention to protect people in need of asylum,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s Director for East and Southern Africa.
“Commonwealth leaders must take a firm and clear stance to force the UK government to rescind its misguided, cruel and racist policy that shifts its responsibility towards refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda.”
“Member states need to seize the opportunity in Kigali to denounce this inhumane arrangement and pressure the UK and Rwanda to end the deal. It seriously threatens to undermine the international mechanism for the protection of asylum seekers.”
Background
The UK and Rwanda signed a Memorandum of Understanding on 14 April 2022 that agrees a system to relocate asylum seekers who are not being considered by the UK to Rwanda.
In its submission to the Universal Periodic Review process in 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees raised concerns over Rwanda’s shortcomings in its asylum process, citing the arbitrary denial of access to asylum procedures for some people, the risk of detention and deportation of undocumented asylum seekers, the discriminatory access to asylum procedures that LGBTIQ+ individuals face, or the lack of legal representation. In a legal analysis published in June 2022, UNHCR concluded that the UK-Rwanda arrangement “does not meet the requirements necessary to be considered a lawful and / or appropriate bilateral transfer arrangement.”
END OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL STATEMENT
”Rishi Sunak has said he will ensure the plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda will work – despite his own family’s background as immigrants.”
Rishi Sunak has said he will ensure the plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda will work – despite his own family’s background as immigrants.
He said despite that history, the British Government at the time “decided” his grandparents should be allowed to move to the UK – in contrast to migrants making the treacherous small boat crossings over the Channel.
The ex-Chancellor is fighting for the Tory leadership and keys to No10 with Liz Truss – and must now court Tory members who will decide on their new winner by early September.
Speaking exclusively to LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr, said he had been given opportunities by his relatives being allowed to move to Britain, and wanted others to enjoy those.
But that would not extend to migrants who have attempted to cross from France in their thousands under a Sunak premiership. The Government claims it will deter crossings by sending them to Rwanda.
“We need to make sure that we make our Rwanda policy work. Now, I voted for Brexit for many reasons but in part because it gave us the ability to control our borders,” he told LBC on Thursday.
“And I say that as someone who’s proudly from a family of immigrants.”
When Andrew suggested critics would suggest he would be the “last” person to want the Rwanda plan, given his family’s immigrant background, Mr Sunak said: “It’s actually the opposite.
“It’s because this country did something amazing for my family, and it welcomed them as immigrants.
“That’s part of the reason I’m standing and sitting here today with you – because of the opportunities this country gave my family. I want to repay that, I want to make sure that opportunity’s available for others.
“But we do need to have control of our borders.
“When my grandparents came here, they came here because the British Government had decided that it wanted them to come here.
“It is absolutely right that we continue as a country to decide who we want to come here, and I think it’s entirely reasonable that at the same time as we welcome the best and the brightest, which is what we’re now doing… we get control of our borders.
“People are seeing on their screens that boats are arriving, it shows that we haven’t got a grip of it and I think the Rwanda policy gives us the opportunity to solve that.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Andrew Marr, Rishi Sunak took a swipe at foreign secretary Liz Truss – who recent polling suggests would beat him when Tory MPs submit their final votes on the pair.
Despite trying to avoid being drawn into a “blue on blue” attack with Ms Truss, following a week of public spats between the candidates, he said “all the evidence” shows she would lose to Labour at the next election.
He defended his economic policy, which has seen him postpone any tax cuts over fears it will be inflationary, as realistic and honest, while Ms Truss has pledged to cut taxes and use £30bn to allow that.
He also said “one of the first” things he would do as prime minister is appoint an independent ethics adviser – post that has been vacant since Lord Geidt dramatically resigned in June, accusing Boris Johnson of proposing a “deliberate” breach of the ministerial code.
Mr Sunak, who reiterated he voted for Brexit – compared to his rival, who backed Remain before – said leaving the European Union allowed for financial services reform and the introduction of freeports, designated economic zones with special rules that he believes could provide thousands of jobs.
He denied ever using an offshore banking trust in a tax haven and said he has had to worry about money – despite being on the Sunday Times rich list this year – because of his upbringing at his parent’s pharmacy.
He also reacted to a question about whether his Ready for Rishi website domain had been registered in December, well in advance of a Tory leadership, amid reported criticism from No10 that he had stabbed Boris Johnson in the back, waiting to launch his own bid for Prime Minister.
He said domains are registered all the time and he spent December fighting against an Omicron-variant Covid lockdown, claiming the UK was “hours” away from a new shutdown.
Rishi Sunak will be the first person of colour to become British prime minister. The former chancellor went to an elite fee-paying school and is the latest premier to have studied politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford.
Elected for the first time to parliament in 2015, Rishi Sunak will become the UK’s youngest prime minister in more than 200 years, it was declared on Monday, tasked with steering the country through an economic crisis and mounting anger among some voters.
It is a remarkable return for Sunak, who lost a leadership bid to Liz Truss less than two months ago when he was accused by some in the Conservative Party of bringing down their hero, Boris Johnson.
One of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster, he enters Downing Street facing a need to stem a fiscal crisis, as well as tackling a cost-of-living crunch, a winter of strikes and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
His backers say the former chancellor of the exchequer is a safe pair of hands who can restore Britain’s credibility with investors who sold the country’s bonds and sterling after Truss’s mini-budget offered tax cuts with little on how to fund them.
But the former Goldman Sachs analyst and hedge fund partner also faces challenges within the governing Conservative Party, where some lawmakers blame him for his role in ousting Johnson and are concerned he has not got what it takes to win elections.
The opposition Labour Party is likely to paint him as a member of the uber-rich elite, out of touch with the pressures faced by millions as Britain slides towards a recession, dragged down by the surging cost of food and energy.
Some fear he cannot reunite a party that is deeply divided and getting used to quickly dispensing with leaders they do not like.
“He couldn’t beat Liz Truss last month; he’s not turned into an election winner less than two months later,” one senior Conservative lawmaker said on condition of anonymity after supporting Johnson in his failed bid to run again.
Sunak replaces Truss, who said she would resign four days ago but who defeated him on 5 September with 57 percent of the vote from Conservative members.
Then, the former chancellor repeatedly described his predecessor’s ideas as “fairytale” economics that would spook the markets.
He was proved right, but after a fast-track leadership race, some Conservatives say they doubt his commitment to a Margaret Thatcher-style small state vision to spur growth after he put Britain on course for the highest tax burden since the 1950s with emergency pandemic spending on saving jobs and welfare.
When declaring his candidacy, Sunak, 42, said he had a track record that showed he could “fix our economy, unite out party and deliver for our country”.
“There will be integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level of the government I lead and I will work day in and day out to get the job done,” he said in veiled criticism of Johnson, forced out over a scandal-ridden premiership.
First Indian-heritage prime minister
Born in Southampton in 1980 to Hindu parents of Punjabi Indian descent, Sunak repeatedly during the last leadership campaign spoke of helping his mum, who ran a pharmacy, with the books, doing payroll and accounts.
He had a privileged education – he went to an elite fee-paying school and is the latest prime minister to have studied politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford, following David Cameron and his predecessor, Truss.
During the last leadership campaign, he supported the creation of more selective grammar schools after new ones were banned by the opposition Labour Party, but repeatedly said “a world class education” should be a birthright.
He will also be the first person of colour to become Britain’s prime minister.
Ravi Kumar, 38, a Conservative Party member working at a finance company in the central English city of Nottingham, described the appointment as a “watershed moment”.
“I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and I could not even imagine a non-white prime minister in my lifetime… So to see a British Indian leader is phenomenal,” he told Reuters.
But Sunak’s marriage to the daughter of an Indian billionaire has raised concerns in the party that he is too far removed from the concerns of everyday voters, some of whom are being forced by spiralling inflation to decide whether to spend their money on food or heating.
It didn’t help that in April Sunak’s wife was forced to confirm reports that her non-domiciled status meant she did not pay tax on all her international earnings, something she agreed to end.
“Rishi never had a overdraft so he is used to having a Treasury [finance ministry] account and a current account,” said one Conservative insider who had backed Johnson.
“Rishi has good PR but an inability to be brave and be the Brexit Chancellor the UK needs,” the insider said on condition of anonymity.
Sunak’s supporters say he is just the man who is needed to steady the ship financially after Truss’s so-called mini-budget roiled financial markets, raising government borrowing and increasing mortgages and fears pensions funds could go bust.
“We need someone who can provide stability and proven economic competence in these challenging times, and Rishi Sunak is that person,” said Grant Shapps, brought in as Britain’s home secretary after Truss sacked his predecessor.
Shapps was just one of several ministers to back Sunak after Johnson pulled out late on Sunday, surprising and even angering his own supporters. Johnson has not made public who he backed.
Covid champion
Sunak rose swiftly up the ranks of the Conservative Party, becoming, in 2020, one of the youngest chancellors.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Britain, Sunak dropped the Conservatives’ small-state instincts to borrow massively and stave off the risk of an economic depression.
That made him one of the most popular politicians in the country, as he was praised for helping businesses and workers.
In one photograph that captured the sense of unity behind his rescue plans, Sunak posed outside his Downing Street office flanked by the heads of Britain’s biggest trade union group and a leading employers’ group.
But that consensus disappeared as Britain emerged from the crisis saddled with an extra 400 billion pounds of debt and then fell into a cost-of-living crisis that led to even more demands on the public purse.
Polls earlier this year showed his stock had fallen with the public, who were worried about the cost of living crisis and angered that he had raised payroll taxes while his wife had avoided British levies.
Labour leader Keir Starmer is expected to seize on the appointment of a new wealthy prime minister by Conservative lawmakers rather than by the country as a reason why Britain should face a national election before it is due in two years.
“My focus is on the millions of people who are struggling to pay their bills, now have additional anxieties about their mortgage. I know what it feels like,” Starmer said on Sunday.
Citizens in India have watched Rishi Sunak’s ascension to prime minister of Britain with a sense of admiration and triumph, hailing the rise of a person of Indian descent and a Hindu to the top job in a major Western country.
Although Sunak, whose parents migrated from East Africa to Britain in the 1960s, has never lived in India, his heritage has made Indians proud.
Sunak’s grandparents hailed from Punjab state before the Indian subcontinent was divided into two countries, India and Pakistan, after British colonial rule ended in 1947. They had moved to East Africa in the 1930s. Sunak is married to Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian technology billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy, who founded one of India’s most successful software companies.
Many Indians and the media, which gave prominent coverage to his elevation as prime minister, emphasized not just his Indian roots but also his faith; Sunak is a Hindu, the majority religion in India, and has spoken about its importance to him.
When news broke this week that Sunak was destined to be Britain’s new leader, Indians were celebrating the Hindu festival of lights known as Diwali. For many, like Mumbai resident Nikhil Shirodkar, the development added to the celebratory mood.
“It is indeed a very special moment that a person of Indian origin and a practicing Hindu is heading a government in Britain,” said Shirodkar, who heard the news as he got ready to perform Diwali rituals. “I would have never thought it possible that the country has accepted a member of an ethnic minority as prime minister. It is really amazing,” he said, calling it a testament to multiculturalism.
Similar sentiments echoed on social media while mainstream media ran triumphant headlines like the one in the Times of India newspaper that said “Rishi Sunak, a ‘proud Hindu,’ is new UK PM.”
Since Sunak first bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party in July, television networks and newspapers have carried stories about how in 2019 he had taken his oath as a member of Parliament on the Bhagavad Gita, a revered Hindu text; performed a cow worship, a Hindu ritual in August; and lit lamps at his Downing Street residence on Diwali two years ago when he was chancellor.
Inevitably, India’s colonial legacy also became a talking point, with many calling it ironic that Britain, which ruled India for 200 years, would now be led by a man who traced his descent to its former colony.
However, historians pointed out that Sunak’s rise to the top job was not really a case of history coming full circle as many would like to believe.
“At some point of time as historians we were expecting that a person of Indian origin would become prime minister of a country like Britain or Canada,” said Archana Ojha, professor of history at Delhi University. “That conclusion is derived from a study of future demographics. While there may not be a big increase in the number of Indians in these countries, they are a rich and influential community and hence poised to play a very important role in politics there.”
But she pointed out that Sunak has also benefited from being at the right place at the right time; his ascension came after two prime ministers quit in the face of political scandal and economic crisis.
“He became prime minister when no one else in the party was well-placed to take the role. If his tenure goes well, it will be a triumph for him and others of ethnic descent,” Ojha said. “But if he fails, that will also reflect a failure of the policy of multiculturalism.”
From Indian heads of technology giants such as Google’s Sundar Pichai to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, India has long cheered the achievements of people of Indian origin and the Indian diaspora.
But even as they were gladdened by the latest and possibly the most significant such success, some opposition politicians questioned whether the same could happen in India, which critics say is sliding into majoritarianism under the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
P. Chidambaram, a veteran leader of the opposition Congress Party, tweeted, “First Kamala Harris, now Rishi Sunak. The people of the U.S. and the U.K have embraced the non-majority citizens of their countries and elected them to high office in government. I think there is a lesson to be learned by India and the parties that practice majoritarianism.”
Sunak’s rise is expected to have little direct impact on political ties between Britain and India, which have been on the upswing in recent years. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited India in April this year.
The challenge in the coming months, however, will be to seal an ambitious free-trade deal that India and Britain had hoped to wrap up by October, but which missed the deadline because of the recent political turbulence in the country. While some hope that those talks will get momentum if Sunak can restore stability, others warn that Britain’s economic woes will make it hard to pursue the pact, which aims to double bilateral trade to $100 billion by 2030.
“Trade deals happen when the going is good because they are about give and take,” said Biswajit Dhar, trade analyst and professor at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
“The British economy is in doldrums and the first priority for Sunak will be to clear the economic mess,” he said. “Also, India usually comes up with huge demands in the services sector, and with the high unemployment rates that Britain is seeing, I doubt if they can accommodate those at this juncture.”
END OF THE ARTICLE
Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Notes 21, 22 and 23/Rishi Sunak
It’s a myth that British imperialism benefited one of its richest colony, India, when in reality it drained all its wealth and resources.
According to a YouGov poll in 2016, 43 percent of British citizens thought the existence of the British Empire was a “good thing,” while only 19 percent disagreed. It’s a myth that British imperialism benefited one of its richest colonies, India when on the contrary it drained all its wealth and resources just like colonizers do.
“They don’t talk about the colonial textbooks, it should be taught as part of the history because after all, it is their history. It’s also about acknowledging their past and learning about their ex-colonies. Denial is the worst thing,” said Assistant Professor of History Ruchika Sharma at Gargi College, Delhi University.
