The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

In England they had the good sense not to get too excited about anarchism. This was perhaps due to the fact that the English have never shown much interest in ideas, unable to accept that they could make the slightest practical difference. So every variety of anarchist and revolutionary was able to find refuge in London, and be reasonably sure of receiving only minimum surveillance from the police. The club in Berner Street in which Jack the Ripper committed the first of his double-murders was a well-known meeting place for foreign revolutionaries, one of many in London. Because they were allowed to talk as much as they liked about violent revolution, they made no attempt to practise it. The only ‘anarchist outrage’ of the 1890s in London was an attempt by a feeble-minded youth, Martial Bourdin, to blow up the Greenwich Observatory (February 1892); the bomb exploded prematurely, blowing him to pieces, but the Observatory was untouched. Eighteen years later, in December 1910, a group of Russian anarchists broke into a jeweller’s shop in Houndsditch, east London, and opened fire when the police knocked on the door, killing three policemen. A nationwide manhunt led to the arrest of several of the gang, and in early January of the following year, two more members were surrounded by police at a house in Sidney Street. After an all-night siege and a shooting match that lasted all morning, the house burst into flames and both anarchists were burnt to death. Even this failed to provoke the government into trying to suppress anarchist ideas. So in England, the ideals of anarchism faded away gently, suffocated by the British failure to take them seriously. In Spain, where repression continued (and another premier, Canelejas, was assassinated in 1912), they lived on, to play a major role in the civil war of the 1930s.

The anarchists were not entirely mistaken to believe that governments have been responsible for some of the world’s worst problems. But they failed to grasp that it is not a question of individual wickedness; merely of policies that, at the time, struck honest men as reasonable. The blame for ‘the horrifying sense of sin manifest in the conduct of human affairs’ cannot be laid at the door of a few wicked individuals, or even a few thousand. England is an interesting case in point. By 1900, the British Empire was several times larger than the Roman Empire had ever been. But the British did not regard themselves as conquerors; merely as a civilising influence, like missionaries. The upper-class Englishman of the 1890s saw himself reflected fairly accurately in Conan Doyle’s portrait of Dr Watson: decent, honest, not very bright, but infinitely loyal. He would have found it difficult to believe that the empire’s foreign subjects saw him as an oppressor and exploiter.

Yet this, in practical terms, is what the British were. In Ireland, there had been political problems since the time of Henry VIII, when England became Protestant and Ireland remained Catholic. The English solution to every outbreak of dissatisfaction was to send an army to massacre the Irish. They called this ‘pacification’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica remarks: ‘Ireland was now so “pacified” that even in the year of the Armada it scarcely moved.’

In 1607, the old Irish earls fled in disgust and died abroad, and the English decided to try a radical solution: taking Ulster away from the Irish and settling English Protestants there. In 1641 the Irish rebelled again and massacred the Protestants in Ulster. Eight years later, Cromwell went to Ireland and massacred a great many Catholics in revenge – so many that it more or less settled the Ulster question once and for all. James II asked the Irish to help him recover his throne, but was defeated at the battle of the Boyne and fled abroad. Again, the Irish had to bear the brunt of another ‘pacification’.

When the Irish rebelled in 1916, the trouble-makers were a few cranky nationalists who had little general support; the English suppressed the rising without difficulty. But instead of putting the rebels in jail – or better still, letting them go free to live with their unpopularity – they decided to shoot them. Old wounds re-opened; there was a full-scale rebellion; British troops went in to suppress the Irish Republican Army. Eventually, the British public itself became disgusted by the bloodshed, and in 1921, Southern Ireland became a republic. But the old problem of the ‘plantation’ of Ulster with Protestants refused to go away and, in the last decades of the twentieth century, is causing as much trouble as ever. We can see that, in the case of Ireland, the British have constantly over-reacted to their difficulties, and non-stop bloodshed has been the result.

