Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
--- Begin Message ------ End Message ---
-Caveat Lector-
South African War (Boer War) v. Iraq War
"Queen Victoria of England went home happy on her Diamond Jubilee day, June 22, 1897. History had humoured her, as she deserved... It was more than a personal happiness, more even than a national rejoicing, for the British had chosen to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee as a festival... It would mark this moment of British history as an Imperial moment, a Roman moment. It would proclaim to the world, flamboyantly, that England was far more than England: that beneath the Queen’s dominion lay a quarter of the earth’s land surface, and nearly a quarter of its people... (Jan Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, (London: Faber and Faber, 1998, p.21).
"Being islanders, they knew more about the world than most of their neighbours: they possessed more ships than all other nations put together... They were an immensely experienced people. Compact, patriotic... and this gave them punch and phalanx... (Morris, p.27).
"... the Transvaal had been discovered to contain, in the highlands around Johannesburg, the world’s largest deposits of gold. In those days gold played more than a practical, almost a mystic part in the affairs of the nations: that this vast new supply should fall within a British sphere of authority seemed to the imperialists, not to speak of the City of Speculators, almost a divine dispensation. So by the last years of the century strategy, morality, economics, instinct and plain greed made it inevitable that the Boer Republics must be tidied up beneath the Crown - ‘sooner of later’, as Winston Churchill wrote, ‘in a righteous cause or a picked quarrel ... for the sake of out Empire, for the sake of honour, for sake of the race, we must fight the Boers.’ (Morris, p.66).
"In such a spirit did the soldiers of the Empire go to war against the Boers in the autumn of 1899 - cocky after a century of easy victories, secure in their tribal jokes and customs, confident in their leaders... but though the Empire had a population of 370 million, and there were not much more than 100,000 Boers - though General Buller had 85,000 men [in his expeditionary force] at his disposal, and the Boers only 35,000 - though the Army believed it could end the war by Christmas, and it was the ambition of every British officer to get to the front before then - still the campaign to which they were so boisterously sailing marketed the beginning of the end of their Empire, and the first faltering of their pride... nothing would be quite the same after the Boer War (Morris, pp.64-65).
"The Boer Army ... was hardly an army at all... it was simply the Boer manhood in toto, mustered in local mounted units called commandos, owning its own horses, elected its own officers... Its discipline, like its morale, was variable... The Boers had armed themselves, though, with the most modern equipment from European arsenals... and above all they were born to the terrain... all in all they were born irregulars, perhaps the best guerilla soldiers in the world... (Morris, p.69).
"It was the first of the propaganda wars. Every incident in the field, flashed across the world by the electric telegraph, was magnified or distorted to prove a point or support an ideology. The whole world joined in this new excitement: the Boer War was the Algeria or Vietnam of its time. When, in Black Week, the British armies were so disastrously defeated three battles in a row, half the world laughed or cheered at their discomfiture... (Morris, p.86).
"The British public, which for twenty years had been accustomed to see its army perform with remarkable efficiency and success in campaigns on a limited scale against coloured forces, was amazed by the break-down" (R.C.K Ensor, England 1870-1914, (London: OUP, 1936), p.293).
"The first humiliations of Black Week, which convinced many Europeans that the British were actually going to lose the war, had vividly revealed foreign feelings about the Empire. The British indeed had supporters in every country... But they had more enemies... (Morris, p.94).
The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s grandson ... had been openly pro-Boer since the Jameson Raid. The Boers were armed mostly with German weapons... After Black Week ... editorials damned the British, cartoonists lampooned them, public opinion everywhere was at once shocked by British policies, and entertained by her discomfitures. From many parts of the world young men volunteered to fight with the Boers, Germans, Frenchmen, Americans... (p.94). [Parallel: [British] ‘Human Shields’ head for Iraq, bbc.co.uk, January 25, 2003].
