Bad old England

The island’s indigenous population was the first to be genocided. This concerns the so-called enclosure, which, as we were told, took place between the 15th and 19th centuries. However, the first enclosure acts were passed as early as the 13th century – the Statute of Merton (1235) and the Statute of Westminster (1285). Enclosure itself consisted of the liquidation of common lands, which resulted in the dispossessed people becoming vagabonds and beggars. The confiscated lands were enclosed – hence the name.

Harsh laws were passed against those robbed. They were flogged, branded, and could be enslaved for a time, or for life if they attempted to escape. If caught a third time, they were executed. During the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547), according to the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed (d. 1580), 72,000 people (about 2.5% of the country’s total population) were executed in England, including for «vagrancy and begging.» Under Queen Elizabeth I (1568-1603), 89,000 people were executed for the same offenses, as well as for begging without permission from the authorities (V. Medinsky, «Peculiarities of National PR,» p. 137).

The Crushing of Margaret Clitherow. 16th-century engraving.

In fact, medieval England could easily be called a country of the death penalty. In 15th-century England, executions were carried out for 80 crimes. Among them: insulting the crown, blasphemy, stealing a cow, seducing a nun, and sneaking into a royal palace at night. Moreover, the methods of execution varied greatly – criminals were hanged, quartered, disemboweled (and this was only one method of execution; I can’t even imagine how they did it), beheaded, crushed, broken on the wheel, burned at the stake, impaled, and suspended by the ribs.

By the 17th century, the list had expanded to 200. People could be executed for anything: both serious crimes and minor ones: being armed or disguised in someone else’s forest, cutting down trees, destroying livestock, bigamy, or pickpocketing over 1 shilling.

People were executed for stealing a sheep, a rabbit, etc., Catholicism, witchcraft, adultery, obtaining a naval pension with false documents, impersonating a patient in a nursing home, damaging London and Westminster Bridges, spending time with gypsies, rebellion, destroying cars, etc.

In the early 19th century, the list was expanded to 225 items punishable by death. However, at that time, the death penalty was readily replaced by hard labor in the colonies, as the growing empire needed free slaves.

Genocide of the Irish and Scots

At the same time, the English «aristocracy» turned on their neighbors—the Irish and Scots—and committed genocide against them as well. The English had been in conflict with the Scots for centuries. Periodically, the English subjugated the Scots, and the Scots periodically rebelled.

David Morier, The Battle of Culloden, 1746

After suppressing the last major Scottish rebellion in 1746 at the Battle of Culloden, the last battle fought on the island, the British carried out the Highland Clearances. As a result, the Scots lost their culture, way of life (and many even their very lives), and property.

They were forbidden to speak Gaelic, play the bagpipes, and any national music was banned, as were national symbols. They were forbidden to wear national dress, particularly tartans and kilts, under penalty of six months’ imprisonment (repeat offences were punishable by seven years’ exile to overseas colonies). They were also forbidden to possess firearms, and ordinary people were forbidden from carrying any weapons.

The clan system (semi-feudal, semi-tribal), under which the Scots had lived for centuries, was destroyed, spelling ruin for ordinary Scots; the property of the «rebels» went to the English crown. Many were executed, and even more were imprisoned and exiled. Those who did not leave were subjected to various forms of repression, including massacres, as occurred on February 13, 1692, when all members of the MacDonald branch of Clan Glencoe were exterminated. This crime went down in Scottish history as the «Massacre of Glencoe.»

John MacDonald (John Blake MacDonald (1829-1901)). Glencoe, 1692

As a result of mass deportation, most Scots ended up in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Scotland currently has a population density of 65 people per square kilometer—the lowest in Europe—and the number of Scots descendants abroad significantly exceeds the number of Scots in Scotland itself—5.295 million people. Compared to 20-25 million in the United States, 4.715 million in Canada, up to 2 million in Australia, and 0.7 million in New Zealand.

