AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the movement against royalty in Britain.
JOHANN HARI: Well, we have to deal with some really weird arguments,
republicans. So, for example, the monarchists always say, "Oh, it¹s really
good for tourism." Actually, of the top 20 tourist attractions in Britain,
only one of them, number 17, is related to the royal family: Windsor Castle.
Ten points ahead of it is Windsor Legoland. So using that logic, we should
have a Lego man as our head of state instead of these people.
You know, then they say, "Oh, the monarchy is a great defender of
democracy," which, in itself, seems logically absurd. You know, let¹s not
democratically elect our head of state in order to preserve democracy. It¹s
also, for people who talk a lot about British history, incredibly
historically illiterate. The last British monarch but one, Edward VIII,
literally conspired with Adolf Hitler to run Britain as a Nazi colony. He
urged the Nazis to bomb Britain more during the Second World War. So the
idea that heredity throws up people who defend democracy is bizarre.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And this issue of empire that rarely gets talked about, that
the Queen was not only the Queen of England, but also of the commonwealth of
nations of the British Commonwealth that all came out of the colonial
empire?
JOHANN HARI: Well, Britain is a country that really hasn¹t come to terms
with its imperial past, if you compare it to a lot of other places like
Germany and the awareness they have of the crimes that were committed there.
Most British people, for example, just don¹t know about, for example, the
famines that happened in India in the 1870s and 1890s that were caused by
the British. There was a natural crop failure, and Lord Lytton, who was the
British governor, ordered that the grain be forcibly requisitioned and
shipped to London. Twenty-nine million people died in those famines. You
know, if you look at these
would make the Indians weak. The very good and honorable British people
there were some in India
imprisoned and deported. You know, instead, he built labor camps for the
starving Indians, where the calorie
at Buchenwald at the height of the Nazi atrocities. You know, who knows
about that? You know, there¹s a fantastic book called Late Victorian
Holocausts by Mike Davis that really details them.
But instead, pro-imperial historians, this guy called Andrew Roberts, who
was invited to the White House under President Bush, gave a great speech
defender of the behavior of the British Empire and apologist for the
Amritsar massacre, where they openly massacred, you know, peaceful
protesters. But that¹s all we really hear about the Empire.
AMY GOODMAN: Let¹s talk about Kenya for a minute.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: The British government is facing a lawsuit over the repression
of the Kenyan struggle for independence against colonial rule. A group of
veterans of Kenya¹s resistance movement have filed a suit in British court
seeking compensation for human rights abuses during the Mau Mau rebellion of
1952 and 1960. More than 100,000 Kenyans are believed to have been killed in
the British crackdown. Gitu wa Kahengeri is a Mau Mau veteran and
spokesperson for the case.
>
> GITU WA KAHENGERI: The colonial regime in Kenya at that time had robbed all
> our lands, had broken almost every human right against us, and we were living
> at that time in our country like slaves. And therefore, we rose up and say we
> must see that Kenya recovers its freedom and native land.
AMY GOODMAN: Johann Hari, talk about Kenya and its relation to the current
U.S. president.
JOHANN HARI: Well, these are ghosts that are really returning at the moment
in the form of this case. The British invaded Kenya in the 1880s because
they wanted more land, and they seized the most fertile land in Kenya. They
banned the local people from growing their cash crops, like coffee, and
began to commit terrible atrocities against the people there in order to
steal their land. Eventually, in the 1950s, there was a mass uprising
against this. And the British reacted by forcibly removing all of the
Kikuyu, all the people who lived in that area, all the population. Anyone
who objected was moved into a massive concentration camp network. They were
detained there. There was mass torture, pouring boiling wax into people¹s
ears, raping people with bottles. This has all been extensively documented.
One of the people who was detained in those camps was Barack Obama¹s
grandfather, who was basically broken in those camps, never recovered. And<
AMY GOODMAN: What was his involvement in the resistance?
JOHANN HARI: Well, they basically swept up all the Kikuyu men, as far as we
know. His family claimed that he didn¹t do anything. Of course, it would
have been perfectly legitimate to resist violent imperial occupation of your
country. But as far as we know, he didn¹t do anything. They were just mass
punishing any man of that age. It was a huge crackdown.
