With some recent, high-profile crimes committed by people purporting to follow the religion of Islam, the image of Muslims around the globe has largely been manipulated to project extremism, violence and intolerance. This manufactured image was long in the making, beginning as early as the 1980s, and reached epic proportions following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, irrespective of whether or not Muslim individuals, either by faith or birth, were behind it as executors or plotters. The negative propaganda which Muslims found themselves subjected to was done with the intention and precise objective, as the days following 9/11 have proven, to justify war against two predominantly Muslim countries. If the negative portrayal of Muslims was for reasons related to Islam, and not for other motives, then it would be difficult to explain the protective and shielded media coverage of several Middle Eastern monarchies with histories of violence and intolerance not only towards non-Muslims but also Muslims and those monarchies own citizens. Many Muslims throughout the world found themselves defending an unjust campaign portraying Muslims in negative stereotypes and associating Islam with violence and savagery. Mysterious groups alleged to be part of a global Islamic movement emerged with no objective but beheading Westerners and Christians, and distributing the gruesome savagery on YouTube and other media for the world to see.
While it cannot be ascertained who is the mastermind behind the illusive, ghostly and mercurial global al-Qaida organization (if it qualifies for such designation), it is highly likely that it has roots in Saudi and US intelligence establishments. ‘Islamic’ extremism was perceived favorably by Western media during the fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and during the Chechen wars of independence. Nevertheless, evidence points to a concerted campaign initiated and financed by the West (including think-tanks and media corporations) to portray Muslims as extremists and terrorists. The motives are abundant, most prominent of which are justification for the ill-conceived invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and, by extension, further legitimization of Israel’s anti-Palestinian policies and occupation of Palestinian territories that fall within dominantly Muslim-populated geographical areas.
The West found in al-Qaeda, and its self-replicating derivatives, individuals who can be used to further the West’s geo-political interests. But what made the West cultivate and harbor a group with a highly controversial and extremist doctrine that views the world with a binary lens: right vs. wrong. Halal (sanctioned by Islam) vs. haram (not sanctioned by Islam), Sharia (Islamic legislation) vs. Kufr (disbelieving), dar al-Islam (the house of Islam) vs. dar al-Harb (the house of disbelievers)? Solid evidence is not yet available to prove the link between al-Qaeda and Western and Saudi intelligence, at least in the public domain; however, a preponderance of evidence shows that al-Qaeda morphed out of direct Saudi government patronage. The conflict in Syria that started in 2011 indicates complicity between a host of governments, NATO member countries and al-Qaida. With the massive worldwide manhunt for al-Qaida, one would expect that any alleged al-Qaeda operative would be under heavy surveillance and most likely would not be able to cross international borders, at least with ease; such border crossing would be clandestine and rare. Yet a large influx of al-Qaeda operatives took place from the Horn of Africa, Northern Africa, Afghanistan, and the Arabian Peninsula into Syria through neighboring Turkey. That such movement of high-grade radicals could take place without the knowledge of Turkey, a NATO member country, seems highly unlikely. A recent German documentary produced by DW television uncovered the movement of goods from Turkey to ISIS territory with full knowledge of Turkish authorities.
In the pursuit of global geo-political plans, the West found in the religious doctrine of the Wahhabi-Salafi sect a highly extremist and exclusionist philosophy to advance its objectives. ‘’Philosophy’’ may be too grand a word to describe it; perhaps ‘outlook’ is more appropriate. The Wahhabi-Salafi sect is highly susceptible to manipulation because of its fundamental unspoken doctrine of imitation and largely succumbing to the wishes of the Amir (English: leader).
Wahhabism is attributed to Muhammad Ibn AbdulWahaab (1703–1792), a religious figure who was a staunch follower of Ibn Taymiyah (1263–1328). Salafism, derived from Salaf (English: forefathers) refers to the doctrine of imitating the companions of Prophet Mohammed in practically everything that is known about them. These two unlikely philosophies merge and bring about the violence that is wrongly attributed to Islam today.
Wahhabism is a dangerous sect (or cult) that interprets Islam primarily from narrations attributed to Prophet Muhammad, irrespective of their authenticity and their contextual time-space applicability. Wahhabis believe that everything the Salaf (English: companions of the prophet and their successors and the successors of the successors) did was perfect, and that the emulation of the Salaf is a religious duty, and their edicts are binding on all Muslims. In their understanding of Islam, the Wahhabis consider the Qur’an to be supplementary to alleged prophetic narrations rather than the primary source of guidance and legislation. The Wahhabis believe that wars waged by Arabs under the banner of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties were religiously mandated and thus were fundamentally Islamic. Amongst their beliefs is to invade non-Muslims’ land and force non-Muslims to convert, pay tax, or face execution. They do not believe that non-Muslims should have places of worship on Muslim land (surprisingly, they don’t provide a definition for ‘Muslim land’). Most alarming and dangerous of their doctrines is the ease by which a person can be killed. Their religious doctrine is replete with stories of people executed for offenses such as adultery, insulting Prophet Muhammad, interpreting the Qur’an in a way different from theirs, drug smuggling, theft, abandoning the daily prayer rituals, leaving Islam and converting to a different religion among others. The threshold for killing in their doctrine is exceptionally low; this reflects their disdain for human life. Their dress code is binary: black for women and white for men. In the narratives of their doctrine, the black color resembles evil and darkness while white is associated with goodness; thus their dress code for women reflects their opinion of women. Their interpretation of the Qur’an groups women with animals and material objects.
For Western governments with heavy interests in the Middle East, violence in the name of Islam justifies their geopolitical penetration into the region. The higher the level of violence by the ‘Islamic’ extremists, the higher the justification for intervention; the more objectives achieved, the higher the violence, and so on. The feedback loop, self-serving to both ‘terrorists’ and the governments that ostensibly oppose them, but in reality need them to further their geo-political goals, goes on until the objectives change. This is followed by new instructions to the Salafi leaders to focus on a new ‘jihad’. In looking at the history of the Arabian Peninsula over the past century, one finds al-Qaeda and the seemingly modern jihadi movements to be nothing but repackaging of older ones.
The founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia brilliantly and effectively used the same Wahhabi-Salafi doctrine to unify most of the Arabian Peninsula under his command. But his conquest could have never been possible without the British financial and intelligence support and, most critically, Orientalists’ understanding of the Salafi doctrine. The British directed the shots since they were the financiers of the then exiled and fragmented clan of Ibn Saud. The British financial support for Ibn Saud was not a charitable or benevolent gesture. The British Empire was at work chiseling the remains of the Ottoman Empire. The transformation from coal to oil to fuel the fleets of the British Empire, needed access to the Persian Gulf and its abundant fuel reserves. Ibn Saud found in the diehard Wahhabi-Salafis marauders, known then as the Ikhwan (English: brothers), zeal and fervor that could conquer mountains in the name of Islam, or more accurately in the name of the rewards promised by concocted Prophetic sayings for those who achieve ‘martyrdom’ during such allegedly God-sanctioned campaigns. The Wahhabi-Salafi brand of violence could have been known to the British from the time of their occupation of Egypt. It was Mohammad Ali of the Ottoman Empire who first had to deal with the Wahhabis and the first Saudi Kingdom. Ali suppressed the revolt of Mohammad Ibn Saud against the Ottomans and in the process, destroyed Der’eya, the seat of the government of the first Saudi dynasty, in 1818.
Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (the father of Salman, the present king of Saudi Arabia) struck a strategic alliance with the Wahhabis, who were led by the AlSheikh clan to divide the influence and booty of his conquest. The AlSheikh would control religious affairs and supply Ibn Saud with a new generation of Ikhwan fighters, whereas the control of everything else would belong to Ibn Saud. Whether it was Ibn Saud or the British behind this brilliant scheme remains unclear. Most likely the British were aware of the fervor of the Wahhabis; and both, Ibn Saud and the British used them with high efficiency and devastating effectiveness. The British grand plans were at work and Ibn Saud was given financial rewards and rule over vast tracts of land. The Hijaz had no strategic interest to the British who considered it a liability had they occupied it (potentially raising the wrath of millions of already agitated Muslim subjects under their colonial domain), so it was strategically given as a reward with consequent enormous financial benefits to Ibn Saud. The financial benefits of Hijaz come from the tax and economic activities associated with the annual Muslim pilgrimage to the cities of Medina and Mecca. Most interestingly, Ibn Saud with his extremist and fanatic fighters could have wiped clean all the scattered fishing Arab villages dotting the western side of the Persian Gulf cost. In fact, he could have sent a small crowd, not even a battalion, to spread the domain of his nascent kingdom, but the British had to draw a line in the sand, figuratively and literally. The British global strategic scheming was in full execution. The tiny remote fishing villages, in the British grand geo-political framework, had to be reinvented as little kingdoms and sheikdoms (the latest reinvention was the Kingdom of Bahrain with an area of only 305 square miles). The First and Second Gulf wars of 1991 and 2003 were the fruits of the British Empire’s machinations in those early days.
Fast forward to 2011. A global coalition started to unseat the Assad regime under the guise of the Arab Spring. The start of the insurrection in Syria can be traced to Der’aa, a small town close to the southern Syrian border with Jordan. The insurrection in Der’aa was met with severe repression by the Assad regime; a response that the regime later deeply regretted. Who was behind that Der’aa insurrection is engulfed in mystery. The partnership between the Jordanian and US intelligence dates back to the 1950s and surfaced very prominently when a Jordanian intelligence agent, Humam al-Balawi went on a rampage, killing 6 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents and a high-ranking Jordanian intelligence officer in Afghanistan in 2009. Jordan is highly valuable to US intelligence for several reasons:
1) The entire country, the army and the king are all underwritten by US money. Jordan has been a perfect model of a US satellite country since the transition from British to American control in the early 1950.
2) Jordan has a very diverse mixture of Arabs from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia; therefore, recruiting agent provocateurs is easy, especially considering the perpetual dire economic conditions of Jordan.
3) Jordan has a strong presence of Wahhabism that had been well tolerated by the regime (Abu-Musa’b al-Zarqawi, the mysterious al-Qaida figure that was killed by US forces in Iraq, was a product of the Jordanian flavor of Wahhabism). Using Jordan as a spring board to foment insurrection in Syria was highly probable considering that the Syrian regime was practically the last nuisance to Israeli’s efforts to neutralize the Arabs and force them to acquiesce to its own ‘peace’ terms which include the annexation of the West Bank and tracts of Lebanon and Syria. Of course, Syria is the strongest and strategic link between Lebanon and Hezbollah.
The insurrection in Syria that started in Der’aa was suppressed ruthlessly by the Assad regime, but the transformation into an armed insurrection was in sharp contrast to all other expressions of the Arab Spring, excluding Libya, which had a NATO intervention rather than a peaceful one. One cannot find armed components to any of the uprisings that occurred in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, or even Yemen. The armed insurrection in Syria needed money and men. The intelligence services who understood well how the Saudi regime came to power used the same process: direct appeal to the culture of extremism amongst the Wahhabis and much more broadly to the Salafis across the globe. The Saudi regime opened the door to many clergy under their tutelage and direct patronage to articulate the virtues of Jihad, especially on Syrian land. The Jihad sermons reached pitch fever in 2013 when the Saudi clergy even started reinterpreting alleged Prophetic Sayings (attributed to Prophet Muhammad), putting the Jihad in Syria as the pinnacle of all Jihads, even eclipsing any Jihad needed to liberate occupied religious sanctuaries such as the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem. Many of the Syrian Jihad sermons by Saudi clergy are available on YouTube. One notable example is Mohammad Al-Arifi, who used to be a darling of the Saudi regime until recently; his inexcusable sin of mere criticism of the inefficiency of a recently-installed train service in Mecca netted him a short jail term. The result of these passionate, highly-charged sermons was a huge influx of fighters from Saudi Arabia, the Horn of Africa, North Africa, Afghanistan, even Europe. Considering the regional governments’ paranoia with security and especially for the slightest form of dissent, facilitating such a massive influx must have occurred under the full view of all governments in the region, most prominently, Jordan and Turkey. Financing of fighters, whether through the governments or individuals or organizations, came from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, since money laundering in those countries is easy. The US committed to providing logistics but the term ‘logistics’ can be interpreted broadly and expansively as America’s many imperial adventures around the world have proven.
During the early days of the present Saudi Kingdom, Wahhabis wanted to go beyond the Arabian Peninsula to spread their Wahhabism and zeal to the north (Trans-Jordan and Basra regions). They believed that Ibn Saud was a true Islamic Caliph. The British had to bomb the advancing Ikhwan, while at the same time bankrolling their king to the tune of 5,000 Sterling pounds per month (this could easily classify Ibn Saud as a former agent of the British Empire).
While ISIS is now the target of international outrage, and U.S. bombs, it is possible that this will not always be the case; history does tend to repeat itself, and if so, the change could be dramatic.
ISIS recruits believed in the Khilafa (an Arabic term used historically to describe an Islamically-sanctioned state) and expanding the domain of Islam as much as the Ikhwan did in the early years of the 20th century. ISIS expansion, however, had to curbed by the US and NATO. The similarity between the history of the Ikhwan and ISIS is truly striking. Based on these similarities, it is probable that ISIS will establish a new country over oil-rich swaths of lands taken from Syria and Iraq. The new ISIS nation will eventually soften its Jihadi zeal and receive international recognition. International corporate-controlled media can whitewash the new ISIS state as it has done most effectively for many other nations-states.
