U S (1900-99)
General MacArthurIn the Korean War (1950-53), he congratulated the napalm bombing of the city of Hoeryong. He had ordered the US airforce to turn N Korea into a wasteland by destroying “every installation, factory, city and village.” He later rejoiced that “a large part of enemy lines is now a wilderness of scorched earth.” He said he wanted to “spread a belt of radioactive cobalt from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea.” The Korean War killed at least 2 million civilians.
President Conant of Harvard University:
Speaking to the
New York Herald Tribune (Oct 1948)
"In the first place, this nation, unlike most others, has not evolved from military conquest. We have nowhere in our traditions the idea of an aristocracy descended from conquerors... On the contrary, we have developed our greatness in a period in which a fluid society overran a rich and empty continent..."
[Tariq Ali,
Clash of Fundamentalisms, Verso 2002]
Major General Smedley D Butler (1881-1940)
Butler was a high-powered state terrorist in the service of Big Capital. But one who spoke the truth towards the end of his life. He didn’t have to preach about ‘human rights’ and the need to make the world ‘safe for democracy’. IN 1933, Butler expounded his views on American imperialism with amazing candour:
"I spent 33 years & 4 months in active military service in the US Marine Corps, I served in all commissioned ranks: from second lieutenant to Major General. During that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
I was rewarded with honours, medals, promotions. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few points. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents."
[Third World Resurgence No 50, Oct 94 & Tariq Ali,
Clash of Fundamentalisms, Verso 2002]
Lorena Hickok, US Government Official, 1934
"More than half the population of the city [Savannah, Georgia, USA] is Negro…They are almost as inarticulate as animals. They are animals. Many of them look and talk like creatures barely removed from the ape. Some I talked to yesterday seemed hardly more intelligent than my police dog."
[reporting on blacks in Georgia to President Franklin D Roosevelt’s administration.]
[Quoted in Williams’
Sisters in the Wilderness]
President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)
"The experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organisation… there is an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilisation which are irksome to their physical nature.
Our industries have expanded to such a point that they will burst their jackets… Our domestic markets no longer suffice; we need foreign markets. The world must be made safe for democracy."
During his presidential campaign in 1912: "In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration, I stand for the national policy of exclusion... We cannot allow a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race."
[R&Class, vol43, Jan04]
President William Howard Taft (1909-13) 1912:
“The day is not far distant when … the whole (western) hemisphere will be ours by virtue of our race superiority as in fact it already is ours morally…”
From John Pilger’s article in
New Statesman & Society (4 Sept 1994)
Robert Lansing (US Secretary of State) 1912:
"The experience of Liberia and Haiti shows that the African race is devoid of any capacity fort political organisation… there is an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilisation which are irksome to their nature."
[
Third World Resurgence, No 50 (Oct 94), pg 38.]
Lewis Terman, American psychologist, in 1916:
[Referring to the African-Americans] "No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens… their dullness seems to be racial…they cannot master abstractions but they can often be made efficient workers…"
William Jennings Bryan (colleague of Theodore Roosevelt 1901-09) 1900:
"Our republic (is) gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in the world’s progress and the accepted arbiter of the world’s surplus."
Charles Metcalfe, Governor of Haiti, 1840:
"To make them labour and give them a taste for luxuries and comforts, they must be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human labour… This was the sort of progress the negroes had to go through…"
[Quoted in Noam Chomsky,
Year 501, pg227]
Britain (1900-99)
Harold Macmillan (1894-1986). PM in 1957-63:
Wall Street Journal (12 June 03) contains the following quote from Harold Macmillan's diary. The entry for 27 September 1952 [when Macmillan was in Churchill’s cabinet) has this to say about the U.S.:
"We are treated by the Americans with a mixture of patronizing pity and contempt. They treat us worse than they do any other country in Europe. They undermine our political and commercial influence all over the world...
They really are a strange people. Perhaps the mistake we make is to continue to regard them as an Anglo-Saxon people. That blood is very much watered down now; they are a Latin-Slav mixture, with a fair amount of German and Irish. They are impatient, mercurial, panicky."
Field Marshal Montgomery (British Chief of Defence Staff in World War II):
In late 1947, ‘Monty’ toured 11 African countries and concluded that the African “is a complete savage and quite incapable of developing the country himself”. Then in January 1948, ‘Monty’ secretly submitted a serious plan to make the African continent into a white supremacy stronghold against communism.