In India, it was a similar story. From the British point of view, ‘conquest’ had been thrust upon them. The East India Company only wanted to trade with India. The Portuguese, French and Dutch had to be firmly discouraged by the British navy. When a local nabob, Saraj ud-Daulah, attacked the British settlement in Calcutta in 1756 and threw 146 English prisoners into the notorious Black Hole, the British under their commander Clive defeated Daulah at the battle of Plassey, placed their own man on the throne, and the British were the rulers of Bengal. This brought them into conflict with the Marathas, the leading power in India since they had overcome the Moguls; the British finally crushed the Marathas in 1818, and so became rulers of an even larger portion of the subcontinent. In 1856, a particularly bloody mutiny broke out when Hindu troops – known as Sepoys – heard a rumour that the fat that covered their cartridges came from pigs and cows. Since they had to bite the end off the cartridges to load, and since pigs were sacred to Mahommedans and cows to Hindus, they would be committing sacrilege. The Sepoy troops at Meerut reacted by massacring the British officers and their families. Various native princes who objected to British rule took the opportunity to rebel. Delhi fell to the mutineers, then Cawnpore. The atrocities were appalling: women and children disembowelled and burned alive. When the British re-took Cawnpore, they found a well full of dismembered corpses of women and children, while in the nearby house two women had been tied to pillars, their throats cut, and a child impaled by his chin on a hook. When the British finally subdued the rebels three years later, they took an equally appalling revenge; rebels were executed by the thousand – tied over the mouths of cannons and blown in two. And the British crushed the remaining maharajahs and became masters of India. No one was to blame but the rebels. But the Indians saw it differently. They had been subjected to the abuses and oppressions of the East India Company since Clive’s victory, and for them the mutiny was as justifiable as Boudica’s rebellion against the Roman forces in Britain. It has to be acknowledged that the British displayed unusual stupidity in trying to force the Sepoys to bite the cartridges and allowing the rebellion to begin at all.

The East India Company also played its part in the ‘pacification’ of China. In India, they had discovered the drug called opium made from poppies, and in the form of laudanum it became a popular drug in England for soothing colds and toothaches. At first it was thought to be no more harmful than alcohol, but by the early nineteenth century, it was known to be addictive. This did not prevent the East India Company offering to trade China opium in exchange for tea in the 1830s. The Chinese, like the Japanese, wanted nothing to do with ‘foreign devils’, and kept their doors closed to Europeans. But the Cantonese were induced to try opium, and were soon demanding it in large quantities. To trade with the west, it was necessary to play an elaborate game. A wealthy group of Cantonese called the Hong merchants acted as go-betweens. The British (and American) ships would anchor down-river at Macao. The Hong merchants would go on board and do their business, then hordes of junks would take the chests of opium – weighing more than a hundredweight each – back to Canton. The foreign devils would then set sail, chased by vessels of the Chinese navy, which fired salvos after them. And the emperor would be told that once again the foreigners had been repelled by the Chinese navy.

In 1838, the emperor appointed a rigidly honest official to stop the traffic, as a consequence of which, more than a thousand tons of opium was dumped into the river. The enraged British government sent in the British navy, which went up and down the coast bombarding Chinese towns, and captured the island of Chusan. The humiliated emperor had to back down and pay six million dollars in compensation; he also handed over the port of Hong Kong, so that the British were now able to flood China with opium. Canton, Shanghai and other ports were also opened to foreigners, who could live in their own settlements and move around China subject only to their own laws. Various foreigners annexed slices of territory – the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, even the Japanese. In 1899, a patriotic secret society called the Order of Harmonious Fists – which the British derisively nicknamed the Boxers – began tearing up railways and killing foreigners and Chinese Christians. The Boxer rebellion was as bloody and cruel as the Indian mutiny, and was stamped out as ruthlessly – by an international force that included the Japanese. The Chinese government had to pay a third of a billion dollars in compensation, and to make more concessions. The result was an upsurge of Chinese nationalism, which led to the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, by rebels headed by Sun Yat-sen. When Sun tried to get the foreigners out of China, most of them flatly refused to co-operate. Sun turned to the Soviet Union for aid. The long-term result was present-day communist China – another product of western stupidity and western greed.