Re: More on Syria
Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2018 9:54 pm
Republican John Mitchell: ‘How families, when all eaten up and no hope left, took their last look at the sun, built up their cottage doors, that none might see them die or her their groans, and were found weeks afterwards skeletons on their hearths. How every one of those years, ’46, ’47 and ’48, Ireland was exporting to England food to the value of 15 million pounds sterling.’
He accused the British government of deliberately starving the Irish people, of making use of the potato blight to ‘thin out these multitudinous Celts.’ While the potato crop might have failed, there was, Mitchell insisted, still more than enough grain, cereals and live-stock in the country to have fed the population, but it was exported to England.
‘Insane mothers began to eat their young who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England.’
British involvement in the West Indies slave trade is estimated to have killed upward of 2 million - by the most conservative estimates. A manual for slave-owners advocated 'terror' tactics to combat rebellion, with slow-burning a favorite method of execution - ensuring plenty of screaming to traumatize the other slaves.
Opium Wars: By the 1830s the scale of problems caused by the trade forced the government to respond. China was being drained of silver to pay for the opium, its administration was being corrupted and the extent of addiction (estimates of the number of addicts go as high as 12 million) was seen as a threat to both state and society.
India: The English threw aside the mask of civilization and engaged in a war of such ferocity that a reasonable parallel can be seen in our times with the Nazi occupation of Europe”- writers John Newsinger in The Blood Never Dried.
“You will find that we have been incomparably the most sanguinary (bloodthirsty) nation on earth.” Whether it was in “China, in Burma, in India, New Zealand, the Cape, Syria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc.” The Burmese had no chance against our 64 pound red-shot shot and other infernal improvements in the art of war.
“Searing with hot irons . . . dipping in wells and rivers till the victim half suffocated . . . squeezing testicles . . . putting peppers and red chillies in the eyes or introducing them into the private parts of men and women . . . prevention of sleep . . . nipping the flesh with pincers . . . suspension from the branches of a tree . . . imprisonment in a room used for storing lime . . . ” This everyday abuse and violence continued until the end of the British Raj.
Sudan, Battle of Omdurman, September 1898: On this occasion the Sudanese conveniently launched a frontal assault on the invading army and were massacred in a display of overwhelming firepower. Modern rifles, machine guns and artillery destroyed the Sudanese army before it even got close enough to the British to begin inflicting casualties. One NCO described the slaughter as ‘dreadful.’ The troops were ordered to ‘bayonet and shoot everyone we saw.’ The young Winston Churchill, a participant in the battle, wrote home that the victory was ‘disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded.'
World War I: The most terrible conflict in human history had been fought not for democracy, liberty or freedom, but to protect the British Empire from its powerful German rival. To this end, millions of lives had been sacrificed.
Egypt: Crowds were machine gunned and bombed from the air and heavily armed mobile columns were despatched to ‘pacify’ the countryside, shooting anyone who resisted, burning villages and flogging suspects (in one village every man was publically flogged). By the end of April the revolt had been put down with 1000 Egyptians killed, over 1500 imprisoned and hanged.
India: Protesters decided to proceed with an anti-Rowlatt rally on the afternoon of 13 April at the Jalianwalla Bagh, an enclosed space. The meeting was banned but they decided to defy it. General Reginald Dwyer decided to make an example of them. He marched a detachment of Gurkhas to the rally any without any warning opened fire on 20 to 25 thousand people peacefully listening to speeches. The troops continued firing for over ten minutes. By the time they finished the bodies were piled ten to 12 deep around the exits.
Iraq: Punitive columns were despatched throughout the countryside, burning villages, shooting rebels and seizing livestock, and rebel strongholds and concentrations were shelled and bombed from the air. The British used gas shells in quantity. Rebel fatalities were official 8,450, but a figure of over 10,000 is more realistic. Bombing had played an important part in the suppression of the revolt with the RAF dropping 1000 tons of bombs.