Only now has the meaning of the song «My Bonnie is over the ocean» we learned in English class become clear. It turns out it’s a Scottish folk song, and there’s a good chance it’s dedicated to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the leader of the last Scots rebellion against the English, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

After the Jacobites (supporters of the exiled English King James II) were defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Charles Stuart went into hiding on the Isle of Skye and later on the continent. His followers could legally perform this song in his honor, as the English adjective «bonnie» (handsome, good, sweet) can refer to both men and women, as well as Prince Charlie and the many Scots who actually sailed overseas.

The English also took steps to depopulate Ireland. Beginning in the 16th century, the English gradually confiscated land from the Irish, punishing those who resisted. For example, in the 17th century, they exiled them to the barren and desolate region of Connacht in western Ireland, condemning them to starvation. Those who found themselves outside this region were killed.

Many Irish, including women and children, were deported to English colonies in the West Indies and turned into «white slaves.» Those who remained were hunted down. An English soldier was paid 5 pounds for the head of a «rebel or priest» (by comparison, a wolf’s head cost 6 pounds). As a result of this genocide, the country’s population plummeted. While over 1.5 million people lived in Ireland in 1641, by 1652 only 850,000 remained, and of these, 150,000 were English and Scottish colonists.

A memorial in Dublin dedicated to the victims of the Great Famine

In the 19th century, the Irish «enclosure» led to a famine in the country, forcing the Irish to emigrate. The population was halved: while in 1841 the island’s population was 8,178,000, by 1901 it was only 4,459,000.

A monument to Irish immigrants in Philadelphia who died in North America by the thousands.

Genocide of Hindus

Then the British expanded beyond their small island, subjecting all peoples wherever they went to genocide. India was subjected to genocide and unparalleled plunder. The British cold-bloodedly crushed it economically – from the very first day of their rule, through the East India Company, they began raising taxes, which led to the sharp impoverishment of ordinary Indians. For example, as a result of more than doubling the land tax, over 11 years (1879/80-1889/90), in the Madras Presidency alone, «1,900,000 acres of land belonging to 850,000 peasant households were auctioned off to pay land taxes. This means that one-eighth of the entire agricultural population of the Presidency was deprived of land ownership…»

The «invisible hand of the market» and «free trade» resulted for India and Indians under the «effective management» of the British, with the wheat harvest declining (for the first time since the Mughal era, that is, since 1570). The Indian textile industry, which had been a significant competitor to the English textile industry—all Indian fabrics (cotton, wool, silk) were of much better quality and less expensive than English ones—was literally destroyed.

At first, to conquer the textile market with their highly uncompetitive products, the British resorted to an 80% protective tariff—that is, to protect their textile industry from competition, they imposed a tariff on foreign imports. This didn’t help much. Then they imposed a complete ban on Indian calico, a semi-finished product used to produce various fabrics. This didn’t work either—English fabrics were still of poor quality.

And then the last «democratic measures» were resorted to—competitors were to be physically eliminated. In Bengal, the main center of Indian textile production, a famine was artificially orchestrated. In 1769-1770, it killed a third of the population—7 to 10 million people. In the 1780s-1790s, the tragedy in Bengal was repeated—this time, half the population—10 million people—died of starvation.

Chinese Genocide

What the British did in China is already fairly well known. The English drug mafia, which included the royal family, «simply» saturated the entire country with drugs, profiting enormously in the process. The scale of the opium trade is staggering. While the East India Company sold 1.5 tons of opium in 1775, by 1830, annual sales had increased to 1,500 tons. These two-legged predators were completely indifferent to the fact that entire generations were dying in the narcotic haze, that the Chinese were degrading intellectually and physically at a terrible rate, and that this was effectively killing off subsequent generations, for what kind of offspring could drug addicts produce?!

Chinese opium smokers

Opium shipments from India to China continued for several decades. Nearly all officials of all ranks were addicts (10 to 20% of capital city officials and 20 to 30% of provincial officials; in some institutions, 50 to 60% of all officials were addicts). Soldiers and officers smoked opium without exception, yet China attempted to resist. In 1839, the emperor launched a massive operation to confiscate and destroy opium stockpiles in Canton and ordered the country closed to foreigners. Ships carrying opium were simply sunk at sea. London responded quickly, sending a navy—40 ships with 4,000 soldiers on board.

