By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 22nd May 2012.

The term genocide conjures up attempts to kill an entire people: the German slaughter of the Jews or the Herero, the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, the near-extermination of the Native Americans. But the identity of the crime does not depend on its scale or success: genocide means “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”(1)

Though, in 1995, the women and children of Srebrenica were first removed from the killing grounds by Bosnian Serb troops, though the 8,000 men and boys they killed were a small proportion of the Bosnian Muslim population, it meets the definition. So the trial of Ratko Mladic, the troops’ commander, which began last week, matters. Whatever one thinks of the even-handedness of international law, and though it remains true that men who commissioned or caused the killing of greater numbers of people (George Bush and Tony Blair for example(2)) have not been brought to justice and are unlikely to be, every prosecution of this kind makes the world a better place.

So attempts to downplay or dismiss this crime matter too, especially when they emerge from the unlikely setting of the internationalist left. I’m using this column to pursue a battle which might be hopeless and which many of you might regard as obscure. Perhaps I have become obsessed, but it seems to me to be necessary. Tacitly on trial beside Mladic in the Hague is a set of ideas: in my view the left’s most disturbing case of denial and doublethink since the widespread refusal to accept that Stalin had engineered a famine in the Ukraine.

I first raised this issue a year ago, when I sharply criticised a book by two luminaries of the left, Edward Herman and David Peterson. The Politics of Genocide seeks to downplay or dismiss both the massacre of Bosniaks at Srebrenica in 1995 and the genocide of Tutsis committed by Hutu militias in Rwanda in 1994(3). Their claims are extraordinary: that the cause of death of the “vast majority” of the Bosniaks at Srebrenica remains “undetermined”(4); that rather than 800,000 or more Tutsis being killed by Hutu militias in Rwanda, “the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million”(5), while members of the Hutus’ Interahamwe militia were the “actual victims” of genocide(6).

What has changed since then is that the movement to which I thought I belonged has closed ranks: against attempts to challenge this revisionism, against the facts, in effect against the victims of these genocides. My attempts to pursue this question number among the most dispiriting experiences of my working life.

After I covered the issue last year, Herman and Peterson wrote a long denunciation on the Znet site(7). I believe in testing every proposition, so I set out to discover whether, as they insisted, I was wrong. I consulted four of the world’s leading genocide scholars: Martin Shaw, Adam Jones, Linda Melvern and Marko Attila Hoare. I asked them each to write a brief response to the claims the two men made on Znet. Their statements, which I have also posted on my website, are devastating(8,9,10,11). They accuse Herman and Peterson of obsfucating, distorting and misrepresenting the evidence, and of engaging in genocide denial.

For Edward Herman and David Peterson to be right, the entire canon of serious scholarship, human rights investigations, exhumations and witness statements would have to be wrong. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But they offer little but the recycled claims of genocidaires and genocide deniers, mashed up with their own misrepresentations.

But this discovery did not disturb me as much as the responses of their supporters. I wrote to Michael Albert, the publisher of Znet, asking whether he might publish Martin Shaw’s review of Herman and Peterson’s book (originally published in the the Journal of Genocide Research(12)) as a counterweight to their article. He flatly refused, then went on to accuse me of a long list of heinous beliefs.

I wrote to Noam Chomsky, a hero of mine, who provided the forward to Herman and Peterson’s book, asking whether he had read it and whether he accepted the accounts it contains of the Rwandan genocide and the massacre of Srebrenica. Watching that brilliant mind engage in high-handed dismissal and distraction has been profoundly depressing. While failing to answer my questions, he accused me of following the Washington script (I have posted our correspondence on my website(13)).

John Pilger, who wrote a glowing endorsement of the book, volunteered this response: “Chef Monbiot is a curiously sad figure. All those years of noble green crusading now dashed by his Damascene conversion to nuclear power’s poisonous devastations and his demonstrable need for establishment recognition – a recognition which, ironically, he already enjoyed.”(14) The leftwing magazine Counterpunch cited my article as evidence that I am a member of the “thought police”, and that the role of the Guardian is “to limit the imaginative horizons of readers.”(15)

Thus has this infectious idiocy spread though the political community to which I belong. The people I criticise here rightly contend that western governments and much of the western media ignore or excuse atrocities committed by the US and its allies, while magnifying those committed by forces deemed hostile. But they then appear to create a mirror image of this one-sided narrative, minimising the horrors committed by forces considered hostile to the US and its allies.

Perhaps this looks to you like the kind of esoteric infighting to which the left too often succumbs, but this seems to me to be important: as important as any other human rights issue. If people who claim to care about justice and humanity cannot resist what looks to me like blatant genocide denial, we find ourselves in a very dark place.

Those of us who seek to judge a case on its merits, rather than according to the identity of the victims and perpetrators, have a duty to defend the memory of people being airbrushed by Herman, Peterson and their supporters. This does not make us apologists for western power, or establishment flunkies or thought police. It means only that we care about the facts.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. United Nations, 1948. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/genocide.htm

2. http://www.arrestblair.org/

3. Edward S Herman and David Peterson, 2010. The Politics of Genocide. Monthly Review Press. New York.

4. http://www.zcommunications.org/george-monbiot-and-the-guardian-on-genocide-denial-and-revisionism-by-edward-s-herman

5. The Politics of Genocide, page 54.

6. The Politics of Genocide, page 58.

7. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, 4th September 2011. George Monbiot and the Guardian on “Genocide Denial” and “Revisionism”.
http://www.zcommunications.org/george-monbiot-and-the-guardian-on-genocide-denial-and-revisionism-by-edward-s-herman

8. http://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/genocide-denial-expert-assessments/

See also the following reviews of Herman and Peterson’s book:

9. Martin Shaw, September 2011. Review of The Politics of Genocide. Journal of Genocide Research, Vol.13, no.3, pp353–387.

10. Gerald Caplan, 17th June 2010. The politics of denialism: The strange case of Rwanda: Review of ‘The Politics of Genocide’. Pambazuka Issue 486. http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/65265

11. Adam Jones, 16th November 2010. Denying Rwanda: : A Response to Herman & Peterson. http://jonestream.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/denying-rwanda-response-to-herman.html

12. Martin Shaw, September 2011. Review of The Politics of Genocide. Journal of Genocide Research, Vol.13, no.3, pp353–387.

13. http://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/

14. John Pilger, quoted by David Edwards, 5th August 2011. A ‘Malign Intellectual Subculture’ – George Monbiot Smears Chomsky, Herman, Peterson, Pilger And Media Lens. http://medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=637
Also at:
http://www.zcommunications.org/a-malign-intellectual-subculture-george-monbiot-smears-chomsky-herman-peterson-pilger-and-media-lens-by-dave-edwards

15. Jonathan Cook, 28th September 2011. A Thought Police for the Internet Age: the Dangerous Cult of the Guardian.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/28/the-dangerous-cult-of-the-guardian/

Posted on monbiot.com, 21st May 2012

From: George Monbiot
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2011 10:10 AM
To: Noam Chomsky
Subject: foreword to Politics of Genocide

Dear Noam,

I hope you are very well. I’m writing a column for the Guardian today about genocide denial, in which Edward Herman will feature prominently. I have just finished reading his book The Politics of Genocide. It contains a revisionist and wildly inaccurate account of the Rwandan genocide, as well as some eminently contestable statements about the massacre at Srebrenica.

I note that in your foreword you neither endorse nor disown the specific statements the book contains. But I think most readers would see the fact that you wrote the foreword as an endorsement of the book.

Is that how you see it? Do you accept the accounts it contains of the Rwandan genocide and the massacre of Srebrenica? If not, in what respects do you reject them?

I know that the time difference doesn’t give you a great deal of time to respond, so I’ll ask the Guardian to stretch the opportunity to the last minute: namely 1730 British summer time today. I would need only a couple of sentences from you, if you wanted to respond.

Many thanks,

With my best wishes, George

From: Noam Chomsky
Sent: 14 June 2011 03:27
To: ‘George Monbiot
Subject: RE: foreword to Politics of Genocide

At work all day and evening, and just found your letter.

I purposely mentioned only one aspect of the book, which I do think is important, particularly so because of how it is ignored: namely the vulgar politicization of the word “genocide,” now so extreme that I rarely use the word at all. The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it “genocide” so cheapens the word as to constitute virtual Holocaust denial, in my opinion. It amazes me that intelligent people cannot see that.