The struggle degenerated into a messy and generally inglorious manhunt, soured by recriminations and reprisals, executions in the field, arson and broken oaths... the Boers thought the British were resorting to genocide... the British accused the Boers of treachery, fighting as they did in civilian clothes, and disregarding many conventional laws of war... Across this hideous chequer-board [of blockhouses] the fugitive commandoes clawed their way. They were like wild animals, Kitchener said, forever running away - ‘not like the Sudanese, who stood up to a fair fight’. By the end of 1901 more than sixty British columns were in the field, but more than 20,000 guerillas still eluded them... (Morris, p.88).
The British won, of course, and the Peace of Vereeniging was concluded at their dictate in May, 1902: but the protracted guerilla campaign, the sordid anticlimax of it all, the thousands of deaths by disease or neglect, robbed the victory of any grandeur... (Morris, p.89).
"When at last the Boers surrendered ... both sides were exhausted and embittered. The British had suffered terribly from heat and disease: of their 22,000 deaths, two-thirds from cholera and enteric fever. The Boer guerillas ended the war half-starved and virtually destitute, and their families were decimated by the appalling conditions of Kitchener’s detention camps... Before the war was over Buller’s expeditionary force of 85,000 men, sailing out so confidently to their victory by Christmas, numbered 450,000 men, the largest British army ever sent overseas... (Morris, p.72).
"The Boer war had cracked the British mirror; the Jubilee was over; the Empire had grown too big for itself. It had seemed to most of its citizens invulnerable because of its size, but now, it seemed, it was size that made it vulnerable. Empire gave the British a finger on every pulse, a say in every conference; but at the same time it made them subject to all the world’s anxieties, innately responsive not merely to the Mauser of a Boer, but to the whim of any foreign despot... The Boer War showed that it was getting too much for them. In the 1860s Matthew Arnold had portrayed Great Britain as a weary Titan... This prophetic picture would have been unrecognizable only five years before, but in 1902 the world, thoughtfully watching, saw its outline dimly delineated in the aftermath of war (Morris, pp.91-92).
"It was clear to everybody now ... that a single colonial war, against and enemy with a population half that of Birmingham, had tried the Empire to its limits. The British admitted as much... (Morris, p.93).
"But in the years after the Boer War the ants began to stir... (Morris, p.96).
PHASES OF THE WAR
"The thirty-two months’ war ... had five successive phases... The first was that of Boer invasion, which may be regarded as closing with the surrender of Cronje (27 February 1900) [Parallel: Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait or something yet future?]. The second was that of organized Boer resistance to British invasion, [Parallel: 2003 American invasion of Iraq?], and it ended (October 1900) with the occupation of Komati Poort and Kruger’s flight into Portugese territory. The third ... as that in which the Boers developed guerrilla warfare, before the British had evolved any plans for meeting it (Ensor, p.252).
"From the beginning of 1901 Lord Kitchener tentatively developed two policies - one to build chains of blockhouses along the railways which were his lines of communication; the other to denude the country systematically of its farms and stock, gathering the non-combatants into concentration camps [Guantanamo Bay a forerunner?]... (Ensor, pp.344-45).
"The war then entered on a fourth phase, in which lines of block houses, such as hitherto had been built to guard the railways, were pushed independently across the country with wire fences to divide it into closed compartments. Only large parties of Boers could break through such a line by force; and one closed areas after another was persistently ‘swept’, every person found in it being taken to a concentration camp. This phase lasted till the end of 1901; and despite many brilliant surprises and feats of arms by Botha, De Wet, De la Rey, Smuts, Kritzinger, and others, it gradually wore the guerrillas down... (Ensor, pp.345-46).
As 1901 went on, the military pressure told. In May some of the Rand mines were restarted [Parallel: oil wells?]... but Boer successes also persisted till the end of the year, when the war entered a fifth and final stage. The new feature was the use of the blockhouse lines not merely as fences but as lines of communications. This enabled ‘drives’ to be organized on a scale not practical earlier. Escape became impossible;... on 23 March, only seven weeks after the first of the new drives, the Boers sued for peace... The money cost [of the war] to Great Britain exceeded £222 millions... (Ensor, p.347).
: futurewatch [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
<A HREF="">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
