Richard Gott pointedly ends his review of the Oxford History of the British Empire (LRB, 25 April) with a remark that New Labour looks eager to take up the white man's burden. No more than Old Labour, surely, with its Kenyan groundnuts scheme, or the socialist tradition in general. Indeed a lot less. Marx and Engels often praised 'the right of civilisation over barbarism'. H.G. Wells closed his Anticipations in 1902 with a demand for an all-white utopia, and in an article for the New Statesman in August 1913 Sidney and Beatrice Webb called for empire without end: 'Idle to pretend that anything like effective self-government, even as regards strictly local affairs, can be introduced for many generations to come - in some cases, conceivably never.' Shortly before, in a letter of 1899, the Californian socialist and white-supremacist Jack London, stirred by US victories in the Spanish-American War, called it 'unavoidable, the Black and the Brown going down before the White'. In a preface to On the Rocks in 1933 Shaw demanded socialist genocide, and in February 1938, impressed by reports of Hitler's ethnic cleansing, he wrote to Beatrice Webb asserting 'the right of states to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable'. So his view of the trial of leading Serbian socialists in the Hague might have been interesting. The selective memory of the Left has chosen to forget the uniquely racist tradition of socialism over a century and more, from Marx to Shaw, when only socialists demanded genocide. Now, if we dare, we may choose to remember it.
George Watson St John's College, Cambridge
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