Palestine: The British with the help of Zionist death squads brutally defeated the Great Revolt in the spring of 1939. By the end of the conflict some 5000 rebels had been killed. The Zionists proceeded to establish the state of Israel, driving out some 700,000 Palestinians in the process. .
India still had to face the greatest disaster to befall the country in the 20th century, the Bengal famine of 1943-44. The British administration responded with ‘a callous disregard of its duties in handling the famine.’ The result was a terrible death toll from starvation and disease in 1943-44 that totalled more than 3.5 million men, women and children.
Churchill’s attitude was quite explicitly racist. He told Amery, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ Amery, on one occasion said, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.’
The coup d’etat that finally overthrew Iran's first democratic government in August 1953 was organised by the CIA with Britain’s M16 very much in a supporting role. The Shah’s brutal dictatorship rewarded its American sponsors with a renegotiated division of the oil spoils. The government received 50% of the profits. The AIOC had a 40% share in this consortium. Royal Shell had 14% and the French state oil company a 6% share.
Mau Mau Revolt: The official British figure for rebels killed in action was 11,503, but the real number was much higher. Some estimates go as high as 50,000, and this is much closer to the truth. 160,000 people were interned during the course of the emergency, even more were imprisoned for emergency offences. Electric shock was widely used, and so was fire. Women were choked and held under water, gun barrels, beer bottles and even knives were thrust into their vaginas. Men had beer bottles thrust up their rectums, were dragged behind Land Rovers, whipped, burned and bayoneted.
Anyone thought suspicious could be flooged, tortured and, if necessary, killed with virtual impunity. They described the torture they had carried out with as much concern as they talked about the weather: ‘By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears and his eyeball, the right one, I think was hanging out of its socket. He died before we got much out of him.’
Zimbabwe: On 24 October 1893 a Ndebele attack was routed by machine gun and artillery fire and a few days later at Imbembesi another attack was beaten off. As Frederick Courtney Selous observed, the Ndebele ‘were in each case driven off with heavy loss by the fire of the Maxim guns.’ The conquest ‘will ever be remembered as one of the most brilliant episodes in the history of British colonisation in Southern Africa.’
‘Wipe them all out . . . everything black,’ urged Rhodes. Robert Baden-Powell, the future founder of the Boy Scouts, acknowledged the ‘extraordinary bloodthirsty rage of our men.’[/i]
Indonesia: The battle for Surabaya had cost the natives at least 10,000 casualties. It unleashed a nationalist uprising that spread throughout Java and threatened to engulf the British. The battle of Surabaya is still celebrated in Indonesia every year on ‘Heroes Day.’ Indonesian casualties have been estimated as some 20,000 killed.
General Suharto effectively took power and launched a general massacre of the left. Even while the Confrontation was still under way, the British collaborated with the generals in a massacre that cost the lives of over 500,000 men, women and children, many of them slaughtered with the utmost bruality.
British participation in the Korean War made the Labour government and its Conservative successor party to a terrible conflict that left Korea effectively laid waste. The war cost the lives of between 500,000 and 1 million South Korean civilians and of 1.5 million North Korean soldiers and civilians. British governments stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with their American ally throughout the slaughter.
Iraq: In December 1998 when Clinton launched the punitive air raids against Iraq, British aircraft took part in the attacks that hit 250 targets. The government supported UN sanctions that by 1996 were estimated to have killed some half a million Iraqi children. Iraq, which had had no involvement with the 11 September attacks whatsoever, was to be invaded again and occupied as part of the war on terror. The invasion of Iraq began on March 2003. Its catastrophic consequences for the Middle East have been well documented.
Greg Dyke wrote of how Campbell had ‘turned Downing Street into a place similar to Nixon’s White House. You were either for them or against them. I was quite shocked by these similarities between the Nixon White House and Blair’s Downing Street.’ The American political system, however reluctantly and belatedly, called Nixon to account. The British political system has signally failed with regard to Blair.
