Guerrilla History - The Battle of Spioen Kop - From the Archives

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Guerrilla History "From the Archives" is a new series of episodes, consisting of previously patreon-exclusive episodes that we are unlocking for the general public after one year.  This From the Archives episode was originally released on Patreon on May 29, 2021, and is about the Battle of Spioen Kop, during the Second Boer War.  This battle, which was an utter calamity for the British, was the last high water mark for the Boers during the Boer Wars, and ushered us  into the 20th century of warfare. You can support Guerrilla History by joining us at patreon.com/guerrillahistory, where you will also get bonus content!

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is Adnan Hussein, one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history. Brett, Henry, and I have some news that I hope you'll be excited to hear. More free content for you. Every month, as you know, we record a reconnaissance report, a major episode with a guest about their historical work, as well as an intelligence briefing, a shorter discussion, usually among the three of us. Occasionally we also post a dispatch from the field of contemporary left history, often with a guest about a breaking story or a recent set of events or issues and provide some historical analysis. We also typically record a second intelligence briefing as an exclusive episode for patrons, subscribers at patreon.com slash gorilla history. We have decided to unlock an intelligence briefing each month after a year has passed as, special from the archive episodes for you to enjoy. We hope you'll find these a useful resource. Of course, if you'd like to subscribe and have early access to intelligence briefings and all

the other additional content like readings and discussions of classic texts, primary sources, reviews and discussions, do become a patron at patreon.com slash gorilla history with our gratitude. We do this because we love to make history a resource in our political education as an activist global left and in our struggles for justice. So we're happy to share these older episodes with you in this series from the archive. As ever, solidarity. some waffey, but they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to a guerrilla history intelligence briefing. Guerrilla history is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian

history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan-Husain, and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thanks, Henry. Good to be with you.

Yeah, nice to see you, as always, Adnan. And I'm also joined, as always by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett, long time, no see. Hello, hello. Happy to be back. Yeah, always nice to see you as well. So today we're going to have a, I'm going to say off the top, but it's going to be a shorter

intelligence briefing, although, you know, we tend to overshoot how long we think things are going to go every time. So we'll see how this goes. But just for listeners who are new to our Patreon, to remind you, intelligence briefings are our Patreon episodes. We produce roughly to a month. One will go out is an early release where it'll be accessible to Patreon members first and then go out on the general feed. And the other half, like this one, are Patreon exclusive. So the only way that you're going to hear this is by being on our Patreon. So thank you for your support of the show. It's what allows the show to go on.

So today we're going to be talking about a fairly specific topic, which is the Battle of Spion Cop, which took place during the Second Boer War. And when I posed this to you, too, what were your initial thoughts? I mean, had either of you heard of this battle before I said that I wanted to do a bonus episode on it? I had not heard of the specific battle, though, of course, I'm just broadly familiar a little bit with the Boer Wars. And, of course, there were two, but this is from the second Boer War round. But I didn't know anything about the real details of the battle. I knew absolutely nothing about it or the broader context.

So, yeah, it was interesting to try to learn a little bit about it, and I'm interested to hear you lay out the story. Okay. So, yeah, I think that this will be a little bit of story time now for the listeners, because I think that probably like you two, the listeners probably haven't heard of this battle. I mean, until I read about it in a book that I had when I was a kid, I had never heard about it either. But let me lay out the background information here. So the Boer Wars, this is taking place in present day, South Africa. So looking back before the wars began, way before the wars began. The Dutch first landed on the coastal areas of South Africa back in 1652. And they had settlements all along the coastline. It was a good trading point. You know, that's right on the Cape of Good Hope. The British, however, decided that they wanted to have those trading outposts. They wanted to have those ports on the Cape of Good Hope. So they went down there and these, you know, Dutch traders that were on the coastline, well, under the weight of the British Empire, they decided that they would move inland and let the British have

the coastline. So that's what ended up happening. The British took the coastline so that they could use that as along the shipping routes is a basically a stop-off point. And the Dutch that had moved there, were now being called the Boers, which was just in their lane, that's Dutch for farmer. They moved inland and became farmers. That's why they were called the Boers. so now the boars are inland the british are on the coastline doing their trading up until about 1886 in 1886 there was a couple of states that the boars had called orange free state and transvaal but in 1886 in the boar territories they found diamonds and gold and the british said well we were happy with our arrangement of having the sea and you having this farmland but now that

there's diamonds and gold we're not so happy with this arrangement you got a good deal. And we can't have that. So that was the start of the first Boer War. The British financial barons like Cecil Rhodes, who of course ended up being, you know, Rhodesia ended up being named after him. That's where you've probably heard his name before. They decided that they were going to go in and wage war against the Boers. And this was the first Boar War. And it took place in 1880 until 1881. It was an absolute disaster. for the British, completely disastrous. They had no idea what they were doing.