The Opium Wars began (the first, 1840-1842; the second, 1856-1860). The Chinese lost, and unsurprisingly. The Chinese army, though large—880,000 men—was made up of drug addicts, and drug addicts don’t make great fighters. Moreover, British drug dealers kept sending new shipments of the drug to Chinese army bases, giving away the opium practically for free, since victory in the war promised to pay for everything.

They turned out to be right. The Chinese were forced to pay indemnities to the British, hand over Hong Kong Island, open six more ports to British trade (previously only one had been open), and allow the use of Chinese as slave labor in the colonies of Britain, France, and the United States, which had joined in the Second Opium War. The opium trade in China became legal. The results for the country were disastrous. By the mid-20th century, opium poppy plantations, which had begun to be cultivated in China itself, occupied up to a million hectares, and the number of consumers of the drug was measured in tens of millions. Mao Zedong was able to break the narcotic stranglehold on the country that had lasted more than a century and a half.

By the way, English drug dealers also got English workers hooked on opium – approximately 5% of the population of England.

British atrocities in Australia and New Zealand

The British also committed atrocities in Australia and New Zealand. Beginning in 1770, after James Cook discovered Australia, they began sending English convicts there to colonize the continent. The Australian Aborigines were extremely unfortunate – they were assigned criminals as neighbors, who behaved accordingly. By 1788, an estimated 300,000 to 1 million people lived in Australia, grouped into more than 500 tribes. As had happened with the North American Indians, the «white masters» began to exterminate the native population with relish. The British infected the Aborigines with smallpox, to which they had no immunity. At least half the tribes perished from smallpox.

Then the white degenerates, the outcasts of the outcasts (from the founding of the colony until the mid-19th century, 130-160 thousand convicts were transported to Australia), poisoned the Aborigines with poisons and contaminated food:

“To calm the niggas down, they were given something amazing. The food they were given was half strychnine — and no one escaped his fate… The owner of Long Lagoon, with the help of this trick, killed more than a hundred blacks… In former times in New South Wales it was useless to ensure that those who invited blacks to visit and gave them poisoned meat suffered the deserved punishment … «(Janine Roberts, S. 30; Hirst & Murray & Hammond, Liberalism and Empire (London, 1900)).

The unfortunate were hunted like wild animals, confident in their right to kill the “blacks”: “because they are cattle killers, women – because they give birth to cattle killers, and children – because they will still be cattle killers…” (W. Ziehr, Holle im Paradie, p. 53.)

В Квинсленде (северная Австралия) в конце 19 века невинной забавой считалось загнать целую семью «ниггеров» – мужа, жену и детей – в воду к крокодилам. В среде новоявленных фермеров процветала торговля туземными женщинами, и английские поселенцы охотились на них целыми группами. В одном правительственном сообщении за 1900 г. отмечается, что «этих женщин передавали от фермера к фермеру», пока «в конечном счёте, их не выбрасывали как мусор, оставляя гнить от венерических болезней…» (H. Reynolds, Other side of Frontier, p. 17; Janine Roberts, Nach Volkermord Landraub, S. 33.)

On the island of Tasmania, Aboriginal people perished from other diseases brought by Europeans, to which they also had no immunity: venereal diseases rendered many women infertile, while pneumonia and tuberculosis killed most Tasmanians. Furthermore, the Tasmanians attempted to put up what resistance they could against the invaders, despite the fact that the odds were stacked against them—spears and arrows versus guns and cannons.

By 1835, the native population of Tasmania had been completely eradicated. The British had taken a liking to the land. The 200 surviving Tasmanians were resettled to another island. The last full-blooded Tasmanian, Truganini, died in 1876. «The Tasmanians were useless and all died,» was how John Lawrence Le Breton Hammond (1872-1949), a British historian and journalist, commented on this tragedy.

