How "liberal elites ruined the British Empire"... posted by Richard Seymour

...and may ruin the American one.

Yesterday I opened up a book just out in paperback called Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins. It details how in the dying days of the British Empire, the Kikuyu people of Kenya began to rise up in armed rebellion. In response, Britain detained almost the entire population (of one and a half million people!), either by placing them in concentration camps (the British called them 'reception pens') or by ring-fencing their villages with barbed wire. Perhaps over a hundred thousand detainees died - from starvation, disease, beatings and so forth. Vast purges were launched, especially during Operation Anvil, which saw almost the entire Kikuyu population driven from Nairobi, the capital. The brutality was astonishing, and terror was a tool widely used to control and intimidate: one woman describes how she was attacked in her house by a group of British soldiers, who informed her that they'd just killed her husband. Then they started to hammer her with the butts of their guns, shoving her from one person to the next. Her two year old child, hearing her scream, clambered out of his bed, between the legs of the soldiers and tried to cling to his mother's ankles. The woman was told she was being given the independence her husband had set out to get. The child was being trampled. When at long last she had been beaten numb and dragged out of the house, she remembered that the last thing she saw was her son's dead body on the floor of her house.



That's just a small sample of the kind of ruthless violence deployed to maintain a cheap labour plantation in the east of Africa. And it stands as an introductory passage to this (frankly) very revealing article in the neoconservative Weekly Standard. In it, the author warns that "Empires don't last forever, and the combination of martial victory, popular ennui, and liberal anti-patriotism is a dangerous mix for a superpower." He renders the British Empire as a case in point: "after the conclusion of the first World War, Britain's imperial psyche began to fracture ... deep desire to avoid conflict, even at the price of letting the Empire dissolve, permeated British society. In 1931, the House of Commons passed the Statute of Westminster, the first step toward independence for Britain's dominions. In 1932, a poll found that 10.4 million Britons supported England's unilateral disarmament, while only 870,000 opposed it." How did it all go wrong? Well, one reason was "the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites, whose pacifism evolved into anti-patriotism."

'Anti-patriotism' is a carefully contrived phrase, since it morphs easily into 'anti-Americanism'. Some examples of this 'anti-patriotism' are leading intellectuals announcing that they will refuse to fight for King and Country and even - gosh - refusing to rise to their feet when God Save the King was played. Echoes of this when people denounce Bush as a 'fascist', consider peace more patriotic than war, worry about America becoming over-aggressive etc. Here is the final warning shot:

The liberal opponents of the British Empire were proved wrong, but their misplaced disillusionment was enough to sap the vitality of imperial confidence. After rising one last time to fight Nazism, the sun set on the British Empire.

I'd like to know in what sense liberal and radical opponents of the British Empire were "proved wrong". However, this is in itself a very interesting ideological development - the ideology of American imperialism after the war was, of course, anti-imperialism. Britain was still a threat, the nascent American emperors didn't trust either it or France, disapproved of the whole Suez deal etc.


Eisenhower, Eden, Churchill and John Foster Dulles before Suez.

These days, it is not out of place to hear American neoconservative ideologues spouting off about the merits of different kinds of empire. Robert Kagan will go half-way toward meeting his friend Niall Ferguson when he says the American Empire is just an update of the old British one that isn't tough enough to stick to its guns. Christopher Hitchens declared himself a convert to Empire in December, 2002 (you can find it in 'Regime Change' or, if you're American 'A Long Short War'), noting that if ever the US got finished dealing with selected dictators the world over and the world turned its attention to solving the AIDS crisis or big famines, it would be US airlifts that they would rely on. Think about that one for a second: the idea that the US and its imperial partners might have a hand in creating famines, drought, mass starvation, pollution and even, dare I say it, mass murder - it's totally absent. Such ridiculous purblindness leads him to posit hallucinatory garbage about the US empire being deployed "in its capacity as a Thomas Paine arsenal, or at the very least a Jeffersonian one". Indeed, that myopia is strikingly similar to that which apologists for the British empire bring to bear, what with their 'counterfactuals' and minimisations and diversionary tactics.

