By Gary Brecher
You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just read
something sicker than any Congo cannibal buffet. It’s an article by a posh
little Limey named Jeremy Brown condemning the Sri Lankan Government for being
too messy in putting down the LTTE, and demanding that we stop buying the cheap
textiles the poor Sinhalese make their living churning out.
What’s sick about this is that the British establishment destroyed
the Sinhalese people completely. Completely and purposely, sadistically; stole
their land, humiliated and massacred their government and made it Imperial
policy to erase every shred of self-respect the Sinhalese had left. You can
talk about the Nazis all day long, but for my money nothing they did was as
gross as what you find out when you actually look into the history of
British-Sinhalese relations. If you can even call them relations” – I guess a
murder-rape is a sort of relationship.
But nobody knows about it. Weird, huh? Nothing ‘weirds’ me out
more than the total news blackout the Brits have managed to put on all the sick
shit they did to brown and black people all over the world. They had a system,
and it worked. They’d grab some paradise island in the tropics, use the Royal
Navy to wall it off from the rest of the world and crush the local tribe. If
the locals resisted, the Brits would starve them to death, shoot them down,
infect them with smallpox or get them addicted to opium – whatever they had to
do to gang-rape the locals so bad that they would lose the will to
resist.
And to this day, they don’t catch even a little bit of Hell for it.
Everybody thinks the Brits are all cute and harmless. You’re all a bunch of
suckers for those suave accents, you suckers! The truth is that compared to
the Brits, the Nazis who people are always whining about, were a gang of
eighth-grade stoners who ran around spray-painting swastikas on school
property. The Nazis lasted one decade; the Brits quietly ran their
extermination programs for three hundred years and to this day they wouldn’t
even think of feeling guilty about it – it wouldn’t cross their
minds.
That’s what made me want to puke battery acid when I read Mister
Jeremy Brown’s sermon on the naughty Sinhalese: this pig Brown has no clue about
why Sri Lanka is so fucked up, no hint at all that it’s the result of British
Imperial policy. Not mistakes” or a few bad apples” or regrettable excesses”
but clear, cold, ruthless British policy.
One of the funniest bits in Brown’s little Anglican sermon to the
Sinhalese is when he mentions Arthur C. Clarke, the Brit sci-fi writer who moved
to Sri Lanka. The reason that’s funny is that a few years back, when he was
too senile and drunk to watch his tongue, Clarke admitted in an interview that
the whole reason he moved to Sri Lanka is for the boys.” As in, he liked to
rape little boys, and they were cheap and pretty in the dear old ex-colony.
The Brits wouldn’t stop raping the Sinhalese even after their troops were forced
(sorry, withdrawn) from the island.
Jeremy Brown wouldn’t know that, of course. To him, Clarke is a
wonderful example of all the wonderful things British people have done for poor
little Sri Lanka:
Britain has helped to rebuild Sri Lanka’s tourist industry: Britons
accounted for 18.5 per cent of the foreigners who visited the former colony’s
famous beaches, wildlife parks, tea plantations and Buddhist temples last
year. Only India sends more tourists. Many Britons also own property there,
especially around the southern city of Galle, not far from where Arthur C.
Clarke, the British science fiction writer who settled in Sri Lanka, used to
love to scuba dive. [Is that what they’re calling it these days? ]
So the question facing British shoppers and holidaymakers is this:
should they continue to support Sri Lanka’s garment and tourist
industries?
Don’t you love that last sentence: Sadly, the answer must be no.”
Anybody who can write a sentence like that without blowing his brains out at the
monitor is a hopeless twit anyway, but let’s help Jeremy out a little bit,
folks, let’s go back in time and take a quick look at all the wonderful things
the Brits did for these rotten, ungrateful Sinhalese.
The pattern you see in the colonizing of Sri Lanka is a real familiar
one, if you study the European naval empires: the Portuguese, the greatest
sailors and explorers, came to Sri Lanka long before the Brits, claimed the
place, but couldn’t hold on to it. The Portuguese lost the island to the
Dutch, those up & coming Protestant go-getters, in the mid-1600s. That’s
another pattern you see everywhere, the old Papist powers losing out to the
Protestants, who were just faster and smarter.