The top leadership of ISIS is shrouded in mystery. ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi, who was also declared, by ISIS of course, an Islamic (if not the only) Caliph, was jailed by the Americans during their occupation of Iraq then mysteriously released (a practice perfected by Israelis where ghost heroes are manufactured through short periods of imprisonment). The vast majority of ISIS members are thrilled at the thought of Caliphate being resurrected from the ashes and mayhem that has defined the Middle east since the British and French set foot there immediately after the end of WWI.
A very troubling doctrine of Wahhabism is the emphasis on allegiance to the Islamic Amir (English: leader), even if he were a tyrant, as long as the Amir allows people to perform the daily prayers. This doctrine, which has no foundation in either the Qur’an or Islam, helped Ibn Saud conquer Arabia as much as it helped al-Baghdadi conquer parts of Syria and Iraq. This very doctrine of allegiance to the Amir helps ISIS, Al-Qaida, or other offshoots to recruit individuals willing to execute orders of the Amir such as killings, bombings, etc. The executor of the Amir’s orders believes that he is executing God’s will. In summary, their doctrine is a carefully selected collection of narratives by controversial religious scholars who advocated extreme violence and land theft in the name of Islam.
The religious doctrine of the Wahhabis is so vast that one can always find in it alleged Prophetic narratives that justify and advocate for what is politically most expedient. The West, starting with the British Empire down to the American Empire, knew too well the Wahhabi extremist ideology and used it then and now, with high effectiveness and devastating consequences, to advance their geopolitical interests. The Wahhabis extreme violence at the beginning of the 20th century, most infamous of which was the Ta’if massacre , where between 300 and 400 Sunni Muslims were bludgeoned to death at the hands of the Ikhwan in 1924, is no different from their extreme violence that we are witnessing today. ISIS not only targeted non-Muslims such as Christians and Yazidi for killing, rape and forced conversion to Islam, but also savagely attacked Kurds. What the mainstream media failed to highlight was that Kurds are staunch Sunnis, neither ‘infidels’ nor Shias.
Justification for killing a cartoonist who depicts Prophet Mohammad disfavorably, along with any bystander who comes in between, can be found in Wahhabi doctrine as easily as killing 132 children in a school in Pakistan for no fault but being children of military personnel. It is the same doctrine that justifies blowing up 37 innocent Yemani men lining up to apply for a police job in one of the poorest countries in the world . The extremist and violent doctrine of the Wahhabi sect makes it easy for intelligence agencies to recruit suicide bombers. It is not possible at this time to confirm the identity of the plotters of grand-scale terrorist attacks such as 9/11 and the massacre in Charlie Hebdo; however, many indications point to Western intelligence. Acts of major terrorism amongst Muslims, such as the brutality of ISIS against so many Muslims, are heavily influenced by the doctrine of violence in the Wahhabi sect. Muslims can help in so many ways by taking a deep look at their religion and having the courage, mandated by Islam itself, to reject what is foreign and contradictory to their religion, such as the Wahhabi sect that fosters and breeds extreme violence, and embracing Islam from its undisputed sources. The stakes have never been higher for Muslims.
Your fight against Zionism provokes critics against you in Israel and in the West. Your detractors conflate consciously between “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Semitism.” What is the difference between these two concepts?
Gilad Atzmon: “anti-Semitism” is a misleading notion that refers generally to criticism of Jews as ‘people’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race.’ Such criticism that is biologically driven hardly exists nowadays.
Anti-Zionism, is a different kind of fish — it refers broadly to criticism of the Jewish state, its politics, policies and ideology.
But the truth is that I do not fit in any of those categories. Although I criticize Israel harshly and more than often, I am actually interested in the true meaning of Jewish identity, culture, politics and ideology. I believe that as long as people operate politically under the Jewish banner we are entitled to question their motives, politics and philosophy. Israel defines itself as “The Jewish state,” hence, its Jewishness must be examined.
I am indeed critical of the Jewish state, but I am often also critical of Jewish Left and even the Jewish so-called ‘anti’-Zionists. I basically disapprove of all ‘Jews-only’ clubs, whether they are on the Left or the Right. I would argue that like Zionism and Israel, Jewish anti-Zionism is racially driven and Judeo-centric to the bone. It is primarily committed to Jewish tribal interests rather than to the Palestinian cause. In my book The Wandering Who I obviously produce enough evidence to support this claim.
Do You consider Zionists as the main cause behind the global financial crisis? How?
Not exactly, in The Wandering Who I contend that a financial bubble was created in the USA by the Federal Reserve in order to divert the attention from a military blunder in Iraq (a neocon Zionist war). But I actually argue that rather than a ‘conspiracy,’ the credit crunch was, in fact, an accident. The bubble burst unexpectedly…
We tend to believe that Zionism is limited to the colonization of Palestine in order to create a state there. Now, you say that it is “a global movement fed by a unique tribal solidarity”. What do you mean by “tribal solidarity”?
To start with, your terminology is slightly inaccurate. Zionism is not a colonial movement, in spite of the fact that many of us are using the term. Colonialism is defined as a material exchange between a mother state and a settler state. In the case of Zionism we can easily identify the ‘settler state’ but it is far more difficult to find or identify who is the ‘mummy’. Also the Jewish re-settlement in Palestine was spiritually and ideologically driven rather than being economically motivated.
However, with Jewish lobbies operating aggressively in most Western capitals (AIPAC, CFI, CRIF etc’), promoting global Zionist interests and advocating global wars against Iran and Syria, it is really impossible to avoid the fact that Zionism is now a global movement with global interests.
Tribal solidarity, in that respect, is also very easy to grasp. It refers to the vast support world Jewry lends to their national movement and tribally driven campaigns.
Could Zionism prevail creating “global conflicts,” as you say? In other words, why can’t Zionism pursue peace?
Because Jewish secular identity is defined by negation. The Godless political Jew (as opposed to the orthodox one) is defined by the animosity evoked in others. Jews need enemies and thus the continued existence of the Jewish state in the Middle East may lead to many more sectarian wars in the region in the future. But again it isn’t just Israel or Zionist politics. The Judification of the Palestinian ‘solidarity’ movement introduced us to vile witch-hunts consistent with the vile Jewish herem (excommunication) culture. In the last few years we have seen the UK PSC expelling activists and even Palestinians from its ranks. As I say above, Jewish politics is defined by negation, as such, it can only promote wars.
If Israel was created by the British capitalists to control oil production and transportation in the Middle East in the early twentieth century, how could Zionism take the West hostage several decades later? What led to this reversal of roles?
