The article by Karl Marx you quoted is quite consistent with my earlier argument. I said that wanton killing is unacceptable, regardless of which side commits it and to what end. I argued against attempt to exonerate such killings by ideology - which is often practiced by both the right (our killing of them is justified) and the left (their killing of us is justified). I also suggested arguing the opposite side of such ideological exonerations while talking to the proponents.
The article you quoted does just that - it counters the outcry of Western propaganda machine over Third World barbarism with a claim that the supposedly "civilized" people were equally barbaric.
Wojtek
> The outrages committed by the revolted sepoys in India are
> indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable - such as one is prepared to meet
> only in wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above
> all of religion; in one word, such as respectable England used to
> applaud when perpetrated by the Vendeans on the "Blues," by the
> Spanish guerrillas on the infidel French-men, by Serbians on their
> German and Hungarian neighbours, by Croats on Viennese rebels, by
> Cavaignac's Garde Mobile or Bonaparte's Decembrists on the sons and
> daughters of proletarian France. However infamous the conduct of the
> sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England's
> own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of
> her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a
> long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that
> torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There
> is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of
> historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the
> offended, but by the offender himself.
>
> The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the
> nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence
> with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the
> British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered
> by them. To find parallels to the sepoy atrocities, we need not, as
> some London papers pretend, fall back on the middle ages, nor even
> wander beyond the history of contemporary England. All we want is to
> study the first Chinese war, an event, so to say, of yesterday. The
> English soldiery then committed abominations for the mere fun of it;
> their passions being neither sanctified by religious fanaticism nor
> exacerbated by hatred against an overbearing and conquering race, nor
> provoked by the stern resistance of a heroic enemy. The violations of
> women, the spittings of children, the roastings of whole villages,
> were then mere wanton sports, not recorded by mandarins, but by
> British officers themselves.
>
> Even at the present catastrophe it would be an unmitigated
> mistake to suppose that all the cruelty is on the side of the sepoys,
> and all the milk of human kindness flows on the side of the English.
> The letters of the British officers are redolent of malignity. An
> officer writing from Peshawar gives a description of the disarming of
> the 10th Irregular Cavalry for not charging the 55th Native Infantry
> when ordered to do so. He exults in the fact that they were not only
> disarmed, but 'stripped of their coats and boots, and after having
> received 12d. per man, were marched down to the riverside, and there
> embarked in boats and sent down the Indus, where the writer is
> delighted to expect every mother's son will have a chance of being
> drowned in the rapids. Another writer informs us that some inhabitants
> of Peshawar having caused a night alarm by exploding little mines of
> gunpowder in honour of a wedding (a national custom), the persons
> concerned were tied up next morning, and "received such a flogging as
> they will not easily forget." News arrived from Pindee that three
> native chiefs were plotting. Sir John Lawrence replied by a message
> ordering a spy to attend to the meeting. On the spy's report, Sir John
> sent a second message, "Hang them." The chiefs were hanged. An officer
> in the civil service, from Allahabad, writes: "We have power of life
> and death in our hands, and we assure you we spare not." Another,
> from the same place: "Not a day passes but we string up from ten to
> fifteen of them (non-combatants)." One exulting officer writes:
> "Holmes is hanging them by the score, like a 'brick.' " Another, in
> allusion to the summary hanging of a large body of the natives: "Then
> our fun commenced." A third: "We hold court-martials on horseback, and
> every n-word we meet with we either string up or shoot." From Benares
> we are informed that thirty zemindars were hanged on the mere
> suspicion of sympathizing with their own countrymen, and whole
> villages were burned down on the same plea. An officer from Benares,
> whose letter is printed in the London Times, says: "The European
> troops have become fiends when opposed to natives.
>
> And then it should not be forgotten that, while the cruelties
> of the English are related as acts of martial vigour, told simply,
> rapidly, without dwelling on disgusting details, the outrages of the
> natives, shocking as they are, are still deliberately exaggerated. For
> instance, the circumstantial account first appearing in The Times, and
> then going the round of the London press, of the atrocities
> perpetrated at Delhi and Meerut, from whom did it proceed? From a
> cowardly parson residing at Bangalore, Mysore, more than a thousand
> miles, as the bird flies, distant from the scene of action. Actual
> accounts of Delhi evince the imagination of an English parson to be
> capable of breeding greater horrors than even the wild fancy of a
> Hindu mutineer. The cutting of noses, breasts, etc., in one word, the
> horrid mutilations committed by the sepoys, are of course more
> revolting to European feeling than the throwing of red-hot shell on
> Canton dwellings by a Secretary of the Manchester Peace Society, or
> the roasting of Arabs pent up in a cave by a French Marshal, or the
> flaying alive of British soldiers by the cat-o'-nine-tails under
> drum-head court-martial, or any other of the philanthropical
> appliances used in British penitentiary colonies. Cruelty, like every
> other thing, has its fashion, changing according to time and place.
> Caesar, the accomplished scholar, candidly narrates how he ordered
> many thousand Gallic warriors to have their right hands cut off.
> Napoleon would have been ashamed to do this. He preferred dispatching
> his own French regiments, suspected of republicanism, to Santo
> Domingo, there to die of the blacks and the plague.
>
> The infamous mutilations committed by the sepoys remind one of
> the practices of the Christian Byzantine Empire, or the prescriptions
> of Emperor Charles V's criminal law, or the English punishments for
> high treason, as still recorded by Judge Blackstone. With Hindus, whom
> their religion has made virtuosi in the art of self-torturing, these
> tortures inflicted on the enemies of their race and creed appear quite
> natural, and must appear still more so to the English, who, only some
> years since, still used to draw revenues from the Juggernaut
> festivals, protecting and assisting the bloody rites of a religion of
> cruelty.
>
> The frantic roars of the "bloody old Times," as Cobbett used
> to call it-its playing the part of a furious character in one of
> Mozart's operas, who indulges in most melodious strains in the idea of
> first hanging his enemy, then roasting him, then quartering him, then
> spitting him, and then flaying him alive-its tearing the passion of
> revenge to tatters and to rags-all this would appear but silly if
> under the pathos of tragedy there were not distinctly perceptible the
> tricks of comedy. The London Times overdoes its part, not only from
> panic. It supplies comedy with a subject even missed by Moliere, the
> Tartuffe of Revenge. What it simply wants is to write up the funds and
> to screen the Government. As Delhi has not, like the walls of Jericho,
> fallen before mere puffs of wind, John Bull is to be steeped in cries
> for revenge up to his very ears, to make him forget that his
> Government is responsible for the mischief hatched and the colossal
> dimensions it had been allowed to assume.
>
> From: Karl Marx, "The Indian Revolt," New York Daily Tribune, 16 September
1857.
>
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