Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

There's a major reckoning required here. It was in our private schools that children were immersed in the ideology of empire, while subjected to extreme discipline, the complete loss of autonomy and the purging of dissident views and behaviour.
Thread/
theguardian.com/world/2021/nov…

WH Auden remarked that life at these schools “was based on fear …. not to mention the temptation it offered to the natural informer …. It makes one dishonest and unadventurous. The best reason I have for opposing fascism is that at school I lived in a fascist state."

But many boys did not draw the same conclusion. The ideology in which they were immersed became the justifying framework of their lives. And they imposed it on other people both at home and abroad.

Britain’s colonial subjects experienced this ideology much as the colonised peoples of central Europe experienced fascism. Hitler brought home the genocidal practices of colonial nations and married them to the efficiencies of the industrial state, with monstrous results.

But the ideology, heavily informed by eugenics, was similar. Like other colonial nations, Britain regarded its subjects as inferior peoples whom, when circumstances warranted, could be wiped out without a flicker of remorse.

It was in the private schools, where the officer class and the colonial administrators were educated, that these attitudes were driven home. People we now rightly see as war criminals were worshipped in prayers (“let us now praise famous men”) in these schools, into the 1970s.

Men like Clive, Rhodes, Kitchener, Gordon and Stanley were treated as role models. So you can see why people who passed through this system get so defensive about the removal of their statues.

So powerful and persistent were these themes that even after the Second World War, the British reinvented the concentration camp, complete with mass torture, in an effort to suppress rebellion in central Kenya. Here’s another thread about it:

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1273132740142120961