Libya: In 2011 NATO invaded Africa's most prosperous nation to seize control of the lucrative oil industry, allowing its leader to be tortured to death in the streets, and bringing about civil war and widespread terrorism.
He accused the British government of deliberately starving the Irish people, of making use of the potato blight to ‘thin out these multitudinous Celts.’ While the potato crop might have failed, there was, Mitchell insisted, still more than enough grain, cereals and live-stock in the country to have fed the population, but it was exported to England.
‘Insane mothers began to eat their young who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England.’
British involvement in the West Indies slave trade is estimated to have killed upward of 2 million - by the most conservative estimates. A manual for slave-owners advocated 'terror' tactics to combat rebellion, with slow-burning a favorite method of execution - ensuring plenty of screaming to traumatize the other slaves.
Opium Wars: By the 1830s the scale of problems caused by the trade forced the government to respond. China was being drained of silver to pay for the opium, its administration was being corrupted and the extent of addiction (estimates of the number of addicts go as high as 12 million) was seen as a threat to both state and society.
India: The English threw aside the mask of civilization and engaged in a war of such ferocity that a reasonable parallel can be seen in our times with the Nazi occupation of Europe”- writers John Newsinger in The Blood Never Dried.
“You will find that we have been incomparably the most sanguinary (bloodthirsty) nation on earth.” Whether it was in “China, in Burma, in India, New Zealand, the Cape, Syria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc.” The Burmese had no chance against our 64 pound red-shot shot and other infernal improvements in the art of war.
“Searing with hot irons . . . dipping in wells and rivers till the victim half suffocated . . . squeezing testicles . . . putting peppers and red chillies in the eyes or introducing them into the private parts of men and women . . . prevention of sleep . . . nipping the flesh with pincers . . . suspension from the branches of a tree . . . imprisonment in a room used for storing lime . . . ” This everyday abuse and violence continued until the end of the British Raj.
Sudan, Battle of Omdurman, September 1898: On this occasion the Sudanese conveniently launched a frontal assault on the invading army and were massacred in a display of overwhelming firepower. Modern rifles, machine guns and artillery destroyed the Sudanese army before it even got close enough to the British to begin inflicting casualties. One NCO described the slaughter as ‘dreadful.’ The troops were ordered to ‘bayonet and shoot everyone we saw.’ The young Winston Churchill, a participant in the battle, wrote home that the victory was ‘disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded.'
World War I: The most terrible conflict in human history had been fought not for democracy, liberty or freedom, but to protect the British Empire from its powerful German rival. To this end, millions of lives had been sacrificed.
Egypt: Crowds were machine gunned and bombed from the air and heavily armed mobile columns were despatched to ‘pacify’ the countryside, shooting anyone who resisted, burning villages and flogging suspects (in one village every man was publically flogged). By the end of April the revolt had been put down with 1000 Egyptians killed, over 1500 imprisoned and hanged.
India: Protesters decided to proceed with an anti-Rowlatt rally on the afternoon of 13 April at the Jalianwalla Bagh, an enclosed space. The meeting was banned but they decided to defy it. General Reginald Dwyer decided to make an example of them. He marched a detachment of Gurkhas to the rally any without any warning opened fire on 20 to 25 thousand people peacefully listening to speeches. The troops continued firing for over ten minutes. By the time they finished the bodies were piled ten to 12 deep around the exits.
Iraq: Punitive columns were despatched throughout the countryside, burning villages, shooting rebels and seizing livestock, and rebel strongholds and concentrations were shelled and bombed from the air. The British used gas shells in quantity. Rebel fatalities were official 8,450, but a figure of over 10,000 is more realistic. Bombing had played an important part in the suppression of the revolt with the RAF dropping 1000 tons of bombs.
Palestine: The British with the help of Zionist death squads brutally defeated the Great Revolt in the spring of 1939. By the end of the conflict some 5000 rebels had been killed. The Zionists proceeded to establish the state of Israel, driving out some 700,000 Palestinians in the process. .