[From
Guardian, 7 Jan 99]
George Orwell (1937):
"The high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon keeping a tight hold on the Empire... In order that England may live in comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation - a state of affairs in which you acquiesce every time you step into a taxi or eat strawberries and cream.
This basic formula remains: 'We in the rich world live in comparative comfort only because of the inordinate power our govts wield and the inordinate wealth which flows from that power... We acquiesce in this system each time we buy salad from the supermarket (grown with water stolen from Kenyan nomads or step into a plane... Global democracy means ensuring that the world is run for our benefit."
Agricultural Survey Commission 1932 (for European settlement in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia):
"Any land with poor soils, inadequate water supplies, low nutrition grasses unsuitable for European cattle or overgrown with impenetrable bush should be allocated to Africans."
David Lloyd George (1863-1945), British PM:
(referring to British pressure at the 1932 disarmament convention that bombing civilians be allowed)
"We insisted on the right to bomb niggers."
[Mark Curtis
The Great Deception, Pluto 1998, pg 135]
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"Our possessions of the West Indies. like that of India, gave us the strength, the support but specially the capital, the wealth, at a time when no other European nation possessed such a reserve. It enabled us to come through the great struggle of the Napoleonic Wars, the keen competition of the 18th and 19th centuries and enabled us… to lay the foundation of that commercial and financial leadership … to make our great position in the world. [no date given]"
[Patterns of Racism, Inst of Race Relations, London 1982, pg26]
To the Peel Commission of Inquiry (1937), following the British crushing of the first Palestinian intafada (1936-39): "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race has come in and taken their place."
[Asian Times (12 April 1994)]
"The Indians of East Africa are mainly of a low class of coolies and the idea of equality with Europeans is revolting to every white man in British East Africa…"
"The Indians are the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans…"
- Black people: ‘niggers’, ‘baboons’; Italians: ‘mere organ grinders’
Chinese army in the Korean War: 4 million pigtails don’t make an army."
[Gary Younge,
Guardian, 30 Sept 2002]
Churchill branded Gandhi “a half-naked fakir” who “ought to be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back.” [no date given.]
“This small island [is] dependent for our daily bread on our trade and imperial connections. Cut this away and at least a third of our population must vanish speedily from the face of the earth.”
[MediaLens, 10 Mar 2003]
Churchill quote: “We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scant inheritance. We have an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions - mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force – often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”
[Peter Fryer, Black People in the British Empire, Pluto 1989, pg4]
Winston Churchill addressing a banquet of West Indies sugar planters in London on 20 July 1939:
"Our possession of the West Indies, like that of India... gave us the strength, the capital, the wealth at a time when no other European nation possessed such a reserve. It enabled us to come through the Napoleonic wars, the keen competition of the 18th and 19th centuries and enabled us to lay the foundation of that commercial and financial leadership which gave us a great position in the world."
[Mark Curtis, The Great Deception (Pluto 1998), p135]. Also more briefly in Chomsky: Chronicles of Dissent, p308 and Necessary Illusions, p308.
As Secretary of State at the War Office (1919), W Churchill authorised the RAF Middle East Command to use chemical weapons “against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment”, dismissing objections by the India Office as “unreasonable”. “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes (to) spread a lively terror…” (The tribes were the Kurds of Iraq and the Afghans.)
“We cannot acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any available weapons to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier”, adding that chemical weapons are merely “the application of Western science to modern warfare”.
Bomber Harris (1920s):
Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris (Bomber Harris), Chief of RAF Bombing Command in World War II, mounted incendiary air raids over civilian populations in Germany culminating in the destruction of Dresden. As young squadron leaders in the air campaign against Iraq in 1924, he wrote:
“The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. They know within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be nearly wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured…”.
A colleague of Harris in the Iraqi operations of the 1920s wrote:
“Air control is a marvellous means of bringing these wild mountain tribes to heel. It is swift, economic and humane. We always drop warning messages before we start to ‘lay eggs’ on their villages… An eastern mind forgets quickly, and if he is not punished for his misdeeds straightaway, he feels his punishment is not merited if delayed.”
