Enduring values

Gary Younge is very upset about the horrible abuses inflicted on Iraqis by British forces:

In mid January, Chancellor Gordon Brown went to Africa in a bid to relieve the locals of the burden of their debt and Britain from the burden of its history.

"The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over," he argued. "We should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world. Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values."

Less than a week later, photographs from Camp Breadbasket showed British soldiers standing on Iraqis enmeshed in netting, forcing them to simulate oral and anal sex, feigning to punch them in the head and parading them around on forklift trucks. Their actions suggested that while Brown was busy unilaterally absolving the inequities of our colonial past, the Iraqis are still dealing with the iniquities of our colonial present.

Like the US government following revelations from Abu Ghraib, the British government wants to dismiss the miscreants as the deviant wrongdoers in an otherwise noble cause. But the truth is that the atrocities committed in Camp Breadbasket were not aberrant but as consistent with Britain's colonial tradition and invasion of Iraq as Brown's statements are with our post-colonial amnesia.

The evidence arising from the case suggests that some other enduring values - brutality, cruelty, oppression and racism - are more readily associated with British rule in much of the world from Ireland to India.

Funny, I've met a fair few Poms (British) over the years and they've always seemed a jovial lot. Sure they'll have a whine about most anything but they seem like nice people overall. Must be the army attracts all the psychos, which is just as well, I suppose; I don't know that a totally sane person would make much of a soldier.

If not for Britian's colonial psycho-soldiers a great deal more of today's world would be in need of civilizing.