What a load of old pish!

doezens of candidates who (for example) profited from the atlantic slave trade and they go for some toff who murdered a prince 

Olly Cromwell - bit of a patchy record

What a crap list - Could think of dozens - what about all the WW1 generals and politicians who sent hundreds of thousands to their death. What about Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer who ordered British forces to open fire on civilians in Amritsar? What about Bomber Harris? Let's be really controversial and add Winston Churchill - he doesn't exactly have an unblemished record

Winston Churchill - he doesn't exactly have an unblemished record

The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities
It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do so few people know about them?
George Monbiot
Tuesday December 27 2005
The Guardian


In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.

As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.

Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.

Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.

These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.

In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".

There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.

Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.

Why would I want to discuss the 100 greatest Britons in a thread about the worst KLF?

Why would you want to start a thread about worst Britons?

Maybe because you hate your own people,your own culture, and your own country???

As i said before,that sort of mentality is unique amounst White Westerners.It happens nowhere else in the world.

that sort of mentality is unique amounst White Westerners.It happens nowhere else in the world.

So you'd be proud of a legacy that includes the deliberate and systematic elimination of anything between 12 and 29 million human being s would you?

I remember as a child hearing about how wicked and evil the Mau Mau were in Kenya.
Little did we know how ungrateful the filthy black scum were after we'd sliced off their ears, set them alight and beaten them to death.

The British invented concentration camps, no laurels for Hitler there I'm afraid.

Our soldiers were up until very recently indeed, until in fact the women themselves got sick of the raping and spoke out even though it meant almost certainly being ostracized from their villages and families, engaged in the systematic abuse of african women and girls whilst on active duty.

You seem to be of the opinion that I somehow despise my country.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I do not like people being bombed, raped and tortured in other countries around the world in my name, if it's all the same to you, and I think it's better to say so than to pretend it's not happening.

klf.

you apparantly love your country despite the national tv and radio being run by guardianista lefties and the place being overun by illegals.

don't you 

so what was so out of place in his post then 

=itsmeBarbara,Dec 29 2005, 08:20 PM]
I feel better. No more pretending, I am a white people hating, anti-christian terrorist hugger.

whew.

The British invented concentration camps, no laurels for Hitler there I'm afraid.

Martyn was going into great detail as to why he hates Britain so much,and then casually throws in: 'You seem to be of the opinion that I somehow despise my country.Nothing could be further from the truth.

It doesn't wash.

This is interesting...

France's positive spin on colonial past creates uproar
PARIS (AP) — France, grappling for decades with its colonial past, has passed a law to put an upbeat spin on a painful era, making it mandatory to enshrine in textbooks the country's "positive role" in its far-flung colonies.

But the law is stirring anger among historians and passions in places like Algeria, which gained independence in a brutal conflict. Critics accuse France of trying to gild an inglorious colonial past with an "official history."

At issue is language in the law stipulating that "school programs recognize in particular the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa."

Deputies of the conservative governing party passed the law in February, but it has only recently come under public scrutiny after being denounced at an annual meeting of historians and in a history professors' petition.

An embarrassed President Jacques Chirac has called the law a "big screw-up," newspapers quoted aides as saying. Education Minister Gilles de Robien said this week that textbooks would not be changed. But the law's detractors want it stricken from the books — something the minister says only parliament can do.

The measure is one article in a law recognizing the "national contribution" of French citizens who lived in the colonies before independence. It is aimed, above all, at recognizing the French who lived in Algeria and were forced to flee, and Algerians who fought on the side of France.

Unlike other colonies, Algeria, the most prized conquest, was considered an integral part of France — just like Normandy. It was only after a brutal eight-year independence war that the French department in North Africa became a nation in 1962, after 132 years of occupation.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has equated the law with "mental blindness" and said it smacks of revisionism. The Algerian Parliament has called it a "grave precedent."

The friction comes as France and Algeria work to put years of rocky ties behind them with a friendship treaty to be signed this year.

"Morally, the law is shameful," said University of Paris history professor Claude Liauzu, who was behind the petition, "and it discredits France overseas."

France was once a vast empire, including large holdings in Indo-China and Africa. It unraveled in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly calmly.

However, France suffered ignominious defeats in Indo-China and Algeria. Paris only called the Algerian conflict a "war" in 1999. Throughout the fighting, and for decades thereafter, France had referred only to operations there to "maintain order."

In colonial times, French textbooks typically depicted the French presence in the colonies as that of benevolent enlightenment, with a clear mission to civilize.

The newspaper Liberation this week published drawings from "France Overseas," an illustrated colonial Atlas of 1931 that showed "before" and "after" drawings, one a sketch of Africans cooking and eating another human being, the second a school house on a well-manicured street with a French flag flying overhead.