India still had to face the greatest disaster to befall the country in the 20th century, the Bengal famine of 1943-44. The British administration responded with ‘a callous disregard of its duties in handling the famine.’ The result was a terrible death toll from starvation and disease in 1943-44 that totalled more than 3.5 million men, women and children.
Churchill’s attitude was quite explicitly racist. He told Amery, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ Amery, on one occasion said, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.’
The coup d’etat that finally overthrew Iran's first democratic government in August 1953 was organised by the CIA with Britain’s M16 very much in a supporting role. The Shah’s brutal dictatorship rewarded its American sponsors with a renegotiated division of the oil spoils. The government received 50% of the profits. The AIOC had a 40% share in this consortium. Royal Shell had 14% and the French state oil company a 6% share.
Mau Mau Revolt: The official British figure for rebels killed in action was 11,503, but the real number was much higher. Some estimates go as high as 50,000, and this is much closer to the truth. 160,000 people were interned during the course of the emergency, even more were imprisoned for emergency offences. Electric shock was widely used, and so was fire. Women were choked and held under water, gun barrels, beer bottles and even knives were thrust into their vaginas. Men had beer bottles thrust up their rectums, were dragged behind Land Rovers, whipped, burned and bayoneted.
Anyone thought suspicious could be flooged, tortured and, if necessary, killed with virtual impunity. They described the torture they had carried out with as much concern as they talked about the weather: ‘By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears and his eyeball, the right one, I think was hanging out of its socket. He died before we got much out of him.’
Zimbabwe: On 24 October 1893 a Ndebele attack was routed by machine gun and artillery fire and a few days later at Imbembesi another attack was beaten off. As Frederick Courtney Selous observed, the Ndebele ‘were in each case driven off with heavy loss by the fire of the Maxim guns.’ The conquest ‘will ever be remembered as one of the most brilliant episodes in the history of British colonisation in Southern Africa.’
‘Wipe them all out . . . everything black,’ urged Rhodes. Robert Baden-Powell, the future founder of the Boy Scouts, acknowledged the ‘extraordinary bloodthirsty rage of our men.’[/i]
Indonesia: The battle for Surabaya had cost the natives at least 10,000 casualties. It unleashed a nationalist uprising that spread throughout Java and threatened to engulf the British. The battle of Surabaya is still celebrated in Indonesia every year on ‘Heroes Day.’ Indonesian casualties have been estimated as some 20,000 killed.
General Suharto effectively took power and launched a general massacre of the left. Even while the Confrontation was still under way, the British collaborated with the generals in a massacre that cost the lives of over 500,000 men, women and children, many of them slaughtered with the utmost bruality.
British participation in the Korean War made the Labour government and its Conservative successor party to a terrible conflict that left Korea effectively laid waste. The war cost the lives of between 500,000 and 1 million South Korean civilians and of 1.5 million North Korean soldiers and civilians. British governments stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with their American ally throughout the slaughter.
Iraq: In December 1998 when Clinton launched the punitive air raids against Iraq, British aircraft took part in the attacks that hit 250 targets. The government supported UN sanctions that by 1996 were estimated to have killed some half a million Iraqi children. Iraq, which had had no involvement with the 11 September attacks whatsoever, was to be invaded again and occupied as part of the war on terror. The invasion of Iraq began on March 2003. Its catastrophic consequences for the Middle East have been well documented.
Greg Dyke wrote of how Campbell had ‘turned Downing Street into a place similar to Nixon’s White House. You were either for them or against them. I was quite shocked by these similarities between the Nixon White House and Blair’s Downing Street.’ The American political system, however reluctantly and belatedly, called Nixon to account. The British political system has signally failed with regard to Blair.
Libya: In 2011 NATO invaded Africa's most prosperous nation to seize control of the lucrative oil industry, allowing its leader to be tortured to death in the streets, and bringing about civil war and widespread terrorism.