I don’t agree. Israel wasn’t created by the British Empire and oil wasn’t at all the logos behind the Balfour Declaration. This is a popular banal materialist Marxist fantasy that doesn’t hold water and is set to deceive.
Zionist lobbies managed to squeeze the Balfour declaration out of the British Empire at the peak of WWI promising to bring the USA into the war in return. Britain needed the USA to join the war effort in order to break the stalemate on the Western front. Promising Palestine to the Jews seemed a little price to pay. The Balfour Declaration in that regard was there to appease the American Germanic patriotic Jewish financial elite who were quick change their allegiance from Germany to Britain. The message is clear, the Jewish lobby in the USA was already amongst the most influential political bodies in the USA and Britain as early as 1917.
The Western media is resistant to any criticism of Zionism. Currently, Dieudonné is attacked from every possible side in France. How do you explain this relentlessness media and political onslaught against this comedian?
Dieudonné has proved to be resilient to Jewish nationalist terror. All attempts to destroy him achieved the opposite, it only helped him to refine his humour and criticism of Jewish power. By now Dieudonné has managed to expose the lethal continuum between the Jewish Lobby, the so-called Palestinian solidarity movement and the French imaginary ‘Left’ establishment. Is it really a surprise that the ‘socialist’ government that just a few weeks ago shamelessly attempted to jeopardize the negotiation with Iran in a desperate attempt to appease the Israeli government is now chasing a black comedian who refuses to subscribe to the primacy of Jewish suffering?
Unlike welded and well-organized Zionists, the anti-Zionist movements seem scattered. Why don’t the latter have a strong organization to fight this sprawling group that “kills in the name of Jewish suffering,” as you say?
The Zionification of the Palestinian solidarity movement, which I have been monitoring for more than a decade, is pretty much completed. It located Jewish tribal interests at the centre of the Palestinian struggle. Instead of caring for Palestine, solidarity organisations are now primarily concerned with the fight against ‘anti-semitism’. The Palestine solidarity movement is now operating as a controlled opposition. It is funded largely by liberal Zionists, such as George Soros and his Open Society Institute, who also funds the pro-Israeli Jstreet. The same Soros funds most Palestinian NGOs and even the BDS Movement. We are seeing the emergence of a little Palestine solidarity industry that is set to achieve nothing and is actually very good at it (achieving nothing).
But on the other hand, there are some very positive developments:
More and more people out there see the real picture. And I actually take some credit for it. More and more people are becoming sensitive to Jewish lobby activity and Zionist advocacy of global conflicts. More and more people grasp the role of the Left. They see the Guardian’s attempt to vindicate war criminal Sharon. In short, more and more people grasp that Palestine is here, in Paris, in London, in Athens and in Detroit.
As it stands, we are all Palestinians. The vast popular support of Dieudonne is a clear message to AIPAC, CRIF and CFI – beware, the party comes to an end. Enough is enough.
I would be very happy to see the Jewish lobby, both Zionist and the so-called ‘anti-’, coming to terms with the current change, but I doubt it. Being an avid reader of Jewish history and Left’s impotence, I predict that the Lobby will become more aggressive and I am really concerned with the inevitable consequences to Jews and the rest of us.
For more than 200 years the Rothschild family has kept their banks in family hands, out of the general view of the public, in an effort to conceal their vast wealth. The Rothschilds have taken advantage of tax-free jurisdictions and have purposefully established their banks in countries with strict banking secrecy laws like Monaco, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
The Rothschild dynasty first began to acquire prominence around the mid 1700′s. The first major patriarch of the family, Mayar Amschel Rothschild, sent his 5 sons to strategic banking centers throughout Europe. Nathan Rothschild went to London, Jabob to Paris, Salomon to Vienna, Asmchel (Jr.) to Frankfurt, and Calmann Rothschild to Naples.
From 1813-1815 Nathan Rothschild almost single handedly financed the British war effort while his brothers financed the French war effort. In one year of the war, 1815, Nathan Rothschild provided the British government with nearly 10 million pounds, which is equivalent to 6.5 billion pounds today.
Since the Rothschilds were playing both sides of the warring parties, they were the only ones who could get through both sides of the blockades quickly. Their network of banks provided news of major battles to Nathan Rothschild in London before even the British government received it. The Rothschilds traded on this inside information on the London stock exchange, making vast fortunes in the process. After the final battle of Waterloo, Nathan Rothschild received news that the British were victorious and promptly started to sell British government treasuries. The market knew by this point that Nathan was getting information before anyone one else and therefore assumed the British had lost the battle and started selling their British government bonds. Once the price had crashed, Nathan used his agents to secretly buy up nearly the entirety of the British government debt. Using large amounts of leverage, Nathan Rothschild made many multiples of his money on this one trade.
After the war, Nathan Rothschild bragged of turning his 20k pound fortune into 50 million pounds in only 17 years. In 1820, 50 million pounds would be equivalent to 32 billion pounds today. It was at this point that Nathan Rothschild so famously said, “I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”
In 1850, Jacob Rothschild’s recorded net worth was 600 million francs, which was significantly more than all the other French bankers combined. In today’s US dollars that would be equivalent to $11.4 billion. James and Nathan Rothschild became two of the richest men in the world in only a few decades. With this vast wealth they built or bought 41 massive mansions and palaces across Europe. The video below (at 2:22) shows just a fraction of their real estate holdings.
In 1840, the Rothschild family became the Bank of England’s bullion brokers.
In 1844, Salomon Rothschild purchased the United Coal Mines of Vitkovice and Austro-Hungarian Blast Furnace Company which went on to become one of the top ten global industrial companies.
In 1845, the Rothschild family was granted exclusive access to build a rail transport company across much of France. The company was called Chemin de Fer du Nord.
In 1871, the Rothschild family raised 5 billion francs so the French government could pay reparations to Prussia. This sum would be equivalent to $95 billion today.
In 1880, the Rothschild family took control of Rio Tinto, ending up with a 30% stake. Rio Tinto is now the 4th largest mining company in the world. In the same year, the Rothschilds founded Imerys, which is currently a world leader in industrial metals mining.
In 1890, the Rothschild family founded the mining company Eramet, which is currently a multi-billion dollar company listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange.
Kuhn and Loeb, which received financing from the Rothschilds, financed Standard Oil, various profitable railroad projects, and Carnegie’s steel empire. The European Rothschild dynasty also had close financial ties to multiple leading American banks including J.P. Morgan.
In 1886, the French Rothschild bank acquired significant Russian oil fields and formed the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company, which became the world’s second largest oil producer. They sold their interest to Royal Dutch Shell in 1911 for an undisclosed amount.
