The Anti-Empire Project

I’ve been doing research for the historical podcast and we’ve reached a moment that I’ve always wanted to know more about, when the British massacred a thousand trapped people in a walled garden over 10 minutes of continuous shooting into an unarmed crowd of tens of thousands of people on April 13, 1919 in Jallianwalla Bagh, Amritsar. There’s a really good 2019 book about it by scholar Anita Anand, called The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and the Raj.

Anand includes a lot of details about the massacre itself, about the British genociders who conducted it and the stories they told about their racial superiority and the need to teach the natives a lesson. Even though I’m always reading these colonial histories, I often forget how directly the Israeli genocide playbook is a copy of the Anglo-American genocide playbook.

All these quotes are from Anand’s book.

Psychological disorder: obsession with the colonized

Here’s a silk merchant, Thomas Cope, talking about a British-induced famine in India that killed a million people in 1840:

‘I certainly pity the East Indian labourer, but at the same time I have a greater feeling for my family than for the East Indian labourer’s family. I think it is wrong to sacrifice the comforts of my family for the sake of the East Indian labourer because his condition happens to be worse than mine.’

Indian revolutionaries worked underground in different parts of the world under the obsessive surveillance and control of the British. The psychology of the British – their simultaneous obsession with Indians and their insistence of their own superiority – was striking. Their obsessive pursuit of the Indian revolutionaries and their constant denigration of Indian people, combined with insistence that they keep India forever and that they were making it better, seems uniquely pathological and unhinged – until you notice the Israelis have the exact same mentality today. Look at Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor who ordered the massacre and who was shot dead 21 years later by an Indian revolutionary named Udham Singh, just after finishing a public lecture justifying the slaughter, exhibiting all these obsessions in a single paragraph op-ed in the Times:

“The British Empire in India is the greatest achievement of our race. It has been built up by the blood, the brains and the energy of our ancestors. During 150 years it has given peace, security, increasing well-being and honest administration of a medley of hostile races, conflicting creeds and jarring casts who had never, but for a few brief periods, known those conditions before. WHAT IS INDIA? Not a Country but a Continent. Not a Nation, but a Noah’s ark of races religions and tongues. INDIA NEVER HAD – Unity, security, peace, justice, communications, public health – until the British came.”

Atrocity propaganda to teach a lesson

The genocidal British commander Rex Dyer didn’t stop at the massacre. He ordered public floggings of children and aerial massacres of villagers. A story circulated that after the massacre, mobs in Amritsar had assaulted a white woman named “Miss Sherwood”. Dyer said he “visited Miss Sherwood” and then decided to commit these additional atrocities, including the “crawling order”, where any Indian who lived on the street where “Sherwood” had been assaulted, would have to crawl on their bellies the entire way to their house, being kicked and brutalized by white soldiers the whole way.

Beastly behavior supposedly justified by the need to punish assaults against white women. The same playbook that the Israelis have used to rationalize the ongoing genocide.

“In Amritsar, Rex Dyer and his men remained busy. They erected large wooden triangles around the city – ‘flogging triangles’, which struck fear into the heart of the civilian population. Though only six people were flogged in public (twenty others were whipped in camera), the incidents were so horrifying that entire neighbourhoods were left traumatised.

“Wrists tied to the apex, legs splayed and fastened to the base, the six young men suspected of taking part in the brutal attack on Miss Sherwood were given summary punishments of thirty lashes. According to one resident of Kucha Kaurianwala, some were no more than boys.”

One woman, Ishwar Kaur, eyewitnessed the floggings:

“Sometimes, I stood up to see the flogging; sometimes I sat down, not being able to bear the sight. The first Sikh boy was whipped with his clothes on, and then his clothes were taken off, and he was flogged naked. Then all the boys were whipped naked. The third boy became senseless three times. Each time, he was unbound, laid flat in the street, and water was poured down his throat. [The flogging resumed when the boy regained consciousness.]”

British Lt.Col Frank Johnson approved: ‘I would sooner have been deprived of the services of 1,000 rifles than the power of inflicting corporal punishment.’

Rex Dyer was enthusiastic about it: ‘Shooting was, in my opinion, far too mild a punishment and it was for me to show that women must be looked upon as sacred.’

Dyer died in 1927 on a crowdfunded dairy farm – white British people raised thousands of pounds for him to purchase it in gratitude for his commission of the massacre – before any Indian Revolutionary assassins could reach him.

Does this aerial massacre remind you of anything?

“In one incident, 150 peasants, making their way home after a long day in the fields, suddenly felt the shadow of a plane flying low over their heads. One of the planes despatched by Sir Michael made a pass and then wheeled back. Without warning, the pilot opened fire with machine guns. The screaming of the civilians was drowned out by the engines of the plane. Those who could ran for their lives, the others fell onto the road where bullets strafed them in the back. One woman, a child and two men were cut to pieces by automatic fire there on the dirt road… The lucky ones fled into their village, but to their horror found themselves pursued by Major Carberry in his First World War BEX bi-plane. He turned his machine guns on them again, shooting many in the back. Even the ones who managed to reach their homes found no sanctuary. Carberry continued to fire through their roofs and walls, with no idea who was inside.” Carberry also unloaded his bomb bay, dropping 8 twenty-pound bombs on the village.