The Association of History and Geography Professors has asked that politicians "end the practice of manipulating history" and abrogate the law.

The separate petition by history professors gathered 1,000 signatures in three weeks, said Liauzu.

"We're in a rather crazy situation," he said. "They say the law won't be applied but it's up to lawmakers to cancel it."

Beyond the real concerns over the political manipulation of historic events, there is another danger of falsely misrepresenting French colonization, Liauzu said.

"France is a country profoundly marked by immigration" with the majority of French from immigrant stock, Liauzu said. By failing to tell the truth, children of today's immigrants "are deprived of any past."
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

At war with France’s past

By Claude Liauzu

FRANCE “recognises its debt to the women and men who participated in the work carried out by France in its former departments in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Indochina and in all the territories formerly under French sovereignty”, according a law adopted by the French parliament on 23 February 2005 (1).

That declaration does not mention repression and torture, or other crimes of colonialism. Recently France’s ambassador to Algeria recognised its responsibility for the massacres at Sétif on 8 May 1945 - the day the world celebrated the end of the war in Europe and the victory over Nazism (2). Does this make him “anti-French”, a term used during the darkest days of the Algerian war to discredit all opposition?

This should not should be construed as an attack on the French populations of former colonies, especially Algerian pied noirs (3). But the memory of their genuine hardships sometimes makes them insensitive to the miseries of other victims. Their sufferings were mild compared with the fate of many harkis, Algerians who fought for the colonial army only to be abandoned and left to face the hatred of their fellow countrymen. Even those who managed to flee were stripped of their dignity and consigned to “reservations” (4).

It is not honest nor intelligent, in the name of anticolonialism, to yield the moral high ground to the nostalgic revisionism of far-right politicians and backward-looking obsessives determined to impose their view. It is deceitful to turn a law passed in 2001 (which described slavery as “a crime against humanity”) into a pretext for presenting French colonials as victims and use it to pre-empt any discussion of colonisation. It was outrageous that during the debates on this law some deputies compared the atrocities in Algeria immediately after independence in July 1962 with the crimes committed against the Jews under Vichy.

Such falsifications reflect a tendency in French thought since the crises at the end of colonial empire. The school curriculum that long exalted greater France played down, or covered up, five centuries of colonial history. Not until 1999, when a law was introduced to meet the demands of former combatants, was the expression “Algerian war” finally used in an act of parliament, instead of pacification, events or peace-keeping.

The time for silence has passed. Many who fought in the war have kept their mouths shut for decades and feel the need to speak. Young people, whose parents were subject to colonial regimes before they emigrated to France, want to hear the truth. France’s political establishment traditionally supported colonial wars and has reacted to these demands with amnesties, especially for former members of the armed resistance to French withdrawal from Algeria, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), and with compensation packages for the repatriated. It has announced days of commemoration and erected monuments. The junior minister responsible for the repatriated announced the establishment of a foundation devoted to the Algerian war, as a centre for historical studies and debate.

The danger is that partisan agendas will restrict independent historical research. The political establishment did not bother to consult historians when drafting the law of February 2005. Yet article 4 stipulates: “University syllabuses must grant the place that it deserves to the history of France’s presence overseas, particularly in north Africa. School courses must . . . recognise the positive role played by the French presence overseas, particularly in north Africa, and must accord the prominent position that they merit to the history and sacrifices of members of the French armed forces.”

This law was intended to settle the relation between memory and history and between historians and the state. But the canonical historical memory that it seeks to impose is contrary not only to the freedom of thought at the heart of secularism but also to the conventions of academic research. France has struggled to deal with the divisive legacy of 1789. Since the Third Republic (1871-1940) it has managed, with difficulty, to negotiate a compromise between the state and the historical community that would create a consensus on a shared history and allow social integration. February’s law undermines that compromise.

Just imagine school classes where only the “positive role” of the French colonial project would be taught. Such an approach will deprive the descendants of colonised populations of their past and create the “little savages from sink estates” that everyone fears. It must be self-evident that the creation of this national mythology will generate separatist counter-mythologies.

Historians have to get on with their work. But in a crisis, is it good enough - as Marc Bloch asked when he examined the “strange defeat” (5) of 1940 - to keep your head down and get on with the job? Is it acceptable, faced with this law, to fall into the professional trap of confusing apoliticism with academic objectivity? In France, where history weighs heavily on a divided post-colonial society, apoliticism may simply be cowardice.