Basically from beginning to end, the first Boer War was calamitous for them. And there's one battle in particular that is emblematic of it, which was the Battle of Majuba Hill. At this battle, the Boers suffered one fatal injury and six individuals were wounded. Meanwhile, the British had 92 individuals killed, 131 injured, and more than 50 taken prisoners.

So it was an embarrassing defeat, and shortly thereafter, the war ended. And the British had to concede that, in fact, the Boers had won this war, and they founded the first South African Republic. But that didn't last for very long. In 1890, so this is 18 years later or so, there was another war that kicked off. And this is the second Boer War. when this kicked off, things also were going very, very bad for the British, even though, again, they're fighting against these farmers, you know, using old German weaponry. There was one thing that the, that the Boers had that was more advanced than the British had, which was smokeless gunpowder, which I'll talk about in a little bit.

But they're using old German weaponry and they're just farmers coming out of the countryside to fight against the invading imperial British army. So all of these battles start happening and they didn't go very well. They had individuals that were marching in the wrong direction during battles that they ended up miles and miles away from the people that they were supposed to be reinforcing. They had battles where, you know, a couple of dozen boars were injured, whereas, you know, thousands of British were injured. There was a battle of Crohn-J or Crohnier, I don't speak. you know, the language. So forgive me on the pronunciation. But in this battle alone,

68 British officers died in over 11, over 1,000 men were killed or wounded, whereas the Boers had less than 200 casualties. So this whole thing was a disaster. And the disaster culminated with the Battle of Spoyant Cop, which we'll talk about in just a second. And then the aftermath of that battle is where things really get interesting, even though we're going to be talking about the battle. So that's kind of the context here is that this was a war over these resources that over this land that had previously thought to be not worth anything. But, you know, when mineral resources are discovered, of course, the imperial powers are going to decide, hey, that's our right to try to go in there and take it. Adnan, what do you think?

Yeah, I just, that was a great laying out of the basic context. And I just wondered, you know, viewers might be, or listeners rather, might be a little surprised to learn that the Dutch colonized with settlers this area in the 17th century, mid-17th century. So you have a settler colony that's established by the Dutch for several hundred years before the British later come and impose their will and also introduce new settlers. And the reason why it makes a certain amount of sense is because you have to also remember and understand that the Dutch were involved in trade to Southeast Asia and established colonies in what is today Indonesia, right? So that was a way of linking them and that before the British, the Dutch were, in fact, one of the dominant maritime powers and colonized different places. So here you have this European population in the southern part of Africa from the 17th century on.

It's very much like what we would be familiar with in North American history, where you had different European colonial powers introducing settlers to the North American continent from the 16th century, basically, but especially around that same time. you have the French in what became, you know, what became the province of Quebec in Canada was, you know, a French settler colonial period settlement. And so this seems to me, if, you know, people are having a little bit of difficulty understanding conceptually what kind of a struggle we're talking about. We're looking at intra-imperial rivalries and controls among settler,

you know, a European settler colonial outposts around the world. And it's a lot like the Seven Years War that takes place in, you know, in the North American continent, right? Which was really important, you know, to the history of North America, where the French were defeated by the British. This is kind of something sort of similar to that, it seems. Yeah, although the main difference between this and that would be that the

Boers at this point didn't have much contact with the Dutch. They were more or less an autonomous group of people within this area, which is what would have separated from something like the Seven Years War. That's right, yeah, because it's like the American Revolution has already happened. So maybe it's more like the War of 1812 or something like that. Yeah, I think that that would be a pretty fair. It's a different, you know, this is a different ethno-linguistic population of settlers, right? Yeah. Yeah. Brett, anything you want to lay out there before we get into talking about the battle itself? I don't know I have really anything to add to that in particular.

I'm enjoying the discussion. I want to hear about the battle itself for sure. Okay. So the battle, it's January 24th, 1900. It's the first major battle of the 20th century. The British were going in and looking for this ridge line. Now, the British, again, this was still when they were under their leaders whose names I believe were Warren and Butler, the generals Warren and Butler.

They were incompetent, completely incompetent. So instead of sending out scouts to see what the area was like, they had one guy looking with binoculars and he said, hey, there's a ridge line up there. And on this map, it's listed as spy and cop, which in this language means look out hill. So it must be the high ground. Now, I've got this audacious plan.