1. First traders, then colonizers
The British East India Company made its sneaky entry through the Indian port of Surat in 1608. Originally the company started with a group of merchants trying to seek a monopoly over trade operations in the East Indies. In 1615, Thomas Row one of the members approached the ruling Mughal emperor Jehangir to gain permission to open the first factory in Surat.
Slowly as they expanded their trade operations, the British started forming colonies. Penetrating deep into Indian politics, the imperialists took advantage of the infighting between the ruling royalty in different states, pitting one against the other by taking sides and offering protection.
To monitor the activities of the company, the British government installed the first governor general of India, Warren Hastings, who laid the administrative foundation for subsequent British consolidation. The East India Act of 1784 was passed to dissolve the monopoly of the East India Company and put the British government in charge. After the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the British government assumed full control, dissolving the trading company.
Imperial rule destroyed India’s local hand loom industry to fund its own industrialization. India became one of the major cotton exporters to the U.K. The raw materials from India were taken to the U.K. and the finished products were sent back to Indian markets and other parts of the world, leaving the Indian handloom industry in shambles and taking jobs away from local weavers.
India, that was one of the major exporters of finished products became an importer of British goods as its world share of exports fell from 27 percent to 2 percent. India was once referred to as “Sone ki Chidiya” or “The Golden Bird” before the British looters drained all its wealth. At the beginning of the 18th century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together, but by the time the British were kicked out of India in 1947, it had dropped to less than 4 percent, according to the BBC.
2. How the British Empire starved India
The last famine in India, in Bengal between 1943 and 1944, claimed over four million lives. The Bengal famine — also referred to as the man-made famine — between 1943 and 1944 claimed over four million lives and is said to have been engineered as part of an unsympathetic and ruthless economic agenda, according to Rakhi Chakraborty’s book titled, “The Bengal Famine: How the British Engineered the Worst Genocide in Human History for Profit.”
Madhusree Mukerjee, a U.S.-based journalist, points out in her book, “Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II,” that U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill ignored farmers’ pleas for emergency food aid, leaving millions to starve as their rice paddy fields were turned over to jute production. Mukerjee cites ministry records that reveal ships carrying cereals from Australia bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean Sea where supplies were already abundant, the Telegraph reported.
According to Crimes of Britain, during the Bihar famine of 1873, the so-called “relief efforts” were deemed “excessive.” The British didn’t intend to end the misery caused by the famine but instead devised a strategy to prolong the starvation. The people suffering the famine, in what the empire called the “distance test” were made to walk over 10 miles to and from the relief works, according to the Crimes of Britain. The food provided at these slave labor camps where the annual death rate in 1877 was 94 percent was less than that provided at the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald.
3. Stole from the language of the oppressed
Imparting the English language was a colonial instrument designed to help the British empire oppress the Indian masses. The strategic decision by the East India Company was made to create a class of Indians, the “Babus,” who could act as a bridge between the millions of Indians who didn’t speak the language. Secretary to the Board of Control Lord Macaulay, in a nasty 1835 “Minute on Education,” urged the Governor-General to teach English to a minority of Indians, reasoning, “We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”
In their 200 years of rule, the British couldn’t help but steal words from local Indian languages that are now part of the English vocabulary. Ironically, one of the first words that they took was “loot” equivalent to “plunder.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late 18th century, after which it became a commonly used term across the U.K. Some other common words stolen from the subcontinent include bungalow, cheetah, chutney, juggernaut, maharaja, mantra, nirvana, pundit, thug, veranda, pyjama, shampoo and bangle, among others.
4. Indian Railways: “Dogs and Indians not allowed”
In 1843, Governor-General Charles Hardinge said the construction of railways would benefit the empire and help with “the commerce, government and military control of the country.” The railroad was paid for by Indian taxpayers. The British shareholders claimed the investments guaranteed massive returns.
The colonizers were only interested in exploiting India’s natural resources as they transported items such as coal, iron ore, cotton and other natural resources to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. Indians were prohibited from riding in first class compartments in the trains that they helped build even if they could afford it as the first compartments were labeled as “Dogs and Indians are not allowed.” Thousands of Indian workers died during the construction of the railroads.
5. The Imperialist policy of Divide and Conquer
The British Empire adopted the age-old political strategy of divide and conquer throughout their colonization of India. The occupiers used the strategy to turn locals against each other to help them rule the region. Whenever the British felt threatened by Indian nationalism and saw it growing, they divided the Indian people along religious lines.
In 1905, Viceroy of India Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal dividing the largely Muslim-dominated eastern section from the Hindu dominated western part. But the strategy didn’t last long as Bengal was reunited in 1911. After oppressing India for 200 years, draining its wealth and filling their own coffers, the U.K. ripped the Indian subcontinent into pieces just before they finally left. The partition of 1947 that came along with India’s independence left nearly one million dead and 13 million displaced. Billions of dollars were lost in property left behind.
IN THE CLUB: ASSOCIATION LIFE IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA Benjamin B Cohen Orient BlackSwan 211 pages; Rs 695
One of the abiding mysteries of India’s horrific 200-year colonial encounter with England is the near-total absence of rancour between the peoples of the two countries. It is as if the depredations by the British never happened. The British have forgotten all about it, as they well might; and the Indians have decided to let bygones be bygones. Indeed, there is fairly large body of opinion in India that believes that the colonial experience was actually a good thing for the natives, what with all the mod-cons that the British kindly left behind – railways, ports, army, schools, hospitals, the judiciary, police and administrative apparatus and so on.
I have often sought an explanation for this and one of the best I ever heard came from a newspaper baron who said Indians and the British understand each other perfectly because both love to exclude people from social groups to which they belong. India, he said, had the caste system. The British had their own equivalent of it in England. And in India, well, they had their clubs.
These, as Benjamin Cohen points in this excellent and tidy little study with its fascinating bibliography, were designed to create islands of succour for the expatriates. Social homogeneity was the virtually sole requirement. The government types had their own clubs, and these were at the top of the totem pole. The businessmen, known deprecatingly as boxwallahs, too had their clubs, as did the Anglo-Indians and other persons of lesser social standing. The lines were clearly drawn and everyone was supposed to know his place.
They had, and still have, idiosyncratic rules. Women were not allowed until the late 19th century. Even then, they could only come as guests and not become members. They responded in the first few decades of the 20th century by forming their own clubs where no males were allowed to set foot.
You could not bring your own alcohol to the club. If you did you had to pay a fine before you could drink it. The process of becoming a member was typically designed to exclude the “wrong” types. A member had to nominate you; then another had to second you. Then all the members would vote whether or not to take you in. As in all voting there was politics and personal enmity. The means by which you voted against someone for whatever reason was the black wooden or ivory ball. You dropped it into the urn and your vote remained anonymous. White balls were used for saying yes. As the years went by the rules became more and more cumbersome.
The codes of conduct were strict and often silly. For example, a member was severely castigated and almost expelled because he sat on the bar. Mr Cohen provides a most entertaining account. Another didn’t become a member because he was foolish enough to call for a bearer while in the reading room and then, when he stepped out, whistle in the corridor outside it.
The clubs relied heavily on servants. The term extended from the club secretary to peons, masalchis and markers. There were scores of them in any decent club. They took care of everything that the members might need, including loans. In many of these clubs, although the practice was strictly forbidden, the servants used to lend money to the members. Clearly, when it came to money, the sahibs were not as picky as when it came to receiving reprimands sent by the club secretary or president. The markers were a special breed available to play tennis or billiards with a member who found himself alone on the court or at the table.
The food was and is generally awful, being fake British cooked mostly by Indians who had been taught how to make things like omelettes, cutlets and puddings. Some clubs tried to import chefs but the experiment didn’t work and the attempt was abandoned after a while.
The real problem, however, was warm alcohol. Members liked it to be cool, if not cold. But in the absence of refrigeration, the only way out was to keep the bottles covered in wet cloth covers, known for some reason as “petticoats”. Then in the mid-19th century, an American called Frederic Tudor appeared on the scene. He came to be known as the “Ice King” because he carted ice all the way from the east coast of America to India for sale to clubs and others, like the railways, which used it in tubs to cool the first class. These carriages were running till the mid-70s, minus the ice of course.
By the time the British left, there were over 500 clubs in existence. In most of them, dogs and Indians were not allowed. This practice was not very different from upper caste Indians not allowing Dalits into temples. And just as with the temples, the rule about the dogs could be relaxed but never about the Indians. It was only in the 20th century that this changed.
During the tough times of Colonial aftermath, Indian women had three choices – be killed by the enemy, be killed by their family so as to avoid being killed by the enemy, or kill themselves, said Anita Rani in a recent podcast by Afua Hirsch, a Norwegian-born British journalist.
While a few well-read people in India are aware of the atrocities of partition, unfortunately the British education system still tries to glorify colonisation as a ‘golden era’. Hirsch however is dispelling many such myths in a series of interviews that go against the popular word.
“We rarely hear the stories of the colonised. It’s the voices of the colonisers that have shaped our ideas of the British empire,” the podcast presenter Hirsch said.
In British schools, children are told how the ‘clever’ Brits arrived in chaotic foreign lands, and bestowed them with world-class structures and roads etc. “Moreover, things went mad in the country after the British left,” said Hirsch.
India was the largest colonial empire when they covered 25% of the world lands – claiming the Sun never sets in the British empire. Rani, a British-Indian TV presenter herself, belongs to Punjab. In the podcast, she speaks about her grandfather ‘Sant Singh’ who was in the British-Indian army.
The Greatest Modern tragedies
The partition in 1947 described as “one of the greatest tragedies in modern human history” created the largest recorded mass migration in history. About 15 million people became refugees overnight as they were forced away from the country they were born in.
Sant Singh’s family who, while he was posted elsewhere, were forced to leave their home. Presumed murdered, they were never seen again. Many families were divided and friends turned foes during the vast communal violence as depicted in the moving novel, Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh, a writer and a Punjabi like Rani.
Famines, funds and wars
In spite of what British claim, for Indians, colonial times were far from wonderful. Though to be fair, the British did establish schools, the railways and even tried to mitigate inequality amongst the ‘natives’ they so abhorred. In fact, they fought a lot of extremists against the violent practice of Sati where young women of deceased husbands were burned on the pyre.
Yet, much Indian blood was spilled during the British rule. The Bengal famine of 1943, which ended up claiming over 2 million lives was a result of the British government’s policies where grain was lifted off to fund its war rations. In India, it resulted in malaria, starvation and malnutrition.
Last year in April 2019, India marked the 100th anniversary of Jallianwala Bagh, where the British troops fired mercilessly on innocent protestors.
No clear, full apology
The former British Prime Minister Theresa May expressed “deep regret” for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. However, May did not offer an absolute apology; she told the House of Commons, “We deeply regret what happened and the suffering caused by the massacre.” Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and other MP’s asked May for a full, clear apology instead.
Queen Elizabeth however apologised for the act in October 1997, when she visited Jallianwala Bagh to pay tribute with a 30-sec moment of silence. In February 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron while visiting Amritsar, called the massacre “a deeply shameful event in British history”.
The Imperial Amnesia
Many historians and thinkers refuse to believe that the British truly regret their actions. Shashi Tharoor the Congress MP is one of the many critics who wrote a book called ‘Imperial Amnesia’.
“There is a statute of limitations on colonial wrongdoings, but none on human memory, especially living memory. There are still millions of Indians alive today who remember the iniquities of the British Empire in India,” the book’s abstract says.
Hirsch however is one of the few who refuses to forget. She says that “we need to fully recognise our past – not as far away as we imagine – in order to understand ourselves.”
The other parts of the podcast available on Audible Amazon have six episodes which include Emmy the Great and Benjamin Zephaniah, are not just telling their own stories but the stories of millions and different British empires.
END OF THE ARTICLE
BRITISH COLONIAL ATROCITIES IN AFRICA [KENYA]
THE GUARDIAN
UNCOVERING THE BRUTAL TRUTH ABOUT THE BRITISH EMPIRE/MAU MAU
The Harvard historian Caroline Elkins stirred controversy with her work on the crushing of the Mau Mau uprising. But it laid the ground for a legal case that has transformed our view of Britain’s past
Help us sue the British government for torture. That was the request Caroline Elkins, a Harvard historian, received in 2008. The idea was both legally improbable and professionally risky. Improbable because the case, then being assembled by human rights lawyers in London, would attempt to hold Britain accountable for atrocities perpetrated 50 years earlier, in pre-independence Kenya. Risky because investigating those misdeeds had already earned Elkins heaps of abuse.
Elkins had come to prominence in 2005 with a book that exhumed one of the nastiest chapters of British imperial history: the suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. Her study, Britain’s Gulag, chronicled how the British had battled this anticolonial uprising by confining some 1.5 million Kenyans to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages. It was a tale of systematic violence and high-level cover-ups.
It was also an unconventional first book for a junior scholar. Elkins framed the story as a personal journey of discovery. Her prose seethed with outrage. Britain’s Gulag, titled Imperial Reckoning in the US, earned Elkins a great deal of attention and a Pulitzer prize. But the book polarised scholars. Some praised Elkins for breaking the “code of silence” that had squelched discussion of British imperial violence. Others branded her a self-aggrandising crusader whose overstated findings had relied on sloppy methods and dubious oral testimonies.
By 2008, Elkins’s job was on the line. Her case for tenure, once on the fast track, had been delayed in response to criticism of her work. To secure a permanent position, she needed to make progress on her second book. This would be an ambitious study of violence at the end of the British empire, one that would take her far beyond the controversy that had engulfed her Mau Mau work.
That’s when the phone rang, pulling her back in. A London law firm was preparing to file a reparations claim on behalf of elderly Kenyans who had been tortured in detention camps during the Mau Mau revolt. Elkins’s research had made the suit possible. Now the lawyer running the case wanted her to sign on as an expert witness. Elkins was in the top-floor study of her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the call came. She looked at the file boxes around her. “I was supposed to be working on this next book,” she says. “Keep my head down and be an academic. Don’t go out and be on the front page of the paper.”
She said yes. She wanted to rectify injustice. And she stood behind her work. “I was kind of like a dog with a bone,” she says. “I knew I was right.”
What she didn’t know was that the lawsuit would expose a secret: a vast colonial archive that had been hidden for half a century. The files within would be a reminder to historians of just how far a government would go to sanitise its past. And the story Elkins would tell about those papers would once again plunge her into controversy.
Nothing about Caroline Elkins suggests her as an obvious candidate for the role of Mau Mau avenger. Now 47, she grew up a lower-middle-class kid in New Jersey.
Her mother was a schoolteacher; her father, a computer-supplies salesman. In high school, she worked at a pizza shop that was run by what she calls “low-level mob”. You still hear this background when she speaks. Foul-mouthed, fast-talking and hyperbolic, Elkins can sound more Central Jersey than Harvard Yard. She classifies fellow scholars as friends or enemies.