In that connection, I’ve been rather intrigued by the responses to my piece on the politics of genocide. No one seems to care in the slightest about the really extraordinary genocide denial reported there, not by some remote figure, but by a respected commentator in a leading journal of the left-liberal intellectuals, the New York Review. And not denial of tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, but of some 10 million in the territorial US alone, and many times that many in the continent. And not in the past, but right now. The most sympathetic interpretation is that the revelation was new to readers: if they’d noticed it themselves and had not expressed their outrage and amazement, the moral disgrace is even more profound. The only plausible conclusion is that extraordinary denial of genocide – or worse in some ways, not even caring about it – simply doesn’t matter when it’s the core part of the history of England and its offshoots.

I’m so disgusted by these performances, frankly, that I wouldn’t respond, certainly not to the Guardian with its generally shameful record on not only these matters but on elementary respect for freedom of speech, as Philip Knightley pointed out in commentary that probably did not appear in print in England.

Noam

From: George Monbiot
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 10:53 AM
To: Noam Chomsky
Subject: RE: foreword to Politics of Genocide

Dear Noam,

Thank you for your message.

I strongly agree with your comments about the American genocide, and have written something similar myself, drawing heavily on David Stannard’s excellent and horrifying book American Holocaust:

http://www.monbiot.com/2010/01/11/the-holocaust-we-will-not-see/

But denying the scale and nature of the atrocities in Srebrenica and Rwanda does nothing to address the widespread and outrageous revisionism concerning the American genocide. Far from it: it damages the credibility of those who would draw it to our attention, ensuring that their views are marginalised even further.

This is one of the reasons why I am puzzled by the implicit endorsement of Herman and Peterson’s book you provided by writing the foreword. Did you read their manuscript before you wrote it? If so, did you not have concerns about their unsupportable claims in the sections on Srebrenica and Rwanda? Would it not have been wise, if you were to write the foreword, to have distanced yourself from those claims?

I understand your reluctance to engage with the Guardian after the Emma Brockes affair. Like many of us who work for the paper, I was deeply concerned about the way you were treated then, and I was glad to see that the Guardian retracted the unjustifiable claims she made. But this paper is a broad church, whose members are often sharply at odds with each other. Don’t judge us all by what she wrote.

My own effort in this case is to do what I’ve always sought to do: to stand up for the victims, whoever they might be, against the aggressors, whoever they might be. I haven’t always got it right, by any means, but it’s always the same struggle: to work out who has been been wronged and who has wronged them, and to expose and confront the oppressors. In this case, to my astonishment, as their denial of the events in Srebrenica and Rwanda aligns them with the interests of those who carried out the massacres, I find that Herman and his co-authors are supporting the oppressors. I know you have worked with him in the past, but that surely should not have prevented you from seeing it too.

I rate you very highly. That has not changed, despite my concerns in this case. But for the sake of all those of us who follow you, and – much more importantly – for the sake of the victims of the genocidal acts at Srebrenica and in Rwanda, could you not now make a statement distancing yourself from the demonstrably false claims in Herman and Peterson’s book?

With my best wishes,

George

From: Noam Chomsky
Sent: 15 June 2011 17:44
To: ‘George Monbiot
Subject: RE: foreword to Politics of Genocide

I am sorry that you did not understand my letter. I’ll try once more, and apologize in advance if this turns out to be blunt, since simply stating the facts evidently did not work.

In the background are two striking facts, which reveal quite a lot about the intellectual/moral culture of the circles in which we mostly live. One is an obsessive concern that certain articles of faith about crimes of official enemies (or designated “others”) must never be questioned, and that any critical analysis about them must elicit horror and outrage (not mere refutation). A second is that critical analysis of charges about our own crimes is a most honorable vocation (for example, questioning of the Lancet studies of Iraqi deaths and claims that the true figure is 1/10th as high), and minimization or outright denial of these crimes, however grotesque they are, is a matter of utter insignificance (e.g., that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the course of US aggression in Vietnam – McNamara’s figures – or that Bush and Blair should be hanged by the standards of Nuremberg). Examples are too numerous and familiar to mention.

These two facts, virtually definitive of the reigning moral/intellectual culture in which we largely live, are illustrated lucidly in this so far failed correspondence, and by what you have published about the topic – but, as I wrote to you, by every reference I have seen to my article on politics of genocide, the introduction to Herman-Peterson; and again, as you know, this article kept scrupulously to their general point, which is accurate and extremely important, and avoided any reference to their particular discussions.

The first fact, the obsessive concern, is illustrated by the desperate and convoluted attempts to show that by not mentioning or even hinting about the issues taken to be sacred, I am legitimizing “genocide denial” – of crimes of enemies. The second, the easy tolerance of genocide denial on a colossal scale right in our own circles, in fact inability even to notice it, is illustrated by the reaction to the actual content of the article.

To repeat, in that article there is not a word, not a hint, about the two issues of obsessive concern to western intellectuals – 8000 outright murders without provocation in Srebrenica, and assignment of responsibility for perhaps 1 million deaths in Rwanda. But even the most casual glance at the article reveals that it gives a dramatic example of the second fact: the publication, in a leading journal of left-liberal intellectual opinion, of an article by a highly-regarded political analyst praising a respected historian for denying the slaughter of some 10 million people in the territorial US, and tens of millions more elsewhere. That’s genocide denial with a vengeance, and it has, so far, passed completely without comment apart from what I’ve written (to my knowledge – please correct me if I’m wrong).

To illustrate the second fact still more dramatically, in references to my article, this is considered unworthy of mention — in your case, even after it is specifically brought to your attention. Recall again that all of this is right now, right in our circles, known to every literate reader, but considered entirely insignificant, even ignored in condemning (on ridiculous grounds) the first article to bring it to attention.

I should add that there are many other examples in the article, but in writing to you I kept to this one so as not to obscure the crystal clarity of conclusions.

Your response simply provides a further illustration of my points. You say that you wrote about the extermination of native Americans, citing Stannard. Very glad to know that, but it is completely irrelevant. The issue under discussion is genocide DENIAL – that’s the issue you raised in the first place, and the one discussed in my article. You completely avoid it in your two letters to me and what you published, though it is a prime topic in my article.

A second point raised in my letter to you (and in the article) is the vulgarization of the phrase “genocide,” so extreme as to amount to virtual Holocaust denial, and the reason why I rarely use the term. Take a concrete case: the murder of thousands of men and boys after women and children are allowed to flee if they can get away.

I’m referring to Fallujah, different from Srebrenica in many ways, among them that in the latter case the women and children were trucked out, and in the former case the destruction and slaughter was so extreme that current studies in medical journals estimate the scale of radiation-related deaths and diseases at beyond the level of Hiroshima. I would not however call it “genocide,” nor would you, and if the word were used, the more extreme apologists for western crimes, like Kamm, would go utterly berserk. Another of many illustrations of the two basic facts.

Finally, you also completely misunderstood my reference to the Guardian. I don’t care one way or another that they published an interview that they regarded as so dishonest that they removed it from their website (over my objections, incidentally). I’ve had interviews and articles in the journal since, and expect to continue to do so. I was referring to something totally different: namely, the exultation when a huge corporation, ITN, was able to put a tiny journal out of business by relying on Britain’s libel laws, which as you know are an international scandal. It was that remarkable fact, not limited to the Guardian, that occasioned the bitter condemnation of the British press by Philip Knightley, to which I referred you, in which he repeats elementary principles of freedom of speech/press that should be second nature, but that are evidently not understood in left-liberal intellectual circles in the UK.

I hope this is now clear. Some further comments interpolated below.

Noam

…

I strongly agree with your comments about the American genocide, and have written something similar myself, drawing heavily on David Stannard’s excellent and horrifying book American Holocaust:

http://www.monbiot.com/2010/01/11/the-holocaust-we-will-not-see/

Glad you wrote it, but it should be clear it is completely irrelevant to what we are discussing, as noted above.

But denying the scale and nature of the atrocities in Srebrenica and Rwanda does nothing to address the widespread and outrageous revisionism concerning the American genocide. Far from it: it damages the credibility of those who would draw it to our attention, ensuring that their views are marginalised even further.

True, but not relevant to what we are discussing.