And, you know, a lot of these lessons of British imperialism, the places
that continue now, there¹s a great irony. The British Empire was the first
place to aerially bombard Pakistan in 1924. President Obama is now aerially
bombarding Pakistan. You know, this guy whose grandfather was put in British
concentration camps is now following the script that was laid out by British
imperialism.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, the British role in Asia, as well, in the
Opium War, in the colonization of Hong Kong for so long, until only
recently, until only about a decade ago
JOHANN HARI: The stand-up comedian Chris Addison, the British stand-up
comedian, said one of the great things about being British is you can look
at every part of the world and say, "Yeah, we screwed that one up." But it¹s
worth remembering, there were always great British people who were
anti-imperialist, who argued against this. At every stage, there were people
who said, "This is an atrocity, and we shouldn¹t be doing this," just like,
you know, Democracy Now! is part of the great American tradition of
resisting the crimes of the American state. There have always been British
people who fought back and argued against this and sided with the peoples in
those countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let¹s talk about today. The guest list for the royal
wedding includes not only dignitaries and celebrities, but also
practitioners of torture and other human rights violations. One invited
guest, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Ali al-Khalifa, is the current Bahraini ambassador
to London and the former head of Bahrain¹s National Security Agency, an
agency that¹s accused of electric shocks and beatings. Bahrain has in recent
months been wracked by protest. Its government has been accused of
unleashing a violent crackdown on political dissenters. Bahrain¹s Crown
Prince was also originally invited to attend the wedding but declined.
Yesterday, we reached Nabeel Rajab of the Center for Human Rights in Bahrain
for comment. This is what he had to say.
Sorry, we don¹t have that clip. But can you talk about the Bahraini guest?
JOHANN HARI: Well, at a time when our governments claim they¹re bombing
Libya to protect the Libyan population and because they¹re opposed to human
rights abuses, some of the worst human rights abusers in the world have been
invited to be fawned over in London today. You know, you had the Saudi royal
family, who horsewhip women if they have the temerity to sit behind the
wheel of a car, who horsewhip the victims of rape. You know, you had the
King of Swaziland, who murders trade unionists, murders democrats, murders
dissidents. You know, you had, as you mentioned, Bahraini torturers.
You know, and it¹s worth seeing the contrast between Libya and Bahrain. The
British Foreign Secretary William Hague, our equivalent to Hillary Clinton,
said
Libya was to lower the price of oil. Contrast that with Bahrain. You know,
Bahrain is a place where the oil flows just
It¹s where the American bases are. The contrast is very clear: if you¹re
essential to our oil supplies, we¹ll fawn over you; if you mess with our oil
supplies, if you¹re disobedient in supplying your oil, you get what happens
in Libya.
AMY GOODMAN: Let¹s try to go to that clip of Nabeel Rajab of the Center for
Human Rights in Bahrain.
>
> NABEEL RAJAB: Disappointing to see the invitation for the wedding is being
> extended to our ambassador to London, especially taking into consideration his
> bloody role as the head of the national security apparatus, which is
> responsible for gross human rights violations since he was in power.
> Unfortunately, this has not been taken into consideration by the people who
> invited him. I think this is a sad message to the people of Bahrain and to the
> victims of torture. I myself was attacked by the forces that belonged to the
> same institution. I was attacked severely, and I was admitted to hospital. And
> I was approximately two weeks in hospital getting treated for my
> had because of the attack, which I still have the same problem ¹til now.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Nabeel Rajab of the Center for Human Rights in
Bahrain. Johann Hari?
JOHANN HARI: It¹s worth bearing in mind what¹s actually happened in Bahrain.
We¹ve heard a lot about the heroic uprising in Tahrir Square. There was a
similar uprising in Bahrain in a place called Pearl Square. The Bahraini
government have physically demolished Pearl Square. They¹ve knocked the
whole thing down, so demonstrators can¹t even gather. Massive repression of
the Shia population there, who are a majority being viciously suppressed by
a Sunni dictatorship. You know? And what do we do? We welcome them, and we
fawn over them. It shows that our language about, you know, respect to human
rights is tragically deceptive.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to go back to the wedding for a second. What is this
costing? Who¹s paying for it? And also, what does the maintenance of the
royal family cost the English public every year?
JOHANN HARI: Sorry, when you said you wanted to go back to the wedding, I
suddenly had an image of you in a large hat, a large furry hat, which is
delightful.
The wedding is costing about $100 million. They claim it¹s being paid for by
the royal family¹s budget, by their private wealth. And you say, well, where
do you think they got their money from? They haven¹t been out, you know,
doing anything productive lately.
Overall, the official figure is the royal family costs about $260 million a
year. Actually, that¹s a deceptive figure, because there¹s loads of things
that aren¹t included. So, for example, whenever the royal family go and
visit a foreign country, they charge their clothes bill to the local
embassy, for example. So it costs a lot of money, at a time when Britain is
going through really extreme austerity.
You know, Charles Windsor, the heir to the throne, has over 60 personal
staff. He has someone who puts his toothpaste on his toothbrush every
morning. He¹s never done that. You know, we¹re talking about real opulence.
He has three personal chauffeurs. What do they do when they need to
transport him? Cut him into three pieces, you know?
