[Marxism] "outrages"

[andrew c pollack <andypollack@xxxxxxxx>]

New at Marxists Internet Archive, Marx's classic letter exposing the
hypocrisy of the colonizers', whose own outrages laid the basis for the
outrages of the colonized.

As I write, businessmen meet in Dubai to plan the next step in the
carving up of Iraq's resources, and news accounts quote their outrage at
the barbaric behavior of the resistance -- coupled with quotes of how the
military will put down that resistance and pave their way to greater
profits. But we've already seen the kind of outrages "our" military is
capable of. Just the same as the Brits in India...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/09/04.htm#n1

Karl Marx in the New York Tribune 1857

The Indian Revolt

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Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;
Written: by Marx, September 4, 1857;
First Published: in the New York Daily Tribune of September 16, 1857;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
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London, September 4, 1857
The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys[1] in India are. indeed
appalling, hideous, ineffable ? such as one is prepared to, meet only in
wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of
religion; in one word, such as respectable England. used to applaud when
perpetrated by the Vendeans on the ?Blues ?Il 2 by the Spanish guerrillas
on the infidel Frenchmen, by Servians on their German and Hungarian
neighbors, by: Croats on Viennese rebels, by Cavaignac?s Garde Mobile or
Bonaparte?s Decembrists on the sons and daughters of proletarian France.
However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a
concentrated form, of England?s own conduct in India, not only during the
epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last
ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices
to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial
policy.. There is something in human history like retribution; and it is
a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the
offended, but by the offender himself.

The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility,
not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the
Ryots, tortured, dishonored and stripped naked by the British, but with
the Sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them. To find
parallels to the Sepoy atrocities, we need not, as some London papers
pretend, fall back on the middle ages, nor even wander beyond the history
of contemporary England. All we want is to study the first Chinese war,
an event, so to say, of yesterday. The English soldiery then committed
abominations for the mere fun of it; their passions being neither
sanctified by religious fanaticism nor exacerbated by hatred against an
overbearing and conquering race, nor provoked by the stern resistance of
a heroic enemy. The violations of women, the spittings of children, the
roastings of whole villages, were then mere wanton sports, not recorded
by Mandarins, but by British officers themselves. Even at the present
catastrophe it would be an unmitigated mistake to suppose that all the
cruelty is on the side of the Sepoys, and all the milk of human kindness
flows on the side of the English. The letters of the British officers are
redolent of malignity. An officer writing from Peshawur gives a
description of the disarming of the 10th irregular cavalry for not
charging the 55th native infantry when ordered to do so. He exults in the
fact that they were not only disarmed, but stripped of their coats and
boots, and after having received 12d. per man, were marched down to the
riverside, and there embarked in boats and sent down the Indus, where the
writer is delighted to expect every mother?s son will have a chance of
being drowned in the rapids. Another writer informs us that, some
inhabitants of Peshawur having caused a night alarm by exploding little
mines of gunpowder in honor of a wedding (a national custom), the persons
concerned were tied up next morning, and ?received such a flogging as
they will not easily forget.? News arrived from Pindee that three native
chiefs were plotting. Sir John Lawrence replied by a message ordering a
spy to attend to the meeting. On the spy?s report, Sir John sent a second
message, ?Hang them.? The chiefs were hanged. An officer in the civil
service, from Allahabad, writes: ?We have power of life and death in our
hands, and we assure you we spare not.? Another, from the same place:
?Not a day passes but we string up from ten to fifteen of them
(non-combatants).? One exulting officer writes: ?Holmes is hanging them
by the score, like a ?brick.? Another, in allusion to the summary hanging
of a large body of the natives: ?Then our fun commenced.? A third: ?We
hold court-martials on horseback, and every nigger we meet with we either
string up or shoot.? From Benares we are informed that thirty Zemindars
were hanged on the mere suspicion of sympathizing with their own
countrymen, and whole villages were burned down on the same plea. An
officer from Benares, whose letter is printed in the London Times, says:
?The European troops have become fiends when opposed to natives.? And
then it should not be forgotten that, while the cruelties of the English
are related as acts of martial vigor, told simply, rapidly, without
dwelling on disgusting details, the outrages of the natives, shocking as
they are, are still deliberately exaggerated. For instance, the
circumstantial account first appearing in the Times, and then going the
round of the London press, of the atrocities perpetrated at Delhi and
Meerut, from whom did it proceed? From a cowardly parson residing at
Bangalore, Mysore, more than a thousand miles, as the bird flies, distant
from the scene of action. Actual accounts of Delhi evince the imagination
of an English parson to be capable of breeding greater horrors than even
the wild fancy of a Hindoo mutineer. The cutting of noses, breasts, etc.,
in one word, the horrid mutilations committed by the Sepoys, are of
course more revolting to European feeling than the throwing of red-hot
shell on Canton dwellings by a Secretary of the Manchester Peace
Society,[3] or the roasting of Arabs pent up in: a cave by a French
Marshal,[4] or the flaying alive of British; soldiers by the
cat-o'-nine-tails under drum-head court-martial, or any other of the
philanthropical appliances used in British penitentiary colonies.
Cruelty, like every other thing, lids its fashion,, changing according to
time and place. Caesar, the accomplished.: scholar, candidly narrates how
he ordered many thousand Gallic warriors to have their right hands cut
off. Napoleon would have been ashamed to do this. He preferred
dispatching his own French.. regiments, suspected of republicanism, to
St. Domingo, there to; die of the blacks and the plague.