This is one of the reasons why I am puzzled by the implicit endorsement of Herman and Peterson’s book you provided by writing the foreword. Did you read their manuscript before you wrote it? If so, did you not have concerns about their unsupportable claims in the sections on Srebrenica and Rwanda? Would it not have been wise, if you were to write the foreword, to have distanced yourself from those claims?

There’s no “implicit endorsement.” I made no reference to their claims about these or other matters, but kept to their main thesis, which is extremely important and not understood at all. It would, in my opinion, have been totally inappropriate to comment on these or many other claims in the book. I was not writing a review, but pickup the main thesis and elaborating on it. True, it might have been “wise” — if my goal were to appease British intellectuals. It wasn’t.

I understand your reluctance to engage with the Guardian after the Emma Brockes affair. Like many of us who work for the paper, I was deeply concerned about the way you were treated then, and I was glad to see that the Guardian retracted the unjustifiable claims she made. But this paper is a broad church, whose members are often sharply at odds with each other. Don’t judge us all by what she wrote.

I hope the misunderstanding is now clear.

My own effort in this case is to do what I’ve always sought to do: to stand up for the victims, whoever they might be, against the aggressors, whoever they might be. I haven’t always got it right, by any means, but it’s always the same struggle: to work out who has been been wronged and who has wronged them, and to expose and confront the oppressors. In this case, to my astonishment, as their denial of the events in Srebrenica and Rwanda aligns them with the interests of those who carried out the massacres, I find that Herman and his co-authors are supporting the oppressors. I know you have worked with him in the past, but that surely should not have prevented you from seeing it too.

I rate you very highly. That has not changed, despite my concerns in this case. But for the sake of all those of us who follow you, and – much more importantly – for the sake of the victims of the genocidal acts at Srebrenica and in Rwanda, could you not now make a statement distancing yourself from the demonstrably false claims in Herman and Peterson’s book?

No, I won’t. It would be sheer cowardice. I haven’t written about these cases, and see no reason to take a stand just because they are Holy Causes among British left intellectuals, who have ample opportunities to refute what they think is wrong. And have ample opportunities to discuss vastly worse cases, which they ignore, such as those I mentioned (a tiny sample): genocide denial in their own circles on a colossal scale, for one.

From: George Monbiot
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2011 10:33 AM
To: Noam Chomsky
Subject: RE: foreword to Politics of Genocide

Dear Noam,

Thank you very much for your response.

I understand very well what you are saying, and understood it the first time round, except for your reference to the Guardian, which I misinterpreted as a comment about the Emma Brockes interview. But I am not convinced that you have fully grasped my points.

To avoid any further misunderstanding, let me begin by spelling out where we agree.

- I agree that attempting to dismiss the crimes of our own states (and corporations) is perceived as “a most honorable vocation” by a large number of journalists and intellectuals in the West, both conservative and liberal, who refuse to apply the same analysis to the alleged crimes of official enemies or designated “others”.

- I agree that the same people (alongside governments and most of the political class) have engaged in the “minimization or outright denial” of the crimes of the US, the UK and their allies and that they are seldom held to account for this minimisation or denial.

- I agree that Bush and Blair should be – well, not “hanged” exactly – but prosecuted “by the standards of Nuremberg”. In fact I think it’s fair to say that I have done more than almost anyone else to try to make this a reality in Blair’s case, with the launch of www.arrestblair.org, and the articles accompanying it. Please read these BEFORE you dismiss them as “completely irrelevant”:

http://www.monbiot.com/2009/10/26/arresting-blair/

http://www.monbiot.com/2010/01/25/a-bounty-for-blairs-arrest/

http://www.monbiot.com/2010/02/02/the-reckoning/

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/01/20/blair-at-large/

http://www.arrestblair.org/blairs-crimes

- I agree, as I said in my article, with Herman and Peterson’s “general point”, even though I strongly disagree with their publication of obvious falsehoods.

- I agree with your exposure of the outrageous genocide denial practised, as you rightly say “by a highly-regarded political analyst praising a respected historian” in “a leading journal of left-liberal intellectual opinion”. It’s a shocking and disgusting example of a phenomenom which greatly concerns us both. As you rightly say, it is “genocide denial with a vengeance”.

Here’s where we disagree:

- Forgive me if I am wrong, but you appear to be characterising Herman and Peterson’s work on Srebrenica as “critical analysis” of the crimes committed by the West’s opponents. I repeat a question you have not yet answered: did you read their book before your wrote the foreword? I mean the whole book, not just the introduction in which they lay out their “general point”? If so, would you really characterise their blatant falsehoods about Srebrenica and Rwanda, which their notes utterly fail to justify, as “critical analysis”? How do you respond to the specific claims they make, such as those I mentioned in the article, namely:

The Serb forces “incontestably had not killed any but ‘Bosnian Muslim men of military age’.”

“[T]he great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million”.

The 800,000 “largely Tutsi deaths” caused by genocide “appears to have no basis in any facts”?

All these claims and many more are flat wrong and demonstrably so. They amount to outright denial – with a vengeance.

- I understand your point about the vulgarization of the term genocide. But I contend that it has a specific and well-understood meaning: acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The intent behind the crime bears no necessary relationship to its scale or success. In fact far greater mass atrocities, in terms of the numbers killed, have been committed which do not meet the strict definition of genocide. But this does not mean that they shouldn’t be exposed and prosecuted as rigorously as genocide is.

- You say that what I have published on this topic illustrates “the reigning moral/intellectual culture in which we largely live”, in which the crimes of the West are minimised or dismissed and those of its opponents are magnified. I believe that this can only be a wilful mischaracterisation of my work. I know that you are, or were, aware of what I have published on this topic: we have discussed it in person, and you congratulated me on it. To refresh your memory, let me give you just a few out of many examples:

My first book, which nearly had me killed, was written about West Papua, and the mass killings carried out by the USA’s client state – Suharto’s Indonesia – with the connivance and assistance of the US and the World Bank.

I think I was the first journalist in the UK to draw attention to the atrocities being committed by Paul Kagame’s RPF in Congo, and the way we in the West refused to see them: http://www.monbiot.com/2004/04/13/victims-licence/.

I have repeatedly drawn attention to the way we have airbrushed from history the famines that Britain manufactured in India, beginning with an article entitled “How Britain Denies its Holocausts”: http://www.monbiot.com/2005/12/27/how-britain-denies-its-holocausts/

I have written many times about the atrocities that took place on home soil, which again we ignore. Here is one of many examples: http://www.monbiot.com/2009/02/24/the-propaganda-of-the-victor/

I could go on. But let me draw your attention in particular to the article which you dismiss, evidently without having read it, as “completely irrelevant. The issue under discussion is genocide DENIAL”.

Had you bothered to read it, you would have discovered that the article is entirely relevant, because its theme is … genocide DENIAL. In fact you didn’t even have to read it – the title alone was a bit of a giveaway: “The Holocaust We Will Not See”. Here are some extracts:

“But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.”

“Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.”

“But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly. It reveals, he says, “a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide – that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see”. But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.”

How much more relevant could my article have been to the point you are making?

- You say that “there’s no ‘implicit endorsement’” of Herman and Peterson’s book in the fact that you wrote the foreword. You justify this statement by pointing out that the foreword makes “no reference to their claims about these or other matters”. You are the last person to whom I thought I would ever have to explain the meaning of the word implicit. Your name appears on the front cover, in the same font and size as the names of the authors. Most readers would surely conclude that by agreeing to write the foreword, you were giving the book your seal of approval. Your name on the cover may well be the book’s main selling-point, as you are so much better known than either of the authors.

- You say “It would, in my opinion, have been totally inappropriate to comment on these or many other claims in the book.” Why would it have been inappropriate? The only reason you give is that you were not “writing a review”. Are reviews the only places in which you can comment on claims made in books? Is a foreword not a rather appropriate place in which to do so?

- I asked you whether you would make a statement distancing yourself from the demonstrably false claims in Herman and Peterson’s book. You replied “No, I won’t. It would be sheer cowardice.” On the contrary, it would be an act of courage. Taking on allies is a far tougher call than taking on opponents, as I’ve found whenever I have done so – indeed as I find right at this moment, as I argue with a man whom I have admired perhaps more than anyone else on earth. But doesn’t intellectual honesty sometimes mean that it is necessary? Should our principles not be consistent, whoever they might offend?