The open admission that America is an empire and has been for decades, the open celebration of this fact, is hardly a sign of confidence in America's hegemonic gifts. Of course, the very idea that America is anything other than an unusually charitable, bountiful nation, extending its shield of security across the Atlantic and determinedly facing down threats to its safety, will continue to be formally disavowed. However, the 'unofficial' ideological shift to glorifying military adventurism is very interesting. Slavoj Zizek notes somewhere (probably in various recent texts, but most likely in The Borrowed Kettle) that the willingness to abandon the legitimising rituals of 'human rights' by openly creating a network of extra-legal prisons in which the use of torture is ubiquitous suggests that the US ruling class is in a panic.

It is a similar story with the aggressive posture of neoconservatives toward the United Nations: of course, it was on US soil under the direction of a US bureacrat named Leo Pasvolsky that the UN was created - specifically as a 'balance of power' mechanism, through which the most powerful states might regulate their affairs and condescend to the natives in the General Assembly. A two-month enclave in San Francisco put the finishing touches on agreements previously reached at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta. Essentially, (although Americans sometimes seem to imagine it to be a foreign conspiracy) the UN was an American creation that was supposed to solidify and embody to some extent US power. The UN supported the Korean adventure, as it did numerous other escapades, including the Gulf War in 1990. It retroactively legitimised the most recent one as well, and provided the means by which the Kosovo intervention would be considered not an abrogation of international law, but a fundamental reconstitution of it (from 'state sovereignty' to 'cosmopolitanism'). The UN has only really been troublesome a few times with the arrival of newly liberated ex-colonial nations and the Non-Aligned Movement. And it does have some embarrassing things in its books about occupied peoples having the right to resist the occupiers by any means necessary. But as an organisation, it has largely been only too susceptible to US hegemony. Yet, Bush felt compelled to effectively threaten the UN with foreclosure if it did not support the war on Iraq.

No longer confident of their ability to control the processes of international law, the interpretations of the Geneva Conventions and even the direction of some ordinarily docile formations like the Organisation of American States, the United States is abandoning its old modes of legitimation. Casting about for new sources of moral authority, US neoconservative intellectuals (I speak loosely) have finally settled on Empire, the British Empire, the one which was less than fifteen years ago sponsoring far right loyalist death squads in my former home. Well, they might have done worse, but wasn't that affair rather on the opposing side to Paine and Jefferson?

If nothing else, the United States has inherited the British colonial flair for absurdity. I today obtained a transcript of an interview with one Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Martin, a PR person at Guantanamo Bay. In it, he is asked about the hunger strike of some 131 of the approximately 505 inmates at the island prison. He replies: "The detainees began refusing meals to protest their continued detention. This is a technique consistent with al-Qaeda training, and reflects the detainees' attempts to elicit media attention and to try to bring pressure on the US government." (Emphasis added). Notice that on this interpretation, any protest about human rights violations is potentially congruent with "al-Qaeda training". He might as well have said it was 'consistent with Mau Mau training' for all the difference it would make. The fact that these are not tried and convicted criminals makes the invocation of 'al-Qaeda' utterly specious, especially given that they have already been obliged to release a number of people whom they admit they have no evidence against. Further, asked about the forced feeding of those on hunger strike, the Lt Col responded gravely:

And another thing I might add about the hunger strike, there's some misinformation out there that states that those on hunger strike are in bed and near death – nothing could be further from the truth, that's false. The detainees who are choosing not to eat are bedridden but active, they walk and exercise, they take showers, they send and receive mail, they have access to the ICRC, and are allowed to practise their religion, and we've also rotated the involuntary feeding schedules to accommodate Ramadan for that religious and cultural practice of our detainees.

Bedridden, but active, walking, exercising, taking showers. Tubes stuck down their noses, but sending letters and moving about. Forcible feeding in violation of human rights laws, but they shut off the food during daylight hours to accomodate Ramadan. I've heard of politically correct racism before, but politically correct gulags?