In 1887, the Rothschild family financed and invested in the Kimberly diamond mines in South Africa, which became De Beers. The Rothschilds were the largest shareholders.
To this day the Rothschild family own and operate some of the largest and most profitable investment banks around the world.
During the first 17 years of his career, Nathan Rothschild’s annual rate of return was 81.4%, while Jacob’s annual rate of return from 1812-1868 was 14%.
Based on historical records and financial calculations it is possible to provide a rough estimate of their wealth today. The following estimate of the Rothschild family fortune will be based on an annual rate of return of 5%, which is extremely conservative given their past track record of using power, political connections, and inside information to make incredibly high annual returns. When the extremely profitable investments listed above are factored in, it is a certainty that they were able to achieve such a modest return.
In 1817, Nathan Rothschild bragged of having 50 million pounds. At a 5% annual rate of return that would equate to roughly 500 billion pounds today. In 1850, Jacob Rothschild was worth 600 million francs. At a 5% annual return that would equate to 860 billion francs, which would have been converted to Euros in 2001 at a 6.56 to 1 ratio, equalling €130 billion. By 2012, that fortune would total €224 billion.
Combined their fortunes would equal more than 1 trillion US dollars, which could do any one of the following:
1. Buy every stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange
2. Support the military of every NATO country combined for a year
3. Buy everyone on earth an iPod
4. Pay off Greece’s debt 2.5 times
5. Run the Australian government for nearly 3 years.
Obviously this estimate is conservative in its own right, and does not take into account the fortunes of the other three brothers who built financial empires in Switzerland, Frankfurt, and Italy. The Rothschild family eventually spread their operations to America, Israel, and most tax-free jurisdictions around the world.
As per the command of the patriarch, Mayar Amschel Rothschild, the family has intermarried and maintained cohesiveness until the present day so the fortune was not squandered or dispersed. One of their websites today reads: “Across two centuries and many generations, the qualities associated with the Rothschild family have remained unchanged: innovation, industriousness and, above all, strength through unity.”
In 1909, British Prime Minister Lloyd George claimed that Lord Nathan Rothschild was the most powerful man in Britain. This is of course at a time when Britain was considered to be one of the world’s preeminent superpowers. During the 20th century the Rothschild family started to disappear from mainstream attention. Many Rothschild financed biographies were released during this time period, which claimed that their fortunes have dwindled in modern times. It should be noted that these biographies have not given any detailed accounting of the families’ assets or mentioned the specific investments that lost more money than was made through some of the world’s most profitable investments listed above.
The real questions that must be asked are why the most powerful family in the history of the world, who financed nations and provided the money to create Israel, are not prominently featured in history courses? And why the media refuses to even mention the name of this incredibly wealthy and powerful family today?
The answers to these questions are one in the same. As the video below proves, nearly the entirety of the American (and European) media are controlled by Jewish Zionists. And these Zionists know that if the world knew that one family controlled more wealth than dozens of poor nations put together, there would be a public outcry.
Britain systematically destroyed documents in colonies that were about to gain independence, declassified Foreign Office files reveal. ‘Operation Legacy’ saw sensitive documents secretly burnt or dumped to cover up traces of British activities.
The latest National Archives publication made from a collection of 8,800 colonial-era files held by the Foreign Office for decades revealed deliberate document elimination by British authorities in former colonies.
The secret program dubbed ‘Operation Legacy’ was in force throughout the 1950s and 1960s, in at least 23 countries and territories under British rule that eventually gained independence after WWII. Among others these countries included: Belize, British Guiana, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia and Singapore, Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe), Tanzania, and Uganda.
In a telegram from the UK Colonial Office dispatched to British embassies on May 3, 1961, colonial secretary Iain Macleod instructed diplomats to withhold official documents from newly elected independent governments in those countries, and presented general guidance on what to do.
British diplomats were briefed on how exactly they were supposed to get rid of documents that “might embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants (such as police agents or informers)” or “might compromise sources of intelligence”, or could be put to ‘wrong’ use by incoming national authorities.
‘Operation Legacy’ also called for the destruction or removal of “all papers which are likely to be interpreted, either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or bias”.
The newly declassified files revealed that the Royal Navy base in Singapore was turned into the Asian region’s primary document destruction center. A special facility called a “splendid incinerator” was used to burn “lorry loads of files”, Agence France-Presse reported.
The “central incinerator” in Singapore was necessary to avoid a situation similar to that in India in 1947, when a “pall of smoke” from British officials burning their papers in Delhi, ahead of India proclaiming independence, filled the local press with critical reports. That diplomatic oversight was taken into account, as ‘Operation Legacy’ operatives were strictly instructed not to burn documents openly.
But not all the doomed archives could be shipped to Singapore. In some cases documents were eliminated on site, sometimes being dumped in the sea “at the maximum practicable distance from shore” and in deep, current-free areas, the National Archives publication claims.
The newly published collection of documents reveals that the British cleared out Kenyan intelligence files that contained information about abuse and torture of Kenyans during the Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule in the 1950s. A special committee formed in 1961 coordinated document elimination in Kenya. Yet some files were spared simply when an estimated 307 boxes of documents were evacuated to Britain, just months ahead of the country gaining independence in December 1963.
The existence of some remaining Mau Mau legal case documents was revealed in January 2011.
Even after eliminating important evidence half a century ago, earlier in 2013 the British government was forced to pay 23 million dollars in compensation to over 5,200 elderly Kenyans, who had suffered from Britain’s punitive measures during the Mau Mau uprising.
In another documented occasion, in April 1957, five lorries delivered tons of documents from the British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur to the Royal Navy base in Singapore. Files were incinerated there; these contained details about British rule in Malaya, such as a massacre of 24 rubber plantation workers at the Malayan village of Batang Kali in 1948, who had allegedly been murdered by British soldiers.
Despite the mass document elimination, Britain’s Foreign Office still has some 1.2 million unpublished documents on British colonial policy, David Anderson, professor of African history at the University of Warwick, told AFP.
So Her Majesty’s government might still publish more valuable material that can shed more light on how one of the biggest empires in human history used to be governed. Overall, Britain had total control over 50 colonies including Canada, India, Australia, Nigeria, and Jamaica. Currently, there are 14 British Overseas Territories that remain under British rule, though most of them are self-governing and all have leaderships of their own.
On 15 August, India will celebrate Independence Day. There will be the usual celebratory flag waving and nationalist sentiments. The mainstream media will wallow in it, and key figures will indulge in the type of self congratulatory back-slapping that is common across the world when celebrating nationhood. But what will people be celebrating? The throwing off of British colonialism, the development of nationhood? Perhaps both of those things, but maybe neither, for what has ‘the nation’ and ‘independence’ come to mean in 2013?