- It is not “because they are Holy Causes among British left intellectuals” that I believe you should distance yourself from the evidently false claims made by Herman and Peterson about Rwanda and Srebrenica. Far from it. It is because of their shocking disavowal of the victims. You care about the victims of the West’s atrocities, and you insist that we don’t airbrush them from history. You are right to do so. Yet you appear to believe that the only reason why anyone would “take a stand” on behalf of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre and the Rwandan genocide against those who deny their very existence would be “because they are Holy Causes among British left intellectuals”. How do you explain this remarkable double standard?

I have gone on for far too long, but I hope you now better understand our areas of agreement, our common ground and our points of difference.

With my best wishes,

George

From: Noam Chomsky
Sent: 27 June 2011 16:25
To: ‘George Monbiot
Subject: RE: foreword to Politics of Genocide

I’m sorry that you apparently do not appreciate how grotesque the reaction of Guardian writers was to the shameful LM affair. I presume Knightley’s very cogent critique was not published. That’s too bad. But since you want to drop it without comment, I’ll drop it too.

On the rest, I have no doubt that there is a very wide area of agreement between us. And I constantly read your work with much profit and appreciation. About the disagreement, I’m sorry I have not been able to make my point by just stating the facts. So let me try again, adopting the procedure you recommend, beginning with the questions.

Did you read my article before writing about it? If not, then we can drop the discussion. If you did, then you know that it brought up colossal cases of genocide denial, vastly beyond anything that concerns you, and vastly more important as well for obvious reasons. I’ll keep just to the one case we’ve discussed – there are others — but that you don’t seem to comprehend, for reasons that escape me: the denial of the slaughter of tens of millions in the Western hemisphere, about 10 million in the territorial US alone.

As to why it’s vastly more important than what concerns you, the reasons should be clear. First, the denial of genocide appears (without a single published reaction) in one of the most prominent intellectual journals of left-liberalism; so we are discussing easy tolerance of denial of colossal genocide (by “our side”) by your associates and friends. Second, the denial of the slaughter bears directly on events taking place right now, before our eyes. To mention just the most obvious, at this very moment miserable refugees are still fleeing from the wreckage of the virtual genocide (and in this case the term is accurate) in the Guatemalan highlands under Reagan and with British support and probably participation, never acknowledged, and part of the general denial of extraordinary crimes. And they are being subjected to horrifying treatment, which I presume I need not detail. That’s right now, this minute. I happen to have very direct familiarity with it, but it’s well enough known so that denial becomes even more grotesque. We witnessed more casual denial with the shameful choice of the name “Operation Geronimo,” which elicited anger and disbelief in civilized countries like Mexico, though I saw virtually nothing here or in England. And the remnants of these programs of “extermination” (to use the word of the most distinguished perpetrator) are surviving in misery in reservations, right now.

All of that is incomparably more significant than the question of how many people Serbs “executed” at Srebrenica as distinct from killing them in combat (the issue between you and Herman, once your misquotation is corrected: and the fact is that you don’t know, he doesn’t know, and we will probably never find out) and whether the huge number slaughtered in Rwanda (Herman’s estimate is higher than yours) were mostly Hutu or mostly Tutsi.

I might add that in the sister journal of the NYRB, the LRB, denial of colossal atrocities by “our side” is also familiar, and also passes without comment. E.g., Mark Mazower, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n07/mark-mazower/short-cuts, who casually refers to the “mistreatment” of Native Americans in the US. Would you or your associates so easily ignore a far less egregious reference to the “mistreatment” of Bosnians or Tutsis? No need to answer, but this as usual passes without comment in your circles.

In your (disparaging) published comments you mention absolutely none of this. Therefore, adopting your concept (not mine) of “implicit endorsement” you endorse denial of horrendous crimes that is incomparably worse than anything that you focus your attention on. And when this is repeatedly brought to your attention, you still don’t see it.

Though this is a side matter, I’m sure you also see why Srebrenica became a Holy Cause to British (and to a lesser extent American) intellectuals. If that wasn’t obvious before, it became so in 1999, when as a last resort to cover up their disgraceful behavior concerning Kosovo, with remarkable lies, and simultaneous silence over their participation in crimes in East Timor in 1999 that went far beyond even the most extreme claims about Kosovo (much worse in the case of Britain than the US), they retreated to “don’t forget Srebrenica” – once again engaged in extraordinary denial of their own crimes, since of course what the US-UK had done in East Timor in earlier years far exceeded anything charged to the Serbs.

I don’t accept your notion of “implicit endorsement,” so don’t accuse you of easy tolerance of denial of truly colossal genocide, with terrible consequences continuing before our eyes. And I certainly don’t publish comments accusing you of this. I presume it’s not necessary to spell out the rest.

Noam

GM’s note: At this point, faced with Professor Chomsky’s repeated and apparently wilful failure to grasp the simple points I was making or answer the simple questions I was asking, I almost lost the will to live. I have not replied. I have to say that I found this paragraph in particular utterly depressing, as it appears to confirm my suspicion that Professor Chomsky, whose research is usually so thorough, is deliberately ignoring a vast weight of evidence which conflicts with his political beliefs:

“All of that is incomparably more significant than the question of how many people Serbs “executed” at Srebrenica as distinct from killing them in combat (the issue between you and Herman, once your misquotation is corrected: and the fact is that you don’t know, he doesn’t know, and we will probably never find out) and whether the huge number slaughtered in Rwanda (Herman’s estimate is higher than yours) were mostly Hutu or mostly Tutsi.”

Posted on monbiot.com, 21st May 2012

I asked four of the world’s leading genocide scholars to assess Herman and Peterson’s response to my first article about their claims, in order to discover whether I had got it wrong. Here is what they said.

***

Statement by Professor Adam Jones, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction.

“Ed Herman’s shift from unmasking atrocities, as with Vietnam, to denying and concealing them in the cases of Srebrenica and Rwanda, is one of the most depressing things I have witnessed on the left. Herman began grinding a denier’s axe on Srebrenica soon after the events — perhaps out of some nostalgic attachment to the oppressive and atrocious ‘Yugoslav’ government of Slobodan Milosevic. His more recent intervention on Rwanda is truly his nadir. He has demonstrated no past familiarity or competence with this case, and yet he advances what is probably the most systematic denial of the Tutsi genocide I have ever read, at least from anyone who’s not on trial for genocide or defending them.

“Herman and Peterson present an interpretation of the events in Rwanda from April to July 1994 that is a straightforward inversion of the reality accepted, and studied in intimate detail, by every major scholar and investigator of the subject. I am not aware of a single exception in comparative genocide studies and scholarship on Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. This is quite analogous to declaring that the Jewish Holocaust did not occur, and in fact, the real victims were Germans slaughtered by Jews. Herman and Peterson contend that the ‘only well-organized’ killing force in Rwanda during this period was the Tutsi-dominated RPF. The RPF certainly committed major and possibly genocidal atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, claiming tens of thousands of victims. But this was dwarfed by the Hutu holocaust of Tutsis, which exterminated up to a million people. Herman and Peterson completely obfuscate the agents of ‘Hutu Power,’ the killing squads that roamed every corner of Rwanda available to them for week after week, hunting down every last ragged Tutsi survivor they could find, checking in and out of their day’s duties like clockwork. They were organized and mobilized by an apparatus of hate that sprang into immediate action when the Hutu president Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in April 1994. How much detailed pre-planning of the killing there was is a legitimate question. But to baldly deny that systematic and generalized killing of Tutsis occurred in those three apocalyptic months is to deny the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, and to do it in such a casual and malicious way that it leaves me slack-jawed.

“There is also a sense in which, while not racist in themselves, Herman and Peterson’s contentions rely on the racism once described by a central object of their criticism, the late Alison Des Forges. Talking about western inaction during the Tutsi genocide of 1994, she said that ‘Rwanda was simply too remote … too poor, too little, and probably too black to be worthwhile.’ Most people today have trouble telling Hutus from Tutsis in a country so distant from centers of power. And hey, who really cares anyway? That’s the type of widespread ignorance and callousness that Herman and Peterson exploit — the kind they need, if their nonsense is to slide past.”

***

Statement by Linda Melvern, investigative journalist and author of A People Betrayed and Conspiracy to Murder.