One of the last documented massacres of Aboriginal people in the Northwest occurred in 1928. A missionary, seeking to investigate Aboriginal grievances, witnessed the crime. He followed a police detachment heading to the Aboriginal reserve in Forest River and witnessed the officers capturing an entire tribe. The prisoners were chained together, lined up behind each other, and then all but three women were killed. The bodies were then burned, and the women were taken back to camp. Before leaving, they also killed and burned these women. The evidence gathered by the missionary prompted authorities to open an investigation. However, the police officers responsible for the massacre were never brought to trial.

In short, some of the local Aborigines were exterminated, and most of the remaining ones were enslaved. Those who weren’t enslaved were driven into reserves in the western and northern regions of the continent, which were the least habitable. In 1921, there were only about 60,000 Aborigines in Australia. Thus, the British exterminated, according to various estimates, up to 90% of all Aborigines in Australia.

However, the British not only exterminated people, they also destroyed the natural environment of this long-isolated continent, bringing with them rabbits, sheep, foxes, and other animals that critically disrupted Australia’s long-established ecological system. As a result, the Australian Aborigines were pushed to the brink of starvation. Sheep and rabbits rapidly multiplied and began to destroy the grass cover, leading to the extinction or near extinction of many Australian animals. The Aborigines, who had always relied on hunting, began to hunt sheep. This served as a pretext for whites to launch mass «hunts» against the Aborigines.

This appalling treatment of Australians continued for a long time. For example, in September 1977, a Port Adelaide councilor commented on Aborigines: «Under the Black Act, within a 100-mile radius of Adelaide, they should be put in boxes and sent to government laboratories for use in experiments instead of rats.» (Based on the book «The English Roots of German Fascism» by Manuel Sarkisyants.)

This is how the “white man’s burden” manifested itself in all its glory, its deadly concentration of civilization, hypocritically praised by the herald of the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling, the same one who wrote the tale of Mowgli.

Only in February 2008, nearly 250 years later, did the Australian government deign to apologize to the Indigenous people, not for the wholesale genocide, but for the fact that from 1910 to the 1970s, children were forcibly removed from Indigenous families and raised in orphanages. Around 100,000 children were subjected to forced «acculturation,» deprived of their loved ones, names, native language, and culture.

I will give a few more facts that show the anti-human nature of “good old England”.

Great Britain – the great slave trader

Besides the fact that «good old England» regularly committed genocide against the indigenous populations of conquered lands, it was also the world leader in the slave trade, which is unsurprising, as slavery has always existed on the islands. In 1086, 10% of England’s population were slaves.

In their colonies, the English initially used so-called «white slaves»—Scottish and Irish prisoners of war, and later, Irish civilians, including women and children. By the end of the 17th century, the English had enslaved approximately 100,000 Irish, stripped of their property, and ended their days working on Caribbean, American, and Indian plantations.

White slaves in the fields of Barbados

Little white slaves in the Pennsylvania mines

Then they began transporting Africans, using the so-called «triangular trade»: goods were transported to Africa, exchanged for slaves; from there, they were transported to America and exchanged for other goods—rum, sugar, etc.; and from America, the goods were transported to England. In Liverpool and Bristol, the slave trade was the main business. From the 16th century until 1807, when Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, effective throughout the British Empire, approximately 13 million slaves were transported to the American colonies. But since for every slave brought alive, three to four died, the figures for the genocide of the African population are simply staggering.

In 2015, the BBC released the documentary «Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners.» Based on documents that had lain dormant for nearly two centuries, it reveals some remarkable facts. These documents reveal the names of 46,000 British slave owners who applied for compensation for their lost property after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 officially freed 800,000 Africans, who were then legally the property of British slave owners.

The British government paid slave owners £20 million (approximately 40% of government expenditure in 1834), or £17 billion in today’s money. Naturally, this burden fell on the shoulders of taxpayers and the freed slaves, who were required to work for their former masters for 45 hours a week for free for the next four years after their intended emancipation.