JOHANN HARI: Well, we have to deal with some really weird arguments,
republicans. So, for example, the monarchists always say, "Oh, it¹s really
good for tourism." Actually, of the top 20 tourist attractions in Britain,
only one of them, number 17, is related to the royal family: Windsor Castle.
Ten points ahead of it is Windsor Legoland. So using that logic, we should
have a Lego man as our head of state instead of these people.
You know, then they say, "Oh, the monarchy is a great defender of
democracy," which, in itself, seems logically absurd. You know, let¹s not
democratically elect our head of state in order to preserve democracy. It¹s
also, for people who talk a lot about British history, incredibly
historically illiterate. The last British monarch but one, Edward VIII,
literally conspired with Adolf Hitler to run Britain as a Nazi colony. He
urged the Nazis to bomb Britain more during the Second World War. So the
idea that heredity throws up people who defend democracy is bizarre.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And this issue of empire that rarely gets talked about, that
the Queen was not only the Queen of England, but also of the commonwealth of
nations of the British Commonwealth that all came out of the colonial
empire?
JOHANN HARI: Well, Britain is a country that really hasn¹t come to terms
with its imperial past, if you compare it to a lot of other places like
Germany and the awareness they have of the crimes that were committed there.
Most British people, for example, just don¹t know about, for example, the
famines that happened in India in the 1870s and 1890s that were caused by
the British. There was a natural crop failure, and Lord Lytton, who was the
British governor, ordered that the grain be forcibly requisitioned and
shipped to London. Twenty-nine million people died in those famines. You
know, if you look at these
would make the Indians weak. The very good and honorable British people
there were some in India
imprisoned and deported. You know, instead, he built labor camps for the
starving Indians, where the calorie
at Buchenwald at the height of the Nazi atrocities. You know, who knows
about that? You know, there¹s a fantastic book called Late Victorian
Holocausts by Mike Davis that really details them.
But instead, pro-imperial historians, this guy called Andrew Roberts, who
was invited to the White House under President Bush, gave a great speech
defender of the behavior of the British Empire and apologist for the
Amritsar massacre, where they openly massacred, you know, peaceful
protesters. But that¹s all we really hear about the Empire.
AMY GOODMAN: Let¹s talk about Kenya for a minute.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: The British government is facing a lawsuit over the repression
of the Kenyan struggle for independence against colonial rule. A group of
veterans of Kenya¹s resistance movement have filed a suit in British court
seeking compensation for human rights abuses during the Mau Mau rebellion of
1952 and 1960. More than 100,000 Kenyans are believed to have been killed in
the British crackdown. Gitu wa Kahengeri is a Mau Mau veteran and
spokesperson for the case.
>
> GITU WA KAHENGERI: The colonial regime in Kenya at that time had robbed all
> our lands, had broken almost every human right against us, and we were living
> at that time in our country like slaves. And therefore, we rose up and say we
> must see that Kenya recovers its freedom and native land.
AMY GOODMAN: Johann Hari, talk about Kenya and its relation to the current
U.S. president.
JOHANN HARI: Well, these are ghosts that are really returning at the moment
in the form of this case. The British invaded Kenya in the 1880s because
they wanted more land, and they seized the most fertile land in Kenya. They
banned the local people from growing their cash crops, like coffee, and
began to commit terrible atrocities against the people there in order to
steal their land. Eventually, in the 1950s, there was a mass uprising
against this. And the British reacted by forcibly removing all of the
Kikuyu, all the people who lived in that area, all the population. Anyone
who objected was moved into a massive concentration camp network. They were
detained there. There was mass torture, pouring boiling wax into people¹s
ears, raping people with bottles. This has all been extensively documented.
One of the people who was detained in those camps was Barack Obama¹s
grandfather, who was basically broken in those camps, never recovered. And<
AMY GOODMAN: What was his involvement in the resistance?
JOHANN HARI: Well, they basically swept up all the Kikuyu men, as far as we
know. His family claimed that he didn¹t do anything. Of course, it would
have been perfectly legitimate to resist violent imperial occupation of your
country. But as far as we know, he didn¹t do anything. They were just mass
punishing any man of that age. It was a huge crackdown.