After high school, Princeton University recruited her to play soccer, and she considered a career in the sport. But an African history class put her on a different path. For her senior thesis, Elkins visited archives in London and Nairobi to study the shifting roles of women from Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu. She stumbled on to files about an all-female Mau Mau detention camp called Kamiti, kindling her curiosity.
The Mau Mau uprising had long fascinated scholars. It was an armed rebellion launched by the Kikuyu, who had lost land during colonisation. Its adherents mounted gruesome attacks on white settlers and fellow Kikuyu who collaborated with the British administration. Colonial authorities portrayed Mau Mau as a descent into savagery, turning its fighters into “the face of international terrorism in the 1950s”, as one scholar puts it.
The British, declaring a state of emergency in October 1952, proceeded to attack the movement along two tracks. They waged a forest war against 20,000 Mau Mau fighters, and, with African allies, also targeted a bigger civilian enemy: roughly 1.5 million Kikuyu thought to have proclaimed their allegiance to the Mau Mau campaign for land and freedom. That fight took place in a system of detention camps.
Elkins enrolled in Harvard’s history PhD programme knowing she wanted to study those camps. An initial sifting of the official records conveyed a sense that these had been sites of rehabilitation, not punishment, with civics and home-craft classes meant to instruct the detainees to be good citizens. Incidents of violence against prisoners were described as isolated events. When Elkins presented her dissertation proposal in 1997, its premise was “the success of Britain’s civilising mission in the detention camps of Kenya”.
But that thesis crumbled as Elkins dug into her research. She met a former colonial official, Terence Gavaghan, who had been in charge of rehabilitation at a group of detention camps on Kenya’s Mwea Plain. Even in his 70s, he was a formidable figure: well over six feet tall, with an Adonis-like physique and piercing blue eyes. Elkins, questioning him in London, found him creepy and defensive. He denied violence she hadn’t asked about.
“What’s a nice young lady like you working on a topic like this for?” he asked Elkins, as she recalled the conversation years later. “I’m from New Jersey,” she answered. “We’re a different breed. We’re a little tougher. So I can handle this – don’t worry.”
In the British and Kenyan archives, meanwhile, Elkins encountered another oddity. Many documents relating to the detention camps were either absent or still classified as confidential 50 years after the war. She discovered that the British had torched documents before their 1963 withdrawal from Kenya. The scale of the cleansing had been enormous. For example, three departments had maintained files for each of the reported 80,000 detainees. At a minimum, there should have been 240,000 files in the archives. She found a few hundred.
But some important records escaped the purges. One day in the spring of 1998, after months of often frustrating searches, she discovered a baby-blue folder that would become central to both her book and the Mau Mau lawsuit. Stamped “secret”, it revealed a system for breaking recalcitrant detainees by isolating them, torturing them and forcing them to work. This was called the “dilution technique”. Britain’s Colonial Office had endorsed it. And, as Elkins would eventually learn, Gavaghan had developed the technique and put it into practice.
Later that year, Elkins travelled to the rural highlands of Central Kenya to begin interviewing former detainees. Some thought she was British and refused to speak with her at first. But she eventually gained their trust. Over some 300 interviews, she heard testimony after testimony of torture. She met people such as Salome Maina, who had been accused of supplying arms to the Mau Mau. Maina told Elkins she had been beaten unconscious by Kikuyu collaborating with the British. When she failed to provide information, she said, they raped her using a bottle filled with pepper and water.
Elkins’s fieldwork brought to the surface stories repressed by Kenya’s policy of official amnesia. After the country gained independence in 1963, its first prime minister and president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, declared repeatedly that Kenyans must “forgive and forget the past”. This helped contain the hatred between Kikuyu who joined the Mau Mau revolt and those who fought alongside the British. In prying open that story, Elkins would meet younger Kikuyu who didn’t know their parents or grandparents had been detained; Kikuyu who didn’t know the reason they had been forbidden to play with their neighbour’s children was that the neighbour had been a collaborator who raped their mother. Mau Mau was still a banned movement in Kenya, and would remain so until 2002. When Elkins interviewed Kikuyu in their remote homes, they whispered.
Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. The British had sought to quell the Mau Mau uprising by instituting a policy of mass detention. This system – “Britain’s gulag”, as Elkins called it – had affected far more people than previously understood. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. She also came to understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.
“I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic,” Elkins wrote in Britain’s Gulag. “Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated.” After nearly a decade of oral and archival research, she had uncovered “a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead”.
Elkins knew her findings would be explosive. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. Felicitous timing helped. Britain’s Gulag hit bookstores after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had touched off debate about imperialism. It was a moment when another historian, Niall Ferguson, had won acclaim for his sympathetic writing on British colonialism. Hawkish intellectuals pressed America to embrace an imperial role. Then came Bagram. Abu Ghraib. Guantánamo. These controversies primed readers for stories about the underside of empire.
Enter Elkins. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with outrage over her findings. Her book cut against an abiding belief that the British had managed and retreated from their empire with more dignity and humanity than other former colonial powers, such as the French or the Belgians. And she didn’t hesitate to speak about that research in the grandest possible terms: as a “tectonic shift in Kenyan history”.
Some academics shared her enthusiasm. By conveying the perspective of the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at the University of Texas at Austin. Richard Drayton of King’s College London, another imperial historian, judged it an “extraordinary” book whose implications went beyond Kenya. It set the stage for a rethinking of British imperial violence, he says, demanding that scholars reckon with colonial brutality in territories such as Cyprus, Malaya, and Aden (now part of Yemen).
But many other scholars slammed the book. No review was more devastating than the one that Bethwell A Ogot, a senior Kenyan historian, published in the Journal of African History. Ogot dismissed Elkins as an uncritical imbiber of Mau Mau propaganda. In compiling “a kind of case for the prosecution”, he argued, she had glossed over the litany of Mau Mau atrocities: “decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women”. Ogot also suggested that Elkins might have made up quotes and fallen for the bogus stories of financially motivated interviewees. Pascal James Imperato picked up the same theme in African Studies Review. Elkins’s work, he wrote, depended heavily on the “largely uncorroborated 50-year-old memories of a few elderly men and women interested in financial reparations”.
Elkins was also accused of sensationalism, a charge that figured prominently in a fierce debate over her mortality figures. Britain’s Gulag opens by describing a “murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people” and ends with the suggestion that “between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for”, an estimate derived from Elkins’s analysis of census figures. “In this very long book, she really doesn’t bring out any more evidence than that for talking about the possibility of hundreds of thousands killed, and talking in terms almost of genocide as a policy,” says Philip Murphy, a University of London historian who directs the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and co-edits the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. This marred what was otherwise an “incredibly valuable” study, he says. “If you make a really radical claim about history, you really need to back it up solidly.”
Critics didn’t just find the substance overstated. They also rolled their eyes at the narrative Elkins told about her work. Particularly irksome, to some Africanists, was her claim to have discovered an unknown story. This was a motif of articles on Elkins in the popular press. But it hinged on the public ignorance of African history and the scholarly marginalisation of Africanist research, wrote Bruce J Berman, a historian of African political economy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. During the Mau Mau war, journalists, missionaries and colonial whistleblowers had exposed abuses. The broad strokes of British misbehaviour were known by the late 60s, Berman argued. Memoirs and studies had added to the picture. Britain’s Gulag had broken important new ground, providing the most comprehensive chronicle yet of the detention camps and prison villages. But among Kenyanists, Berman wrote, the reaction had generally been no more than: “It was as bad as or worse than I had imagined from more fragmentary accounts.”
He called Elkins “astonishingly disingenuous” for saying her project began as an attempt to show the success of Britain’s liberal reforms. “If, at that late date,” he wrote, “she still believed in the official British line about its so-called civilising mission in the empire, then she was perhaps the only scholar or graduate student in the English-speaking world who did.”
To Elkins, the vituperation felt over the top. And she believes there was more going on than the usual academic disagreement. Kenyan history, she says, was “an old boys’ club”. Women worked on uncontroversial topics such as maternal health, not blood and violence during Mau Mau. Now here came this interloper from the US, blowing open the Mau Mau story, winning a Pulitzer, landing media coverage. It raised questions about why they hadn’t told the tale themselves. “Who is controlling the production of the history of Kenya? That was white men from Oxbridge, not a young American girl from Harvard,” she says.
On 6 April 2011, the debate over Caroline Elkins’s work shifted to the Royal Courts of Justice in London. A scrum of reporters turned out to document the real-life Britain’s Gulag: four elderly plaintiffs from rural Kenya, some clutching canes, who had come to the heart of the former British empire to seek justice. Elkins paraded with them outside the court. Her career was now secure: Harvard had awarded her tenure in 2009, based on Britain’s Gulag and the research she had done for a second book. But she remained nervous about the case. “Good God,” she thought. “This is the moment where literally my footnotes are on trial.”
In preparation, Elkins had distilled her book into a 78-page witness statement. The claimants marching beside her were just like the people she had interviewed in Kenya. One, Paulo Nzili, said he had been castrated with pliers at a detention camp. Another, Jane Muthoni Mara, reported being sexually assaulted with a heated glass bottle. Their case made the same claim as Britain’s Gulag: this was part of systematic violence against detainees, sanctioned by British authorities. But there was one difference now. Many more documents were coming out.
Just as the hearings were set to begin, a story broke in the British press that would affect the case, the debate about Britain’s Gulag, and the broader community of imperial historians. A cache of papers had come to light that documented Britain’s torture and mistreatment of detainees during the Mau Mau rebellion. The Times splashed the news across its front page: “50 years later: Britain’s Kenya cover-up revealed.”
The story exposed to the public an archival mystery that had long intrigued historians. The British destroyed documents in Kenya – scholars knew that. But for years clues had existed that Britain had also expatriated colonial records that were considered too sensitive to be left in the hands of successor governments. Kenyan officials had sniffed this trail soon after the country gained its independence. In 1967, they wrote to Britain’s Foreign Office asking for the return of the “stolen papers”. The response? Blatant dishonesty, writes David M Anderson, a University of Warwick historian and author of Histories of the Hanged, a highly regarded book about the Mau Mau war.
Internally, British officials acknowledged that more than 1,500 files, encompassing over 100 linear feet of storage, had been flown from Kenya to London in 1963, according to documents reviewed by Anderson. Yet they conveyed none of this in their official reply to the Kenyans. “They were simply told that no such collection of Kenyan documents existed, and that the British had removed nothing that they were not entitled to take with them in December 1963,” Anderson writes. The stonewalling continued as Kenyan officials made more inquiries in 1974 and 1981, when Kenya’s chief archivist dispatched officials to London to search for what he called the “migrated archives”. This delegation was “systematically and deliberately misled in its meetings with British diplomats and archivists,” Anderson writes in a History Workshop Journal article, Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial and the Discovery of Kenya’s ‘Migrated Archive’.
The turning point came in 2010, when Anderson, now serving as an expert witness in the Mau Mau case, submitted a statement to the court that referred directly to the 1,500 files spirited out of Kenya. Under legal pressure, the government finally acknowledged that the records had been stashed at a high-security storage facility that the Foreign Office shared with the intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6. It also revealed a bigger secret. This same repository, Hanslope Park, held files removed from a total of 37 former colonies.
The disclosure sparked an uproar in the press and flabbergasted Elkins: “After all these years of being just roasted over the coals, they’ve been sitting on the evidence? Are you frickin’ kidding me? This almost destroyed my career.”
Events moved quickly from there. In court, lawyers representing the British government tried to have the Mau Mau case tossed out. They argued that Britain could not be held responsible because liability for any colonial abuses had devolved to the Kenyan government upon independence. But the presiding judge, Richard McCombe, dismissed the government’s bid to dodge responsibility as “dishonourable”. He ruled that the claim could move forward. “There is ample evidence even in the few papers that I have seen suggesting that there may have been systematic torture of detainees,” he wrote in July 2011.
And that was before historians had a chance to thoroughly review the newly discovered files, known as the “Hanslope disclosure”. A careful combing-through of these documents might normally have taken three years. Elkins had about nine months. Working with five students at Harvard, she found thousands of records relevant to the case: more evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution technique” used to break hardcore detainees. These documents would probably have spared her years of research for Britain’s Gulag. She drew on them in two more witness statements.
Back in London, Foreign Office lawyers conceded that the elderly Kenyan claimants had suffered torture during the Mau Mau rebellion. But too much time had elapsed for a fair trial, they contended. There weren’t enough surviving witnesses. The evidence was insufficient. In October 2012, Justice McCombe rejected those arguments, too. His decision, which noted the thousands of Hanslope files that had emerged, allowed the case to proceed to trial. It also fed speculation that many more colonial abuse claims would crop up from across an empire that once ruled about a quarter of the earth’s population.
The British government, defeated repeatedly in court, moved to settle the Mau Mau case. On 6 June 2013, the foreign secretary, William Hague, read a statement in parliament announcing an unprecedented agreement to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the insurrection. Each would receive about £3,800. “The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,” Hague said. Britain “sincerely regrets that these abuses took place.” The settlement, in Anderson’s view, marked a “profound” rewriting of history. It was the first time Britain had admitted carrying out torture anywhere in its former empire.
The lawyers were done fighting, but the academics were not. The Mau Mau case has fuelled two scholarly debates, one old and one new. The old one is about Caroline Elkins. To the historian and her allies, a single word summarises what happened in the High Court: vindication. Scholars had mistreated Elkins in their attacks on Britain’s Gulag. Then a British court, which had every reason to sympathise with those critics, gave her the fair hearing academia never did. By ruling in her favour, the court also implicitly judged her critics.
The evidence backing this account comes from Justice McCombe, whose 2011 decision had stressed the substantial documentation supporting accusations of systematic abuses. That “spoke directly to claims that, if you took out the oral evidence” in Britain’s Gulag, “the whole thing fell apart”, Elkins says. Then the Hanslope disclosure added extensive documentation about the scale and scope of what went on. At least two scholars have noted that these new files corroborated important aspects of the oral testimony in Britain’s Gulag, such as the systematic beating and torture of detainees at specific detention camps. “Basically, I read document after document after document that proved the book to be correct,” Elkins says.
Her victory lap has played out in op-eds, interviews and journal articles. It may soon reach an even bigger audience. Elkins has sold the film rights for her book and personal story to John Hart, the producer of hits including Boys Don’t Cry and Revolutionary Road. An early summary of the feature film he is developing gives its flavour: “One woman’s journey to tell the story of the colonial British genocide of the Mau Mau. Threatened and shunned by colleagues and critics, Caroline Elkins persevered and brought to life the atrocities that were committed and hidden from the world for decades.”