We're going to go in in the middle of the night. We're going to march up this hillside. We're going to carry bags of sand up of it, up at because we need to build our own entrenchments there because the ground is pretty rocky. We're not going to really be able to dig ourselves in. So we're going to have people carrying bags of sand up to the top of this hill in the dead of night. And then when the morning comes and the boars wake up, they're going to see, we have the high ground. They didn't really have anything planned for what was going to happen after that other than, hey, we have the high ground, this high ground that really wasn't significant. can't in any particular way other than, you know, you would control this little piece of land now.

But that was their, that was their goal and that was the objective that was set out for the field commander, take this ridge and hold it. So that was what they did. They went up this hillside and they saw a couple of, of boar, these farmers with guns. They saw a couple of them along the way and, you know, there was a couple of volleys of fire back and forth, but there was really no resistance at all. They get up to the top of this hill and they're going to camp out for the night. And what's important to also notice that it was a very, very misty night.

They really couldn't see much at all. But what they did know is that there was hardly any bores on the hillside going up the hill, which seems strange. You know, if it's the high ground in the area and you know that the enemy is in the area and they're from that area, wouldn't they have a bunch of people protecting that hillside? you know, wouldn't they have a bunch of people protecting the high ground? No, they saw a grand total of 15 bores protecting this, what they thought was a very strategically placed hill that would give them the high ground. Nonetheless, they didn't really think much of it. They get to the top

of the hill. They put out their sandbags and they go to bed. Morning time comes around. The mist burns off and what do they discover? In fact, it is not the high ground. There's three hills surrounding them on almost every side they're surrounded by high ground with boars who are entrenched on the tops of the hills as well as artillery that is hidden on the tops of those hills or just behind the hills i should say they were howitzer so they would shoot over the hills and you know it would drop down on the on the individuals so now here's the situation we're in the british are on this little plateau that they thought was the highest ground in the area and in fact it ended up being right at the feet of these hills.

The ground is hard so they can't dig into it. Their instructions were simply to take the hill and hold it at all costs, and they're surrounded on three sides by boars entrenched. Well, needless to say, it was a turkey shoot. The howitzers were lobbing these artillery rounds in there, and the people were getting blown to bits. The boars were shooting straight down on the top of them. There was nowhere for them to hide until there was enough British that were dead

that they could use the corpses as, you know, makeshift barricades between them and the fire. And they, the artillery from the British artillery, they couldn't bring it up the hill. It was too steep. So the artillery is camped out pretty far away. And this is why I brought up smokeless gunpowder. And then I'll let you guys bring in, you know, any, any things that you want to mention here in terms of, you know, questions or whatever. So the artillery from the British is really far away. And up until this battle, the gunpowder that had been.

used was not smokeless gunpowder. So when you would have an enemy firing artillery from pretty far away, what you would do is you'd look for where the smoke's coming from and then you would shoot your artillery at that spot. This was the first battle where smokeless gunpowder was used. So the British artillery are miles away looking for where the artillery is firing from and they can't see anything. So they just start shooting the tops of these hills and basically use up all of their ammunition for their artillery on rocks because they had no idea where any of the wars were any of the artillery placements on or behind the hillsides were so they expend all of their artillery rounds shooting at nothing shooting at ghosts because they didn't know where they were

and the communication lines were almost completely broken there was one or two scouts that tried to go back and forth but most of them didn't make it there was one that eventually didn't I'll talk about that in a second but the commander who was in charge of of the area who again was Warren he was the overall commander he was the immediate commander not on the battlefield this butler was his superior officer but that's not that important the point is is that this Warren was a very literal guy he was given the orders from his command that he was supposed to take the high ground and his understanding was still that the spy and cop was the high ground and so he just told them, no, hold your ground there. So they're laying there on rock with nothing to dig into getting shot at from all sides. And they didn't have any scouts that they were sending out to see where weak points and the bore lines were. I mean, it was absolute calamity. So before we go on, is there anything that you guys want to just throw out there?

