What would Marx say about Gaza?
By T.H.
In 1857, a major rebellion threatened British rule in India. Since the latter half of the eighteenth century, India had been made into a massive site for revenue extraction by military force. The rebellion started with the mutiny of Indian soldiers under British command (the sepoys), but soon spread to other parts of Indian society. At the time, Karl Marx was a regular contributor to The New York Daily Tribune; he wrote many articles on India. His reaction to the rebellion is instructive:
“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 Frenchmen, 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.”
“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…”
“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 … 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.”
“John Bull [a name for a typical Englishman] 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.”¹
In a separate article discussing the role of torture in revenue extraction, Marx concluded with this paragraph:
“We have here given but a brief and mildly-coloured chapter from the real history of British rule in India. In view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects. And if the English could do these things in cold blood, is it surprising that the insurgent Hindus should be guilty, in the fury of revolt and conflict, of the crimes and cruelties alleged against them?”²
Marx and Engels, The First Indian War of Independence 1857-1859, pp. 79-82; available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/09/16.htm
Ibid. 67; available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/09/17.htm