But some scholars find aspects of Elkins’s vindication story unconvincing. Philip Murphy, who specialises in the history of British decolonisation, attended some of the Mau Mau hearings. He thinks Elkins and other historians did “hugely important” work on the case. Still, he does not believe that the Hanslope files justify the notion that hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Kenya, or that those deaths were systematic. “Probably most of the historical criticisms of the book still stand,” he says. “I don’t think the trial really changes that.”
Susan L Carruthers feels the same about her own criticism of Britain’s Gulag. Carruthers, a professor of history at Rutgers University at Newark, had cast doubt on Elkins’s self-dramatisation: her account of naively embarking on a journey of personal discovery, only to see the scales drop from her eyes. She finds that Elkins’s current “narrative of victimisation” also rings a bit false. “There’s only so much ostracism one can plausibly claim if you won a Pulitzer and you became a full professor at Harvard – and this on the strength of the book that supposedly also made you outcast and vilified by all and sundry,” she says. “If only all the rest of us could be ostracised and have to make do with a Pulitzer and a full professorship at Harvard.”
The second debate triggered by the Mau Mau case concerns not just Elkins but the future of British imperial history. At its heart is a series of documents that now sits in the National Archives as a result of Britain’s decision to make public the Hanslope files. They describe, in extensive detail, how the government went about retaining and destroying colonial records in the waning days of empire. Elkins considers them to be the most important new material to emerge from the Hanslope disclosure.
One morning this spring, I accompanied Elkins as she visited the National Archives to look at those files. The facility occupies a 1970s-era concrete building beside a pond in Kew, in south-west London. A blue cord held together the thin, yellowed pages, which smelled of decaying paper. One record, a 1961 dispatch from the British colonial secretary to authorities in Kenya and elsewhere, states that no documents should be handed over to a successor regime that might, among other things, “embarrass” Her Majesty’s Government. Another details the system that would be used to carry out that order. All Kenyan files were to be classified either “Watch” or “Legacy”. The Legacy files could be passed on to Kenya. The Watch files would be flown back to Britain or destroyed. A certificate of destruction was to be issued for every document destroyed – in duplicate. The files indicate that roughly 3.5 tons of Kenyan documents were bound for the incinerator.
“The overarching takeaway is that the government itself was involved in a very highly choreographed, systematised process of destroying and removing documents so it could craft the official narrative that sits in these archives,” Elkins told me. “I never in my wildest dreams imagined this level of detail,” she added, speaking in a whisper but opening her eyes wide. “I imagined it more of a haphazard kind of process.”
What’s more, “It’s not just happening in Kenya to this level, but all over the empire.” For British historians, this is “absolutely seismic,” she said. “Everybody right now is trying to figure out what to make of this.”
Elkins laid out what she makes of this development in a 2015 essay for the American Historical Review. Broadly speaking, she thinks end-of-empire historians have largely failed to show scepticism about the archives. She thinks that the fact that those records were manipulated puts a cloud over many studies that have been based on their contents. And she thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in which historians must rethink their field.
The issue of archival erasure figures prominently in Elkins’s next book, a history of violence at the end of the British empire whose case studies will include Kenya, Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Palestine and Northern Ireland. But if the response to her latest claims is any indication, her arguments will once again be controversial. The same document shenanigans that leave Elkins wide-eyed prompt several other historians to essentially shrug. “That’s exactly what you would expect of a colonial administration, or any government in particular, including our own,” laughs Wm Roger Louis. “That’s the way a bureaucracy works. You want to destroy the documents that can be incriminating.”
Murphy says Elkins “has a tendency to caricature other historians of empire as simply passive and unthinking consumers in the National Archives supermarket, who don’t think about the ideological way in which the archive is constructed”. They’ve been far more sceptical than that, he says. Historians, he adds, have always dealt with the absence of documents. What’s more, history constantly changes, with new evidence and new paradigms. To say that a discovery about document destruction will change the whole field is “simply not true”, he says. “That’s not how history works.”
Some historians who have read the document-destruction materials come away with a picture of events that seems less Orwellian than Elkins’s. Anderson’s review of the evidence shows how the purging process evolved from colony to colony and allowed substantial latitude to local officials. Tony Badger, a University of Cambridge professor emeritus who monitored the Hanslope files’ release, writes that there was “no systematic process dictated from London”.
Advertisement
Badger sees a different lesson in the Hanslope disclosure: a “profound sense of contingency”. Over the decades, archivists and Foreign Office officials puzzled over what to do with the Hanslope papers. The National Archives essentially said they should either be destroyed or returned to the countries from which they had been taken. The files could easily have been trashed on at least three occasions, he says, probably without publicity. For a variety of reasons, they weren’t. Maybe it was the squirrel-like tendency of archivists. Maybe it was luck. In retrospect, he says, what is remarkable is not that the documents were kept secret for so many years. What is remarkable is that they survived at all.
Isabel Ringrose tells the terrible truth about the British Empire that Boris Johnson expects us to salute
America and the Caribbean – How Britain profited from barbarism
The songs Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia will be played without lyrics at the BBC Proms this year. This led Boris Johnson to call for an end to a “bout of self recrimination and wetness” about British history.
The bloody legacy of the British Empire is not something to be proud of. Through vicious military conquest, it used enslavement, massacres, famines and partitions to create profit.
It was the largest empire ever known, covering a quarter of the world and colonising hundreds of millions of people. The Union flag represents its barbarity.
Its first colonies were established in Jamestown, north America, in 1607. Upon arrival, the British convinced the chief of the local Powhatan tribe that his people should be put to work supplying the colonisers with food.
The Powhatans rose up in revenge, but were butchered. Their numbers fell from 8,000 to under 1,000.
Britain was responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all those transported across the Atlantic.
The most profitable West Indian colonies were part of the Empire. Some, such as Barbados and Jamaica, had vicious slave codes to deter rebellions.
Plantations grew cotton, tobacco and sugar cane. By 1750, sugar made up a fifth of all European imports. Slave merchants pocketed £12 million on the sale of African people.
Between 1761 and 1807 British ports banked £60 million—around £8 billion today—from slave sales.
Britain’s rulers viewed slaves as subhuman. Slavers killed over 130 slaves on the Zong ship in 1781—just so they could claim insurance.
Life on plantations was brutal. A third of newly-imported slaves died within three years.
Africa and the Middle East – Control built on divide and conquer
The Empire forced African economies to depend on Britain for trade. Colonisation was brutal—but there was resistance.
British took over Kenya in 1890. In 1952, Kenyans demanded independence and waged the Mau Mau rebellion.
The British castrated people, sliced off ears, flogged, executed and burnt those fighting for independence.
They herded them into concentration camps that have become known as “Britain’s Gulag” and killed up to 100,000 people.
Britain also wanted to control Egypt and southern Africa to secure trade routes to India.
The Empire grabbed the Cape Colony in South Africa in 1806 and settlers pushed out the Boers. Its attempts to snatch gold and diamond industries in South Africa led in 1899 to the Second Boer War.
At least 25,000 Afrikaners died, mostly in concentration camps set up by the British. The black people who died weren’t even counted.
Between 1880 and 1900 Britain ruled 30 percent of Africa’s people.
Britain invaded Egypt in 1882 and began a long obsession with control of the Middle East. The Suez Canal opened not long after—and soon Britain owned 44 percent of it.
The rush for oil grew after the First World War, when imperial powers vied for control of the oil-rich lands that Britain dominated.
Divide and conquer became the Empire’s unofficial motto. It set ethnic and religious groups against each other.
In 1917 the British signed a declaration supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine—knowing this would mean the expulsion of Palestinians.
Asia and Australasia – Plunder, riches and genocide
India became known as the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire mostly because of the extent to which it was plundered.
The British East India company started by trading in textiles and spices in 1600. But by the 1750s it was snatching control of ports and cities, and shipping its captured wealth back home.
The equivalent of billions of pounds of India’s wealth was pocketed by Empire.
Anger at colonialism fuelled the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Thousands of Indian troops stopped serving the British and instead turned their guns on them.
In reprisal, the British invented new ways of killing rebels—including blowing them from cannons.
After the Mutiny, the Crown took direct control and announced that queen Victoria was now “Empress of India”.
The economic chaos that Empire had created led to repeated famines. Millions of people died while the British continued to export food from India.
Resistance forced Britain to finally quit India in 1947—but not before it had slashed the country in two with Partition, creating India and Pakistan.
Indigenous Australians had inhabited the continent for around 65,000 years prior to arrival of the British in the early 17th century.
But in the 150 years that followed, indigenous numbers plummeted.
Between 1788 and 1934, at least 40,000 Indigenous Australians were murdered by settlers in 270 frontier massacres.
These were state‑sanctioned attempts to eradicate Aboriginal people.
Between 1910 and 1970, one in three Indigenous Australian children were forcibly taken from their homes.
Ireland
British colonial rule oversaw the Irish Famine of 1845-1849.
One million people died and a further million were forced to emigrate.
In 1846, the British government claimed the free market would solve the problem. But it meant most people couldn’t afford food.
During the famine’s worst year in 1847, 4,000 vessels took food to England. Meanwhile 400,000 Irish people starved to death.
China
Britain twice waged war on China to force it to buy the highly addictive, and profitable, opium that Britain stole from India.
The British Navy bombared China in 1840 and 1856. The wars saw the massacre of Chinese troops and mass looting.
The army eventually stormed Beijing to force the Chinese to keep taking Britain’s drugs.
Silence the songs of Empire
Rule Britannia is a callous song celebrating the horrors of the empire.
“Britons never will be slaves” is a boast about how Britain profited from slavery. The song rejoices that Britain “rules the waves”.
Yet it used this to mercilessly transport those it enslaved across them. And Britain is not a “Land of Hope and Glory”.
By 1901 when the song was written, Britain had assumed ownership of over 400 million people worldwide. And it had instilled terror among people across its empire.
Neither can Britain be described as the “mother of the free” after colonising a quarter of the world.
Patriotism is the claim that there is something special about Britain. So it follows that British people, whether billionaires or the working class, have a common set of interests and values. This goes hand in glove with painting people from other countries as an “other”.
The British ruling class used patriotism to build popular support for Empire in the 19th century. It presented colonial subjects as racially inferior, and encouraged working class people to think they had a stake in subjugating them.
That empire came to an end thanks to changes in capitalism and victorious national liberation struggles that spelt an end for colonialism in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 60s.
Delusions
Despite Tories’ imperial delusions of “global Britain”, they run a clapped out, fourth rate power that has been in decline since the end of the Second World War.
But the end of Empire didn’t mean a decline in patriotism and nationalism. Precisely because Britain no longer has an empire, right wing politicians pump out nationalist nonsense about how important and special Britain is and scapegoat “the foreigner” for decline.
And the racism of empire still lives on in how people from the former colonies are treated in the immigration system.
They also imply that those who support refugees are unpatriotic. Just last week the Home Office released a chilling video promising more deportations of refugees who have used their legal right to claim asylum in Britain.
The problem, said the video, was “activist lawyers” who “abuse” the system.
Deflects
By claiming we all have something in common, patriotism deflects blame away from the Tories, bankers and bosses who attack working class people.
Despite this many liberals and left wingers argue it’s possible to have a British patriotism that’s inclusive or even “progressive”.
The far right may wave the Union flag or St George’s Cross as racist symbols.
But, it’s argued, instead of the British Empire, you can be patriotic about multiculturalism, the NHS, or the struggles of the Suffragettes and Chartists.
Yet there’s nothing particularly “British” about these values or institutions. Attempts at “progressive patriotism” just reinforce regular racist patriotism.
It encourages the idea that there’s something that unites everyone in Britain across class divides. And this is something the ruling class can co-opt.
They respond to the widespread popularity of reforms won through working class struggles, such as the NHS, by trying to adopt them as “national symbols”.
This in turn bolsters right wing ideas. So when restricting migrants’ right to use the NHS, Tories often say it’s a “national health service not an international health service”.
Really the history we should be proud of is one of working class struggles and mass movements that clashed with the establishment. Far from being united, workers and the British ruling class were bitter enemies.
Even if presented as harmless, patriotism leads away from class politics to class peace.
Tomáš Tengely-Evans
Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Notes 24, 25 and 26/Rishi Sunak
Dr Steve Cushion on the thoughtless use of terms like ‘plantation’ by companies
The glorification of the plantation is dog-whistle politics – a nod and a wink to white supremacists the rightwing nationalists, reassuring them that, as far as the powers that be are concerned, black lives do not matter (Plantations kept slaves. They were a place of horror. Why exploit them as a sales brand?, 25 October). This has a long history. Gone with the Wind, for example, portrayed a completely sanitised view of slavery. This is not to suggest that racism is a deliberate conspiracy by a cynical ruling class. Having presided over a system based on the enslavement of Africans in the West Indies for 200 years, they clearly believe their own propaganda and can no longer help themselves.
The thoughtless use of terms like plantation are a reflection of the generalised institutional racism in Britain. Rightwing, pro-business politicians are on the attack with their “war on woke”. The 2021 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, chaired by Tony Sewell, formalises this approach. When looking for evidence of structural racism in Britain, one has to look no further than the Windrush scandal. It is shocking that one of the principal groups targeted by the Home Office’s hostile environment are the descendants of the enslaved Africans trafficked to the Caribbean with the full support of the British state. They would not even be in the Caribbean were it not for the slave trade organised by British big business. If we can have plantation rum, why not gulag vodka? Dr Steve Cushion UCL Institute of the Americas
Many from ethnic minority backgrounds quit their jobs due to racial discrimination, finds survey by Trades Union Congress
LONDON, UK
UK employees from ethnic minority backgrounds face high levels of racial discrimination in the workplace, forcing many to quit, a new survey has found.
The survey, conducted by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), found that over 120,000 Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) workers across the UK left their jobs due to racism in their respective workplaces.
“This report lifts the lid on racism in UK workplaces. It shines a light on the enormous scale of structural and institutional discrimination BME workers face,” TUC Secretary General Francis O’Grady said.
“This report must be a wake-up call. Ministers need to change the law so that employers are responsible for protecting their workers and preventing racism at work,” O’Grady added.
According to the TUC, one in four (27%) BME workers experienced racist jokes at work in the last five years. The same number of people were made to feel uncomfortable at work due to people using stereotypes or commenting on their appearance.
One in five (21%) workers said they had racist remarks directed at them or made in their presence and were bullied or harassed at work due to their appearances.
For 38% BME workers, the most common perpetrator of harassment at their workplace was one of their colleagues, while 17% of workers reported it was a direct manager or someone else with direct authority.
The study also revealed that the majority of racist behavior and other discriminatory incidences faced by BME workers went unreported due to the institutional nature of racial harassment.
“It’s disgraceful that in 2022 racism still determines who gets hired, trained, promoted – and who gets demoted and dismissed,” O’Grady said.