[From
Economic & Political Weekly, 9 Jan 99]
Lord Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary (1917 & 1919):
On 18 July 1917,
Lord Rothschild (representing Zionist interests) wrote a memo appealing to the British government): ‘Palestine should be-constituted as the national home of the Jewish people.’ In November 1917, Foreign Secretary responded with a Declaration pledging ‘to view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’
A European power was promising to transform a non-Euro territory into a European settler state without consulting the local population. The London Times (22 April 1998), playing down the British complicity, said the pledge ‘was never intended to be more than a romantic gesture.’
In May 1918, Zionist
Chaim Weizmann had written to Balfour about : ‘the treacherous nature of the Arabs… he screams and blackmails. The Arab is a roué and therefore has a great advantage over the clean minded English official who is not conversant with the Oriental mind. The fellah is dishonest, uneducated, greedy…’
In July 1919, the same Balfour confirmed:
"In Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country… Zionism, be it right or wrong, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
The British Census of Palestine (1922) determined the 1914 population at 689,272 persons of whom no more than 60,000 were Jews. By 1922m there were 78% Muslims, 11% Jews and the rest Christians & others. The British promoted rapid European migration to Palestine, their proportion reaching nearly 26% in 1934. IN 1937, PM Lloyd George wrote to the Palestine Royal Commission:
“The Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that if the allies committed themselves to establishing a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the allied cause.”
[Edward Said: "The Question of Palestine" (Kegan Paul 1980),
The Politics of Dispossession (Vintage 1995)]
Encylopedia Britannica, 1911
"Mentally the Negro is inferior to the white… the mental constitution is very similar to that of a child. Because of their dog-like fidelity… given suitable training, the Negro is capable of becoming a craftsman of considerable skill."
[quoted in R&C, vol 38, Oct 96, pg 61 in the article on Walter Daniel Tull 1888-1918 – black soldier & footballer]
Others (1900-99)
Paul Rohrbach wrote in
German Thought in the World (1912):
“No false philanthropy or race theory can convince sensible people that the preservation of South Africa’s kaffirs is more important to the future of mankind than the spread of the great European nations and the white race in general… Not until the native learns to produce anything of value in the service of the higher race… does he gain any moral right to exist.”
[quoted in
Exterminate the Brutes, by S Lindqvist, Granta, 1996]
Jules Harmand, French colonialist, 1910:
"We belong to the superior race and civilisation… The basic justification of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority - not just economic and military but also moral…That quality underlies our right to direct the rest of humanity…"
Carl Jung, Psychologist (1875-1961), in 1921:
"An Indian does not think, at least not what we call ‘think’. He rather perceives the thought. He resembles the primitive in this respect…"
"The natives of Africa act first and do not know what they are doing…"
[Racism of Psychology, p82]
Georges Cuvier in his
Animal Kingdom (1927 reprint)
"The Negro race… manifestly approaches the monkey tribe. The hordes of this variety have always remained in a state of complete barbarism."
[
Racism of Psychology, p71]
Frantz Fanon, Revolutionary writer and psychoanalyst from Martinique (1925-61)
"European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, nourished with the blood of slaves… The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races… Europe is literally the creation of the Third World."
[From
The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin reprint 1990, first published in French 1961]
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), French philosopher, novelist & critic:
Sartre wrote the Preface to Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth. Here are extracts:
"Fanon explains the mechanism by which we are estranged from ourselves… in the Congo, Negroes’ hands were cut off, in Angola until very recently malcontents’ lips were pierced in order to shut them with padlocks… With us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism, since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters… On closer scrutiny, our precious sets of values begin to moult, you won’t see one that isn’t stained with blood… those 8 years of ferocious war [in Algeria] have cost the lives of over a million Algerians…"
Bernadette Devlin (later McAliskey), Irish patriot, 70's:
The racially oppressed can become oppressors. After her visit to the US in the early 70s, Devlin said:
"My people - the people who knew oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair they produce - were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Rican, Chicano. And those who were supposed to be my people - the Irish Americans who knew about Irish misrule and the Famine and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem - looked and sounded like Orangemen to me. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York, the key that I was given to the city by the mayor, I gave to the Black Panthers…"
[R & C, vol34, Apr 93]
http://www.goacom.com/overseas-digest/History/whattheysaid.html
Author