The next stage was also totally by the book: the Brits, the canopy
tree if you know what I mean, come along and force the Dutch out. There were
times the Brits sort of liked the Dutch; they were Protestant, at least, and
blonde/blue-eyed. But business was business, and the Brits realized, by the
end of the 1700s, that Ceylon was worth taking. Of course they didn’t say that
in public; the official reason was that they had to boot the Dutch to guard the
island from the nasty radical Frenchies.
That way of stealing islands, making it sound like you had to take
them for the greater good–that was classic Brit strategy. They always made it
look like they were forced, against their will, to grab this or that colony. I
don’t know if you all ever saw a movie called Erik the Viking”, but it has a
great scene with John Cleese playing this insane bloodthirsty warlord who orders
people tortured to death in this tired, disappointed upper-class voice, and then
whines, It’s the stress that gets you” – all put upon and harassed
(the ‘White Man’s burden’). That’s a perfect image for the way the Brits booted the Dutch
out of Ceylon, tut-tutting while they stole every shed, cannon and bale of tea
on the island.
With the Dutch trade rivals gone, the Brits had only one problem
left: those damned natives, the Sinhala, or Kandyans” as they were called back
then. The name, Kandyans,” came from the fact that their main city was Kandy,
up in the highlands in the south of the island, the fat part of the teardrop.
The Sinhala lived in the highlands for the simple reason that it was a little
cooler, not as totally malarial, up there compared to the coastal
marshes.
By all accounts, the Sinhala/Kandyans were harmless slackers, who
didn’t need or want much from the outside world. All they asked was for people
to leave them alone up on their big rocky highlands to do their Buddhist
thing. Unfortunately that wasn’t British policy. It irked the redcoats that
Kandy still had a king, an army, all this impudent baggage that went with
independence. The British decided to break the Sinhalese completely and crush
their whole society.
You have to remember that by this time, the early 1800s, the Brits
had perfected their techniques in little experiments all over the world. Those
Clockwork Orange shrinks were amateurs compared to the Imperial Civil Service.
They had dozens of ways of undermining native kingdoms.
British administrators were trained to do a kind of rough, quick
sociological sketch of the natives, get a sense of the fault lines and then
figure out how to exploit them. The Brits saw fast that the Kandyans were a
sluggish bunch of people divided into rigid castes in the classic subcontinent
pattern. That made it easy: the Brits made two big castes their official pets
and shunned the others, setting up a violent hate between different parts of
Sinhalese society. That guaranteed that if the diehard Sinhalese/Kandyan
nationalists ever revolted, the teacher’s-pet castes would have a good selfish
reason to help massacre them. (It’s called ‘divide & rule’)
Then there was the Kandyan king himself. The Brits weren’t dumb in
the way Paul Bremer was dumb, de-Baathifying” Iraq. They loved corrupt local
rulers. Much easier and cheaper to bribe one fat old degenerate on a throne than
negotiate with all the commoners. So the Brits started playing with the
nervous, Kandyan royals, scaring them with the threat of losing everything and
then teasing them with the possibility of the safe, soft life of a Brit
puppet.
This was the major league of colonialism. To give you an idea of
how important Ceylon/Sri Lanka was back then, try this on: in 1802, when French
armies were kicking British and Prussian and Italian and Russians all over
Europe (weird how nobody remembers that?), the Brits were so terrified they
tried to give Napoleon all their colonies except Sri Lanka and Trinidad. Those
were the two they needed to keep.
The Kandy Men: No match for the British vampire lords
And this is where another standard Brit policy came into play – a
real smart one that we ought to be imitating: use native auxiliaries, not
homeland troops, as much as possible. For all kinds of reasons, but here are
the main ones:
1. If you bring in troops from some remote part of the Empire to do
your dirty work, it’s those troops, those faces and accents, the locals will
remember, and hate, for generations. So you, the sly little pink Brit
administrator, can stroll in later and commiserate with the locals as they show
you around their burned huts, bayoneted kids, etc., and even say with a straight
face, Oh my, those auxiliaries from wherever; what heathens? Outrageous! I
shall certainly let Whitehall know about these abuses.” Then, of course, you
get in his sedan chair, close the curtains and chuckle all the way home to where
his personal ‘native’bum-boy was waiting.