Well, Henry, I want, well, one thing that I think is quite interesting is how small the numbers overall that we're talking about. So these are groups that are controlling pretty large amount of territory as settlers, and this is an outpost of the British Empire on its sort of control of and so forth. But we're not talking about huge numbers of troops and forces that are massed in these. This is kind of almost like skirmishes, you know, compared to what in one, in the next generation, you know, with World War I, you know, trench warfare, hundreds and thousands of people involved, and huge casualties. So this is like this early period where, you know, warfare is being conducted in quite a different sort of way. But I guess what I'm also wondering, a question for you here, Henry, is what do you see as the significance of this battle

compared, for example, to that Majuba Hill defeat in the first Boer War, which was the first time since the American struggle, the counter-revolution of 1776, as we know. And, you know, listeners do go back and listen to that wonderful episode with Dr. Gerald Horn. This is the first time that the British suffered a pretty decisive defeat was in the first Boer War in 1880, 1881. So what do you think? of this second four war. Well, I think that there's two main reasons why I'm flagging this one up. One is because of how many mistakes there were that were made in this battle itself. I mean, the amount of errors the British made was absolutely staggering,

which just makes it funny and therefore, you know, I want to talk about it because it's pretty funny. Okay, the other point is that this was the last high mark or the high, last high watermark of the boars. And we'll talk about that as soon as this battle ends, but almost immediately after this battle ends, and this battle was actually quite pivotal in this, things swung the complete other way. As I had mentioned, the entire first Boer War was just stupidity from the British side, and they got just, you know, I'm not going to use any bad words, but we'll just say that they got their

clocks cleaned in the first Boar War. And up until this point in the second Boer War, it was much the same. They were getting absolutely slaughtered every time they would try to go out and do something. And a big part of it was because of the incompetence of all of the leaders of the British Army down there. Now, this battle was such an embarrassment that they actually removed the leadership and implemented new leadership, which swung the tide of the war and, you know, the ensuing history. And we'll talk about that in a second. The last thing I want to mention before I let Brett hop in is that you're talking about small numbers. this was really truly a case of guerrilla warfare.

The boars were your quintessential early 20th century guerrilla force where they were farmers. There was very few numbers of them and they would not line up and do these large fixed bayonet charges. And actually it was something that the British were complaining about in the aftermath of this battle is that the boars don't fight fair. The year before this battle, or about a year and a half before this battle took place, There was a big battle in Sudan between the British and the Sudanese. And the Sudanese were taking these old Napoleonic era military tactics to the nth degree. They had inferior weaponry and inferior numbers, but yet they would still stand in strict regimented lines and then do fixed bayonet charges in formation, straight up hills at artillery and whatnot. And it was a complete disaster for the Sudanese.

On the other hand, the boars, like I said, were the quintessential early 20th century guerrillas where they, you know, they would go one by one in different locations, dig themselves into the ground, hide their artillery behind hillsides, and then basically just fire pot shots off from wherever they happened to be. And it was very, very effective all through the first Boer War and up through this battle in the second Boer War. So I think it's an interesting point that this, this really was the, the, the, the, the, uh, guerrilla warfare of this time period. Brett? Yeah, I always, um, I'm interested in farmers turned into a guerrilla warrior. So that's an interesting little aspect. And I also want to say that British men will literally go on absurd imperial adventures that end in complete disaster instead of seeking therapy. And I think that's sad.

But on a real note, because we talked about this a little bit beforehand, Henry, I thought it was really interesting, the role that Churchill played. Oh, yes. Can you talk about that? Yeah, okay. So that actually takes me to the very next point that I was going to make in this story. So as I said, there was a bunch of messengers who were sent back and forth to try to communicate, you know, the people that were being massacred on this plateau, this rocky plateau,

and the commanders out off the battlefield. And most of them weren't making it. But eventually one did. The guy he comes through, and I believe he had a bullet hole through his pith helmet and everything. I mean, like he went through hell to get to the general that was off the field. And I believe it was General Warren, if I'm remembering correctly, of the two. I always mix up which one's which. But he gets over there.

And he tells them, we need reinforcements. We need to send people up to relieve the people who are just laying there under corpses, pretending they're dead because any sign of life would get, you know, another round of volleys off the hillsides from these people we can't even see at us. And the other thing that we really need you to do is send out another group of reinforcements to attack one of those three hills because until that happens, they have all of the high points surrounding us. And even a retreat off the hillside requires us to retreat under fire from the high ground.

So what you need to do is send in a group of soldiers to attack one of these three hills. And, you know, there's not that many of them. You should be able to take it if you, you know, mount a counteroffensive up the rear or something like that. You got to attack it, though, because once we get at least one of those hillsides, we'll be able to basically end the battle as a stalemate. The general, and again, I believe it was General Warren, who is completely incompetent and he was always afraid to do anything without his superior officers telling him exactly what needed to be done.

His instructions were still to take that ridge and hold at nothing else. he refused to grant the reinforcements. He said, no, we're not going to send out more. You know, just leave them out there and they'll, they got to hold that ridge. Now, this is where you mentioned Winston Churchill. There was a reporter who was in the presence of General Warren. Again, I believe it was General Warren. There was a reporter who was there.