“And employers must be clear they have a zero-tolerance policy towards racism – and that they will support all staff who raise concerns about racism or who are subjected to racial abuse,” he added.
As a result of such widespread racist and discriminatory behavior, many BME workers reported that these incidents left a long-lasting impact on their careers.
One in 13 (8%) BME workers left their job as a result of the racism they experienced and more than one in 3 (35%) reported that the most recent incident of racism left them feeling less confident at work.
Some 34% reported that such behavior had left them feeling deeply embarrassed with 31% reporting a negative impact on their mental health.
Following the deeply concerning revelations of the study, the TUC urged the government to work with trade unions and employers to ensure that employers have a duty to take action to prevent racism at work and to improve workers’ rights regardless of race and ethnicity.
A new report by experts from The University of Manchester and barrister Keir Monteith KC has raised urgent questions about racial attitudes and practices in the justice system in England and Wales.
Although the judiciary wields enormous power over individuals, its operations are alarmingly underscrutinised, and one area that has remained largely beyond examination is judicial racial bias. The report draws on a survey of 373 legal professionals.
95% of respondents said that racial bias plays some role in the processes or outcomes of the justice system, and 29% said it played a ‘fundamental role’. A majority of respondents had witnessed one or more judges acting in a racially biased way towards a defendant and in their decision-making.
Racial discrimination by judges is most frequently directed towards Asian and Black people according to the survey, with people from Black communities – lawyers, witnesses, defendants, etc. – by far the most common targets of judicial discrimination. Young Black male defendants were the subgroup most frequently mentioned as targets of judicial bias.
The survey did find that some judges are already acting in ‘antiracist’ ways by being conscious of and knowledgeable about racism, and seeking to mitigate it – however, only a minority of respondents had ever seen a judge act in this way.
Race training is neither compulsory nor provided on a regular basis – only 49% of the respondents who have worked as judicial office holders had received race training in the preceding three years.
Overall, the report suggests that the combination of quantitative and qualitative data presented, substantiated by the kind of reports listed above, amounts to evidence of ‘institutional racism’ in the justice system presided over by judges.
The report is a response to the five-year strategy launched by Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett of Maldon to enhance equality and diversity in the judiciary, and finds that it does not consider the issue of racism or even mention ‘racial bias’. Researchers found a profound disparity between the conclusions of the strategy – that the justice system is basically fair and that progress has been made – when compared to the widespread views and experiences of the legal professionals surveyed.
In addition, the report is critical of the Equal Treatment Bench Book, the textbook given to all judges on appointment, in terms of its framing of bias and racism, especially its lack of acknowledgement of anti-Black racism in the justice system.
The evidence in the report rings alarm bells about access to fair trials, hearings and tribunals as well as to equal professional development.
“Racism in the justice system has to be acknowledged and fought by those at the highest level, but at the moment there is complete and utter silence – and as a consequence, there is no action to combat racial bias,” said Keir Monteith KC. “It is impossible to have diversity and inclusion if the system itself unfairly discriminates. There has to be a hard reboot to protect and revitalize the rule of law and civil rights for all citizens – a good start would be to follow the recommendations in our report.”
“Judges need to sit up and listen, because it is a myth that Lady Justice is blind to colour,” said Professor Leslie Thomas KC, who wrote the report’s Foreword. “Our judiciary as an institution is just as racist as our police forces, our education system and our health service – this is something that cannot be ignored for any longer.”
“This important report demonstrates that the very low number of Black and minority ethnic judges poses an acute challenge to the credibility and legitimacy of the judiciary,” said Stephanie Needleman from JUSTICE. “It is only by creating a critical mass of diverse judges that we can ensure that our judiciary is reflective of society and begin to combat the racism witnessed by survey respondents.”
“We welcome, and are grateful to have been consulted on, this hard-hitting report,” said former Judge Claire Gilham from the Judicial Support Network. “My whistleblowing about racism was dismissed as me not understanding judicial culture, having come from the wrong background. There is no internal data keeping for equality complaints, which makes it very difficult for the judiciary to provide any evidence to deny the findings of this report. A severe shake-up of the system is needed.”
“Even after 25 years as a Trade Union Official, I am shocked at the practices employed in the appointment and promotion of judges,” said Stuart Fegan from GMB. “The Judiciary is funded with public money, and the practices identified would simply not be tolerated anywhere else in the public sector. I am delighted that Labour have committed to review appointment and promotion procedures if they win the next election in order to ensure that judges are reflective of the public they serve.”
The world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history. The U.S. has never been without it.
Race is a human-invented, shorthand term used to describe and categorize people into various social groups based on characteristics like skin color, physical features, and genetic heredity. Race, while not a valid biological concept, is a real social construction that gives or denies benefits and privileges. American society developed the notion of race early in its formation to justify its new economic system of capitalism, which depended on the institution of forced labor, especially the enslavement of African peoples. To more accurately understand how race and its counterpart, racism, are woven into the very fabric of American society, we must explore the history of how race, white privilege, and anti-blackness came to be.
THE INVENTION OF RACE The concept of “race,” as we understand it today, evolved alongside the formation of the United States and was deeply connected with the evolution of two other terms, “white” and “slave.” The words “race,” “white,” and “slave” were all used by Europeans in the 1500s, and they brought these words with them to North America. However, the words did not have the meanings that they have today. Instead, the needs of the developing American society would transform those words’ meanings into new ideas.
The term “race,” used infrequently before the 1500s, was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection. The modern-day use of the term “race” (identifying groups of people by physical traits, appearance, or characteristics) is a human invention. During the 17th century, European Enlightenment philosophers’ based their ideas on the importance of secular reasoning, rationality, and scientific study, as opposed to faith-based religious understandings of the world. Philosophers and naturalists were categorizing the world anew and extending such thinking to the people of the world. These new beliefs, which evolved starting in the late 17th century and flourished through the late 18th century, argued that there were natural laws that governed the world and human beings. Over centuries, the false notion that “white” people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than nonwhite people became accepted worldwide. This categorization of people became a justification for European colonization and subsequent enslavement of people from Africa.
Slavery, as a concept has existed for centuries. Enslaved people, “slaves,” were forced to labor for another. We can point to the use of the term slave in the Hebrew Bible, ancient societies such as Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as during other eras of time. Within the Mediterranean and European regions, before the 16th century, enslavement was acceptable for persons considered heathens or outside of the Christian-based faiths. In this world, being a slave was not for life or hereditary – meaning the status of a slave did not automatically transfer from parent to child. In many cultures, slaves were still able to earn small wages, gather with others, marry, and potentially buy their freedom. Similarly, peoples of darker skin, such as people from the African continent, were not automatically enslaved or considered slaves.
The word “white” held a different meaning, too, and transformed over time. Before the mid-1600s, there is no evidence that the English referred to themselves as being “white people” This concept did not occur until 1613 when the English society first encountered and contrasted themselves against the East Indians through their colonial pursuits. Even then, there was not a large body of people who considered themselves “white” as we know the term today. From about the 1550s to 1600, “white” was exclusively used to describe elite English women, because the whiteness of skin signaled that they were persons of a high social class who did not go outside to labor. However, the term white did not refer to elite English men because the idea that men did not leave their homes to work could signal that they were lazy, sick, or unproductive. Initially, the racial identity of “white” referred only to Anglo-Saxon people and has changed due to time and geography. As the concept of being white evolved, the number of people considered white would grow as people wanted to push back against the increasing numbers of people of color, due to emancipation and immigration. Activist Paul Kivel says, “Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.”
European colonists’ use of the word “white” to refer to people who looked like themselves, grew to become entangled with the word “race” and “slave” in the American colonies in the mid-1660s. These elites created “races” of “savage” Indians, “subhuman” Africans, and “white” men. The social inventions succeeded in uniting the white colonists, dispossessing and marginalizing native people, and permanently enslaving most African-descended people for generations. Tragically, American culture, from the very beginning, developed around the ideas of race and racism.
The racial identity of “white” has evolved throughout history. Initially, it referred only to Anglo-Saxon people. Historically, who belonged to the category of “white” would expand as people wanted to push back against the increasing numbers of people of color due to emancipation and immigration.
The Historical Evolution of Race (and Racism) in Colonial and Early America
Fueled by the Enlightenment ideas of natural rights of man, spurred by the passion for religious freedom, in search of property, and escaping persecution, European colonists came to North America in search of a place to create a new society. The ideals of Enlightenment spread to the North American colonies and formed the basis of their democracy as well as the most brutal kind of servitude – chattel slavery.
In the world before 1500, the notion of hierarchy was a common principle. Every person belonged to a hierarchical structure in some way: children to parents, parishioners to churches, laborers to landowners, etc. As the ideas of the natural rights of man became more prevalent through the 18th century, the concept of equality becomes a standard stream of thought. By categorizing humans by “race,” a new hierarchy was invented based on what many considered science.
Within the first decades of the 1600s, the first Africans were captured and brought to the American colonies as enslaved labor (most colonies had made enslavement legal). At this time in colonial America, enslaved Africans were just one source of labor. The English settlers used European indentured servants and enslaved indigenous people as other forms of coerced labor. These groups of enslaved and forced labor often worked side-by-side and co-mingled socially. The notion of enslavement changed throughout the 1600s. In this early period, enslavement was not an automatic condition, nor did it uniformly apply to all African and African-descended people. Very importantly, being enslaved was not necessarily a permanent lifetime status. The boundaries between groups were more fluid but began to shift over the next few decades to make strict distinctions, which eventually became law.
By the late 1600s, significant shifts began to happen in the colonies. As the survival of European immigrants increased, there were more demands for land and the labor needed to procure wealth. Indentured servitude lost its attractiveness as it became economically less profitable to utilize servants of European descent. White settlers began to turn to slavery as the primary source of forced labor in many of the colonies. African people were seen as more desirable slaves because they brought advanced farming skills, carpentry, and bricklaying skills, as well as metal and leatherworking skills. Characterizations of Africans in the early period of colonial America were mostly positive, and the colonists saw their future as dependent on this source of labor.
The trajectory of Virginia’s development of chattel slavery highlights how the system of chattel slavery and, along with it, anti-blackness (opposed to or hostile toward black people), was codified in colonial America. Labor status was not permanent nor solely connected to race. A significant turning point came in 1662 when Virginia enacted a law of hereditary slavery, which meant the status of the mother determined the status of the child. This law deviated from English common law, which assigned the legal status of children based on their father’s legal status. Thus, children of enslaved women would automatically share the legal status of “slave.” This doctrine, partus sequitur ventrem (see below), laid the foundation for the natural increase of the enslaved in the Americas and legitimized the exploitation of female slaves by white planters or other men. In 1667, the last of the religious conditions that placed limits on servitude was erased by another Virginia law. This new law deemed it legal to keep enslaved people in bondage even if they converted to Christianity. With this decree, the justification for black servitude changed from a religious status to a designation based on race. See more information about the timeline of “Slavery in the Making of America.”
Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 was a short-lived but had a long-reaching effect of deepening the racial divide in the colonial Chesapeake region. Coalitions of poor white people, free and enslaved Africans, rebelled against the rising planter class because they wanted to acquire land reserved for Virginia’s indigenous people. Elite colonists determined that they needed to amass more native lands for their continued expansion, to pacify poor European colonists who sought economic advancement, and to keep a dedicated labor force to do the grueling agricultural work. By the mid-1700s, new laws and societal norms linked Africans to perpetual labor, and the American colonies made formal social distinctions among its people based on appearance, place of origin, and heredity.
The Africans physical distinctiveness marked their newly created subordinate position. To further separate the social and legal connections between lower-class whites and African laborers (enslaved or free), laws were put into place to control the interaction between the two groups. These laws created a hierarchy based on race.
Paradox of Liberty in America’s Consciousness Colonists’ belief in natural laws produced revolutionary political thought in the last part of the 18th century. New generations of Americans, many born in the colonies, seized upon ideas like that of John Locke’s “Social Contract” which argues that all people naturally had a right to life, liberty and property, and that any created government is legitimate only with the consent of those people being governed. Thomas Jefferson built upon these ideas in the Declaration of Independence by proclaiming that “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were inalienable, God-given rights to all men. After the Revolution, the U.S. Constitution strongly encoded the protection of property within its words. It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty – the human right to freedom and the socially protected rights to property – became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question(s) of who could – and can – claim the unalienable rights has been a question for America through time.
Colonists’ belief in natural laws produced revolutionary political thought in the last part of the 18th century. New generations of Americans, many born in the colonies, seized upon ideas like that of John Locke’s “Social Contract.” It argues that all people naturally had a right to life, liberty, and property and that any created government is legitimate only with the consent of the people it governs. Thomas Jefferson built upon these ideas in the Declaration of Independence by proclaiming that “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were inalienable, God-given rights to all men. After prevailing in the American Revolution, our founders created the U.S. Constitution, which contains strongly-worded property rights. It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty – the human right to freedom and the legally protected rights to property – became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question(s) of who could – and can – claim unalienable rights has been an American debate since our inception.
America would come to be defined by the language of freedom and the acceptance of slavery. Along with the revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality, slavery concerns began to surface as black colonists embraced the meaning of freedom, and the British abolished slavery within their lands. The fledgling United States sought to establish itself and had to wrestle with the tension borne from the paradox of liberty. It became necessary to develop new rationales and arguments to defend the institution of slavery. How does one justify holding a human as property? Major political leaders and thinkers of American history promoted theories of difference and degeneracy about nonwhite people that grew in the late-18th century. Physical differences were merged with status differences and coalesced to form a social hierarchy that placed “white” at the top and “black” at the bottom. By the beginning of the 19th century, “white” was an identity that designated a privileged, landholding, (usually male) status. Having “whiteness” meant having clear rights in the society while not being white signified your freedoms, rights, and property were unstable, if not, nonexistent. Ironically, Jefferson and Locke also both made arguments for the idea of inferior “races,” thereby supporting the development of the United States’ culture of racism. Their support of inferior races justified the dispossession of American Indians and the enslavement of Africans in the era of revolution. It was this racial ideology that formed the foundation for the continuation of American chattel slavery and the further entrenchment of anti-blackness.
The successful American Revolution and the new Constitution resulted in fierce debates about the future of slavery and the meaning of freedom. However, the nation did not end slavery nor the uses of racial ideology to separate groups, choosing to maintain the existing hierarchy. The U.S. outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, but the institution of slavery and its connection to African descendants remained. Boosted by the Louisiana Purchase, cotton agriculture (made profitable by the invention of the cotton gin), and seized American Indian lands, a new internal slave trade reinvigorated slavery, justified by 19th-century pseudo-scientific racist ideas.