Among the slave owners were such prominent figures in British society as John Gladstone, father of William Gladstone, Prime Minister during the reign of Queen Victoria. He was paid £106,769, or nearly £80 million in today’s money, for the 2,508 slaves who toiled on his nine plantations. Charles Blair, George Orwell’s great-grandfather, received a much more modest sum – £4,442 (about £3 million in today’s money) for 218 people. A distant ancestor of former Prime Minister David Cameron also received compensation for slaves, as did the ancestors of writer Graham Greene, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and architect Sir George Gilbert Scott.

But what’s far more interesting is the fact that there were a large number of people in Britain who didn’t own any plantations, yet they did own slaves. Not many, just a few, but nonetheless. These were middle-class people—vicars, owners of various manufactories, widows (almost 40% of slave owners were women) who inherited slaves from their deceased husbands. They all leased their slaves to landowners, to work gangs.

Legalized piracy

And «good old England» also learned to profit from maritime robbery—piracy! Sea pirates have always existed, and their activities have always been illegal. However, England managed to reap considerable profits from piracy. It turned out to be quite simple. An English pirate paid a certain tax to the treasury and received a special document—a Letter of Marque—which authorized a private English vessel to attack and capture ships belonging to an enemy power. This, essentially a license to piracy, obliged the pirate to present the loot to a special admiralty court (Prize Court) for recognition as official and the establishment of a reward (prize money). Such pirates became known as privateers, corsairs, or privateers.

The first such licenses were issued by the English King Henry III (1207-1272) in 1243. They were given to strictly designated individuals to capture the king’s enemies at sea. The spoils were divided between the pirate in government service and the royal treasury. This practice was followed by all subsequent kings. It gained particular momentum under Elizabeth I (1533-1603), who received a significant share of the spoils taken by the pirate Francis Drake (1540-1596), who began his activities in the slave trade by capturing Spanish merchant (not military!) ships, although Elizabeth officially claimed to have no connection with Drake’s activities.

Marcus Gheeraerts, Portrait of Sir Francis Drake, 1591. George Gower, Portrait of Elizabeth I with the Defeated Spanish Armada in the Background, 1588.

She, along with several others, also financed the pirate Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. The expedition’s official goal was to discover and explore new lands, but in reality, the pirate was heading to the New World to plunder Spanish ships and ports. And he succeeded. He certainly circumnavigated the globe and discovered many things, but unlike Magellan, he returned home with a tidy profit of 600,000 pounds sterling (the annual income of the English treasury at the time was 300,000 pounds). The Queen and everyone involved in this large-scale pirate raid became fabulously rich, returning their investments many times over.

The scale of Drake’s plunder during his plundering, primarily of Spanish ships and colonies, was so vast that his ships threw the silver overboard, loading their holds exclusively with gold and precious stones. Naturally, the queen greatly valued this source of revenue for the state purse and knighted Drake, a farmer’s son, right on the deck of his ship.

The famous pirate not only plundered but also discovered new lands to the glory of his royal patroness. In 1936, a copper plate bearing the date June 17, 1579, was discovered in the area of ​​modern-day San Francisco, where Drake claimed the territory for Queen Elizabeth.

Another equally famous and successful sea robber, Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), the son of an impoverished landowner who later became a statesman and a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, explored the territory along the Roanoke River in 1584 and named it Virginia in honor of the Virgin Queen, as Elizabeth was then known (this territory is now North Carolina). Thanks to the expeditions he financed, the first English colony was established here, and Raleigh is considered in the United States to be one of the founders of American civilization.

But let’s return to legalized piracy, which benefited not only the pirates themselves but also the state, which essentially protected them. After all, Elizabeth did not extradite Drake to the Spanish government, despite repeated requests. Nor was another pirate, Henry Morgan (1635-1688), who, for the glory of England, razed Spanish Panama to the ground. The English government condemned Morgan (the pirate was unaware that, while he was robbing the Spanish, the Spanish had signed a peace treaty with the English) and exiled him… as governor of Jamaica.

