Mark Curtis
Zed Books, 1995, £14.95/£39.95
The opening lines of Curtis’ introduction are:
‘In attempting to understand Britain’s role in the world, two approaches are
possible. In the first, one can rely on the mainstream information system, consisting primarily of media and academia, where commentators are presumed to provide analyses of current independent of the reasoning and priorities of the state. This is deemed to be consistent with notions of a ‘free press’ and ‘political science’. In the second approach, by contrast, one can consider the facts of the real world.’ (emphasis added)
I read that and let out a sigh of pleasure. Call me a naive empiricist, but I like the sound of ‘the facts of the real world’.
At one level the content is unexceptional. Curtis describes how after WW2, though the USA replaced UK as the world’s school bully number one, Britain showed the way in dealing with ‘local difficulties’ in the empire. What the Americans did in South East Asia in the 1960s and 70s was what Britain had done in Kenya or Malaya. Only scaled up. Where the British killed or imprisoned tens of thousands, dropped thousands of tons of bombs, and defoliated hundreds of square miles, the Americans did the same – but to the power of ten or fifty – or a thousand.
What is exceptional is the fact that Curtis has done a ton of research and has documented much of this. It is one thing to presume that Britain’s so-called decolonisation of its empire in the post-war years was a fraud, designed to leave former colonies with ‘friendly’ governments, and the mass of the population getting screwed as before; or to presume that the ‘Soviet threat’ after the war was largely a fabrication by the USA and UK. But to produce the evidence is another. Curtis has produced the evidence – and, as the extract on the Iran coup reproduced above shows, often from official papers. And to my knowledge, no-one else has.
Given the pathetic intellectual and social deference paid to the Foreign Office and its satellite organisations in this country, it is hardly surprising that the mainstream literature on British foreign policy is so limited. Nobody wants to blot their copy books. (And I use that school metaphor deliberately.) How interesting, then, that Curtis should be described on the book’s cover as ‘a former Researcher Fellow at Chatham House’. (He now works for the charity Action Aid.)
Curtis’ book does not claim to be comprehensive: he’s arguing a thesis with detailed examples, not attempting a history. But a history is probably now within intellectual reach. There is now enough material to do one.
This is genuine, major league, ground-breaking stuff. Curtis is the closest we have yet produced to a British Noam Chomsky.