George Monbiot writes:
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 rightwing 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, and that the Foreign
Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser
revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored
or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press.
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