And, you know, a lot of these lessons of British imperialism, the places
that continue now, there¹s a great irony. The British Empire was the first
place to aerially bombard Pakistan in 1924. President Obama is now aerially
bombarding Pakistan. You know, this guy whose grandfather was put in British
concentration camps is now following the script that was laid out by British
imperialism.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, the British role in Asia, as well, in the
Opium War, in the colonization of Hong Kong for so long, until only
recently, until only about a decade ago
JOHANN HARI: The stand-up comedian Chris Addison, the British stand-up
comedian, said one of the great things about being British is you can look
at every part of the world and say, "Yeah, we screwed that one up." But it¹s
worth remembering, there were always great British people who were
anti-imperialist, who argued against this. At every stage, there were people
who said, "This is an atrocity, and we shouldn¹t be doing this," just like,
you know, Democracy Now! is part of the great American tradition of
resisting the crimes of the American state. There have always been British
people who fought back and argued against this and sided with the peoples in
those countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let¹s talk about today. The guest list for the royal
wedding includes not only dignitaries and celebrities, but also
practitioners of torture and other human rights violations. One invited
guest, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Ali al-Khalifa, is the current Bahraini ambassador
to London and the former head of Bahrain¹s National Security Agency, an
agency that¹s accused of electric shocks and beatings. Bahrain has in recent
months been wracked by protest. Its government has been accused of
unleashing a violent crackdown on political dissenters. Bahrain¹s Crown
Prince was also originally invited to attend the wedding but declined.
Yesterday, we reached Nabeel Rajab of the Center for Human Rights in Bahrain
for comment. This is what he had to say.
Sorry, we don¹t have that clip. But can you talk about the Bahraini guest?
JOHANN HARI: Well, at a time when our governments claim they¹re bombing
Libya to protect the Libyan population and because they¹re opposed to human
rights abuses, some of the worst human rights abusers in the world have been
invited to be fawned over in London today. You know, you had the Saudi royal
family, who horsewhip women if they have the temerity to sit behind the
wheel of a car, who horsewhip the victims of rape. You know, you had the
King of Swaziland, who murders trade unionists, murders democrats, murders
dissidents. You know, you had, as you mentioned, Bahraini torturers.
You know, and it¹s worth seeing the contrast between Libya and Bahrain. The
British Foreign Secretary William Hague, our equivalent to Hillary Clinton,
said
Libya was to lower the price of oil. Contrast that with Bahrain. You know,
Bahrain is a place where the oil flows just
It¹s where the American bases are. The contrast is very clear: if you¹re
essential to our oil supplies, we¹ll fawn over you; if you mess with our oil
supplies, if you¹re disobedient in supplying your oil, you get what happens
in Libya.
AMY GOODMAN: Let¹s try to go to that clip of Nabeel Rajab of the Center for
Human Rights in Bahrain.
>
> NABEEL RAJAB: Disappointing to see the invitation for the wedding is being
> extended to our ambassador to London, especially taking into consideration his
> bloody role as the head of the national security apparatus, which is
> responsible for gross human rights violations since he was in power.
> Unfortunately, this has not been taken into consideration by the people who
> invited him. I think this is a sad message to the people of Bahrain and to the
> victims of torture. I myself was attacked by the forces that belonged to the
> same institution. I was attacked severely, and I was admitted to hospital. And
> I was approximately two weeks in hospital getting treated for my
> had because of the attack, which I still have the same problem ¹til now.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Nabeel Rajab of the Center for Human Rights in
Bahrain. Johann Hari?
JOHANN HARI: It¹s worth bearing in mind what¹s actually happened in Bahrain.
We¹ve heard a lot about the heroic uprising in Tahrir Square. There was a
similar uprising in Bahrain in a place called Pearl Square. The Bahraini
government have physically demolished Pearl Square. They¹ve knocked the
whole thing down, so demonstrators can¹t even gather. Massive repression of
the Shia population there, who are a majority being viciously suppressed by
a Sunni dictatorship. You know? And what do we do? We welcome them, and we
fawn over them. It shows that our language about, you know, respect to human
rights is tragically deceptive.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to go back to the wedding for a second. What is this
costing? Who¹s paying for it? And also, what does the maintenance of the
royal family cost the English public every year?
JOHANN HARI: Sorry, when you said you wanted to go back to the wedding, I
suddenly had an image of you in a large hat, a large furry hat, which is
delightful.
The wedding is costing about $100 million. They claim it¹s being paid for by
the royal family¹s budget, by their private wealth. And you say, well, where
do you think they got their money from? They haven¹t been out, you know,
doing anything productive lately.
Overall, the official figure is the royal family costs about $260 million a
year. Actually, that¹s a deceptive figure, because there¹s loads of things
that aren¹t included. So, for example, whenever the royal family go and
visit a foreign country, they charge their clothes bill to the local
embassy, for example. So it costs a lot of money, at a time when Britain is
going through really extreme austerity.
You know, Charles Windsor, the heir to the throne, has over 60 personal
staff. He has someone who puts his toothpaste on his toothbrush every
morning. He¹s never done that. You know, we¹re talking about real opulence.
He has three personal chauffeurs. What do they do when they need to
transport him? Cut him into three pieces, you know?
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