‘Nazi’ tyrants not all from the same place and time
For example: “(The) final extermination was a large-scale event, undertaken with the co-operation of the military and the judiciary... Soldiers of the... drove the natives between two great rock formations, shot all the men and dragged the women and children out of fissures in the rocks to knock their brains out.”
Except that this was not the Balkans in the 20th century, and it was not a Nazi atrocity.
It was the 40th Regiment of the British army in 19th century Tasmania, as described by Wilhelm Ziehr in Hell in Paradise. In 1900, the British policy of world domination and extermination was described thus by Gilbert Murray (Oxford Regius Professor of Classics, president of the League of Nations and chairperson of the United Nations Association): “... the subject races in the British Empire ... those whom we cannot utilise we exterminate ... Tasmanians were useless, and are all dead.... Go, if you dare, into a searching comparison between the treatment of the Queensland Kanakas, who were useful beasts of burden, and that of the Queensland aborigines, who were regarded as vermin, and you will bless the lot of the half-enslaved Kanaka”.
If we were to believe the succession of documentaries, films and other propaganda to which we are endlessly subjected, Britain finally came good in 1939 and set out selflessly to free the tormented victims of the concentration camps. Sadly, the facts tell a very different story. Having helped bring about the downfall of the democratic German government in 1933, Britain supported the Nazi regime until it suddenly decided in 1939 that there was room for only one world-dominating power.
Then, having declared war on Germany, it failed to prosecute it and was driven out of Europe in 1940. The Nazis, whose movement was inspired and motivated by the British empire, were finally defeated by their intended victims in eastern Europe.
And is it all in the past now? I’m afraid not. While Christian civilisation was once conferred on benighted savages by means of bayonet, whip and cudgel, Britain and its allies now deliver human rights and democracy to the world via the tank, the bomb and the bullet.
Pat Muldowney
Magee College
University of Ulster
Derry