And usually these war reporters would just sit there and, you know, take notes on what was being said back and forth so they could file their stories. But this, this reporter actually had the audacity of some. saying, for God's sakes, General, you have to do something. And the general turned to him and quickly said, you have to know where your place is. You're under arrest. And they locked them up. And of course, that journalist was Winston Churchill back during his journalistic days.

So, yeah, Winston Churchill was actually arrested as a journalist at this battle, which is just an interesting piece of history. Is there anything else that we want to talk about before I kind of talk about the conclusion of this battle? Well, there was another important bystander slash participant who is important in the history of the British Empire. If you're thinking of two of the most important people in British imperial history in its maintenance and in its dissolution, one of course for its maintenance is Winston Churchill. The other is Mahatma Gandhi, who was involved here as, I guess, an ambulance, carerner, wounded people. He was at this battle. And if you think of the end of the British Empire, certainly the loss of India with its independence, the whole Indian subcontinent, was a major blow. You can really date the end of the British Empire to that in the post-immediately post-World War II

period. Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought that up because it was something that I was going to mention, but it was the perfect place to put that in. So, yeah, absolutely Gandhi was present at this battle as, as you said, a kind of a paramedic of sorts at the battle, carrying these bits and pieces of the British soldiers off of the hillside afterwards. Anything else that we want to say? Okay, so let's get to the end of the battle then. So eventually there was some insubordination. There was a, I believe, a colonel who decided that he would attack one of the hillsides

without the general's authority. and he started to march in and the general told him no, no, no, turn around, go back, go back, can't go in. But alas, he kept marching towards this hillside and they started to fight their way up and they actually were inflicting some pretty severe casualties on the boars to the point where the boars almost were going to turn around

and retreat and leave the battlefield and allow the British to have these high points because really they weren't that important but, you know, they figured they'd hold them as long as the British were just going to be idiots sitting on this plateau. So this reinforcement starts to march up the hill and, you know, the boars are thinking, we've got to go. We've got to go. But what happened was this colonel, he got another order. He has to turn around.

And he said, basically, no, we're going to keep going up. But then he got shot, he died. And then the next guy in charge said, okay, the general told us we have to retreat. So we're actually going to pull out. And just before the boars were actually going to be moving their artillery off of the field and evacuating these hillsides, the British decided to leave the people on the plateau completely exposed again.

So the British then have to go into a retreat off of this hillside. It's like a very, very steep cliff. They're sliding down this dusty, rocky hill. and they're getting shot at in the back the entire time because the boars still have the high ground. So the amount of casualties was, again, by the standards of this war, pretty staggering. Overall, the boars had a total of 225 casualties

that would be both killed and wounded. On the other hand, the British lost over 1,600 men, including 87 officers during this battle. it was an absolutely embarrassing defeat, and that gets us to the point that I alluded to earlier. It was such an embarrassing defeat that both of those generals that were in charge, Warren and Buller, were relieved of duty of their commanding duty

because it was an embarrassment, and the entire war was an embarrassment up until that point. So they had to bring in some new, some new generals to take over. So they brought in Lord Roberts of Kandahar and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. And now those names may sound somewhat familiar to some of you, and I see Adnan nodding. Adnan, why don't I let you mention what you're nodding about

before I take up why I think this is an interesting point here? Well, I mean, exactly what you were saying before about the British victory over Sudanese, forces, not too much before this battle, is Khartoum, of course, is today's capital of northern Sudan, or Sudani of Sudan. And then Kandahar, people will probably have heard of Kandahar because of the Afghanistan War. Toon areas of Afghanistan, where also the British were heavily involved and suffered certain defeats in their attempts to expand and control the entire

subcontinent from their colonies in India. So the point that I'm going to make now is, and this is how we're going to get kind of to the end of this conversation, these two new commanders, Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, were very competent generals. That was why they were drafted in because all of the commanders of the existing British forces were complete useless pieces of garbage. These guys were very competent. And immediately, I mean, almost immediately after this battle ended,

something like, yeah, less than a month after this battle ended, there was some pretty significant defeats of the Boers. The war completely changed. It went from the British going in and just getting their rear ends handed to them in every single battle. to all of a sudden they were a well-drilled machine that had superior weaponry, superior numbers, and the war was basically a foregone conclusion at that point. The Boers continued their little guerrilla attacks for the next two years or so after that,

but the result of the war was never in doubt after those two took power. Now, the interesting point is that after this happened, it was a scorched earth policy. Kitchener and Roberts were going around, and particularly Kitchener were going around in just absolute scorched earth tactics. They were burning and killing everything in their path until eventually the board's capitulated.

