Posted on 06/13/2013 4:38:22 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
WARWICK, England — THE British do not torture. At least, that is what we in Britain have always liked to think. But not anymore. In a historic decision last week, the British government agreed to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused while detained during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. Each claimant will receive around £2,670 (about $4,000).
The money is paltry. But the principle it establishes, and the history it rewrites, are both profound. This is the first historical claim for compensation that the British government has accepted. It has never before admitted to committing torture in any part of its former empire.
In recent years there has been a clamor for official apologies. In 2010, Britain formally apologized for its army’s conduct in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” killings in Northern Ireland in 1972, and earlier this year Prime Minister David Cameron visited Amritsar, India, the site of a 1919 massacre, and expressed “regret for the loss of life.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Obama will inherit some of this, right? Will he stop hating white people then?
So what about Irish revolutionaries; the descendants of American revolutionaries; Indian revolutionaries etc. Best to have kept this an historical, not legal/politically correct, circumstance.
[The money is paltry.]
Well.... in Kenya, $4000 is like winning the lottery.
It’s just a start. Once you start buying them off it never stops.
We paid a few farmers in Pigford, and people who had never seen a farm, started crawling out of the woodwork.
And the compensation for the thousands of victims of the Mau Mau (99% of them BLACK)?....
Anderson is a fine, but definately leftist, anticolonial historian.
‘A case already before the courts concerns the 1948 Batang Kali massacre in colonial Malaya, now Malaysia. There, the relatives of innocent villagers — who were murdered by young conscript soldiers ordered to shoot by an older, psychopathic sergeant major — have asked for compensation. For Americans, the case has eerie echoes of Vietnam.
In Cyprus, translators employed by the British during the 1950s told tales of electrocutions and pulled fingernails as British intelligence officers tried to elicit information about gunrunning.
The case of Aden, now in Yemen, could be the worst of all. In 1965, the British governor retreated up the steps of his departing aircraft, firing his revolver at snipers arrayed around the airport runway. This was not the “orderly retreat from empire” that many historians would have us believe characterized British decolonization. Britain’s brutality against its Yemeni enemies in Aden during those final days has become a local legend.’
Paragraph 1 is about the alleged massacre by Scottish troops of villagers. Anderson ignores that a 1970 inquiry found no evidence of such an atrocity.
Paragraph 2?. Anderson omits the appalling tactics used by EOKA in Cyprus, inc. using women and children as human shielsds, shooting unarmed soldiers and policemen offduty, shooting and bombing the families of servicemen, and also British civilians on the island, the murder and torture of Cypriot Greeks who didnt support EOKA.......
Paragraph 3: Despite his sneering comment, most of the Empire WAS peacefully decolonialised. The likes of Malaya or Cyprus or Kenya were the exception. And again, he ignores the terrorist tactics of the NLF in Aden, and makes the British out to be the sole bullyboys.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.