2. Nobody back in London counts casualties as long as it’s Malay
mercenaries dying. You can lose a lot of them–and a lot of Malays did die
fighting the Sinhala, especially in the total rout of a malaria-sapped
British/Malay force at the Mahaveli River in 1803 – but nobody is going to make
a fuss in the Times of London (Mister Jeremy Brown’s paper, as you may
recall). If you’re lucky they’ll pop off before payday and you can keep their
payroll for that estate in Shropshire.
3. Dropping hot-blooded feisty Malay Muslims with guns far from home
and making them fight Sinhalese bleeds Malay society as well as Sinhalese.
Left in peace, Malays could be trouble – a proud, warlike people. So by
sending them to die in Ceylon, you’re diverting all that young, angry Malay
blood away from SE Asia and using it to bleed Kandy. Two birds with one
blood-soaked stone.
You see why I get impatient with you gullible suckers yammering about
the Nazis? The Nazis were retards, a white-trash tantrum, an eighth-grade
chemistry-class pipe bomb, a quick-fizzle flash in the pan, compared to the
Brits, the scariest motherfuckers ever to butt-fuck the planet.
The mercenaries the Brits sent to crush the Kandyans were Malays,
Muslims from SE Asia who didn’t need a lot of pep talks to slaughter South Asian
Buddhists (and steal their chickens). That was life for the Brits back then,
at the top of their game: picking up pieces from one part of the world and
dropping them where they’d do the most harm, half the world away. Ah yes,
let’s ferry some Malay mercenaries to Kandy, that should give the bloody
idol-worshippers something to think about!”
Destroying Buddhism was a big part of Brit policy. The Buddhist
routine, the temples, begging monks, long boring prayers – it was the glue that
kept Kandy together. So the Brits decided to destroy it. They even said so,
in private memos to each other. They weren’t shy in those days. Here’s the
Brit governor in 1807: Reliance on Buddhism must be destroyed. Make sure all
[village]
chiefs are Christian.”
Up to 1818, the Brits had a blast messing with doomed Sinhala
rebellions; a good time was had by all, except the Sinhalese. They had a very,
very bad time, and it was about to get worse.
See, another constant you’ll find in British imperial policy is that
although they’re very sly and patient, they have a very good sense of when to
cut the crap and just wipe out a tribe that’s been annoying them for too long.
They were getting sick of the Sinhalese, with all their bickering and intrigue;
the redcoats just weren’t enjoying the game the way they used to, so boom: the
kill ’em all” era began.
But they did it smart, not like the idiot boastful Nazis you all love
to obsess on. I bet every one on the planet can name the Nazi death camps, but
I’d be surprised if more than, say, a half dozen people outside Sri Lanka can
name the policy the Brits used to destroy the Sinhala for good. Anybody? Didn’t think so! See, here’s another little tip for up
and coming genocidaires out there: always pick the most boring name
possible. Those Nazis, with their heavy-metal jewellery and stupid titles!
Dopes! You want extermination programs with names that put everybody to
sleep.
And that’s why in 1818 Britain brought the wasteland policy” to
Kandy. They could have called it what that Liberian whacko called his
campaign: Operation No Living Thing.” – that’s what it meant: Brit-led troops
draining the sea” the Sinhala irregulars swam in by burning every hut, every
field, and killing every animal in every village they suspected of harbouring
rebels.”
Now that’s another key Brit imperial technique: that word rebels.”
Blows me away: how can a Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, fighting for the country his
people have owned for a hundred generations, be a rebel”? And the pipsqueak
redcoat officers hunting him down, were born and raised in Britain. He was not
the rebel,” he was the force of law and order, the rightful authority. It’s
quite a racket if you have the sheer, sociopathic nerve to say it with a
straight face. (I’m talking to you, Mister Jeremy Brown!)