While most of the press praised these massacres, some journalists at the Bombay Chronicle wrote angrily about it. The English one was deported and Indian ones were sentenced to hard labor, the paper shut down.

The long run loss of the colony after an atrocity

Some of the British imperialist elite didn’t like the 1919 massacre and said so in a parliamentary debate. Churchill, despite loving a good Indian genocide himself, called the massacre “un-British” (in fact it’s hard to imagine anything more British). But it’s Montagu – the Jewish-British secretary of state for India, who had argued against the Balfour Declaration and Zionism a couple of years before because he didn’t think Jewish was an ethnicity – whose intervention was most striking. Montagu argued that these atrocities were, in the long-run, going to lead to the loss of the Indian colony:

“Once you are entitled to have regard neither to the intentions nor to the conduct of a particular gathering, and to shoot and to go on shooting, with all the horrors that were here involved, in order to teach somebody else a lesson, you are embarking upon terrorism, to which there is no end. I say, further, that when you pass an order that all Indians, whoever they may be, must crawl past a particular place, when you pass an order to say that all Indians, whoever they may be, must forcibly or voluntarily salaam any officer of His Majesty the King, you are enforcing racial humiliation. I say, thirdly, that when you take selected schoolboys from a school, guilty or innocent, and whip them publicly, when you put up a triangle, where an outrage which we all deplore and which all India deplores has taken place, and whip people who have not been convicted, when you flog a wedding party, you are indulging in frightfulness, and there is no other adequate word which could describe it.”

Montagu warned of the result of these atrocities:

“The great objection to terrorism, the great objection to the rule of force, is that you pursue it without regard to the people who suffer from it, and that having once tried it you must go on. Every time an incident happens you are confronted with the increasing animosity of the people who suffer, and there is no end to it until the people in whose name we are governing India, the people of this country, and the national pride and sentiment of the Indian people rise together in protest and terminate your rule in India as being impossible on modern ideas of what an Empire means.”

The Indian people did indeed rise together in protest and terminate British rule in India – but it took another 27 years, and another world war, more famines, millions more deaths, after the 1919 atrocity.

The battle is over collaboration

Why did it take so much longer? Why didn’t Montagu’s prediction come about sooner? It has to do with another pattern: collaboration. A certain percentage of collaborators will never be shaken from the practice, no matter how vile the colonizer’s acts.

How did the British continue to have so many Indians killing other Indians for them, taking their bribes, taking their subsidies while the country’s wealth was drained away, maintaining a posture of loyal opposition despite open British race hatred and contempt for them, despite the savagery of British expressed intention and action?

The Butcher of Amritsar himself was presented with a shawl to honor him by one of the British-appointed Sikh religious authorities. How could a leader – even a British-appointed one – with any amount of accountability to his own community, honor a proud genocider?

In 1931, the British killed a number of very important Indian revolutionary leaders: Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru, Sukhdev Thapar, Chandrasekhar Azad. How could the struggle recover from the loss of these leaders (and many others assassinated or executed by the British)?

Meanwhile Gandhi, whose followers had called the 1919 meeting at Jallianwallah Bagh that had ended with the massacre, called off the campaign at the critical moment. This Independence leader who had recruited Indian soldiers to fight for their British colonizers in WWI advocated strict nonviolence against the genociders. During a five month long peasant rebellion in Malabar in South India (see the short edited book by Narayanan and Prashad The 1921 Uprising in Malabar), Gandhi publicly claimed that the peasant revolt against landlords and the British was actually Muslim violence against Hindus, that Muslims must disavow and Hindus must try to forgive. Gandhian leaders went to the peasants and encouraged them to stand down and surrender to the British. Some who did, were immediately hanged. How could leaders think of collaborating with their colonizers, fall into the colonizer’s narrative traps, sow despair and preach surrender?

It’s hard to believe. And yet all of these patterns are present today.

Conclusion

I have long believed the world worked as Montagu described: that counterinsurgency based on atrocity was ultimately futile because it made the fundamental requirement of colonization – the recruitment of collaborators – impossible. The brazen way the Israelis have behaved, the confident way they have flouted what I thought was an obvious truth about colonialism – that hiding its brutality lengthened its tenure and embracing brutality shortened it – has shaken my belief. Maybe I missed something? Maybe brutality actually works? Maybe we can all be cowed into submission rather than enraged into action.

Probably not. Montagu was probably right, still is right. But reading the history of Indian Independence it’s striking to see how long the process took. From the 1857 genocide (which Western history diminuitively calls a “mutiny”) to Independence took 90 years. From the 1919 atrocity, it took 27 years for matters to unfold as Montagu had predicted they would. Decades of massacres, of collaborators, of co-optation and loyal opposition.

I don’t know where we are in the process of Palestine’s liberation – whether we are closer to 1857, 1919, or 1942-46 when Quit India was declared, the Indian National Army formed, and the sailors mutinied.

Everything moves faster now. But the patterns are striking and point in the long run to the same result.