The largest piracy reward in British history was issued for the capture of the Spanish vessel Hermione on May 31, 1762, by two English ships. Two English captains, Herbert Sawyer and Philemon Pownoll, each received £65,000, and their crews received between £482 and £485. In October 1799, the crews of four British ships received rewards for two Spanish frigates, the Thetis and the Santa Brigada, valued at £652,000. The captains received £40,730 each, and the crew members £184, equivalent to 10 years’ pay.

In January 1807, the English frigate Carolina captured the Spanish ship San Rafael, and the captain received 52,000 pounds. This was a considerable sum, as data from 1825 indicated that a family of five (husband, wife, and three children) and a maid could live comfortably on 250 pounds a year, while still paying taxes, the children’s education, not to mention food and clothing.

Today, the business of piracy in public service is alive and well – rewards for sunk or captured (which significantly increases its size) enemy warships are paid by the British government to this day, only now to sailors of the Royal Navy.

The first concentration camps for civilians

«Good old England,» apparently in its great kindness, was the first to invent concentration camps! The first concentration camps for civilians were established by the English lord Horatio Kitchener (Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1850-1916) in South Africa for Boer families during the so-called Boer War of 1899-1902. The Boers were white people, descendants of Dutch, French, and German colonists who settled in Africa beginning in the 17th century. The British initially drove them deep into the continent, after confiscating their land and property, because the British found their African homeland a convenient base for sailing to India.

And then, in the new location where the Boers settled and established their own states—the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State—they soon discovered the world’s largest diamond deposit. And England, naturally, couldn’t help but covet such a lucrative prize. The Boers had no intention of abandoning the lands they had worked so hard to establish. «Good England,» naturally, sent troops.

In 1900, England defeated the Boer regular army and claimed the captured territories, but the Boers were in no hurry to surrender and began a guerrilla war. Over 20,000 Boers, under the command of three combat generals, continued their resistance and caused the occupiers no small amount of trouble. The British responded by destroying farms, slaughtering livestock (they slaughtered them on such a scale that they themselves could not eat the meat, and thousands of cows and sheep simply rotted), and establishing concentration camps for civilians, mostly women and children, since almost all the men had fought.

Burning Boer farm

At the instigation of British Lord Kitchener, 45 tent camps were established for Boers and 64 camps for black South Africans. Conditions were appalling. Prisoners lived, at best, in flimsy tents, drinking water was scarce, hygiene was neglected (for example, the Bloemfontein camp had 13 toilets for 3,500 prisoners), clothes were washed in puddles, measles, bronchitis, pneumonia, dysentery, and typhus decimated the population; healthy people were housed alongside the sick, and medicine was not provided. (Photos 18+ in the article «South Africa’s Auschwitz»)

Boer women and children in a concentration camp

The captured men were taken outside their homeland, sent to similar camps in India, Ceylon and other British colonies.

Concentration camp for Boers

Yes, the British won this war, but they also suffered significant losses. Despite the fact that by the end of the war, the British troops outnumbered the civilian Boers more than fivefold (450,000 to 83,000), the number of combat fatalities was roughly equal – approximately 7,000 British and 8,000 Boer. At least 15,000 more British soldiers died of disease.

New prisoners were brought to the concentration camp in Hopetoun.

From 1900 to 1902, British concentration camps held almost half of the Boer population of the time (the Boers numbered 250,000): 118,000 civilians, of whom 23.7%—almost 28,000—died. The war with the British claimed 14% of the pre-war Boer population, with the largest number of children dying—22,074 under 16. Without these casualties, the Boer population today might be 600,000 larger.

Boer children imprisoned in a Bloemfontein camp

Where did so much cruelty, malice and aggression, so much ineradicable thirst for profit and violence, which spilled out in death throughout the world, come from in “good old England,” a small island country with a completely normal population. 

Elena Lyubimova

Authorship:
Copy of third-party material
Sources used:
https://rusfact.ru/node/90299
Confessions of a former Anglophile (Parts 1 & 2) | rusfact.ru

P.S. It is terrifying to read about this. I wonder how they frame this for themselves—how it is taught in schools and universities. Surely they don’t say, «We were cannibals, and we enjoyed it!» 

Democracy, ever since ancient Greece, could not exist without slaves.