The infamous mutilations committed by the Sepoys remind: one of the
practices of the Christian Byzantine Empire, or the prescriptions of
Emperor Charles V?s criminal law, or the English punishments for high
treason, as still recorded by Judge., Blackstone. With Hindoos, whom
their religion has made virtuosi in the art of self-torturing, these
tortures inflicted on the. enemies; of their race and creed appear quite
natural, and must appear still more so to the English, who only some
years since still used to draw revenues from the Juggernaut festivals,
protecting and assisting the bloody rites of a religion of cruelty.

The frantic roars of the ?bloody old Times,? as Cobbett used. to call it
? its playing the part of a furious character in one of Mozart?s operas,
who indulges in most melodious strains in the! idea of first hanging his
enemy, then roasting him, then quartering him, then spitting him, and
then flaying him alive[5] ? its tearing the passion of revenge to tatters
and to, rags ? all this would appear but silly if under the pathos of
tragedy there were not distinctly perceptible the tricks of comedy.

The London Times overdoes its part, not only from panic, It supplies
comedy with a subject even missed by Molière, the Tartuffe of Revenge.
What it simply wants is to write up the, funds and to screen the
Government. As Delhi has not, like the walls of Jericho, fallen before
mere puffs of wind, John Bull is to be steeped in cries for revenge up to
his very ears, to make him forget that his Government is responsible for
the mischief hatched and the colossal dimensions it had been allowed to
assume.

Notes

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1. Sepoys: Soldiers of the Anglo-Indian Army recruited from the local
inhabitants.

2. New York Daily Tribune of September 16, 1857 Vendeans: Participants in
the counter-revolutionary revolt which the French royalists engineered in
the Vendée (Western France) in 1793, with the support of the English,
against the French Republic.

The ?Blues?: This was what the soldiers of the republican army and in
general all adherents of the Convent were called during the French
Bourgeois Revolution of the end of the eighteenth century.

3. Marx is alluding to John Bowring, one of the leaders of the Peace
Society and other Free-Trader organisations in England. In the fifties,
while occupying the post of British Consul at Canton and of comma n
der-in-chief at Hongkong, this ?philanthropist? showed himself to he a
cruel and rapacious coloniser. In October 1856 he provoked a conflict
with the Chinese authorities because the latter had attacked a ship
carrying contraband while,, flying the British flag. He ordered Canton to
be bombarded, a barbarous act which served as a prelude to war with China
(1856-58).

4. During the suppression of an insurrection in Algeria in 1845, General
Pelissier, subsequently a Marshal of France, ordered a thousand Arab
rebels to be driven into mountain caves and choked to death by lighting
campfires at their entrances.

5. An allusion to the air sung by Osmin, the Majordomo of a rich pasha.
in Mozart?s opera, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail.

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