After the war took place, Lord Kitchener instituted the world's first concentration camps. Now, of course, there had been many prisoner of war camps, you know, all through history, famously in the Civil War, there was Andersonville where the conditions were absolutely shockingly bad. There's been prisoner of war camps for forever. This was the first large-scale example of concentration camps where the bores were rounded up and stuffed into them, men, women, and children in these barbed wire facilities, terrible conditions. One-sixth of the individuals who were put in these concentration camps died of malnutrition alone.

So it's a very interesting historical point to say that, you know, again, this was the high watermark for the Boers. But because it was such an embarrassing defeat for the British, they put in people who were very competent, but also incredibly ruthless and incredibly inhumane. And these concentration camps really did in some ways provide a model for, of course, the Holocaust. Well, that's interesting, you know, I mean, there were also other models, of course, with the Germans, you know, in German West, Southwest Africa, their colony and the genocide of the Herrero people, which is an episode that we should definitely discuss at some point. I'm assuming you saw the news today, Adnan. I didn't actually. Oh, okay. This just came out this morning. So breaking news because this episode is going to be going up today on our Patreon. This morning, the German government has officially apologized for the genocide of the Herrero people and has offered recompense to the tune of $1.3 billion, which frankly is an absolute pittance. I said as much on our Twitter page earlier today. $1.3 billion for a genocide is a pittance. And it's obviously good that they're apologizing and acknowledging the fact that, hey, the Holocaust was not the first genocide that the Germans carried out.

They did so to the Herrero people. Yes. But, but, you know, $1.3 billion for a genocide, that's about the operating revenue of Volkswagen for about one month. Right, right. Well, I mean, so I hope that there will be further reparations. for people of basically what is today Cameroon. But important or interesting historically... Namibia.

And Namibia, sorry, excuse me, not Cameroon, but Namibia, thanks, Henry. Yep. But is that how important colonial experiences were in developing new techniques, historically speaking, of repression, brutality, and conditions. of populations. And so each of the two figures that you mentioned who came in and were competent in crushing the boers through these brutal techniques and methods were coming from experiences and other parts of the British colonial empire where, you know, they put down or attempted to

put down rebellions using these kinds of harsh tactics and then these get refined. So the fact, What made this really notorious was the fact that this was applied to a European settler population. And I think that's why it garnered a lot of attention at the time and some negative press as well is because there were white of this sort of brutality. But these kinds of techniques, of course, were happening, you know, in other colonies to non-Western, non-European people's all the time, to the extent that in the post-colonial period, somebody like Ime Césaire, a wonderful Caribbean anti-colonial thinker who wrote, and poet, who wrote a book, A Discourse on Colonialism, basically starts his treatise by talking about, if you're so scandalized by Nazism, it's only because, you know, it's Europeans who have been the victims of what was common in terms of the brutal

tactics, a kind of fascism that was deployed in the colonies against non-white, non-European peoples for hundreds and thousands of years. So basically, he was saying Nazism is just, that this form of fascism is taking colonial violence and actually bringing it to bear against Europeans. And that's something that's interesting. This is also an early case of this where that same kind of colonial violence is being deployed against a white settler population by the British Empire. Yeah, and you mentioned discourse on colonialism. Brad, you have an episode recently out of Red Menace that covers discourse on colonialism. Why don't I turn it over to you now for any thoughts that you have? We'll start wrapping this up now.

Sure, yeah, some final thoughts just like sort of echoing what Adnan just said is this profoundly deep connection between colonialism and fascism, not only instrumentally and sort of the industrialized genocide of other peoples, et cetera, but in the psychology itself. And on our sister podcast, which is related to this podcast, Red Menace, our last two episodes, one should be coming out today or tomorrow, actually. The one you mentioned was discourse on colonialism where we cover that entire text and talk about a lot of what Adnan just put on the table there. So if you're interested in a deep dive on those fronts, definitely check that out.