“The work of Herman and Peterson is genocide denial; it is presented under the guise of scholarly debate. It is a part of a number of statements and articles aimed at obfuscating, distorting, minimising or even denying the genocide of the minority Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

“A programme of genocide denial was begun in April 1994 as the massacres spread. It was devised by the génocidaires themselves. Its aim was to prove to the world that the huge number of civilian deaths in Rwanda was due to “fighting” in a resumed civil war. This view was actively promoted by the Rwandan ambassador sitting in the UN Security Council in New York. Later on the campaign shifted focus and the perpetrators began desperately to try to prove that a plan to eliminate the Tutsi had never existed — there had been no Conspiracy to Murder. This one great lie would become the foundation stone of the defence case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). It is a view actively promoted by key defence lawyers from the ICTR who claim that the genocide of the Tutsi is “a myth”. They maintain that “ a standard account” of events — or what has even been called an “idealised history” of events — is deeply flawed. Herman and Peterson have relied on genocidaires and their lawyers for their accounts of what they believe took place.

“There is overwhelming evidence to counter this common denial. The conclusions of the UN Security Council’s Independent Commission of Experts in December 1994 reported to the Council that the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the crime of Genocide had been “massively violated” in Rwanda between April 6 and July 15. The experts had found “overwhelming evidence” to show that the extermination of the Tutsi had been premeditated and planned months in advance; a conspiracy to destroy Tutsi is confirmed as fact by judges at the ICTR.

“Over the years the manipulation of the evidence and disinformation has influenced journalists, students and academics. In France, in Belgium, in the USA, in Canada and in the UK the denial of the genocide of the Tutsi has served to detract from continuing efforts to investigate the circumstances of what happened; in my own case have been attempts to try to prevent publication of on-going research.”

***

Statement by Professor Martin Shaw, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals / University of Roehampton / University of Sussex

“Edward Herman and David Peterson, in their reply to George Monbiot, do little to respond to the wave of incredulity and revulsion which their denial of genocide and its endorsement by Noam Chomsky are causing.

“They misrepresent Monbiot, a widely respected radical journalist, as a cog in a Guardian-Observer propaganda machine which – in turn – is simply churning out a version of something called the ‘Western party-line’. Such crude, amalgamated constructs not only make serious debate difficult, but are also designed to damage one of the most important arenas for critical information and debate in the mainstream media – in precisely one of the areas in which it has been strongest, reporting on and debating crimes against humanity.

“Herman and Peterson do this because, as I have argued in my full review in the Journal of Genocide Research, their Politics of Genocide ‘does not stop at raising … counter-examples to the Western mainstream. Instead, it engages in what can only be described as extensive genocide denial.’ Deniers need to block out key information and misrepresent opponents to support their perverse world-views. As the sociologist Stanley Cohen puts it in a classic study, ‘One common thread runs through the many different stories of denial: people, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’

“What is the information which disturbs Herman and Peterson? They cannot accept what has now been established by extensive and rigorous enquiry, that in 1995 unarmed Bosniak men and boys from the Srebrenica ‘safe area’, who were captured by Bosnian-Serbian forces, were murdered in cold blood. They suggested in their book that the case was ‘extremely thin, resting in good part on the difficulty of separating executions from battle killings’. This is a classic genocide denial mechanism (which can be traced back to the Armenian genocide), representing genocidal killing as really only war, suggesting that the victims were not really civilians (they might have been killed in battle), or if they were, as killed accidentally in the course of fighting.

“Herman and Peterson believe that their trump card against Monbiot is that he ‘fails to mention that … we point out that the Bosnian Serbs “had taken the trouble to bus all the women, children, and the elderly men to safety”.’ What this shows, however, is that do not understand genocide, which involves not just indiscriminate attacks on entire populations, but narrower, targeted violence – as often against men of military age (as potential resisters) as against women (whose sexual violation completes the humiliation of a community).

“They also cannot accept that an exceptionally large, fast campaign of mass murder was carried out by Rwandan Hutu Power forces in 1994, claiming that the ‘great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million’. Claiming that Monbiot’s objections are ‘laughable’, they ridicule him for running ‘to his readers with the scoop that we are so sloppy in our use of sources’.

“Yet the principal academic reference for Herman and Peterson’s claim is an unpublished paper, ‘Rwandan Political Violence in Space and Time’, which they attribute to Christian Davenport and Allan Stam and source to Davenport’s website, dated to 2004. Yet on page 37 of the same paper (which while citing a database compiled jointly with Stam, is attributed only to Davenport and dated 2008), are printed in black and white the following unequivocal conclusions: ‘we find that the majority of killings take place in the zone under government control (accounting for approximately 990,000 deaths). They are the ones directly responsible for almost all of the political violence.’ (Accessed on 17 October 2011)

“A charitable explanation could be that Davenport’s paper has been updated since 2004, and this conclusion added since then, although 2008 was still well before The Politics of Genocide went to press. But Herman and Peterson can hardly have missed a clear line of argument which, while qualifying previous accounts of the Rwandan genocide, does not undermine the conclusion that the majority of killing in Rwanda in 1994 was committed by Hutu Power forces. The difference is that Davenport and Stam want to raise questions about the narrative of genocide; Herman and Peterson want to fully overturn it.

“So they are sloppy with their sources: it is they, in the nice phrase they use against Monbiot, who are ‘hit-and-run intellectuals’, scooping up quotes and references without due care. As Cohen says, in denial ‘information is … somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted.’ We find bucket-loads of all these tendencies in Herman and Peterson – and their patron, Chomsky. Indeed one suspects that, as Cohen continued, ‘the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’

“The remaining question is why do the Chomskyites do it? The obvious answer is political: they have such a huge investment in the idea that the USA and the West are the source of all the world’s evils, that they can only process information to fit this case. More complex answers might include, that like their fellow deniers in the former LM coterie, they are building an intellectual and political niche out of contrarian positions. The danger is that such nonsense, with its pseudo-scholarly apparatus of extensive footnotes and media science, finds a ready audience among the political idealistic.”

***

Statement by Dr Marko Attila Hoare, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University, London.

“The extent of Herman’s and Peterson’s cynicism in their misuse of source material is simply breathtaking. Thus, they make much of the findings of Mirsad Tokaca’s Research and Documentation Centre (RDC), that total Bosnian war deaths – narrowly defined – were approximately 100,000. Yet where the RDC’s findings contradict Herman’s and Peterson’s revisionist scribblings, they pass over them in silence. Thus, they continue both to deny the Srebrenica massacre and to parrot the myth that Bosnian Muslim forces themselves massacred thousands of Serbs in the Srebrenica region. Yet the RDC’s findings have comprehensively disproved the latter myth while providing further strong evidence – if any were needed – that Serb forces massacred over eight thousand Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995.

“The RDC’s figures show that 81.06% of all war deaths from the Podrinje region – where Srebrenica and the surrounding Serb villages are located -during the whole of the war were Muslims (a total of 16,940 civilians and 7,177 soldiers) while 18.73% were Serbs (870 civilians and 4,703) soldiers. The RDC’s figures show that 10,333 people from the Podrinje region were killed during 1995; that over 93% of these were Muslims; and that 9,328 out of the 10,333 were killed during the single month of July. Conversely, the RDC has specifically investigated the Serb death-toll in the Bratunac municipality, where the bulk of Bosnian Army killings in the Srebrenica region are alleged to have taken place, and concluded that 119 Serb civilians and 448 Serb soldiers were killed there during the whole of the war. All this from a source that Herman and Peterson themselves loudly trumpet.”

The history of family life has been wildly misrepresented by conservatives.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 15th May 2012

“Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman.” So says the Coalition for Marriage, whose petition against same-sex unions in the UK has so far attracted 500,000 signatures(1). It’s a familiar claim, and it is wrong. Dozens of societies, across many centuries, have recognised same-sex marriage(2,3,4). In a few cases, before the 14th Century, it was even celebrated in church.

This is an example of a widespread phenomenon: myth-making by cultural conservatives about past relationships. Scarcely challenged, family values campaigners have been able to construct a history that is almost entirely false.

The unbiblical and ahistorical nature of the modern Christian cult of the nuclear family is a marvel rare to behold. Those who promote it are followers of a man born out of wedlock and allegedly sired by someone other than his mother’s partner. Jesus insisted that “if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters … he cannot be my disciple”(5). He issued no such injunction against homosexuality: the threat he perceived was heterosexual and familial love, which competed with the love of God.

