Obama and Europe - two of the silliest things ever

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Hrm, I was hoping for wikipedia articals. Never mind I looked em up myself particually the Kikuyu one, and I found that both sides comitted many atrocities to each other and the people caught between.

Contrary to African customs and values, Mau Mau members assaulted old people, women and children. The horrors they practiced included the following: decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women. No war can justify such gruesome actions. In man's inhumanity to man there is no race distinction. The Africans were practising it on themselves. There was no reason and no restraint on both sides.

—Bethwell Ogot

The most notorious was their attack on the settlement of Lari, on the night of 25–26 March 1953, in which they herded Kikuyu men, women and children into huts and set fire to them, hacking down with pangas anyone who attempted escape, before throwing them back in to the burning huts. The attack at Lari was so extreme that "African policemen who saw the bodies of the victims . . . were physically sick and said 'These people are animals. If I see one now I shall shoot with the greatest eagerness'", and it "even shocked many Mau Mau supporters, some of whom would subsequently try to excuse the attack as 'a mistake'"

A British officer describes his actions after capturing three Mau Mau suspects:

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.

And from british screenings:

Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs were thrust up men's rectums and women's vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence.

—Caroline Elkins

In David Anderson's words, "a story of atrocity and excess on both sides, a dirty war from which no one emerged with much pride, and certainly no glory."

Not exactly a pleasant read.

You should look carefully into the collapse of the Empire in the 50's and 60's, ugly, ugly, ugly. We did, after all, deliberately commit multiple acts of cultural genocide, toppled democratic governments (including Iran's) and did various other pretty shocking things.

While I don't know Mike Davies I do know that, for example, India was exporting rice during famines in the 19th Century.

As to the Boers, well you may want to ask my Boer Aunt about that - or perhaps not. I read a book which indicated that reports at the time concluded that certain camp commanders were deliberately running down food and medicine in order to make the problem (the women and children) "go away", it wasn't a modern left-leaning one, either.

Then there are all the Germans and Italians we shot in cold blood, and more recently the phospherus grenades we used to burn Argentinain conscripts alive in their trenches.

And yet my admiration for empire is not deminished, I see it as a country reacting badly to situations they didnt want, and that's the thing, we didnt want to massacre the mau mau, the boers or the indians but were forced into the situations, where such things were considered neccisary, by the disgruntled natives, the incompetence of the people we put in charge and our own mistakes.
And that's what really gets me when people compare the nazis to colonializm, we didnt set out to kill, yet the nazis were planning to get rid of the jews from the start, and they committed such horrors, not out of poorly percieved necessity, but of unprovoked malace and racist hatred.