But we're also having an episode come out very soon on settler colonialism in the U.S. and Israel in its connections to the current situation. And we talk about the settler populations within Israel and in the United States and how their psychologies are really warped in a fascist direction because of the history of settler colonialism and what it takes to maintain a settler colonial setup. And one of what Phan and Sassar, they both talk about, is colonialism not only dehumanizes the colonized, it dehumanizes the colonized. and it makes them less human and recent interviews are abbey martin has this wonderful documentary on gaza

where she's interviewing israeli jews about palestine and what do we do about these arabs etc and just regular people on the street and it just is genocidal logics and premises flowing freely out of the faces of these people and it shows how the dehumanization process occurs in the colonizer's mind toward the colonized and then just separates themselves from their own humanity. And it's actually grotesque to see and to encounter. So I would recommend those two if you want a deeper dive on those subjects. And then just one last note of interest is I'm always interested in little known historical episodes where not only do they predate and are precursors to other historical events down

the line, but where historical figures are engaged in that historical episode that aren't famous yet. So in this instance, we have Gandhi and Churchill. And to see where those trajectories go from this little conflict, I think is particularly interesting as well. So I think this is a really good choice, Henry, for an IB to cover. Yeah, I thought it would be fun. And before Adnan, I turn it over to you for your final thoughts. I just wanted, since you mentioned Churchill again, I pulled up a quote from Churchill that he wrote about the concentration camps that were put in place here. And listeners, keep in mind, Winston Churchill's one of the worst people ever. I mean, I don't mean that that lightly either. I mean, he really was an abysmal human

being. So I know I didn't mention that the first time I mentioned him, but yeah, he's absolutely terrible. And even a monster, as bad as Winston Churchill, still was appalled by the concentration camp conditions. Here's what he wrote. Nothing. Not even the incapacity of the military authorities when charged with a novel and distasteful task of hurting large bodies of civilians into captivity could justify the conditions in the camps themselves. That's from Winston Churchill, who really is just a terrible, terrible person. And people that don't know how bad Winston Churchill was, there's a lot of resources out there for you to find out really how bad he was.

I know that in the West we generally get a pretty rosy view of him because of, you know, World War II and have to prop up our allies, images, and whatnot. I remember, during World War II, Stalin was incredibly popular in the U.S. It was only afterwards that his popularity tanked because of propaganda by the U.S. Churchill never really got negative propaganda at any point. So his popularity remained high in the U.S. even after World War II. But let's not forget, he was an absolutely atrocious human being. And I think it's important to note really quickly.

It's just important to note that, again, I think it comes into play that his sort of having exception to these concentration camps, who were in those camps, had those people been, you know, brown and black people, would Churchill have been as outraged, etc.? Probably not. I'd guess not. So even his moment of humanity is sort of undergirded by an inhumanity. Yeah. Audun? Well, just one other feature, I think that's worth noting about this history. is that this is one of the first occasions where you have a real globally speaking of troops volunteers from across the british empire

so i had first come across some of this in nationalist military histories of canada because there were participants sort of volunteers who came from canada which was you know part of the british empire later um you know even though was independent. It still was very closely affiliated with the British and ultimately is part of the Commonwealth. And so there were volunteers who went from Canada to go fight with the British forces against the Boers. And that included also troops from places like Australia, New Zealand, other colonies in Africa, and so on. And so this is an interesting feature of the marshalling of volunteers and we would see this history continue with Canadian troops going to and

you know Canadian troops and troops from Australia for example fighting in Gallipoli you know there's a very famous movie with Mel Gibson called Gallipoli the battle it's about the battle of Gallipoli Galibolu on the you know in in Turk what is modern day Turkey where British you know troops but a lot of colonial British troops from all over the Empire were attempting to defeat the young Turks, right? Or the officers that become the young Turks. So Mustafa Kamal Atataturk, who we've had an episode talking a little bit about his legacy in terms of the secular history of Republican Turkey. You know, he made his great name as a hero in this battle. But there were Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders,

all, you know, involved. And then the second aspect of it is there not only were these volunteers of kind of white settlers from different parts of former British colonial, settler colonial, settler colonies, but there were also colonial troops in the sense of Indians, for example, who fought in World War I, World War II, and likewise, as I mentioned, Gandhi, right? Gandhi was involved he wasn't you know bearing arms but he was part of this natal indian ambulance corps that was apparently financed by the local indian community that was why and why was there an indian community here is because the british empire had brought and moved populations around in within its empire there were indentured laborers who were working under a system of indenture so all across the

British Empire since the early 19th century. You have the end of the slave trade and then ultimately the abolition of slavery, but that didn't mean that they didn't want or need coerced labor. We just had recorded an episode that will be coming out soon about the tea war with Dr. Andrew Liu, which is all about the British, or at least partly, is about the British use of, you know, indentured labor in tea plantations in Assam region of India. And so all across the British Empire, they're moving people around using course of labor tactics and using colonial troops to help fight their wars. And in this case, you have a community in Natal, composed of free and indentured Indians.

who self-financed this support service for the British military. It's really quite astonishing, and we end up seeing in later history and much larger warfare these kind of resources and these techniques being exploited in much more intensive fashion. And as we wrap up, listeners, I just want to let you all know that, Adnan mentioned that we will have to do an episode. on the genocide of the Herrero and the Nama people at some point. So if you want to prepare yourself for that and you haven't heard about the genocide of the

Herrero and the Nama people, this is just your notice that that is going to be something that we're eventually going to do. So start your reading now. You know, you don't have to be totally immersed in it, but you definitely should be aware of this genocide that occurred right a couple of years after this. It was 1904 through 1908. We were just talking about, you know, 1900. But yeah, this genocide occurred, and we should definitely be aware of it.

