Relearning history

Don’t believe what you were taught in school or hear from the media about benevolent Britain.
We look at some books that give the other side of the story.

For those caught in their long-held conviction of the benevolence of British history, of the goodwill and generosity extended by successive governments to subjects of colonial conquest around the world; for those whose history books told stories of great white men’s great adventures into darkest Africa, of fantastic voyages to unknown shores lasting years and necessitating the loss of many lives, of returning heroes laden with treasure and tales of faraway cornucopias; for those who retain romantic visions of countries conquered and occupied for reasons of honest trade and incidentally to improve the lot of indigenous populations, to bring them civilisation and democracy; for those who considered the invasion of Iraq an aberration, an atypical intervention, something outside the realms of normal government procedure, blatant lies deliberately told to the populace as a cover-up for an illegal act; for those who cling to the fallacy of their leaders being beyond reproach because it’s not “British” to collude behind the scenes or to manipulate events. They always play the game by the rules and British justice is known to be above reproach. After all, didn’t we invent cricket?

For all those – it’s time to re-learn history, this time the real history, to have the scales removed from the eyes, to be confronted with the hard evidence, undeniable facts revealed from previously secret documents painstakingly investigated and compiled by those who seek the truth for humanity’s sake. This time to have the courage to question one’s enduring beliefs in the light of authentic revelations. This time to see through the obfuscation and downright lies that have been the staple diet fed to us by our elected representatives, generation after generation, with the purpose of pursuing their own secret agenda, extending personal interests and cementing alliances with powerful allies often with complete disregard for international law, agreements and that detail of small importance, public opinion.

The following are a sample from investigative journalists and historians known as tenacious and imperturbable individuals resolutely determined to get the truth out into the public domain.

Birth of the corporation

The history of the East India Company, a forerunner of the modern shareholder/corporate set-up is a story of ‘executive malpractice, stock market excess and human oppression.’ Nick Robins says in The Corporation that Changed the World that he set out to address the issue of the company’s social record as a corporation, something which he believes no other history of The Company does. Compared with today’s “corporate leviathans” the East India Company “outstripped Walmart in terms of market power, Enron for corruption and Union Carbide for human devastation.” From its origin in 1600 as an aggressive spice trader, using guile, bribery, mercenary armies, piracy and plunder it moved on to take control of Bengal and Bengal’s cotton fabric industry. Robert Clive (of India) decimated the weaving industry and, as an eerie precursor to current day India’s farmers’ suicides as a result of impoverishment by transnationals, weavers amputated their own thumbs rather than be forced to spin thread for less than starvation wages.

Later came Warren Hastings, responsible for pushing opium into China (illegally), causing the later “Opium Wars” and eventually forcing Chinese ports to open to trade. Despite the British government’s initial protests at the opium trade they were soon persuaded by the company’s Governor General in India that the revenue was growing too quickly to be abandoned. Nick Robins shows only too well that “a peculiar amnesia continues to hang over the role that corporations such as the East India Company had  in the creation of the modern world.”