In the mid-19th century, science and the scientific community served to legitimize society’s racist views. Scientists argued that Africans and their descendants were inferior – either a degenerate type of being or a completely separate type of being altogether, suitable for perpetual service. Like the European scholars before them, American intellectuals organized humans by category, seeking differences between racial populations. The work of Dr. Samuel Morton is infamous for his measurements of skulls across populations. He concluded that African people had smaller skulls and were therefore not as intelligent as others. Morton’s work was built on by scientists such as Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz. Both Nott and Agassiz concluded that Africans were a separate species. This information spread into popular thought and culture and served to dehumanize African-descended people further while fueling anti-black sentiment.
By the 1850s, antislavery sentiment grew intense, in part, spurred by white Southerner’s aggressive attempts to protect slavery, maintain national political dominance and to spread the “peculiar institution” to newly acquired American lands. Proslavery spokespeople defended their position by debasing the value of humanity in the people they held as property. They supported much of this crusade through the racist scientific findings of people like Samuel Morton, which was used to argue the inferiority of people of African descent. As the tension between America’s notion of freedom and equality collided with the reality of millions of enslaved people, new layers to the meaning of race were created as the federal government sought to outline precisely what rights black people in the nation could have.
It was in this philosophical atmosphere that the Supreme Court heard one of the landmark cases of U.S. history, the Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott and his wife claimed freedom on the basis that they had resided in a free state and were therefore now free persons. The Supreme Court ruled that Scott could not bring a suit in federal court because Black people were not citizens in the eyes of the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney also ruled that slaves were property based on the Constitution, and therefore owners could not be deprived of their property. Ultimately, Taney declared with the full force of law that to be black in America was to be an “inferior being” with “no rights” which the white man was bound to respect,” and that slavery was for his benefit. Taney used the racist logic of black inferiority that saturated American culture of the time to argue that African descents were of another “unfit” race, and therefore improved by the condition of slavery. The court’s racist decision and affirmation that African descendants were mere property would severely harm the cause of black equality and contribute to anti-black sentiment for generations to come.
The nation fiercely defended slavery under the guise of property rights because the forced labor of black people was extremely profitable to the entire country. America further developed its concept of race in the form of racist theories and beliefs – created to protect the slavery-built economy. These beliefs also resulted in the establishment of widespread anti-black sentiments, which would influence the American consciousness long after slavery ended.
Reconstructing Race in the Nadir When the Civil War ended slavery, the entire nation shifted its economic reliance to free labor. Still, the damage of anti-blackness and the hierarchy of race continued to shape how people related to one another and how the government would regard and legislate to various “races.” The U.S. came to depend on the exploitation of cheap labor, especially that of those considered nonwhite people, but also that of poor whites, including women and children. White society, particularly in the South, were reluctant to shift their views of black Americans and sought ways to continue exploiting the labor of African descended people while simultaneously remaining privileged. The debt-bonded labor system called sharecropping and hierarchical social order of segregation called Jim Crow would lay the foundation for a deepening racial divide.Expand / Collapse Aside
Keeping the Concept of Race Alive
After the Civil War and Reconstruction, many localities and states enacted laws and social norms that would re-establish the social order where whiteness was supreme. The U.S. legally affirmed the practices of segregation through the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case [see video below]. By law, Americans could lawfully separate people in society and discriminate against black Americans based on race. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision of “separate but equal” legitimized the idea of white supremacy in America as well as the de facto segregation already occurring in the nation outside the South. It resulted in the creation of a multitude of new racist laws and practices whose ramifications are still impacting the country today. American society drew upon centuries of racist ideas to justify this new form of exclusion and exploitation, especially that of scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Newly elaborated racist concepts reinforced the societal belief in supposedly inherent differences between black and white people – helping keep alive the concept of race and racial difference for all people in America.
Backed by the scientific racism of the mid-19th century, a branch of pseudoscience called eugenics contributed to further legitimizing societal belief in the biological superiority of those people considered white and the subjugation of other groups in descending order as skin tones darkened. Eugenics argued that people could be divided up into various races of people according to their genetic descent and were predisposed to be either superior or inferior by nature and in culture. As the 19th century drew to a close, one of the most elaborate displays of this new scientific belief was the Anthropology Exhibition at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. In this very public forum, people were displayed in various arrangements of progress and reinforcing to the general and visiting public the racial hierarchy of the time.
Similar to earlier decades, the category of white expanded or contracted during the early 20th century to include various groups of people such as the Italians and the Eastern European immigrants that were coming to America. Other groups, such as the Chinese, Indigenous people, and black people, would remain outside the world of whiteness. As a result, they would struggle to gain the same privileges afforded to whites, such as voting, education, citizenship, and a share in the nation’s wealth. Acceptance into American culture was closely linked with the assimilation of whiteness, thereby creating an unconscious connection between who is American and whiteness.
””I was just out with my younger brother and younger sister, and I think, probably pretty young, I was probably a mid-teenager, and we were out at a fast food restaurant and I was just looking after them. There were people sitting nearby, it was the first time I’d experienced it, just saying some very unpleasant things. The ‘P’ word.
“And it stung. I still remember it. It seared in my memory. You can be insulted in many different ways.”
BBC
RISHI SUNAK: THE STAR WARS FAN TURNED POLITICAL FORCE
25 OCTOBER 2022
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51490893
At just 42, Rishi Sunak is the youngest prime minister in modern times – taking the record held by his old boss David Cameron, who was 43 when appointed.
His rise to the top has been fast. He only became MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire in 2015 and joined the Cabinet in 2019.
“I showed up and people were surprised,” Mr Sunak said about being selected to represent Richmond, with its overwhelming white population. But his “Yorkshire values” of hard work resonated with people and he won them over by showing an interest in what mattered to them, he said. Seven years on and he has made history as the UK’s first British Asian prime minister.
Mr Sunak joined Boris Johnson’s cabinet in 2019 as chief treasury to the secretary working with chancellor Sajid Javid, and his career rocketed from there
A self-confessed “huge Star Wars fan” with a sizeable collection of lightsabers, he tweeted a photo of himself and his “Jedi Master” Mr Javid at a screening of The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. A few months later, the apprentice became the master when he replaced Mr Javid as chancellor, and was plunged into pandemic crisis planning and budgeting.
For quite a few people, Mr Sunak appeared to be a reassuringly steady hand at the tiller as chancellor.
When he pledged to do “whatever it takes” to help people through the pandemic in the spring of 2020 – and unveiled support worth £350bn – his personal poll ratings went through the roof.
But the UK continued to be buffeted by stormy economic weather, and Mr Sunak himself had to deal with the fallout of being fined by police for breaking lockdown rules in Downing Street in June 2020.
In July, he resigned from the cabinet, saying he felt his own approach to the economy was “fundamentally too different” to that of the PM, Boris Johnson. The move was instrumental in ousting Mr Johnson, which some of the former PM’s allies will not have forgotten.
Just 16 weeks later, he has become leader himself.
His appointment as PM came on the day millions celebrated Diwali, and as a practising Hindu he has said one of his proudest career moments was lighting ceremonial diyas (oil lamps) outside 11 Downing Street while chancellor. A traditional Hindu red bracelet, meant for good luck and protection, could be seen on his wrist when he posed on the steps of 10 Downing Street for the first time as UK leader.
Rishi Sunak: The basics
Age: 42
Place of birth: Southampton, Hampshire
Home: London and Yorkshire
Education: Winchester College, Oxford University, Stanford University
Family: Married to businesswoman Akshata Murty with two daughters
There is no denying that Mr Sunak’s wealth is a world away from that of most. Together, he and his wife Akshata Murty have an estimated worth of more than £700m – a sum which supersedes the personal wealth of King Charles III.
Critics of Mr Sunak have raised the question of whether the millionaire can grasp the scale of the cost-of-living squeeze facing struggling households.
In April, the finances of Mr Sunak and his family came under intense scrutiny, with the tax affairs of his wife – the daughter of Narayana Murthy, Indian billionaire and co-founder of IT services giant Infosys – placed in the spotlight. Headquartered in Bangalore, Infosys reported revenues of more than $11.8bn (£9bn) in 2019, $12.8bn in 2020, and $13.5bn in 2021. The company’s latest annual report shows Ms Murty owns a 0.9% stake in Infosys.
She announced in April she would start paying UK tax on this income to relieve political pressure on her husband.
Mr Sunak’s appointment as prime minister has made his own wealth and tax affairs a hot topic again. He has been tight-lipped about his personal wealth and maintains that he has never benefited from funds based in tax havens.
It remains to be seen whether he and his family will split their time between Downing Street and the £4.5m five-bedroom townhouse in South Kensington, London where they currently reside.
The Sunaks are understood to own a further three properties: a Grade II-listed manor house in the village of Kirby Sigston, near Northallerton, in his Richmond constituency, was bought for £1.5m in 2015. The couple also own a flat in South Kensington and a penthouse apartment with views of the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California.
Mr Sunak won the approval of 202 Tory MPs to replace Liz Truss as prime minister. Newsnight’s political editor Nick Watt says his colleagues find him “very personable”, but also someone who is “very clear and certain in what he thinks”.
For example, in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum – in which he campaigned to Leave – he was called into Downing Street and asked for his support to remain in the EU but he refused.
“He said ‘No, I think Brexit is the right thing to do’ – which is quite a thing for a newly elected MP to say to Downing Street.”
Mr Sunak told the Yorkshire Post he believed leaving the EU would make the UK “freer, fairer and more prosperous”.
He said changing immigration rules was another key reason for his Leave vote: “I believe that appropriate immigration can benefit our country. But we must have control of our borders.”
Before entering politics Mr Sunak was an analyst for the investment bank Goldman Sachs and then worked for two multibillion dollar hedge funds.
His supporters hope his eye for statistics and data will be an asset in making the right economic decisions.
Mr Sunak’s parents came to the UK from east Africa and are both of Indian origin.
He was born in Southampton in 1980, where his father was a GP, and his mother ran her own pharmacy.
“In terms of cultural upbringing, I’d be at the temple at the weekend – I’m a Hindu – but I’d also be at [Southampton Football Club] the Saints game as well on a Saturday – you do everything, you do both.”
In the interview he said he had been fortunate not to have endured a lot of racism growing up, but that there was one incident that had stayed with him.
“I was just out with my younger brother and younger sister, and I think, probably pretty young, I was probably a mid-teenager, and we were out at a fast food restaurant and I was just looking after them. There were people sitting nearby, it was the first time I’d experienced it, just saying some very unpleasant things. The ‘P’ word.
“And it stung. I still remember it. It seared in my memory. You can be insulted in many different ways.”
However, he said he “can’t conceive of that happening today” in the UK.
He attended the exclusive private school Winchester College and worked as a waiter at a Southampton curry house during his summer holidays. He has attracted criticism from Labour for donating more than £100,000 to his former school, to fund bursaries for children who could not afford to attend it.
After finishing school he went on to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics, before studying for an MBA at Stanford University in California. There he met his wife, and the couple have two daughters.
During the previous leadership campaign, he often mentioned his daughters in the context of climate change. Answering a question on climate change during a BBC TV debate, Mr Sunak said he took “advice from my two young daughters, who are the experts of this in my household”.
IN THE CLUB: ASSOCIATION LIFE IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA Benjamin B Cohen Orient BlackSwan 211 pages; Rs 695
One of the abiding mysteries of India’s horrific 200-year colonial encounter with England is the near-total absence of rancour between the peoples of the two countries. It is as if the depredations by the British never happened. The British have forgotten all about it, as they well might; and the Indians have decided to let bygones be bygones. Indeed, there is fairly large body of opinion in India that believes that the colonial experience was actually a good thing for the natives, what with all the mod-cons that the British kindly left behind – railways, ports, army, schools, hospitals, the judiciary, police and administrative apparatus and so on.
I have often sought an explanation for this and one of the best I ever heard came from a newspaper baron who said Indians and the British understand each other perfectly because both love to exclude people from social groups to which they belong. India, he said, had the caste system. The British had their own equivalent of it in England. And in India, well, they had their clubs.
These, as Benjamin Cohen points in this excellent and tidy little study with its fascinating bibliography, were designed to create islands of succour for the expatriates. Social homogeneity was the virtually sole requirement. The government types had their own clubs, and these were at the top of the totem pole. The businessmen, known deprecatingly as boxwallahs, too had their clubs, as did the Anglo-Indians and other persons of lesser social standing. The lines were clearly drawn and everyone was supposed to know his place.
They had, and still have, idiosyncratic rules. Women were not allowed until the late 19th century. Even then, they could only come as guests and not become members. They responded in the first few decades of the 20th century by forming their own clubs where no males were allowed to set foot.
You could not bring your own alcohol to the club. If you did you had to pay a fine before you could drink it. The process of becoming a member was typically designed to exclude the “wrong” types. A member had to nominate you; then another had to second you. Then all the members would vote whether or not to take you in. As in all voting there was politics and personal enmity. The means by which you voted against someone for whatever reason was the black wooden or ivory ball. You dropped it into the urn and your vote remained anonymous. White balls were used for saying yes. As the years went by the rules became more and more cumbersome.
The codes of conduct were strict and often silly. For example, a member was severely castigated and almost expelled because he sat on the bar. Mr Cohen provides a most entertaining account. Another didn’t become a member because he was foolish enough to call for a bearer while in the reading room and then, when he stepped out, whistle in the corridor outside it.
The clubs relied heavily on servants. The term extended from the club secretary to peons, masalchis and markers. There were scores of them in any decent club. They took care of everything that the members might need, including loans. In many of these clubs, although the practice was strictly forbidden, the servants used to lend money to the members. Clearly, when it came to money, the sahibs were not as picky as when it came to receiving reprimands sent by the club secretary or president. The markers were a special breed available to play tennis or billiards with a member who found himself alone on the court or at the table.
The food was and is generally awful, being fake British cooked mostly by Indians who had been taught how to make things like omelettes, cutlets and puddings. Some clubs tried to import chefs but the experiment didn’t work and the attempt was abandoned after a while.
The real problem, however, was warm alcohol. Members liked it to be cool, if not cold. But in the absence of refrigeration, the only way out was to keep the bottles covered in wet cloth covers, known for some reason as “petticoats”. Then in the mid-19th century, an American called Frederic Tudor appeared on the scene. He came to be known as the “Ice King” because he carted ice all the way from the east coast of America to India for sale to clubs and others, like the railways, which used it in tubs to cool the first class. These carriages were running till the mid-70s, minus the ice of course.
By the time the British left, there were over 500 clubs in existence. In most of them, dogs and Indians were not allowed. This practice was not very different from upper caste Indians not allowing Dalits into temples. And just as with the temples, the rule about the dogs could be relaxed but never about the Indians. It was only in the 20th century that this changed.
END OF THE ARTICLE
Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Notes 29 and 30/Rishi Sunak
Unlike Barack Obama who made much of being an African-American, Sunak wants to be seen as just another Tory politician.