What does rebel” mean, anyway? I’ve noticed that in English press
it’s a bad word. Here, in the US of A, it’s different, because we were the
rebels in 1775 and proud of it. But see, people who know the American
Revolution think that the Brit policy against the Yankees, where (give or take a
Banastre Tarlteton or two), the redcoats tried to avoid killing civvies, was
normal Imperial policy. Bullshit! The reason the Brits let us go and didn’t try
scorched-earth on us, was that we WERE Brits, as far as they could tell: white
protestant English-speaking humans. If you weren’t all of the above, you
weren’t human. The only other war where English troops had the same restraint
was – take a wild guess. Right: the English Civil War. In England, they
fought clean. But when Cromwell marched up to subdue the Scots, who were
Protestant (good) but non-English (bad), a lot of POWs never made it back to the
holding pens and a lot of crofts were torched, and a lot of girls were raped.
When he moved from Scotland to Ireland, where the filthy locals were filthy
Papist as well as non-English, well, you don’t want to know what happened
there.
So in places like Sri Lanka, full of brown heathens, Brit policy had
nothing to do with fucking Yorktown – more like Dresden, only
lower-tech.
The Wasteland Policy” was smart and mean at the same time–another
sure mark of the Brit imperial touch. It was designed to deny the rebels”
support in the short term, but in the long term it was pure punishment, taking
away the land, livestock and other assets of all the Sinhalese who were even
suspected of being rebel”-lovers.
And it worked. To this day, 200 years later, the Sinhalese castes
that backed the rebels are dirt poor, and worse: they’re hated by everybody
around them and they even hate themselves. And nobody even remembers who did
it to them, poor lab rats. They think it’s their own fault, that there’s
something wrong with them.
There’s more, and worse, but to tell the truth, this is making me
sick. I’ve tried to tell this story a dozen times and nobody wants to know.
You just end up vomiting battery acid all night, and pigs like Mister Jeremy
Brown of the Times of London never lose one second of sleep over all those
bodies and all those lies and sheer nastiness. What’s the use? I’ll just
fast-forward through a couple of highlight shots. Take reprisals, you know,
like those bad old Nazis used to do after a rebel” attack? The Brits were
there way before the Nazis. They took revenge for a half-assed Kandyan revolt
by killing one out of every hundred Sinhalese. Like, at random. To keep it
fair, you know, not play favourites.
And then the nastiest imperial weapon of all: the demographic bomb.
This was a Brit specialty all over the world (see Fiji for a weirdly similar
case). The Brits ran India, so they had total control over millions of
obedient Tamil peasants who were starving, desperate, and ready to go anywhere,
just pile into the hold of a ship and get out to cut cane or plant rice in some
place that may as well have been on the moon for all they knew.
So along with the massacre/reprisals, the Brits came up with one of
their classic two-birds-one-stone plans: to neutralise the Sinhalese, let’s
import huge hordes of Tamils from India! They’re cheap and docile and they’ll
give the Sinhala something to keep them busy even after we have to leave the
island – and meanwhile they’ll drive the price of labour down even further.
Brilliant, chaps, absolutely brilliant!
And they did it. It worked so well it’s still working today. And
when they were done totally destroying the poor Sinhalese, the Brits did what
they do best, better than any other murder gang on the planet, they took that
amnesia zapper from Men in Black” and zapped everyone in Sri Lanka, then turned
it on themselves and were suddenly so innocent, so damn virtuous and clean, that
a pig like Mister Jeremy Brown can actually sit down at a computer and boast
about all the wonderful times England has raped Sri Lanka, from olden times
right down to Arthur C. Clarke buggering every little boy on the island. One
hell of a job, Brownie! Satan himself must be shaking his head, muttering,
Gotta give it to the fuckin’ Limeys, damn it, they’ve got no shame at all; ya
gotta admire that. Damn, even I wouldn’t have had the gall to talk like
that. Jeremy Brown. I’m putting him down for CEO of the Hell
Propagandastaffel” the minute his liver packs up and he lands down
here.”
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