Forget nations, flags or fly pasts. Freedom and self determination should be about ordinary people, ordinary people who farm and produce, who create genuine wealth, things of genuine worth.
Forget about sound bites referring to ‘the world’s biggest democracy’. Placing an X on a ballot paper every four years or so does not constitute democracy. If people are misinformed, misled and manipulated to think and act in a certain way, while backroom deals are carried out without their knowledge, they are but ignorant links in a chain (1,2).
Then there is no freedom, no self-determination. Someone else has appropriated the freedom and has enslaved. Someone else is determining the agenda.
Look no further to see this in action in that self-anointed bastion of ‘freedom and democracy’, the US.
Influence is bought and paid for by millionaire backers who fund politicians when running for office. And just in case that does not work to full effect, there is the infamous ‘revolving door’ that allows top corporate people to move in and out of the high echelons of government with ease in order to ensure the required policies are enacted. And don’t let the media get in the way of any of this. It won’t. Concentration of media ownership and the integration with armaments companies, banking interests and industry guarantees the public remain blissfully ignorant of issues, not least of how ‘democracy’ really works.
It all serves to ensure that the one percent maintain hegemony over the 99, maintain their unimaginable wealth and privileges and maintain the rest of the population in ignorance, in a state of powerlessness, in a state of poverty, relative poverty or vulnerability.
Yell moronically ‘USA!USA!’ when the authorities protect the people from imaginary or manufactured demons, or sign up and go to kill and die under the patriotic banner of ‘god and nation’. Mission accomplished, manipulation assured, control complete.
Class-based interests
And just who is doing the controlling? Never mind that a select number of companies predominate, dig further and you will find four institutions hold major stakes in most of these top companies and in doing so exert control over international finance and monetary policy via the IMF, World Trade Organisation, World Bank and Central European Bank (3). Control and wealth is highly concentrated in the hands of certain individuals or families.
In India too, a relative handful of families control much of the economy and society and are all too willing to fall in line with Western elite interests (4,5), whose hegemonic strategy lies in depressing wages, exploiting markets and maximising profit. Their interests do not lie with those of the 800 million who live on less than two dollars a day, the bulk of the people residing in the eight states that contain more poor people than 26 sub-Saharan African countries combined or the almost one in two children who are malnourished or their families; nor do their interests lie with the tens of millions across India who are having their lands stolen, their rights trampled on, their villages destroyed, their homelands occupied by paramilitary forces just because the rich require their land, their acquiescence, their mineral rich mountains, their agriculture.
The system cannot remedy this situation. It thrives on it. It produces it. But, of course, in an attempt to justify imperialism and plunder, the lie is forwarded that globalisation or neo-liberalism exists to lift the poor out of poverty, to liberate the masses from their burden.
The reality is that, in the name of ‘economic development’, what is currently happening in India constitutes the biggest land grab since Columbus and the biggest forced removal of peoples from their lands in history (6,7). Elite interests and supporters of their agenda in the media imply that the victims are unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ on the road to the promised land.
Sure, certain people have prospered in India in recent years. Sure, many now have lifestyles that their parents could only have imagined. But even under slavery, the lives of slaves improved over time. Moreover, notwithstanding the massive human ‘collateral damage’, there has been a terrible price to pay in terms of the damage caused in pursuit of an unsustainable model of development that destroys traditional agriculture, destroys the ecology and strips bare natural resources. This type of ‘development’ is warped and wholly unsustainable, whether within India or on a global level.
The poverty alleviation rate in India is more or less the same as it was back in 1991 when the US educated, World Bank/IMF trained Indian bureaucrat politicians began to assume power and shift the country towards the neo-liberalism required by their US backers (5).
India ‘s education system, healthcare system, infrastructure and welfare system has already been sacrificed via illegal ‘capital outflows’ into foreign bank accounts, which has accelerated since the opening up of the economy in ’91. A few have been enriched. At what cost to the rest?
In the West, it’s the same story. The secular theology of neo-liberalism has resulted in what many of us predicted. Tens of millions now bear the brunt of ‘austerity’, as companies rake in record profits and the extremely wealthy increase their wealth again by record amounts (8,9). Call it monopoly capitalism, a ‘new world order’ or some other name. The result is there for all to see: a rich and increasingly internationalised elite and the impoverishment of workers throughout the world.
On Independence Day, or during similar events in other places, we should urge people to think hard before bowing down to the flag, before swelling with pride and saying ‘god save the queen’, ‘the land of the brave’ or ‘mera pyara Bharat’.
Most nation states are run for the benefit of and to protect elite interests. And those interests have little respect for national boundaries or for the people they share the same land mass with. History shows that such interests have no hesitation in sacrificing (their own) national economies (10) or the lives of their compatriots en masse in barbaric wars (11) for ever greater power and ever more profit.
What do freedom, self-determination and patriotism actually amount to when the colonial oppressor is still present and has the compliance of India’s increasingly wealthy elite. Was this always to be India’s fabled ‘tryst’ with destiny?
Don’t be distracted by bogus notions of freedom, self-determination and patriotism.
The colonial oppressor is still there, and he has the compliance of India’s increasingly wealthy elite.
British Respect party MP George Galloway has slammed the government’s small payment of £3,000 apiece to Kenyan victims of torture and mistreatment under British colonial rule during the 1950s.
On Press TV’s weekly program Comment, Galloway reviewed the torture Kenyans experienced during the Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule, explaining that a recent compensation of around £20 million to 5,000 victims is not enough.
“Now that sounds like a lot of money [£20 million] but it actually works out at £3,000 compensation each”, Galloway said.
“We’re talking about men who were castrated by the British colonial administration in Kenya. I’m talking about women who were multiply raped and sexually abused, for that kind of torture. £3,000 ain’t much,” he added.
Galloway also said that British Foreign Secretary William Hague did not accept the legal liability for British colonizers’ brutal crimes in Kenya.
At least 10,000 people died during the 1952-1960 Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule, with some sources giving far higher estimates.
Moreover, Galloway highlighted that the British government still has “hundreds of thousands” of uncompensated victims of British imperial crimes around the world.
Foreign Secretary William Hague stopped short of issuing an apology today to the elderly Kenyans tortured by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising.
The Mau Mau movement emerged in central Kenya during the 1950s to get back seized land and push for an end to colonial rule. Supporters were detained in camps and thousands were tortured, maimed or executed.
Mr Hague told the House of Commons that the government had reached a full and final settlement with solicitors of 5,228 claimants totalling £19.9 million.
The government would also support the construction of a memorial in Kenya’s capital Nairobi to the victims of torture and ill-treatment during the colonial era.
But he said the British government continued to deny liability for what happened during the uprising.
Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander said Labour supported the government.