When it became clear that Rishi Sunak would become Prime Minister of the UK, many Indians felt a sense of vindication — validation, even. That old Winston Churchill quote was repeatedly retweeted, the one about how Indian leaders were “rogues, freebooters, men of low calibre….They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles.”
This was deliciously ironic because the Conservatives, Churchill’s old party, had just elected their third leader in six weeks among endless political squabbles and fights for power. And the man they had chosen was of Indian origin, though he was neither a ‘rogue’ nor a ‘man of low calibre’.
Churchill said many other things of a similar nature. He had a visceral hatred of Indians —though he quite liked India itself as long as it remained British property. According to his colleague Leo Amery, he referred to Indians as a “beastly people with a beastly religion.” So the sound we heard as Rishi Sunak, a Hindu, walked into 10, Downing Street was Churchill’s body spinning violently in its grave.
As someone who loathes Churchill’s views on empire, I am delighted to pull out those quotes. But let’s remember that Churchill’s objections to Indians had less to do with our culture and more to do with our race. In common with many champions of the British Empire, he doubted whether non-White people could be trusted to govern themselves. In that respect, he was like Rudyard Kipling, who wrote famously of the ‘White Man’s Burden,’ regarding colonialism as a means of civilising the natives, a “divine burden to reign God’s empire on Earth.”
So, much more than his heritage, it was Sunak’s colour that was the most unusual aspect of his election as prime minister. With the UK in a mess, he was finally going to pick up the Brown man’s burden.
Sunak is proudly British
But, a few qualifiers. Let’s accept, first of all, that Sunak is not Indian. He is proudly British. Even the ‘Indian origin’ thing is a bit of a stretch: His parents are East African Asians. He seems more Indian to us because he is married to Narayan Murthy’s daughter, but let’s not forget that while she has held on to her Indian passport, he has always been British, a national by birth.
Let’s also dispense with the Barack Obama parallels. Obama made much of being an African-American (in his case, literally), talked about racism and often focused on racial issues. Sunak, on the other hand, is eager to be seen as just another Tory politician. He does not seem to think (or at least, admit) that his race matters much.
Many Tory politicians of colour follow a racial agenda that is no different from that of White, Right-wing politicians. As the writer and journalist Sathnam Sanghera wrote perceptively in The Times (London), when Sunak had to campaign in the shires for votes from Conservative party members (many of whom are Right-wing and possibly racist) he used the same rhetoric as the traditional Tory Right—attacking “Left-wing agitators” for trying to “take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values.” At a time when many in the UK are taking a critical look at the country’s imperialist past, he announced that “vilifying the UK” should be an offence.
Sanghera quotes Sayeeda Warsi, the former chairwoman of the Conservative party who told him in an interview that “it’s almost like ethnic minorities in the Tory party have had to be more Right-wing than the most extreme Right-wing to be accepted.”
Anyone who has followed the statements made by the appalling Suella Braverman, the India-baiting Home Secretary who is partly of East African-Asian heritage, will know what Warsi meant. Braverman referred to her parents as “proud children of the Empire,” defended it and spoke of her “dream” of deporting potential refugees to Rwanda by Christmas. No surprise then that though Braverman was sacked by Liz Truss over a security breach, Sunak quickly reinstated her on his first day in office.
Ancestry does not determine loyalty
But two things need to be said in Sunak’s defence. First, he has never been as craven as Braverman or her predecessor, Home Secretary Priti Patel. And second, why should he let his ethnic origin or colour define his politics? He regards himself as British. Let him act like a British politician. Yes, some of his ancestors were born in India. But then, so were the ancestors of all of Pakistan’s politicians. Ancestry does not determine how pro-Indian you are.
It is understandable for us to feel proud of Brown people who succeed in politics abroad, but we need to recognise that while the Indian diaspora has strong cultural (and sometimes religious) links with India, its members owe loyalty not to the land of their ancestors but to the countries they have chosen to call home.
At some level, we do accept this. We know that people of Indian origin have risen to the top of the political structure in say, Mauritius. But we never doubt that their loyalty is to Mauritius, not India. So it is with the Caribbean. We don’t regard people of Indian origin in say, Guyana or Trinidad as being Indians or expect them to be pro-Indian.
It is only when it comes to some Western countries that we have different expectations. Kamala Harris has cultural links with India because of her mother. But she is entirely American. Why should we expect her to lean towards India? And so it is with Sunak and the current generation of UK politicians. They are British. Cultural and ethnic identity does not make them Indian. And yet, we had people on Twitter hoping that Sunak would return the Kohinoor!
Why do we find it so hard to accept that politicians of Indian origin in the West owe loyalty to the countries they live in and not to India? Perhaps because the rise of Indian-origin politicians in the West is still a relatively new phenomenon. And mostly because we have been so scarred by the Empire, with the abuse hurled at us by the likes of Winston Churchill and the institutionalised racism of the Raj, that we are thrilled by the spectacle of Brits being led by Brown men and women.
And partly, it is because not all people of Indian origin with foreign nationalities who live in the West are ready to fully commit to the countries whose passports they carry. Many of them keep offering opinions on Indian politics, telling Indian nationals who actually live here how India should be run. When it comes to politics, the bright ones—like Sunak—rise in the countries they now live in. The not-so-bright ones merely interfere in the politics of the country they left behind. Those who can succeed in politics, do. Those who can’t, tweet.
So yes, I am pleased that a Brown man will lead the UK. But no, I don’t have any expectations of him from an Indian standpoint. He has chosen his country. And now, he must serve its interests.
Momentary romanticism over ‘being seen’ will not save us from Britain’s cost-of-living crisis, presided over by a prime minister wealthier than the king
Britain last week welcomed a new prime minister, not elected by the people. Yes, you read that right: a select few from the Conservative Party lent their backing to Rishi Sunak, constituting enough support to replace Liz Truss.
Yet, the general public’s attention was not so much on a new Tory leader who the people did not elect, but on the background of the new prime minister. This is, allegedly, a historic moment being compared to former US President Barack Obama’s win – although he won via the mandate of the people, not a select few.
The events of the past few days should force us to ask some urgent questions. How is representational politics, based solely on sharing the same heritage as someone, a helpful measure of political consciousness? What does it mean for economically marginalised citizens to have the wealthiest MP as our prime minister? It has been duly pointed out that Sunak is richer than King Charles III, with an estimated fortune of £730m ($845m).
Indeed, this moment will not necessarily entail any form of tangible economic change to help those in dire need during a massive and widespread cost-of-living crisis. This momentary lapse of asserting that we are in a post-colonial, post-racial world is little more than denial, exposing how racecraft is understood through acquiring higher positions of power. It shifts the focus away from political deceit, deepening inequalities and social breakdown that will take decades to rebuild.
Sunak, in this sense, represents his class – those at the very top. Class is a variable that stratifies Britain in a multitude of ways; a form of social engineering that none of us can escape. His presence as the country’s leader is what I would call a mythic racial nightmare.
The merging of economics with race here is an acute way of emphasising how the leader’s aesthetics mark a cosmetic change, while the same fiscal policies are retained, benefiting those in the same economic position as Sunak. Just this year, Sunak gave a speech in Tunbridge Wells where he boasted of diverting public funds from “deprived urban areas” to more affluent constituencies.
Easing white anxiety
Sunak is committed to the Rwanda plan, wherein refugees arriving on the shores of Britain are deported to Rwanda to have their paperwork processed. He has also expressed his desire to widen the definition of extremism, targeting those who “vilify Britain”.
This is an intriguing point. A day before Sunak accepted his premiership following a meeting with the king, he articulated how he wanted to give back to the country to which he owed so much. He thus not only declared himself the leader of the country, but also asserted that he is not a danger, emphasising his utmost loyalty. Such a public admission exculpates him of being the “Other” and eases white anxiety.
Sunak as the grateful immigrant who remains deferential to the metropole of empire is the only way to reassure the insecure, affirming the notion that Britain cannot possibly be racist. The making of the servile sahib with access to the head of the table is not an unknown tactic.
Amid Britain’s colonisation of India, the famous “Minute on Education” speech was delivered by Thomas Macaulay in 1835. He shared his ambitions on how to advance the British empire, noting: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”
Expansion of capital
I would propose that things are no different today, albeit without the British Raj. A similar machine is at play: the expansion of capital within the upper echelons of society, with the crumbs littered among those at the bottom, the working class.
Sunak’s ascension has been hailed as an advance for other South Asians in Britain, despite their immensely different experiences. Unlike the vast majority of South Asians in the UK, Sunak’s personal migration story is often referred to as one of the “twice migrants”. Originally from Gujranwala (in today’s Punjab in Pakistan), his family moved to Kenya before migrating to the UK in the 1960s.
The belief that most South Asians in Britain, who are working class, will somehow feel elated at seeing someone who “looks like them” in power – that this should be sufficient to reduce their economic anxieties – amounts to a subtraction of race from economics. This is what I call abject politics: a politics incapable of critiquing state actors, because representational politics is weaponised as a distraction.
The South Asians who had already settled in Britain before the arrival of East African Asians forged politically radical movements that fought vehemently against assimilationism and encouraged pushback against those in power.
A momentary romanticism of “being seen” will not save us from the cost-of-living crisis. Indulging this moment obscures and erases the damage that the Conservative Party has done to the country for 12 years.
Now is the time to build collectively from the ground up. It is time to smash the egregious policies passed by government actors and stop masking the violence of those in power simply because they “look like us”.
”Maar zowel Wilders als Ellian delen niet de mening van de GroenLinks-politica. Beide heren zijn van mening dat Bouchallikht degene is die excuses moet gaan aanbieden voor dat wat de islam heeft veroorzaakt.
”’Wanneer gaat u namens profeet Mohammed, Ottomaans rijk, en latere islamitische landen excuses aanbieden voor slavernij. Dat was en is toegestaan volgens de sharia. Uw hoofddoek is symbool van sharia, dus ook van regels omtrent slavernij’, schrijft Ellian.
Wilders houdt er een soortgelijke mening op na: ‘Het is de hoogste tijd dat u excuses aanbiedt voor de eeuwenlange slavernij van de islam, voor het dragen van uw hoofddoek als symbool van de onderdanigheid van de vrouw, voor de islamitische haat naar joden, christenen en afvalligen. Het is de hoogste tijd dat u ontslag neemt.’
Het begon met de uitspraak van Groen LinksKamerlid Kauthar Bouchallikth,
waarin zij zei, dat het hoog tijd was, dat de Nederlandse regering
nu eens excuses gaat aanbieden voor het Nederlandse slavernijverleden
[1 en zie boven]
Hoe dat weer eens ontaardde in het Vervolgdrama extreen-rechts/Bouchallikth
daarover straks meer
Nu eerst die excuses:
Dat het aanbieden van excuses voor het Nederlandse slavernijverleden
steeds meer Bon Ton wordt, is noodzakelijk en een Goede Zaak [2]
Een greep hieruit:
Als eerste Bestuurseenheid in Nederland bood Amsterdam excuses aan [3],
gevolgd door Rotterdam [4] en Utrecht [5]
Recentelijk, juli 2022, bood de voorman van de Nederlandsche Bank,
Klaas Knot, op je jaarlijkse Keti Koti Herdenking [6] namens de Nederlandsche Bank, de Staatsbank van Nederland [7],
zijn excuses aan voor het slavernijverleden [8]
Een indrukwekkend Moment [9]
Overigens had ABN AMRO reeds in april 2022 eveneens excuses
over het slavernijverleden aangeboden. [10]
II
EXCUSES VAN DE NEDERLANDSE STAAT?
Niet vreemd is het dus, dat de druk op de Nederlandse Staat om
excuses voor het slavernijverleden aan te bieden, steeds groter werd
en wordt.
Toegegeven:
De Nederlandse Staat had al eerder ”diepe spijt” betuigd over het slavernijverleden
[mag ook wel, zou ik denken] [11], maar er is meer nodig:
Namelijk officiele excuses [12]
Maar daar wil[de] premier Rutte nog niet aan
Ik citeer Rutte:
””Eh het slavernijverleden, daarvan is mijn punt altijd geweest,
dat is 150 jaar geleden.
Ik vind het, ik heb het altijd gratuit gevonden om te zeggen over iets
wat 150 jaar is gebeurd, in die context, in die totaal andere situatie,
om daarvoor excuses te maken eh…dus te zeggen, ja, die mensen
toen hebben het fout gedaan eh…dat vind ik van een ….dat vind ik
vanwege dat grote tijdsverschil en het feit dat je die context van 150 jaar geleden nooit zo kunt wegen, vind ik onjuist.” [13]
Dat zei Rutte in het VPRO programma ”Zomergasten, in 2016 [14]
Kom me niet aan met dat argument, Mr Prime Minister!
Want die ”context” bestaat niet in absolute zin
Ook in de tijd, toen de slavernij in volle gang was, waren er
al levendige protesten, met name van de kant van 17e Eeuwse
dominees [15]
Maar goed:
Op excuses wordt o.a. aangedrongen [of beter gezegd, geadviseerd] door het in opdracht van het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken opgerichte Adviescollege Dialooggroep Slavernijverleden [16]
De meerderheid van de Tweede Kamer heeft zich
nu onlangs [2022] ook uitgesproken voor excuses [17]
Van de twee coalitiepartijen D’66 en Christen-Unie
is bekend, dat zij reeds in 2020 voor excuses waren [18]
Beweegt Rutte zich nu toch in die richting?
In een toespraak tot het Surinaamse parlement
[Rutte was onlangs voor een tweedaags bezoek
in Suriname], refereerde hij eraan, dat de 2023 herdenking van de afschaffing van de slavernij in
Suriname en op de Antillen in het teken
moet staan van erkenning….” [19]
Letterlijk zei Rutte in de Nationale Assemblee
[Het Surinaamse parlement]:
”Het herdenkingsjaar 2023 moet daarom in het teken staan van erkenning. Erkenning van het afschuwelijke leed dat de tot slaaf gemaakten is aangedaan. Erkenning van de strijd en het verzet, dat er ook was, en dat zo indringend is beschreven door Anton de Kom in zijn boek ‘Wij slaven van Suriname’ [20]
Wat ik aan zijn Toespraak grappig vond, was zijn switch:
Zei hij nog in 2016 in het Programma ”Zomergasten”:
””Eh het slavernijverleden, daarvan is mijn punt altijd geweest,
dat is 150 jaar geleden.