This theme was aggressively pursued by the church for some 1500 years. In his classic book A World of Their Own Making, Professor John Gillis points out that until the Reformation the state of holiness was not matrimony but lifelong chastity(6). There were no married saints in the early Mediaeval church. Godly families in this world were established not by men and women, united in bestial matrimony, but by the holy orders, whose members were the brothers or brides of Christ. Like most monotheistic religions (which developed among nomadic peoples(7)), Christianity placed little value on the home. A Christian’s true home belonged to another realm, and until he reached it, through death, he was considered an exile from the family of God.

The Reformation preachers created a new ideal of social organisation – the godly household – but this bore little relationship to the nuclear family. By their mid-teens, often much earlier, Gillis tells us, “virtually all young people lived and worked in another dwelling for shorter or longer periods”. Across much of Europe, the majority belonged – as servants, apprentices and labourers – to houses other than those of their biological parents. The poor, by and large, did not form households; they joined them.

The father of the house, who described and treated his charges as his children, typically was unrelated to most of them. Family, prior to the nineteenth century, meant everyone who lived in the house. What the Reformation sanctified was the proto-industrial labour force, working and sleeping under one roof(8).

The belief that sex outside marriage was rare in previous centuries is also unfounded. The majority, too poor to marry formally, Gillis writes, “could love as they liked as long as they were discreet about it”. Prior to the 19th Century, those who intended to marry began to sleep together as soon as they had made their spousals (declared their intentions). This practice was sanctioned on the grounds that it allowed couples to discover whether or not they were compatible: if they were not, they could break it off. Premarital pregnancy was common and often uncontroversial, as long as provision was made for the children(9).

The nuclear family, as idealised today, was an invention of the Victorians, but it bore little relationship to the family life we are told to emulate. Its development was driven by economic rather than spiritual needs, as the industrial revolution made manufacturing in the household inviable. Much as the Victorians might have extolled their families, “it was simply assumed that men would have their extramarital affairs and women would also find intimacy, even passion, outside marriage” (often with other women). Gillis links the 20th Century attempt to find intimacy and passion only within marriage – and the impossible expectations this raises – to the rise in the rate of divorce.

Children’s lives were characteristically wretched: farmed out to wet nurses, sometimes put to work in factories and mines, beaten, neglected, often abandoned as infants. In his book A History of Childhood, Colin Heywood reports that “the scale of abandonment in certain towns was simply staggering”: reaching one third or a half of all the children born in some European cities(10). Street gangs of feral youths caused as much moral panic in late 19th Century England as they do today.

Conservatives often hark back to the golden age of the 1950s. But in the 1950s, John Gillis shows, people of the same persuasion believed they had suffered a great moral decline since the early 20th Century. In the early 20th Century, people fetishised the family lives of the Victorians. The Victorians invented this nostalgia, looking back with longing to imagined family lives before the Industrial Revolution.

In the Telegraph yesterday, Cristina Odone maintained that “anyone who wants to improve lives in this country knows that the traditional family is key.”(11) But the tradition she invokes is imaginary. Far from this being, as cultural conservatives assert, a period of unique moral depravity, family life and the raising of children is, for most people, now surely better in the West than at any time in the past 1,000 years.

The conservatives’ supposedly moral concerns turn out to be nothing but an example of the age-old custom of first idealising and then sanctifying one’s own culture. The past they invoke is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions. It has nothing to offer us.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://c4m.org.uk/

2. William N. Eskridge, 1993. A History of Same-Sex Marriage. Virginia Law Review Vol. 79, No. 7, pp. 1419-1513

3. Jim Duffy, 11th August 1998. When Marriage Between Gays Was a Rite. Irish Times. http://www.libchrist.com/other/homosexual/gaymarriagerite.html

4. http://www.randomhistory.com/history-of-gay-marriage.html

5. Luke 14:26.

6. John R. Gillis, 1996. A World of Their Own Making: myth, ritual and the quest for family values. Basic Books, New York.

7. See George Monbiot, 1994. No Man’s Land: an investigative journey through Kenya and Tanzania. Macmillan, London.

8. John R. Gillis, as above.

9. John R. Gillis, as above.

10. Colin Heywood, 2001. A History of Childhood. Polity, Cambridge.

11. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100157628/heterosexual-marriage-im-sorry-you-cant-discuss-that/

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 10th May 2012

Michael Gove is of course quite right: the “stratification and segregation” of British society are “morally indefensible.” He is also right to observe that “it is remarkable how many of the positions of wealth, influence, celebrity and power in our society are held by individuals who were privately educated.” Among other beneficiaries of this unearned privelege, he names some “of our most prominent contemporary radical and activist writers”. As I came top of his list, I feel I should respond.

The first thing to say is that he has one heck of a brass neck. He talks of “those of us who believe in social justice”. I’m sure he does believe in it, much as he might also believe in the existence of the Higg’s Boson. What he does not believe in is making it a reality. Or if he does, he finds himself in some very strange company.

In successive budgets, George Osborne has slammed the door on the poor, sometimes trapping their fingers in the process. By cutting the taxes the richest people pay while simultaneously shrinking both benefits and essential social services, he has done more than any chancellor in living memory to prevent the poor from rising and the rich from sinking.

That, after all, is the point of this government. It exists to secure and enhance the position of the banks, the corporations and the rich. It exists to support the system of rentier capitalism – and the inherited wealth that arises from it – that made so many members of the cabinet wealthy. This is the plutocratic class that funds the Conservative Party, whose air it breathes, whose interests and opinions it shares. Social justice would require the resdistribution of its remarkably concentrated wealth. But that is, of course, structurally impossible for the party to contemplate.

The Conservatives cannot tell us how the land really lies, which is why Michael Gove must make stirring speeches about social justice. If he really believed in it, in the sense of being an adherent to the cause, he would implement a simple policy, which lies within his department’s reach: shutting down private schools. This would produce the following beneficial effects:

1. It would prevent the rich from securing unfair advantages for their children, and thereby obstructing social mobility.

2. It would break down the social segregation which private schools foster, and which Gove claims to lament, in which the most powerful class is separated from childhood from those it will come to dominate, ensuring that its members can neither understand nor empathise with their needs and interests.

3. It would ensure that, rather than opting out of the state education system, they would be obliged to fight for its improvement and better funding. As it is, the dominant class has no qualms about cutting a service upon which it does not depend, and in whose improvement it has no stake.

But this would the last policy Gove could contemplate: he knows what and whom he exists to represent. In fact the occasion of his speech about “social justice” was the celebration of the elite institution which has just been named “Independent School of the Year”. Among the methods he celebrated, it has

“aggressively recruited, and generously remunerated, talented individuals from a range of backgrounds”

In other words, it has cherry-picked teachers from the state sector. Without any apparent embarrassment, he then went on to insist that the key distinction between good schools and bad ones is “effective teaching”, which “can make a difference of a whole additional year of progress to poor pupils.” In other words, if pupils fail, according to Gove, it’s because they have bad teachers, yet he celebrates a system which reserves the best teachers for the children of the rich. So much for social justice.

As for myself, I can’t help where I’ve come from, but I can help where I’m going. One of my aims is to challenge the system which has granted people like me such undeserved advantages, and help sweep away the obstacles to social mobility, both upwards and downwards. That’s because I believe in social justice. But not in the sense that Mr Gove does.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 10th May 2012

What do the terms “marine reserve” and “marine protected area” conjure up for you? Places in which, perhaps, wildlife is protected? In which the damaging activities permitted in other parts of the sea – such as trawling and dredging – are banned? Wrong.

A marine protected area in the United Kingdom is an area inside a line drawn on a map – and that’s about it. In most cases, the fishing industry can continue to rip up the seabed, overharvest the fish and shellfish, and cause all the other kinds of damage it is permitted to inflict in the rest of this country’s territorial waters. With three tiny exceptions, our marine reserves are nothing but paper parks.

The exceptions are the pockets of sea around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran and Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. Together they occupy a grand total of 0.01% of British waters. These are the country’s only “no take zones”: places in which fishing and other extractive activities are banned.

After conducting a massive review of the evidence, in 2004 the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution proposed that 30% of the United Kingdom’s waters should be designated no-take zones. In 2009 a coalition of environmental groups launched a petition with the same aim: it gathered 500,000 signatures. But this didn’t make a damn of difference to either the Labour or the Coalition governments.

