Rafael Poch de Feliu, CTXT, 28/1/2026
Translated by Tlaxcala
After Gaza, the question being asked, from a place of vertigo, by the conscious sector of European public opinion is how to explain the complicity and cooperation of European governments, institutions, and media with the Israeli colonial genocide. The answer lies in history: it is European colonial history that links Western governments to the Israeli massacre.
The entertainment industry is a fundamental tool of
Western hegemonism. In close collaboration with the political, military,
financial, and media complex, its production penetrates every household daily,
performing a key ideological function, perfectly identified and understood. In
retrospect, the Hollywood industry managed to turn that universal encyclopedia
of infamy—the history of European colonialism, particularly that of the
British, direct relatives of today’s hegemon—into exploits, epics, and romantic
tales. The list of films glorifying great colonial crimes has yet to be
written, but it suffices to cite classics like "Lawrence of Arabia"
(1962), "55 Days at Peking" (1963), "Zulu" (1964), or
"Khartoum" (1966) to remember how an entire generation grew up lulled
and entertained by this exalting genre whose legend they internalized.
It is instructive to compare reading any serious work on the action of the British Empire in India or China with films like "Victoria & Abdul" (2017) by Stephen Frears, or "Tai-Pan" (1986) by Daryl Duke, to measure the level of vileness of such bombardment. Frears presents the warm friendship between Queen Victoria and her Indian servant at a time when Indians were dying of hunger in horrific crises directly related to colonial governance. Duke’s film is inspired by the figure of William Jardine (1784–1843) to construct a romantic, erotic, and heroic fiction around history’s principal drug trafficker, who condemned 150 million Chinese to drug addiction and became one of the richest and most powerful men of his time.
Maintained for over two centuries of violence, racism,
and exploitation, the British Empire is still presented in the most haughty and
arrogant manner as a civilizing and model enterprise, alongside the French,
Spanish, Portuguese, etc. empires—declared defective or manifestly failed.
"For some nations, Spain for example, the opening
of the world was an invitation to prosperity, pomp, and ambition, an ancient
way of proceeding. For others, like Holland and England, it was the occasion to
do new things, to ride the wave of technological progress," writes David
S. Landes (In: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, 1998).
This consistency with the more than ambiguous
"vector of progress" noted with satisfaction by the illustrious
Harvard historian may explain the current and renewed nostalgia for the British
Empire, warned of by two authors critical of the phenomenon (Hickel and
Sullivan). "High-impact books like Empire: How Britain Made the Modern
World by Niall Ferguson and The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley
have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to
India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll revealed that 32% of
Britons are proud of the country’s colonial history," they note.
This same pride in the colonial past is, without
doubt, shamefully still present in many other old imperial nations, but
nowhere, as among the "Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic" that
Benjamin Franklin defined as "the most important nucleus of the white
people," does this feeling have more consequences for the present.
"The empire, as it had been, formally came to an
end in the 1960s, but its unhappy legacy remains in today’s world, where
numerous conflicts occur in former colonial territories," observes Richard
Gott in his compendium on British imperialism (Britain’s Empire, 2012).
"If Britain was so successful with its colonies, why do many of them
remain significant sources of violence and unrest?" he asks. The
British—now reduced to the humble category of sheriff’s deputies, to an even
greater extent than the rest of the Europeans—"have continued to wage wars
in the lands of their former empire in the 21st century, and much of the
British population has unquestioningly reverted to their old stance of unthinkingly
accepting what is done in their name in far-flung places of the world,"
says Gott. The role played in the 19th century by "civilization,"
"commerce," and "Christianity" imposed on the
"savages" is now played by the ideology of human rights, gender
equality, and other noble causes. For all these reasons, recalling the
exemplary exploits of such a virtuous empire is not a historical exercise but
an imperative for understanding the present, and very particularly for
understanding European complicity (political, financial, commercial, military,
and media) with the Palestinian genocide.
