Ponytailgate
will doubtless get buried by the jingoism of Anzac Day which will be
used to glorify war and justify yet another imperialist war. If we
stick to facts and not opinion the ANZACs were Winston Churchill’s
cannonfodder in an imperialist endevaour in the midst of an
imperialist war. The Turks were defending their own country against
an invader.
Instead
we we will be told that “we are free” (one lie) because “our
soldiers gave their lives” (another lie).
As
clarification, I am talking about Gallipoli and World War 1, not the
war against Hitlerism.
Nothing
to celebrate in Anzac: The bloody history of the British empire
18
April, 2015
The
Gallipoli campaign was not about democracy, but defending the profits
and colonies of the British empire, one of the most brutal the world
has seen, writes James Supple
The
100 year anniversary commemorations of Gallipoli will glorify it as
sacrifice for a noble cause. Tony Abbott has called it part of a war
that “shaped our nation”. In 2012 then Prime Minister Julia
Gillard declared on Anzac Day that, “all of us inhabit the freedom
the Anzacs won for us”. But Gallipoli and the First World War was
no fight for freedom or democracy.
The
landing at Gallipoli was an invasion of a Middle Eastern country,
modern Turkey, in the service of what was, at the time, the world’s
largest and most powerful empire. Australian troops at Gallipoli were
among almost half a million British, Indian, New Zealand and French
colonial troops who landed there.
At
the time, Australian troops were celebrated as dying in the service
of empire. As historian Mark McKenna has pointed out, “For decades
following 1915, the Imperial context of Anzac Day had been
fundamental to the rituals and meaning of 25 April; newspapers, for
example, commonly placed the king’s or queen’s message on the
front page.”
Tony
Abbott has lined up with conservative historians to declare the war
necessary because, “Europe was at risk from Prussian militarism”.
But the First World War was fundamentally a clash between rival
European powers for control of colonies and profits. It was a product
of fully modern capitalist economies engaged in brutal industrial
slaughter.
Bloody
empire
Today
some still defend the British empire as a civilising force that
helped bring economic development to colonies like India. In reality
it was a brutal arrangement through which Britain plundered the
world, based on sheer military terror and bloodshed.
Britain
began constructing its empire in Ireland, effectively its first
colony. In 1609 it drove local peasants off their lands and settled
English and Scottish colonists in the “plantation of Ulster” as
an effort to maintain control. Huge rents were imposed on Irish
peasant farmers that kept them in poverty.
The
failure of the potato crop between 1845 and 1852 caused a famine in
which one million died. Although Ireland was still producing enough
to feed the population, the British government allowed merchants and
landlords to continue exporting grain abroad for profits while its
people starved.
After
1690 Britain shipped three million African slaves to its profitable
sugar plantations in the Caribbean. This regime of unimaginable
brutality relied on literally working slaves to death: the lifespan
of those that survived the trip across the Atlantic was just seven to
ten years. Savage punishments were required to maintain it. The
Baptist missionary William Knibb recorded that, “flogging on the
estates is as common as eating almost”.
There
were constant slave revolts and resistance. In 1791 a revolt swept
the French slave colony of St Dominique, spreading across much of the
rest of the Caribbean. By 1798 Britain had lost 55,000 soldiers
putting down the rebellions. A further massive revolt followed in
Jamaica in 1831.
It
was these rebellions that convinced the British ruling class of the
need to abolish slavery. The importance of the plantations in
generating their wealth was also in decline as Britain developed as
an industrial power. Yet even when they ended slavery in 1833, it was
the slave owners who received compensation, not the slaves.
“New
world” horrors
The
colonisation of the “new world” across North America, New Zealand
and Australia involved slaughter and genocide against the indigenous
inhabitants. The first British colony in north America was
established in 1607 in Virginia.
When
the settlers struggled to feed themselves at first, the local
indigenous people gave them food that helped them survive. But once
they were established the British set out on a policy of
extermination. They burned crops and villages, and massacred women
and children in punitive raids.
When
the local Powhatan Indians finally struck back after years of
harassment and provocation, killing a number of the settlers, the
English refused to discuss peace and spent the next decade hunting
down and killing the local population. In 1623 they invited over 100
Powhatan to a banquet, supposedly to discuss peace, and poisoned
them.
Britain’s
loss of its American colonies spurred it to grab larger parts of Asia
and Africa. The British East India Company began the plunder of the
subcontinent with its own private army. It ruled large parts of India
from 1757 until 1858 when the British government took full control.
The
East India Company established a monopoly on all trade out of India.
The country’s textile industry was destroyed by seizing Indian
cotton for export to British factories, where it was turned into
cheap cloth that flooded the Indian market.
British
rule also resulted in frequent famines that killed between 12 and 29
million Indians, according to Mike Davis’s in his book Late
Victorian Holocausts.
In
1876 when famine hit there was an overall surplus of rice and wheat
in India but, as in Ireland, the British Viceroy refused to stop its
export to Britain. While peasants starved a law was passed which
banned “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that
potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices”.
Again government policy imposed starvation in defence of British
profits.
Empires
at war
It
was these spoils that Britain and its armies were defending in the
First World War.
Egypt
had been invaded in 1882 in order to ensure the repayment of debts
run up to British and French investors on extortionate terms. A new
nationalist government had attempted to throw off “supervision”
by the British and French governments. The decisive battle at
Tel-el-Kabir was more like a massacre, with 57 British soldiers
killed and between 2000 and 10,000 Egyptians.
During
the First World War, British troops based in Egypt, including
Australian light horse regiments, invaded the Ottoman provinces in
Palestine and Mesopotamia.
At
the war’s conclusion Britain took control of modern day Iraq and
Jordan as well as Palestine, while France gained Lebanon and Syria.
Promises about establishing an independent Arab state, which Britain
made during the war to secure military support against the Ottomans,
were simply dropped.
When
Egypt staged a nationalist rebellion in 1919, Australian troops were
used to help crush it. Australian light horse units had been waiting
in Egypt to sail for home at the end of the war. But with few other
British troops in the country they were ordered to help re-establish
British rule. Australians were sent out to machine gun crowds of
protesters. By the time the revolt was crushed in April 1919, over
1000 Egyptians had been killed, 1500 jailed and 57 hanged.
Winston
Churchill, the man who ordered the assault on Gallipoli, sent in
British planes dropping poison gas to put down the uprising in Iraq
which followed in 1920.
After
the Second World War the US succeeded Britain as the world’s
foremost imperial power. While it stepped back from use of direct
imperial control, it has proved just as willing to overthrow
governments that defy its wishes and which harm the interests of US
multinationals.
Just
as Australia sat under the British umbrella in the First World War,
it now works in partnership with US imperialism, joining its imperial
adventures from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nothing
in this tradition of empire and plunder is worth celebrating.
Photo
above: Victims of the famine in India as a product of British rule in
1876
If
you’re in Sydney come along to Solidarity’s one-day conference on
Saturday May 9:
One hundred years of war, One hundred years of resistance:
Gallipoli and the Anzac myth
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