Hypocrisy and "the truth" - the real canker

I always told the truth. Didn't I?

It is sobering to be reminded, whilst at war again in Africa, of the atrocities committed under the Kenya Emergency between 1952 and 1960.

The full horror of a brutal campaign of torture meted out by British officials on Kenyan rebels including Barack Obama's grandfather has emerged for the first time.

A cache of secret documents detailing efforts to suppress the Mau Mau uprising has lain hidden in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in London, for 50 years.

Removed from Kenya on the cusp of independence, they were uncovered in January after five Kenyans launched a lawsuit against the British government.

The claimants say they suffered castration, sexual abuse and severe beatings in detention camps administered by the British government and want an apology and financial compensation.

"Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence." Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. By CAROLINE ELKINS (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).

"British officer describes his actions after capturing three known Mau Mau:
I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don’t remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn’t tell me where to find the rest of the gang I’d kill them too. They didn’t say a word so I shot them both. One wasn’t dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn’t believe me but all he said was 'bury them and see the wall is cleared up.'" 

"Settler groups, displeased with the government's response to the increasing Mau Mau threat created their own units to combat the Mau Mau. One settler with the Kenya Police Reserve's Special Branch described an interrogation of a Mau Mau, suspected of murder, which he assisted: 'By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.'" Professor David Anderson MA (BA Sussex; PhD Cantab); University Lecturer in African Politics.

I remember how we, back in Britain, were told about the terrible massacres committed against the white settlers. About how it was necessary to use brutal means against brutal black men. Yet the truth of the matter is 32 European settlers lost their lives and 50,000 black Kenyans were killed.

Propaganda, subtle or otherwise, can so easily distort our perception of what is real. For example John Pilger in his otherwise interesting analysis in the New Statesman on the Libyan uprising feels compelled, from the luxury of received truths, to make this remark:

"With Gaddafi now the accredited demon, Israel, the real canker, can continue its wholesale land theft and expulsions."

On this, and many other matters, I tend to hold to the remarks made in an article by Jeremy Bowen (with whom I often disagree!) of the BBC from Tripoli:

"The same day a man waiting in a traffic jam next to the press minibus wound down his window.

'Don't believe anything,' he said. And without another word, drove off."