So, yeah, just a notice for you to look it up. I think another topic since we were talking about this history that I just mentioned is also colonial troops in World War I or World War II. People would be astonished at how much the British and the French relied upon. you know, Africans from places like Senegal and troops from India, you know, fighting their wars for them. Yeah, well, and of course, that reminds me of, it's something that we talked about in a previous episode. I believe it was with Vijay Prashad, but it might have been a different one. There was the West African colonial troops for France who were promised a pension after World War II. And the French decided that they were going to short them, the pension,

like they were going to give them less than half of what they were promised. And so the West African colonial troops that fought with the French in World War II, they kind of rebelled against the French demanding the full payment of the promised pension that they were promised to get for fighting in World War II with the French. And how did the French respond? It wasn't acquiescing to the pension demands. It was massacring them. They went in.

It was called Camp Theoro, T-H-I-A-R-O-E, if memory serves. And they went in. They killed hundreds of people who found. fought with them in World War II because they didn't want to pay their pensions, which they had promised them. So, yeah, absolutely. There's an interesting movie not too long ago called Andejean, or in English it was called Paths of Glory that is about French colonial troops, mostly Algerian, North African ones fighting in World War II. And it also ends with note, it doesn't go into the massacre so much, but it does talk about the fact that promises that were made were broken in terms of payment

of pensions. And apparently, I'm forgetting the name of the French president at the time, Jacques Chirac. Apparently, Jacques Chirac saw the film and it touched him, and he cried after the film and promised that they would make good on those earlier commitments that had been made. You know, this is a very conservative, you know, French politician. But, you know, the whole history of, you know, the colonial military history is very connected also to the Algerian revolution. So this is a very interesting topic. Someday we should, we should trace it a little bit further. Brett, what are some future topics you want to talk about since we're all just throwing things out there right now and seeing what sticks?

Oh, man, I don't know. there's lots of topics to cover. I would like to cover some history of philosophy in particular. That's kind of my background. In fact, on Rev. Left in a week or two, we're doing an episode on Spinoza and trying to read Spinoza sort of through a dialectical materialist lens. So that's the sort of stuff that I would like to bring more into this show because we talk a lot about history and even, you know, vaccines and immunobiology. But I think a couple of episodes on the history of philosophy and its connections to social movements and development, I think, would be particularly interesting. For sure. Yeah, feel free to let us know what, you know, what you want to do, and I'm all for that.

Okay, so on that note, Ben, we're going to wrap up since we got a little bit meandery-e at the end. But Adnan, why don't I have you tell the listeners how they can find you on social media and your other podcast? Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan, A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N. and listen to The M-A-L-L-I-S topics across the Middle East Islamic world, Muslim diasporas, and we have an upcoming episode that should be out first week of June on a new biography of Edward Saeed with its author, Professor Timothy Brennan. So the great Palestinian academic and public intellectual look for that. Yeah, looking forward to it.

Brett, how can the listeners find you and all the work that you're doing? You can go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. On the Edward Saeed front, it might be fun sometime, even if as an I'd be just thinking of ideas to his book, his short book representations of the intellectual is a book I read early on. It covers some really interesting figures, Malcolm Mex, Sartre, et cetera. It might be a really interesting sort of discussion to open up what is an intellectual, what's the role of an intellectual in society, etc. Beautiful. And Adnan pulls it out right there. It's a quick read too.

And it's in Saeed writes really engagingly. So that'd be awesome. But yeah, to find my stuff, Revolutionary Left Radio.com, and go check out our last two episodes on Red Menace, discourse on colonialism and settler colonialism in the U.S. and Israel. And mark down that Saeed idea, Brad. That's something that we definitely should do.

As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck1995. You can support me on Patreon, where I write about immunology and public health. Patreon.com forward slash Huck 1995. You can follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. I always pause after the two R's because people mess that up pretty frequently. And you know how to find us on Patreon because that's where you are right now.

So until next time, listeners, stay safe and solidarity. We're going to be able to Thank you.