The British Gulag
The British Empire was a military dictatorship in
which colonial governors imposed martial law at the slightest dissent. For over
200 years, it was the scene of constant revolt and repressive violence. In the
metropolis itself, hundreds of thousands were confined in His Majesty’s island
Gulag. Especially after the independence of the United States closed that
colonial territory of the new world—in the thirty years before 1776, a quarter
of emigrants arriving in Maryland were convicts—Caribbean islands like Bermuda
and Roatán (Honduras), Asian ones like Penang (Malaysia), or Indian Ocean
islands like the Seychelles or Andaman, were part of the British island prison
system, which also sent many Indian and Chinese prisoners to Singapore. In the
19th century, the Seychelles were a prison for leaders of revolts and local
notables from Zanzibar, Somalia, Egypt, or Ghana, who for one reason or another
could not be executed. Archbishop Makarios, leader of the Greek Cypriot
nationalists, was held there as recently as 1956. But it was Australia, the
great island-continent offering unlimited space, that was the primary
destination the government needed for the social detritus of its catastrophic
industrial revolution—that great milestone of "progress" extolled by
Landes.
In 1840, half the population of Tasmania, about 30,000
people, were prisoners. Since maintaining prisoners in metropolitan jails was
expensive, the minimum sentences for deportation to Australia—to get them off
the government’s hands, even for petty theft—were seven years. Between 1788 and
1868, 162,000 convicts were sent to Australia, including 4,000 trade unionists,
Chartists, Luddites, the famous "Daughters of Rebecca" from Wales who
smashed tollgates and barriers to protest privatization and road tolls, as well
as 2,000 Irish revolutionaries.
The terrible situation of repressed individuals and
convicts from the metropolis themselves repressing and massacring native
populations in the colonies—so vividly seen in the United States with Native
American nations—was repeated in other European colonies and also in Australia.
In 1824, the military governor of New South Wales granted colonists, many of
them deported ex-convicts, a license to kill Aborigines at will. The governor
was named Thomas Brisbane, and his surname today names one of Australia’s major
cities.
Below Decks, by Rodney K. Charman (1995). Representation of the interior of a “coffin ship”( long cónra) transporting Irish migrants to America. Knights of Columbus Museum collection
The Irish Famine
Some consider the Chinese famine during the Great Leap
Forward (1958–1962) the largest in history. A century earlier, the Irish Famine
("An Gorta Mór") was considerably worse than the Chinese one when
considering the proportion of the population involved. With eight million
inhabitants, hunger and its consequences carried off between one and two
million Irish people. Some places lost a third of their population, half dead
and the other half through emigration. (Patrick Joyce, 2024, Remembering
Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World).
"I have visited the desolate remains of what were
once noble redskins in their North American reservations and I have explored
the black neighborhoods where Africans are degraded and enslaved," wrote
English Quaker philanthropist James Hack Tuke in 1847 in a letter following his
visit to Connaught, "but I have never seen such misery, nor such advanced
physical degradation, as that of the inhabitants of the bogs of Ireland."
Other countries like France, Belgium, Holland,
Germany, and Russia also suffered potato blights in 1846/1847, but unlike what
happened in Ireland under British rule, they halted exports of other foodstuffs
to compensate for the loss. English policy destined food produced in Ireland
for export—a strategy whose maintenance was considered more important than the
lives of the Irish. One of the protagonists of this policy, Assistant Secretary
to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, was more concerned with "modernizing"
the Irish economy than saving lives, and thus saw the famine as an opportunity
to apply radical free-market reforms.
"We have not the slightest doubt that, by virtue
of the inscrutable but invariable laws of nature, the Celt is less active, less
independent, and less industrious than the Saxon. This is the archaic condition
of his race," wrote The Times, the central newspaper of the
imperial establishment.
The Economist,
the same weekly that in the 1990s preached the virtues of the Russian shock
therapy—which left a demographic toll of half a million, mostly working-age
men—while denigrating China’s reform, published on January 30, 1847, an
editorial dedicated to the Irish crisis. "That the innocent should suffer
with the guilty is a sad reality," it said, "but it is one of the
great conditions on which the existence of all society is based. Every
violation of the laws of morality and social order carries its own punishment.
That is the first law of civilization." (In: The Economist and the
Irish Famine — Crooked Timber)
Since the 16th century, a tithe was in effect in
Ireland whereby the mostly Catholic Irish had to pay a tenth of their annual
income to finance the Protestant church. Until 1829, Catholics who refused the
Protestant oath of allegiance to the crown could not hold public office. During
the famine, English Protestant theologians attributed the potato blight to
"popery," that is, Catholicism, which had "provoked the wrath of
God." The satirical weekly Punch constantly published cartoons
depicting the Irish as brutish, dirty, lazy, violent apes, solely responsible
for their own misfortune.
In 1847, while The Times ignored the famine’s
disasters, a relief campaign was launched in the United States that exposed the
London government. Packages marked "Ireland" were transported free by
rail, and 114 ships were chartered with aid.