France is haunted by the ghosts of its past. There are the media clichés: no-go areas, loss of national identity, Islamisation, clash of civilisations, anti-white racism. There is panic, a fear that everything is under threat. We cannot avoid considering colonisation and immigration. We need a history that helps us address the central reality of our time: that all western societies are increasingly pluralistic. Young people must understand how and why they are living together, caught in the inescapable and contradictory machinery of globalisation. Without that history, we will be overwhelmed by the generalisations, prejudices and ideologies exploited by intellectuals calling for the West’s moral rearmament against the forces of evil.

This should not lead us to overlook the inadequacies of anticolonialist history. Is it necessary for historians to stress nothing but victimisation and contrition? Must we sanctify the proletariat, slaves, native populations and immigrants? No serious analysis of Algerian immigration to France can omit the shock and burden of the two nationalities, Algerian and French, that the new arrivals had to bear. We caricature the history of colonialism and of the French republic if we ignore the solidarity with liberation struggles implicit in internationalism, and the legacy of the Dreyfus case; both were republican values.

Nor can we avoid critical analysis of nationalism in the developing world. This is essential half a century after the great wave of independence, because of the sad subsequent story of stalled development, dictatorship, repression, and oppression of women.

With so many issues that need discussion, we should be inspired by the lucidity of Edward Said, whose opposition to imperialism never blinded him to the dangers of closed identities: “All those nationalistic appeals to pure or authentic Islam, or to Afrocentrism, négritude or Arabism had a strong response, without sufficient consciousness that those ethnicities and spiritual essences would come back to exact a very high price from their successful adherents ... No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more than starting points...” (6).

The immediate priority in France is to overturn the February law, since it is an obstacle to the development of a sense of history that all French people, whatever their ethnic origins, can share.


(1) Article 1 of the law 2005-158 of 23 February 2005; for the complete text, see the Journal officiel, 24 February 2005 or http://admi.net/jo/textes/ld.h tml

(2) A riot in Sétif, during French victory celebrations, left 21 Europeans dead. Further riots followed in other towns, to which the authorities reacted brutally, resulting in as many as 8,000 deaths. See Mohammed Harbi, “Massacre in Algeria”, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, May 2005. For the speech by Hubert Colin de Verdière, see Déplacement de l’Ambassadeur de France à Sétif (26 - 27 février 2005)

(3) Pied noirs was the nickname of the former French colonists in north Africa (especially Algeria) who were supposed to be distinguishable from indigenous Algerians by their black shoes.

(4) The human rights organisation representing harkis has denounced the law of 23 February 2005, which it accuses of “promoting colonialism”.

(5) See Mark Bloch, Strange Defeat, a Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, W W Norton, New York, 1999.

(6) Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1994.

Did any one mention


THATCHER...

Martyn I think you are being a bit naughty about the above

Most of the camps in Nazi Germany were actually death camps where people were either killed outright or worked to death (i.e. conspiricy).

Oh and before anyone says it, YES I know I'm a pedantic twat, but hey, it keeps me off the streets.

There's Andy arguing the case to not incude Jack the Rippr ,but to include Seb Coe

although Harris was a nicer person that Jack the Ripper was.

How do you know?

Cheers, Andy.

apropos above

here is a little piece i found interesting ..





.... 1939, during the early weeks of what in England was called "the phony war" (the Germans called it sitzkrieg — "the sitting-down war"), there was an illuminating exchange in the House of Commons. Some members of Parliament were putting pressure on Sir Kingsley Wood, the head of the air ministry, to bomb German munitions stores in the Black Forest. Sir Kingsley was shocked. "Are you aware it is private property?" he protested. "Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!" Essen was the home of the famous Krupp munitions factories.

Four years later the Royal Air Force firebombed Hamburg, completely leveling eight square miles of the city and slaughtering 40,000 people — most of them civilians — in one night alone. Six months later came the destruction of Dresden, a joint operation with the USAF, in which 135,000 people were incinerated or buried alive. The children of Dresden were in carnival costumes, as it was Shrove Tuesday. From Sir Kingsley Wood to "Bomber" Harris (Arthur Harris, Churchill's wartime chief of RAF Bomber Command, a strong proponent of massive aerial bombing), you see the coarsening effect of war, the moral slide that always occurs, especially when people come to feel that the existence of their country is at stake.

John Derbyshire
October 16, 2001

His inclusion of Seb Coe is both his valid choice

When I read the things KLF writes, what he thinks about, I have an insight into how easy it was for evil but clever men like Goebbels and Himler to manipulate an entire nation

Why is Seb Coe a valid choice, as one of the worst Britons in History?

In this part of the world "White Westerners" are free to express themselves freely without fear of imprisonment or death, which is one of many reason I like my country

I put inverted commas around that phrase because it wasn't one I'd use and is another reason I like my country since people from anywhere on the entire planet can come her and say what the hell they like without fear of death.