When you watch proceedings of the British parliament, you cannot help but notice how all the MPs are seated very close to one another, most apparently without designated seating, This level of proximity can lead to situations where an MP can notice, as happened recently, that the member next to them was watching pornography on their phone. The seats are in sets of rows facing each other with the two front rows just 13 feet apart. The Speaker sits on a raised throne between the two rows, looking straight down the center aisle. This arrangement lends a certain intimacy to the proceedings and gives the sense of a real debate going on with people from opposing sides alternating to pop up, hoping that the Speaker will call upon them to speak. In the US House of Representatives, it looks less like a debate and more like a series of speeches given from a central podium to a cavernous room.
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Things have not been going well for the grandiosely titled ‘People’s Convoy’ of trucks that was supposed to bring life to a halt in the nation’s capital. They first drove all across the country to Washington DC to protest vaccine mandates or something and then hung around for a week or so at an abandoned racetrack about 50 miles north of the city. After that non-event, some of them then returned to California and decided to protest near the Oakland home of a California state assemblywoman.

But they got a hostile reception from the neighbors who were incensed at big trucks clogging up their quiet and narrow residential streets with their loud air horns blaring and told the truckers to get the hell out of there. As the trucks were leaving, they got stuck in traffic near a Safeway grocery store and a large number of people, many of them young, started purchasing eggs from the store and pelting the trucks, forcing them to flee.
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The twentieth century saw the decline of the colonial empires that had controlled much of the world over the previous centuries. Especially following the end of the Second World War, the rise of independence movements led to the colonial powers being forced to hand over power to the people of the countries they once ruled. When we look at the history of colonial rule, somehow British rule has escaped much of the harsh censure that was leveled at the other powers, with some even going to the extent of viewing the British rule as benign, with them largely peacefully handing overpower. They even like to portray themselves as a civilizing influence, brining modernity to backward nations.

That is a myth. What distinguished British colonial rule from that of the others was the great effort that they put into suppressing the brutality and cruelty of their rule by destroying and suppressing all the records of their actions and using their propaganda apparatus to create a mythical story that puts them in a very favorable light, at least in the western world. As they prepared to leave the countries, they put into action a systematic effort to either destroy evidence of their brutal rule or ship the rest of the documents to a tightly guarded facility in the UK so that almost no one even knew the existence of them.

The mask began to be ripped off in the last two decades or so as scholars discovered the existence of these documents and forced the government to reveal at least some of them. They showed how awful British colonial rule was. Some of the pioneering work in this discovery of hidden history was by Caroline Elkins who, while doing field work in Kenya as a student, stumbled across the story of the Mau Mau nationalist movement and rebellion and how it had been misleadingly portrayed by the British. [Read more…]