The government is now in breach of its promise to designate an “ecologically coherent” network of marine conservation zones by 2012. The excuse it gives for the delay is that “there are a number of gaps and limitations in the scientific evidence base”. But as the Royal Commission pointed out in 2004, the seas around this country “have been scrutinized in great detail since at least the mid-19th Century”, and the data is easily sufficient “to design comprehensive, representative and adequate networks of marine protected areas for UK waters.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Commission, which often voiced inconvenient truths, was shut down by Cameron’s government soon after it took office.

The Westminster government originally agreed to protect 127 sites in English waters, but now it appears to be paring the list down. Within these sites, only the “vulnerable features” will actually be protected; elsewhere it will be business as usual. If the government’s record so far is anything to go by, the vulnerable features will amount to a few handkerchiefs of seabed. The remainder of these “conservation zones” can continue to be pulverised by beam trawlers and scallop dredgers.

But even if all 127 proposed marine conservation zones were to be designated, and even if the entire area of these zones were to be protected, that would account for a total of 0.5% of our seas: one sixtieth of the area recommended by the Royal Commission. In Wales the situation is even worse. The government there says it will consider “no more than 3 to 4 sites”, covering 0.15 per cent of its seas.

So what about all those other marine reserves, such as our Special Areas of Conservation? These are supposed to offer the highest level of protection available under European law, and are officially described as “strictly protected sites”. Surely they offer our wildlife some protection? Wrong again.

The Marine Conservation Society has produced a gut-wrenching catalogue of the damage being done to these places by scallop dredgers, rock-hoppers (boats towing gear which turns over boulders to get at the fish sheltering among them) and all kinds of other destructive devices. If they are banned at all, it is only from a few small corners of the “strictly protected sites”, often by voluntary agreement, and almost always reactively, after extensive damage has already been done.

The idea of actually protecting Special Areas of Conservation, in their totality, in advance and by law, seems to be unthinkable to our governments. As Client Earth and the Marine Conservation Society point out, this puts the UK in breach of the European Habitats Directive.

The issue has come to a head once more with reports that scallop dredgers have been operating, apparently for the first time, in two recommended Marine Conservation Zones (Holderness Offshore and Inner Silver Pit) and one candidate Special Area of Conservation (Inner Dowsing) in the North Sea.

The UK has a fleet of nomadic scallop dredgers, mostly based in Scotland and the Isle of Man, which travel from one conservation area to another, ripping them to shreds, aware that our governments will do nothing to stop them. Scallop dredges operate by raking through the seabed with long metal teeth, dislodging the shellfish and trapping them in a net whose underside is made of chain mail. The teeth rip through the other lifeforms in their path; the steel mesh smashes the animals missed by the teeth. It is hard to think of a more effective method of destroying marine life, yet it is permitted in most of our Special Areas of Conservation and other marine reserves.

The Marine Management Organisation, which is supposed to protect these places, merely wrings its hands. It knows it must apply the government’s universal policy: that nothing should interfere with business, however damaging it is, however much it might harm the natural environment and even other businesses. (Local fishermen say that the scallop dredgers in just one of these sites have recently caused £100,000 of damage to their gear. They are likely to have done even greater damage to the fisheries on which local boats rely).

The chances of Richard Benyon, our fisheries minister, whose crashing conflicts of interest I exposed last month, demanding the protection of anything but the profits of the most destructive and short-sighted industries appear to be close to zero. It’s intensely frustrating for anyone who loves the marine environment, and it’s another powerful indication that “the greenest government ever” is even more destructive than its predecessors.

www.monbiot.com

Published in a Guardian comment thread, 10th May 2012

John Allen really should have read Caroline Elkins’s book before he wrote this article. Had he done so, he would have discovered that the events he dismisses so lightly, or – remarkably – blames on the Kikuyu themselves, are supported by a wealth of material, as well as 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – both rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Many of the most shocking accounts in fact come from the unembarrassed testimony of the British men who meted out or witnessed the torture and killings.

It testifies to our remarkable ability to airbrush the past, and the widespread lack of curiosity in this country about what really happened in Britain’s colonies, that John can so breezily and blatantly rewrite history, and that so many people in the comment thread are prepared to believe his whitewashed account. I am not suggesting he is lying: on the contrary, I believe he has thoroughly convinced himself of the account he has provided, having seen and remembered only what he wanted to see and remember.

We’re all capable of this. But what is striking is that such self-serving disavowal of colonial atrocities is so normal in Britain that it scarcely raises an objection, while the detailed and horrific accounts provided by authors such as Caroline Elkins (a Harvard professor who spent almost ten years on her book and won a Pulitzer Prize for it) are ignored by almost everyone, or furiously denied by those who are aware of them (but in most cases have not read them). John’s response perfectly illustrates the points about denial I made in my article.

I now challenge him to read Elkins’s book and to see what he has so far managed not to see.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th May 2012

Modern government could be interpreted as a device for projecting corporate power. Since the 1980s, in Britain, the US and other nations, the primary mission of governments has been to grant their sponsors in the private sector ever greater access to public money and public life.

There are several means by which they do so: the privatisation and outsourcing of public services, the stuffing of public committees with corporate executives(1), the reshaping of laws and regulations to favour big business. In the UK, the Health and Social Care Act extends the corporate domain in ways unimaginable even five years ago.

With these increasing powers come diminishing obligations. Through repeated cycles of deregulation, governments release big business from its duty of care towards both people and the planet. While citizens are subject to ever more control – as the state extends surveillance and restricts our freedom to protest and assemble(2,3) – companies are subject to ever less.

In this column I will make a proposal which sounds, at first, monstrous, but which I hope to persuade you is both reasonable and necessary: that freedom of information laws should be extended to the private sector.

The very idea of a corporation is made possible only by a blurring of the distinction between private and public. Limited liability socialises the risks which would otherwise be carried by a company’s owners and directors, exempting them from the costs of the debts they incur or the disasters they cause. The bail-outs introduced us to an extreme form of this exemption: men like Fred Goodwin and Matt Ridley are left in peace to count their money while everyone else must pay for their mistakes(4).

So I am asking only for the exercise of that long-standing Conservative maxim: no rights without responsibilities. If you benefit from limited liability, the public should be permitted to scrutinise your business.

Companies already have certain obligations towards transparency, such as the publication of financial statements and annual reports. But these tell us only a little of what we need to know. In News International’s annual report, you will find none of the information disclosed at the Leveson Inquiry, though it is of pressing public interest. In fact it is only due to a combination of the Guardian’s persistance and pure chance (the discovery that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked) that we know anything about the wide-ranging assault on democracy engineered by that company.

Privatisation and outsourcing ensure that private business is, or should be, everyone’s business. Private companies now provide services we are in no position to refuse, yet, unlike the state bodies they replace, they are not subject to the freedom of information act. The results can be catastrophic for public accounts.

Just as the Blair government did while imposing the disastrous private finance initiative(5,6), the Bullingdon boys now shield their schemes from public scrutiny behind the corporate information wall. Companies are once again striking remarkable deals, hatched in secret, at the expense of taxpayers, pupils and patients. Last week, for example, we learnt that Circle Healthcare will be able to extract millions of pounds a year from a public hospital, Hinchinbrooke, which is in deep financial trouble(7). Crucial information about the deal remains secret on the grounds of Circle’s “commercial confidentiality”(8).

The principle of corporate transparency has already been established in English law. The Freedom of Information Act has a clause enabling the government to extend it to companies with public contracts(9). Unsurprisingly, it has not been exercised. The environmental information rules of 2004 define a public authority as any body providing public services, which includes corporations(10). Why should this not apply universally?

The Campaign for Freedom of Information points out that the Scottish government almost adopted this idea: it proposed extending the transparency laws to major government contractors(11). But though this plan was overwhelmingly popular, it was dropped last year on the grounds that the contractors were opposed to it(12). (Who would have guessed?). South Africa, by contrast, provides a general right of access to the records of private bodies(13). The African National Congress, aware of how corporations assisted apartheid, recognises that the state is not the only threat to democracy.

Freedom of information is never absolute, nor should it be. Companies should retain the right, as they do in South Africa, to protect material that is of genuine commercial confidentiality; though they should not be allowed to use that as an excuse to withhold everything that might embarrass them. The information commissioner should decide where the line falls, just as he does for public bodies today.