The Irish Holocaust continued for those who managed to
emigrate. In the last of the three centuries of the slave trade, during which
about ten million Africans were transferred to the New World, with half of them
dying in the process of capture and transport, according to one of the great
historians of that traffic (Joseph Miller, 1988, Way of Death), Irish
emigrants met a fate not so different. On the English ships carrying Irish
emigrants to America, conditions were so appalling that one in four died during
the voyage or within six months of arriving in the New World. The mortality
recorded on what were described as “coffin ships” was no less than that on
ships transporting African slaves to the colonies. That this mortality was
particularly high on English ships points to clear criminal negligence: for
every death of an emigrant aboard an American ship, there were four on a British
one; and for every sick person arriving in the United States on a North
American ship, five arrived on a British vessel. In 1847, of the 98,000
emigrants who arrived in Canada on English ships, 25,000 died on the voyage or
within six months of arrival. All this was news in the US and Canadian press,
but the Times of London ignored it. The British government only began
taking measures in 1854, seven years later. (Thomas Gallagher, Paddy's Lament, Ireland
1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred, 1982)
The entertainment industry has completely ignored the
Irish Famine, but in 2018, a rare Irish exception produced in Luxembourg
presented "Black 47" by director and screenwriter Lance Daly, an
action film with a breathless western rhythm built upon the framework of that
historical tragedy. The Times this time highlighted the film’s
"macho theatricality," noting that "everything is deeply absurd,
but within a hauntingly profound setting." The Independent
emphasized the "excessively bleak" character of what it dubbed a
"potato western" in allusion to spaghetti westerns, and The
Guardian lamented that "the caricaturization of the villains
diminishes the impact" of that excellent film, which was nonetheless a box
office success…
Ireland in the West and Burma in the East were the
territories most powerful and tenacious in their resistance to the English,
which is why repression was particularly harsh there, but convulsions, famines,
and revolts were also chronic in India.
India
According to a recent estimate, in just the forty
years from 1880 to 1920, British colonization caused an estimated 100 million
deaths in India, resulting from the impoverishment of the population and the
increased frequency and mortality of famines. (Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan,
"How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years").
"This is one of the greatest policy-induced mortality crises in human
history," the authors state. "It is larger than the combined total of
deaths that occurred during all the famines of the Soviet Union, Mao’s China,
North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia," all in the 20th
century, they say. Before that, in 1770, a great famine devastated Bengal,
killing about 10 million of its inhabitants, a third of the population. The
situation was worsened by the monopoly on rice and other products imposed by
the British East India Company, which governed the territory. Collapse and
taxes, combined with drought and hunger, marked the beginning of English rule
in India, a pattern that would persist for 200 years.
Since its arrival on the subcontinent in the 17th
century, Britain destroyed India’s manufacturing sector, which had exported
textiles worldwide. The colonial regime eliminated tariffs on British textile
products and created a system of taxes and internal barriers that prevented
Indians from selling their products within the country, let alone exporting
them. "If the history of British rule in India had to be condensed into a
single fact, it would be this: between 1757 and 1947 there was no increase in
per capita income, and in the second half of the 19th century, incomes surely fell
by more than 50 percent," says Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts,
2002). The new colonial economy made populations more vulnerable to droughts
and adverse natural phenomena that fostered hunger. According to historian
Robert C. Allen (Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction,
2011), under British rule, extreme poverty rose from 23% in 1810 to over 50% by
the mid-20th century, real wages decreased, and famines became more frequent
and more deadly. Distant past?
England’s most important politician of World War II,
Winston Churchill, who died in 1965, was a confessed racist. In the 1940s, he
referred to Indians as "a beastly people with a beastly religion" and
of the 1943 Bengal famine, which left three million dead, he claimed it was
"their fault for breeding like rabbits." In 1919, Churchill declared
himself "quite favorably inclined to the use of poison gas against
uncivilized tribes." In the 1930s, he defined Palestinians as "barbaric
hordes who eat nothing but camel dung." Before the war, he was an admirer
of Mussolini ("I could not help being charmed by his gentle and simple
bearing and his serene poise") and had words of praise for Hitler in 1937,
the year of Guernica: "One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his
patriotic achievements. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a
champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place
among the nations." In the 1955 election campaign, Churchill proposed a
slogan for the Conservative Party that many Europeans subscribe to today: “Keep
England White!”
