The True Face of Colonialism

How Gaza Has Ripped Off the Mask

Vietnam War. Think of a photo.

‘Napalm girl’, right? Napalm girl, the tiny naked child torched by American incendiary munitions, was an image that brought the horror of war into the living rooms of America and the wider world, sanctuaries hitherto untouched by the brutal realities of the Western neocolonial project.

Most wars have their iconic images, but they’re often filtered through the sanitised lens of mainstream media, so that you see images like the one below (from the Iraq War) rather than, say, images of the legacy of the widespread use of depleted uranium.

Vietnam was the first war to be ‘televised’, but back before Vietnam, things get clouded. The Korean War, World Wars 1 and 2, America’s military adventurism in Latin American and Asia – these are conflicts which the American public did not experience in any meaningful sense, other than, perhaps, through an increased patriotic clamour and the rush to boost the industrial capacity of the home country. And this was just fine.

Similarly, Britain was able to sustain its brutal colonialist empire for over three hundred years due to the dissemination of propaganda, utilising platforms like the BBC and the World Service to both repress ill-feeling at home and temper international outrage by controlling narrative on the more distasteful aspects of empire. During the Mau Mau rebellion, a mass propaganda campaign was unleashed both in Britain and against the civilian population in Kenya, in order to demonise the anti-colonial movement and brand it as terrorism (see parallels with the conflicts of today.)

Up to 160,000 Kikuyu were interned in concentration camps throughout the years of the uprising. Kenyan estimates are that 90,000 were killed during that time, British figures numbering closer to 30,000.

In 1919, at Jallianwala Bagh in Punjab (which I had the opportunity to visit ten years ago), the most notorious act of brutality of Britain’s rule in India occurred. Britain admits to the slaying of 379 people (Indian numbers range up to 1500), many of whom were pilgrims and those celebrating a holy festival in a garden refuge in the city of Amritsar. Responsible for it were the lieutenant-governor of Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer (an Irishman, who was assassinated twenty years later in London by Punjabi Uddam Singh, now rightfully considered a hero in his country), and brigadier-general Reginald Dyer, the man who gave the orders to open fire. Propaganda attempts to whitewash the campaign in mainland Britain were so successful that one newspaper was able to raise £26,000 pounds for Dyer, in thanks for services to his country. Apparently Rudyard Kipling also donated a tenner. Colonial prick.

Propaganda today is as pervasive as ever, but with the proliferation of social media, there are some things that just can’t be hidden from public view. The destruction of Gaza and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is right there for the whole world to see, if one only dares open one’s eyes. Whereas before we were forced to go looking for the truth, now those who don’t wish to see are compelled to actively hide from it. Despite the relentless barrage of one-sided reports from outlets like the BBC, CNN and Sky, you have to be willingly blind not to comprehend what’s going on. But the reality is that the violence, the brutality, the inhumanity and the systemic indifference of the Western alliance (US, UK, Europe, Australia) is not new, or strange or shocking. This is nothing more than the true face of Empire, of colonialism, which we in the West have benefitted from for hundreds of years, having had the luxury of enjoying a superior standard of living while not having to stomach the despicable truth of its consequences.

Well, now we can see it. It’s right there: the blood, the severed limbs, the terrorised faces of parentless children, grieving mothers, the unidentifiable corpses, a grandfather holding the lifeless body of his granddaughter, entire families huddled in the cold around a single piece of bread… it is to this, this relentless murder machine, that we in the West can attribute the existence we have become accustomed to enjoying.

The catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza is the apotheosis of colonialism and the culmination of western imperialism. It is genocidal. It is inhuman. The only question is, have we the stomach, all of us, to turn and truly face it?