The purpose of this monstrous proposal is not just to shine a light into the rattling cupboards of private companies, but also to change the way in which they behave. A body which acts as if the world is watching presents less of a threat to the public interest than a body which knows it won’t get caught. Would News International have acted as it did if its emails could have been revealed as a matter of course rather than as a matter of chance? If it is true that “governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world”(14), should we not be entitled to know what Goldman Sachs is up to? Is that not the only means we have of preventing its unelected power from becoming tyrannical?

I realise that this is not a good time to be making this request: far from extending our transparency laws, Cameron hints that he wants to roll them back(15,16). But unless we decide what we want and how we mean to obtain it – however remote it might now seem – we have no means of making social progress. If we are to reclaim power from the corporations which have seized it, first we need to know what that power looks like.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.monbiot.com/2012/03/12/the-shadow-government/

2. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/03/29/the-freedom-swindle/

3. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/01/17/the-real-domestic-extremists/

4. http://www.monbiot.com/2010/06/01/the-man-who-wants-to-northern-rock-the-planet/

5. http://www.monbiot.com/2006/05/09/an-easter-egg-hunt/

6. http://www.monbiot.com/2010/11/22/the-uks-odious-debts/

7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/may/03/hinchingbrooke-hospital-eyewatering-cuts

8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/04/scandal-hospital-contracts-in-private

9. Freedom of Information Act 2000, Paragraph 5.1.b. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/contents

10. The Environmental Information Regulations 2004, Paragraph 2.2, c and d. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3391/contents/made

11. The Scottish Government, 2010. Consultation on Extending the Coverage of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/07/20123725/0

12. http://www.cfoi.org.uk/foisa270111pr.html

13. Republic of South Africa, 2000. Promotion of Access to Information Act, Part 3.
http://www.dfa.gov.za/department/accessinfo_act.pdf

14. Alessio Rastani, 26th September 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15059135

15. http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/all/7637853/the-spectators-notes.thtml

16. http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=10438

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1st May 2012

The conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, is said to have sent an unequivocal message to current leaders: that great office confers no immunity. In fact it sent two messages: if you run a small, weak nation, you may be subject to the full force of international law. If you run a powerful nation, you have nothing to fear.

While anyone with an interest in human rights should welcome the verdict, it reminds us that no one has faced legal consequences for launching the illegal war against Iraq. This fits the Nuremberg Tribunal’s definition of a “crime of aggression”, which it called “the supreme international crime”(1). The charges on which, in an impartial system, George Bush, Tony Blair and their associates should have been investigated are far graver than those for which Taylor was found guilty.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, claims that Taylor’s conviction “demonstrates that those who have committed the most serious of crimes can and will be held to account for their actions.”(2) But the International Criminal Court, though it was established ten years ago, and though the crime of aggression has been recognised in international law since 1945, still has no jurisdiction over “the most serious of crimes”(3). This is because the powerful nations, for obvious reasons, are procrastinating. Nor have the United Kingdom, the United States and other western nations incorporated the crime of aggression into their own legislation. International law remains an imperial project, in which only the crimes committed by vassal states are punished.

In this respect it corresponds to other global powers. Despite its trumpeted reforms, the International Monetary Fund remains under the control of the United States and the former colonial powers. All constitutional matters still require an 85% share of the vote(4). By an inexplicable oversight, the United States retains 16.7%, ensuring that it possesses a veto over subsequent reforms(5). Belgium still has eight times the votes of Bangladesh(6), Italy a bigger share than India and the United Kingdom and France between them more voting power than the 49 African members(7). The managing director remains, as imperial tradition insists, a European, her deputy an American.

The IMF, as a result, is still the means by which western financial markets project their power into the rest of the world. At the end of last year, for example, it published a paper pressing emerging economies to increase their “financial depth”, which it defines as “the total financial claims and counterclaims of an economy”(8). This, it claimed, would insulate them from crisis.

As the Bretton Woods Project points out, emerging nations with large real economies and small financial sectors were the countries which best weathered the economic crisis, which was caused by advanced economies with large financial sectors(9). Like the modern opium war it waged in the 1980s and 1990s – when it forced Asian countries to liberalise their currencies, permitting western financial speculators to attack them(10) – the IMF’s prescriptions are incomprehensible until they are understood as instruments of financial power.

Decolonisation did not take place until the former colonial powers and the empires of capital on whose behalf they operated had established other means of retaining control. Some, like the IMF and World Bank, have remained almost unchanged. Others, like the programme of extraordinary rendition, evolved in response to new challenges to global hegemony.

As the kidnapping of Abdul Hakim Belhaj and his wife suggests, the UK’s foreign and intelligence services see themselves as a global police force, minding the affairs of other nations. In 2004, after Tony Blair, with one eye on possible contracts for British oil companies, decided that Gaddafi was a useful asset, the alliance was sealed with the capture, packaging and delivery of the regime’s dissenters(11).

Like the colonial crimes the British government committed in Kenya and elsewhere(12), whose concealment was sustained by the Foreign Office until its secret archives were revealed last month(13), the rendition programme was hidden from public view. Just as the colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to parliament about the detention and torture of the Kikuyu(14), in 2005 Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, told parliament that “there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition.”(15)

Reading the emails passed between the offices of James Murdoch and Jeremy Hunt, it struck me that here too is a government which sees itself as an agent of empire – Murdoch’s in this case – and which sees the electorate as ornamental. Working, against the public interest, for News Corporation, the financial sector and the billionaire donors to the Conservative party, its ministers act as capital’s district commissioners, governing Britain as their forebears governed the colonies.

The bid for power, oil and spheres of influence that Bush and Blair launched in Mesopotamia, using the traditional camouflage of the civilising mission; the colonial war still being fought in Afghanistan, 199 years after the Great Game began; the global policing functions the great powers have arrogated to themselves; the one-sided justice dispensed by international law: all these suggest that imperialism never ended, but merely mutated into new forms. The virtual empire knows no boundaries. Until we begin to recognise and confront it, all of us, black and white, will remain its subjects.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.arrestblair.org/what-are-crimes-against-peace

2. http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/news/latest-news/?view=News&id=758449982

3. http://www.arrestblair.org/legal-status

4. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/aa/index.htm

5. http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/eds.aspx

6. http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/members.aspx

7. France the UK, between them, have 8.58% of the vote. The African nations have 6.79%.

8. IMF, 19th October 2011. Financial Deepening and International Monetary Stability. Staff discussion note. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2011/sdn1116.pdf

9. Bretton Woods Project, March/April 2012. Bretton Woods Update No.80.

10. Joseph Stiglitz, 2002. Globalization and its Discontents. Allen Lane, London.

11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/18/straw-mi6-libyan-renditions-belhaj

12. http://www.monbiot.com/2012/04/23/dark-hearts/

13. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes

14. Caroline Elkins, 2005. Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Random House, London.

15. Here is the quote in full: “Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say, we believe that Secretary Rice is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop, because we have not been, and so what on earth a judicial inquiry would start to do I have no idea.”
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmfaff/768/5121304.htm

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th April 2012

There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain’s colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the right-wing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.

Last week’s revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects(1), and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations(2), is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph’s website. The Mail’s only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of “a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies” while everyone else was “dedicated, loyal and disciplined”(3).

The British government’s suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that “Britain’s empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law. … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria.”(4) Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?

Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly ten years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya(5). She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu’s Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, then conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – both rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and the other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.

Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintained, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died(6).

The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as “Labour and freedom” and “He who helps himself will also be helped”. Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts. They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound(7).

Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons(8). This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.

No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, “1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process.”(9)

The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan’s is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.

Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that “harsh measures” were sometimes used, but he maintains that “while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues.”(10) The theft of the Kikuyu’s land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau’s attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.

What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s(11) and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates(12,13), British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/sins-colonialists-concealed-secret-archive

3. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2131801/Yes-mistakes-stop-proud-Empire.html

4. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1299111/Stop-saying-sorry-history-For-long-leaders-crippled-post-imperial-cringe.html

5. Caroline Elkins, 2005. Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Random House, London.

6. Caroline Elkins, as above.

7. Caroline Elkins, as above.

8. Caroline Elkins, as above.

9. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100083096/in-all-the-coverage-of-the-atrocities-in-kenya-two-words-are-missing

10. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2131801/Yes-mistakes-stop-proud-Empire.html

11. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London.

12. See for example John Newsinger, 2006. The Blood Never Dried: a people’s history of the British empire. Bookmarks, London.

and

13. Mark Curtis, 2007. Unpeople: Britain’s secret human rights abuses. Vintage, London