Ik vind het, ik heb het altijd gratuit gevonden om te zeggen over iets
wat 150 jaar is gebeurd…..” [21]
NU, in deze Toespraak tot het Surinaamse Parlement, klonk
een heel ANDER geluid:
Ik citeer Rutte:
”Tussen ons in het heden en dat moment zitten welbeschouwd niet meer dan enkele generaties en het is volkomen begrijpelijk dat dit levende geschiedenis is voor de nazaten van de tot slaaf gemaakten, de inheemse bevolking en de contractarbeiders. ” [22]
Voortschrijdend Inzicht…………
Maar hoe dan ook, ik heb het ”politieke” Gevoel,
dat de Nederlandse Staat zich steeds meer richting excuses beweegt, die hoogstwaarschijnlijkvolgend Jaar, in 2023, zullen worden aangeboden.Want laten we eerlijk zijn:Als belangrijke Instituties als de Nederlandsche Bank,de ABN AMRO Bank, de steden Amsterdam, Rotterdam,en Utrecht je reeds zijn voorgegaan, alseen eigen door het Ministerie Binnenlandse Zaken opgerichte Denktank je excuses adviseert, als ook een Tweede Kamer Meerderheid voor excuses is, als twee van jeeigen coalitiepartners daar al sinds 2020 voor zijn enje blijft als regering weigeren, dan sta je toch voor Gek?Dat is in het persoonlijke Leven geen probleem, maarpolitiek toch wel?We zullen zien………..Overigens is 2023 het 160 STE HERDENKINGSJAARVAN DE SLAVERNIJ en NIET het 150 ste! [23]Kunnen mensen niet meer rekenen….. III WILDERS AND HIS BOY AFSHIN ELLIAN VERSUS KAUTHAR Nu terug naar waar dit artikel om begonnen is, namelijkde ”excuses” die Wilders and his boy, IslamofoobAfshin Ellian [24] eisten van Groen LinksKamerlid Kauthar Bouchallikth voor de ”islamitische”slavernij [25]Waarom ik dat islamitisch tussen aanhalingstekens zet, daarover straks meer, alsmede over de kritiek van Afshin Ellian.Ik begin met Wilders: Geert Wilders dus, leider van de fascistisch-Islamofobe PVV [26] heeft evenals zijn Comrade of Arms, his BoyAfshin Ellian [over wie later meer] van Groen LinksKamerlid Kauthar, excuses geeist voor de ”islamitische” slavernij:Dit naar aanleiding van een toespraak, waarin zij
juist excuses eiste van de Nederlandse Staat over
het Nederlandse slavernijverleden:
Kauthar merkte daarbij op:
””Als wij het hebben over gelijkwaardigheid binnen
het Koninkrijk, dan kunnen we niet wegkijken van onze geschiedenis.
De geschiedenis van exploitatie en uitbuiting”
Het slavernijverleden van Nederland.
Ik hoop, dat we in 2023, 150 jaar na afschaffing een belangrijke stap
kunnen zetten en de regering eindelijk excuses zal aanbieden voor
het slavernijverleden.
Ik hoop ook, dat die excuses gepaard zullen gaan met handelen
Want zoals een Caraibisch Nederlands parlementarier dat ook zei
Het gaat niet alleen om woorden, maar ook om daden.” [27]
HETZE TEGEN KAUTHAR
Nu moet dit alles worden gezien in het Licht van de Grote Hetze, die destijds
door het extreem-rechtse nieuws medium Geen Stijl en zijn Consorten van PVV en anderen is gevoerd tegen het nu Groen Links Kamerlid
Kauthar Bouchallikth, toen kandidaat voor de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen 2021. [28]
Doel was om haar integriteit in twijfel te trekken, want zij zou gelieerd zijn
aan de Moslimbroederschap! [29]
Onzin, zoals in twee uitstekende opinieartikelen werd gesteld [30], maar waar
het natuurlijk vooral om ging was het feit, dat Kauthar een hoofddoek draagt, ook in de Tweede Kamer [31].
Hoe dan ook, de villeine Spelletjes van de Extreem-rechtse Bende liep op
niets uit, Kauthar Bouchallikth kwam toch in de Tweede Kamer
vanwege voorkeursstemmen [32]
Overigens, hoe sneu kan je zijn, is Geen Stijl kennelijk zo geobsedeerd
door Kauthar, dat ze pagina na pagina, tot nu toe, aan haar wijden……[33]
DE EXCUSES
Tot zover de achtergrond van de extreem-rechtse obsessie met Kauthar
Bouchallikth [vanaf nu simpel ”Kauthar” genoemd]
Zoals ik dus schreef en op Nieuw Rechts te lezen is [34] eiste Wilders en in
zijn kielzog Afshin Ellian excuses van Kauthar voor de ”islamitische slavernij”
naar aanleiding naar haar pleidooi [nu door een Tweede Kamermeerderheid
gedeeld] voor excuses van de Nederlandse Staat voor het Nederlandse slavernij verleden [35]
De Heren schrijven [op Facebook en Twitter]
WILDERS [Facebook]
” ‘Het is de hoogste tijd dat u excuses aanbiedt voor de eeuwenlange slavernij van de islam, voor het dragen van uw hoofddoek als symbool van de onderdanigheid van de vrouw, voor de islamitische haat naar joden, christenen en afvalligen. Het is de hoogste tijd dat u ontslag neemt.’
AFSHIN ELLIAN [Twitter]
‘Wanneer gaat u namens profeet Mohammed, Ottomaans rijk, en latere islamitische landen excuses aanbieden voor slavernij. Dat was en is toegestaan volgens de sharia. Uw hoofddoek is symbool van sharia, dus ook van regels omtrent slavernij’ [36]
Dat is een Hoop bij Elkaar, ik beperk mij tot de tirade van WildersSLAVERNIJ, MISDAAD TEGEN DE MENSELIJKHEID
Nu ben ik glad voor het aanbieden van excuses, door STATEN,
voor het aandeel van hun voorgangers uit het verleden,
in slavernij [en slavenhandel], die misdaad tegen de
menselijkheid [37]
En of dat nu de Westerse transatlantische slavernij en
slavenhandel, of de Arabische of Afrikaanse slavernij [38] is [geen zinnig mens ontkent het bestaan daarvan], dat
maakt mij niet uit.
Slavernij is slavernij, door wie of welke Staat ook
bedreven
En geen enkele vorm van slavernij/handel, of die nu
door ”witte” Westerse landen is gepleegd of door anderen,
moet worden weggepoetst
Okay?
Maar het gaat het het DUO Wilders, Ellian niet om dit evenwicht:
Ze willen de Kauthar hetze hernieuwen, de aandacht [en dat
geldt zeker voor Wilders] afleiden van de misdaden
van de Westerse slavenhandel/slavernij en natuurlijkde Islam, en als afgeleiden moslims, een Trap na gevenLees maar verder: A EXCUSES KAUTHAR:GELIJK OVERSTEKEN, MENEER WILDERS!
Het is grappig, dat juist Wilders die excuses van Kauthar eist, terwijl hijzelf
niets ziet in excuses van de Nederlandse Staat voor het Nederlandse’
slavernijverleden [39]
Waarom moet zij dan wel excuses aanbieden?
Als Wilders excuses eist van Kauthar, prima, maar dan moet
hij ook excuses aanbieden voor het NEDERLANDSE slavernijverleden!
Dat heb ik ook geschreven op Wilders’ Facebookpagina
Zie noot 40
B
EXCUSES KAUTHAR
EXCUSES VAN STATEN, NIET VAN INDIVIDUEN
”” ‘Het is de hoogste tijd dat u excuses aanbiedt voor de eeuwenlange slavernij van de islam, voor het dragen van uw hoofddoek als symbool van de onderdanigheid van de vrouw, voor de islamitische haat naar joden, christenen en afvalligen. Het is de hoogste tijd dat u ontslag neemt.’
ALDUS WILDERS VERSUS KAUTHAR [41]
Nog afgezien van al die andere hele en halve ONZIN, die
Kauthar wordt aangewreven, focussen dus op die Slavernij
Waarom zou Kauthar ALS INDIVIDU excuses moeten aanbiedenvoor een eeuwenoude misdaad tegen de menselijkheid? Als Wilders nu excuses had geeist van pak hem beet, Saoedi Arabie, Marokko, Mauretanie of Ghana, Benin [Afrikaanse slavernij] [42]dan had hij een punt gehad.Want excuses worden door STATEN gemaakt voor de wandadenvan de aan hen voorafgaande Staatsvormen, nietdoor individuenIk vind dat Nederland als STAAT excuses dient aan te bieden,geen Nederlandse burgers!En datzelfde geldt ook voor slavenhoudende Arabische/Afrikaanse landen. C SLAVERNIJ ”ISLAMITISCH”? ”
” ‘Het is de hoogste tijd dat u excuses aanbiedt voor de eeuwenlange slavernij van de islam, voor het dragen van uw hoofddoek als symbool van de onderdanigheid van de vrouw, voor de islamitische haat naar joden, christenen en afvalligen. Het is de hoogste tijd dat u ontslag neemt.’
ALDUS WILDERS VERSUS KAUTHAR [43]
Dan kom ik nu bij de reden, waarom ik in bovenstaandschrijven dat ”islamitisch” tussen aanhalingstekensheb gezetMijzelf geciteerd [zie ergens hierboven]”
Waarom ik dat islamitisch tussen aanhalingstekens zet, daarover straks meer…..” In de eerste plaats is het onzinnig om het Arabischeen Ottomaanse slavernijverleden [44] ”eeuwenlangeslavernij van de Islam” te noemen [45] Want het Arabisch en Ottomaanse slavernijverledenwas een stelsel van Koop en Verkoop van Mensen,dat net zo min ”islamitisch” was, als de Westerseslavenhandel/slavernij ”christelijk ”was Het simpele feit, dat moslims of christenen slavernijbedrijven, maakt die slavernij nog niet”islamitisch” of ”christelijk” [46] Wat anders is, is dat men de slavernij trachtte te rechtvaardigen met als inzet de Islam ofhet Christendom [47] Triomfantelijk zullen Islamhaters mij toeroepen:”Astrid Essed of mevrouw Essed [afhankelijkvan hun zin voor goede manieren], maar je/ukunt niet ontkennen, dat de Profeet Mohammed enzijn volgelingen krijgsgevangenen tot slaaf maaktenen slaven kochten en verkochten [48] Welnu Heren en Dames Moslimhaters [en complimentenals het u al, intellectueel gezien, gelukt is om zoverin mijn artikel te komen], dat ontken ik ook helemaalniet.Maar ook tot u zal zijn doorgedrongen, dat de ProfeetMohammed leefde in de 7e Eeuw na Christus [49]en dat in die Tijd zowel in Europa, de Arabische Wereld en Elders de slavernij een ”gewone” [sociaal-geaccepteerde] praktijk was [50]En aangezien ook Profeten, hoezeer ook spiritueleVoorbeelden, niet volmaakt waren, konden ookzij niet treden buiten een Wereldbeeld, dat bovendien[en daar zat het em natuurlijk ook in] zo lucratief was.Wie in die Tijd had geprobeerd de slavernij af te schaffen,was waarschijnlijk buiten de Wereld gesteld of ergensopgesloten als [on]Gevaarlijke Gek….. Of zoals een eloquenter schrijver als ondergetekende opmerkte ”Prohibiting slavery in the context of seventh-century Arabiaapparently would has been as useful as prohibitingpoverty; it would have reflected a noble ideal butwould have been unworkable on an immediate basis without establishing an entirely new socioeconomic system” [51] WAT JAMMER VOOR U, ISLAMHATERS…… Overigens moet ik er nog aan toevoegen…en datvind ik ZOOO jammer voor de Islamhaters, dat deProfeet Mohammed niet alleen slaven alsmenselijke wezens behandelde, maar henook zekere rechten toekende en zelfs het vrijlatenvan slaven aanmoedigde, al verbood hij dan niet deslavernij als zodanigU gelooft mij niet?Lees dan noot 52
AFSHIN ELLIAN
”’Wanneer gaat u namens profeet Mohammed, Ottomaans rijk, en latere islamitische landen excuses aanbieden voor slavernij. Dat was en is toegestaan volgens de sharia. Uw hoofddoek is symbool van sharia, dus ook van regels omtrent slavernij’,” [53]
Het is niet verwonderlijk, dat ook Afshin Ellian, ”vermaard”
Islamofoob [54], met ongeveer dezelfde eisen tot excuses tegenover
Kauthar kwam aanzetten als Wilders.
Ik ga niet weer op zijn eisen in, die
ongeveer hetzelfde zijn als die van Wilders, omdat ik
dat hierboven al uitgebreid [zie ook bijbehorende noten]
gedaan heb.
WEL wil ik er nog op wijzen, dat zijn opmerking, dat de
slavernij volgens de Sharia was toegestaan [op zich juist] [55]
vrij eenzijdig vind.
Want door de christelijke rechtvaardiging van de slavernij
niet te noemen [56] [wat deze meneer waarschijnlijk
bewust doet, want een rechtsfilosoof moet beter weten [57]
wordt weer die eenzijdige aanval op de Islam benadrukt.
Overigens wil ik u een door een masterstudent religiestudies, Michiel van der Padt genaamd, gedane
felle aanval op de hersenspinsels van Ellian niet onthouden
Zie noot 58
EPILOOG
De gezamenlijke aanval van PVV leider G Wilders en his Boy, Islamofoob
Afshin Ellian [59] op Groen Links Kamerlid Kauthar Bouchallikth, waarbij door
dit DUO op hoge toon haar excuses voor de ”islamitische” slavernij
werd geeist [60], kan niet los gezien worden van de eerdere extreem-rechtse
hetze tegen Kauthar
Lees daarover alles in NOOT 61
Samengevat:
EXCUSES WORDEN AANGEBODEN DOOR STATEN, NIET DOOR INDIVIDUEN
[Opmerking/Excuses van Arabische en Afrikaanse landen,
maar ook van Turkije/namens het voormalige Ottomaanse Rijk over
hun aandeel in de eeuwenlange slavernij zijn welkom en naar mijn mening,
noodzakelijk, net als Nederlandse excuses over het slavernijverleden]
DE ARABISCH/OTTOMAAANSE SLAVERNIJ WAS NIET ”ISLAMITISCH”,
NET ZO MIN ALS DE WESTERSE TRANSATLANTISCHE SLAVENHANDEL
EN SLAVERNIJ ”CHRISTELIJK” WAS
EN TENSLOTTE
ALS WILDERS ZO GEFOCUST IS OP EXCUSES VAN KAUTHAR VOOR
DE ”ISLAMITISCHE” SLAVERNIJ, LAAT HIJ DAN ZIJN EXCUSES
AANBIEDEN VOOR DE NEDERLANDSE ”CHRISTELIJKE” SLAVERNIJ
GELIJK OVERSTEKEN WILDERS
En Lezers, blijf alert op het Fascistische Gevaar! [62]
Geert Wilders (Foto: Peter van de Sluijs; CC 4.0)
