7.
When our last issue appeared, the press of these islands were pouring forth by the column their endorsement of the humanitarian sentiments of the Russian czar. Today the same newspapers are devoting columns to glowing descriptions of the cold-blooded slaughter by the British Army of the half-armed and half-civilized natives of a country they have wantonly invaded.
There is scarcely a capital in Europe from which Great Britain has not been complimented on the successful outcome of the battle before Khartoum; complimented by the very men (and newspapers) who a week ago were ostentatiously singing anthems of brotherly love with all men, and deploring the cruel necessity of war.
The hypocrisy of the whole proceedings is brought into still greater relief when we consider the nature of the battle over which the jubilation is so great, and still more when we remember the circumstances which have led up to the battle. The British occupation of Egypt, from the bombardment of Alexandria down to the latest massacre at Omdurman, has been one prolonged criminal enterprise, conceived and executed entirely in the interests of the holders of Egyptian bonds and speculating capitalists.
The people of Egypt attempting to free themselves from the grasp of the horde of officials and tax gatherers who were ruining the country were attacked in the most unjustifiable manner by the British fleet and army, their chief seaport bombarded, their country invaded, their popular government overthrown, their army overwhelmed by the superior equipments of their enemy, disaster and death spread far and wide over their peaceful plans. Every patriotic effort to repel the invader was denounced as a crime, the well-merited death meted out to such typical canting scoundrels as General Gordon, who fell trying to win the confidence of the people whom he meant to finally betray, was shrieked over as a “murder” while the merciless slaughter of half-armed natives was hailed as a glorious victory.
The wild Bedouins of the desert, in the midst of their fiercest forays, regarded as inviolable the wells from which water can alone be obtained in the desert; the civilized British army filled up the wells with carcases and filth; the savage Arabs made war like men upon men; the British army destroyed the standing crops and burned the villages upon the women and children. The enemy, as our Irish newspapers call them, fought for home and freedom; the British carried fire and the sword and desolation into a land and upon a people who had never injured them, a people who could not have disturbed their conquest even of Lower Egypt, had they ever been so willing.
But Britain has triumphed. Glorious triumph!
An army equipped with all the most destructive weapons, and with which modern science furnishes the assassin armies of the world, vanquished in the open field a band of half-civilized, half-armed, and undisciplined men. Our rulers may well exult at such a victory. But let us hope that the day is not far distant when, on a field not so far away, the hireling army which triumphed in Egypt may fail to save its paymasters and our oppressors from the doom they so richly deserve.
Workers’ Republic, September 10, 1898