However left Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn said it was strange of the government to offer compensation but to deny any formal responsibility.
“I’m a bit surprised,” he said, adding: “This is a very strange result, to offer compensation and a settlement for Leigh Day and at the same time deny liability,” he said.
Mr Corbyn pointed out that many MPs in the 1950s raised the issue in Parliament at the time, praising the Kenyans for their “tenacity” in seeking justice.
“When we deny rights and justice, when we deny democracy, when we practise concentration camps, it reduces our ability to criticise anybody else for that fundamental denial of human rights, and I think this is a lesson that needs to be learnt not just in Kenya but in other colonial wars as well where equal brutality was used by British forces,” he said.
Mr Hague said there was no inconsistency in recognising the suffering endured by many of the victims while continuing to deny liability.
More than 8,000 Kenyans, severely mistreated under British colonial rule during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising, are seeking compensation from the UK.
According to the reports, thousands of names have been submitted to the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), seeking multi-million pound compensation from the British government.
“The Law Society of Kenya has received lists of ex-Mau Mau fighters seeking compensation running into billions of shillings from the British government,” LSK chief Apollo Mboya said in a statement.
More names are expected to be submitted from the Kenya Human Rights Commission, the statement added.
There are also reports that Britain agreed on a compensation settlement totaling £14 million. Britain’s Foreign Office, however, has refused to comment on the issue.
At least 10,000 people died during the 1952-1960 Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule, with some sources giving far higher estimates.
The British government has admitted to British forces’ torturing of detainees at the time following disclosure of a vast archive of colonial-era documents which the Foreign Office had kept secret for decades.
We are witnessing the slow-motion collapse of the second Anglo-Saxon imperium in less than a hundred years. There was something called Pax Britannica under the reign of Queen Victoria, a truly amazing transcontinental empire without peer in world history. That era was England’s apogee. Then, after the Queen’s diamond jubilee in June 1897, England’s prospects darkened, at first imperceptibly.
In the immediate aftermath of those two stupendous British Empire wars of the 20th Century–now known as World War I and World War II–both conveniently blamed on Germany, everything came crashing down. In short order, England was reduced to a zero, thanks to the venality, hubris and fatheadedness of its “elites”. The torch was grabbed by the second Anglo-Saxon power, in the person of our great white father, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his gang of dedicated Reds and starry-eyed Anglophiles.
The upshot was apparent at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in July 1944. It was here that the victors of the second blood bath decided what the spoils were going to be. England, under the leadership of that unbalanced mountebank, Winston Churchill, was only a nominal victor. The true victors were Washington and world communism.
The former held all the cards outside the communist world, since old Europe and Japan had been left in shambles and partly incinerated. And the once great British Empire of palm and pine was now truly bankrupt, thanks to Churchill and the warmongering machinations of Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey, among other misguided statesmen, before him.
Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, is cited in a New York Timesarticle of October 26th, 2012, as suggesting that readers of the recently-uncovered transcripts of the Bretton Woods Conference would discover the British Empire disintegrating before their eyes.
The same Benn Steil has now written a book, The Battle of Bretton Woods. Tony Barber, the esteemed European editor of the Financial Times, reviewed it in the FT weekend edition of February 9th/10th, 2013. Barber remarks that “… Benn Steil explains how two world wars in 31 years bled Britain dry, leaving it with minimal influence over the new international economic and monetary order established by US policymakers in the mid-1940’s.”
The gentleman representing the US at Bretton Woods was Soviet master spy, Harry Dexter White, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Representing Britain was the celebrity economist, John Maynard Keynes. Alas, the urbane Englishman was reduced to “… the status of an articulate annoyance.” Keynes had warned the Foreign Office not to let the US “… exploit the war as an opportunity for picking the eyes out of the British Empire.” But at that point, what choice did John Bull have? None. The Great Game was over.
In the same article, Barber goes on to review another book on a related topic. “In The Leaderless Economy, Peter Temin and David Vines extend the story that Steil concludes at Bretton Woods, charting the decline and fall of the US-dominated international order that it inaugurated. They contend that the world has not recovered from the banking crisis that erupted in 2008 largely because, unlike in the 1940s, no nation is powerful enough to guide the global economy towards prosperity.”
Barber quotes the authors, Professors Temin and Vines: “Like Britain roughly a century earlier, America has become part of the problem, not the solution.” It is unclear what exactly is being referenced here. The folly related to England’s participation in the Great War of August 1914, the disgraceful Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and its reparations regime, the inability of England to cope with the Great Depression of the 1930s, or British insolvency at the end of the Second World War? Let’s say all three. For my money, the key to everything right down to the present moment remains the Great War.
Does the average American realize that he and she are being bled dry by their own “elites” who suffer from a similar myopia and arrogance as the blockheads in Whitehall who gratuitously catapulted England into two world wars? Of course not. How could they? It is being kept under wraps. Those whose interests are being advanced directly and indirectly by current circumstances do not want the music to stop. Why should they blow the whistle on themselves? Instead, they go with the flow. Everyone in Washington follows the line of least resistance.
Remember the “Peace Dividend”? That was supposed to be America’s reward for winning the Cold War in 1990/1991. Resources would be freed up to use on the home front. But something happened to derail the dividend. What was it? Oh, yes. Saddam Hussein invaded the city-state of Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. Saddam had misinterpreted the mixed signals sent from his then-ally, America. Washington had abetted Iraq’s war on Iran for nearly a decade. With Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, Washington was off to the races again. A full-blown crusade was the result.
In the process, half a million Iraqi children were left dead due to the economic embargo imposed by Bush I and Bill Clinton. In the process, America got hit with the atrocity of 9/11. In the process, a disarmed Iraq was targeted for “shock and awe” and overrun as part of the Global War on Terror. GWOT was the private agenda war masterminded by the Neocons for Dick Cheney & Bush II. That private agenda war continues unabated under Barack Obama, who is considered to be some sort of “progressive”.
Concurrently, Afghanistan/Pakistan became a battleground and a hotbed of terrorism. It remains a quagmire for American and NATO troops. Meanwhile, as if more problems were needed, Washington policymakers loudly and shamelessly repeat the false accusation that Iran is running a nuclear weapons program.
G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama knew that accusation was false. Their own intelligence community told them so in writing. Ditto Seymour Hersh in the pages of The New Yorker. No matter. The establishment media does not bark. The campaign against Iran is a rerun of Iraq.
Finally, just the other day somewhere in Palestine, Obama fulsomely embraced Theodor Herzl and his acolytes, thereby rationalizing and condoning the wholesale dispossession of Palestinians forever. Who noticed? It was the line of least resistance as well as Obama’s ticket to the greatest personal reward. No surprise.
America is at war, all right. Yet another unnecessary war of choice. We are being bled dry like England before us. Chalk up a second global Anglo-Saxon ascendancy thrown away and destroyed thanks to the chicanery of foolish men.
Never before seen files on Britain’s cruel colonial grip on Kenya have revealed a desperate attempt to cover up the massacre of unarmed prisoners during the Mau Mau uprising.
Eleven prisoners at the Hola detention camp were brutally clubbed to death and dozens more injured by prison wardens on March 3 1959 after they refused to work.
One of three elderly Kenyans, who last month won a High Court ruling to sue the British government for damages over torture, claims he was beaten unconscious during the incident.
Despite the overwhelming evidence nobody has ever been prosecuted.
Shockingly, the previously secret documents show that British colonial officials refused to identify individuals involved and attempted to blame the deaths on the prisoners “drinking too much water.”
The prison camp was one of many built during the uprising in which suspected rebels were detained by British colonial forces, often in dire conditions.
Shortly before the Hola deaths, a plan had been drawn up by colonial authorities allowing prison staff to use force to make detainees work if they refused, the Foreign Office files released by the National Archives show.
Prison officer Walter Coutts told the inquest into the Hola deaths that the detainees either “willed themselves to death or had died because they drank too much water.”
But a colonial official’s assistant, Kenyan Johannes Ezekiel, said he saw camp commandant Michael Sullivan moving between groups of prison warders, and could “see perfectly well what was going on.”
Mr Ezekiel’s comments were discounted by attorney-general Eric Griffith-Jones, who was in charge of criminal prosecutions, as he was “strongly suspected” to have links with Kenyan nationalist opposition politician Tom Mboya.
After post-mortem examinations revealed the deaths were caused by violence, the commissioner of prisons, who authorised the plan to use force, claimed that he had warned there were risks.
To make matters worse the attorney-general caused uproar in Britain after announcing that no charges could be brought against any individuals.
He said in a secret letter to the Kenyan chief secretary: “No evidence was available to establish whether any, and, if so, what, injuries had been inflicted by the beating in question or on whom.”
The Hola deaths signalled the beginning of the end of Britain’s clampdown on the Mau Mau uprising as colonial authorities began to close prison camps around Kenya in the following years.
Kenya declared independence from Britain just over four years after the Hola deaths, on December 12 1963.
Separate government files, also released for the first time today, show that colonial officials in Cyprus had considered producing adventure comic books and running an essay competition in the 1950s as part of a propaganda bid to stop youngsters rebelling against British rule.
Boxes containing top secret files about former British colonial rule have gone missing, with those relating to Singapore possibly destroyed. Declassified colonial Kenyan files earlier played a key role in proving the UK responsible for grave abuses.
Britain has admitted that it was aware that 170 boxes of files were transferred to Britain from former colonies. But the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Minister David Lidington said that the government did not know what had happened to the files afterwards.
“It remains the case that the FCO is still unable to confirm the existence or destruction of 170 boxes of top secret colonial administration files known to have been returned to the UK,” Lidington told AFP.
“There is some evidence that the Singapore-related top secret colonial administration files were destroyed as part of a review of FCO post files in the 1990s.”
The FCO is continuing the search for the files and any evidence relating to their possible destruction.
The revelation comes after files relating to British rule in Kenya and Cyprus were declassified, made public and played a key in a court case by three elderly Kenyans who say they were tortured during the British army’s suppression of the 1950s Mau Mau Rebellion.
At the court hearing an archive of 8,800 secret files were examined. The released documents proved attempts by UK authorities to cover-up the killings of 11 prisoners during the uprising and showed that detainees had been battered to death by warders at the Hola detention camp.
A British court granted a historic victory to the three Kenyans, allowing them to claim damages for the suffered abuses when imprisoned during the Mau Mau uprising, including castration, beatings and severe sexual assaults.
The Kenyan case set a historical precedent and it is estimated that 2,000 other surviving Kenyans imprisoned during the Mau Mau insurgency can know sue the British government, which could have significant consequences for the government.
Overall, Britain used to have total control over 50 colonies including Canada, India, Australia, Nigeria, and Jamaica. Currently, there are 14 British Overseas Territories that remain under British rule. However, all have their own internal leadership and most are self-governing.
Britain has admitted that Kenyan prisoners were tortured and sexually abused under the UK rule in Kenya, local media reported.
For the first time ever, British ministers were forced to issue a public confession admitting that atrocities were carried out ‘at the hands of the colonial administration’.
The admission came via a Whitehall lawyer addressing three elderly Kenyans who had gone to the High Court in London to demand damages and an apology.
Now in their 80s, one of them told the court how he had been brutally castrated in a British detention camp during the Mau Mau rebellion – Britain’s bloodiest colonial war.
If the trio win their case, it would open the door to up to 20,000 Kenyan survivors of the Mau Mau purge to sue Britain for millions of pounds, using no-win, no-fee lawyers.
The Foreign Office is contesting the case because it officially denies liability and maintains the Kenyans have left it too late to make claims.
Yesterday, each of the three claimants walked slowly to the witness stand to deliver their graphic testimony.
But before Guy Mansfield, the Foreign Office’s QC, cross-examined them, he said: “I wish to make it clear that the British government does not dispute that each of you suffered torture and other ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration.”
The Mau Mau uprising began in 1952 to end British colonial rule. Britain initially dismissed reports of unrest, but later declared a state of emergency – introducing the death penalty for Mau Mau members. The violence ended in 1956, but the state of emergency was only revoked in 1960.
So-called ‘smart phones’ — far more accurately described as ‘dumb phones’ — combine a mobile phone with a watch, with a road map, with a tourist atlas of the world, with a digital camera, with a personal stereo system, with a music collection, with a video recorder, with a diary, with a calculator, with a credit card, with a travelcard, with an office key, with a torch, with a newspaper, with a television, with something to read on the train, and probably a lot more.
I don’t know, because I don’t own one.
‘But it’s so convenient!’ cry those who stare unbelieving at my twenty-year-old Nokia.
To which I reply: ‘Convenience breeds compliance.’ But to what?
Since they were first introduced into our lives in 2008, smartphones have become our outsourced memory and brain, replacing both with the convenience of not having to remember anything or think for ourselves. If you don’t believe me, then answer me this without looking at your smart phone. What is 9 x 13? What was the capital of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia? In what month of which year did the UK invade Iraq at the tail-end of the US-led coalition? Before smart phones, every child in the UK knew the answers to these questions. Now, no adult does.
But they are now even more than this. Smartphones, under the two years of lockdown, were the instrument onto which the COVID-faithful downloaded the software applications (or app) that connected them to the Test and Trace tracking programme that identified and recorded their location, movements, associations and personal contacts. … continue
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