The
Boer Fight For Freedom
by Michael Davitt
(extract from Preface, 1902)
(Taken from Irish Political Review, March 2003)
There are to-day 45,000 women watching 50,000 children inside of barbed wire fences surrounded by British soldiers, arms in hand, in South Africa. They are imprisoned in camps in which 14,000 of these children have died already of sickness induced by cold and the privations inflicted upon them in one year. They were taken from their homes by England’s troops as a military measure, and they are still imprisoned as a means of subduing the spirit of resistance of husbands, fathers and sons fighting for independence… But the world looks on—the civilized Christian world of churches, and of preachers of the Gospel, and of novel readers—at this barbarous spectacle in South Africa…
The same world of churches and of moralists is that which a few years ago called out hysterically for the punishment of Turkey on account of outrages perpetrated upon Armenian Christians…. Had 14,000 Armenian children been slain by “the military measures” of Abdul Hamid, the ships of France, America and England would have entered the Dardanelles in obedience to the outraged feelings of a united Christian world.
But Abdul Hamid does not own gold mines, or regulate the money-markets of Paris, New York and Berlin from Constantinople. He has not this “Christian” advantage. Moreover, he is a Mohammedan. He is outside the pale of Christianity, and can therefore be coerced into a compliance with the humane mandate of an interested Christian public opinion.
England has killed 14,000 Christian children, has imprisoned 45,000 Christian women in barbed wire enclosures, has devastated two Christian cities where there was less poverty and less vice than in any other Christian community in the world, and has armed savages to help her in a war which had its origins in motives as base and as odious as ever prompted the Sultan of Turkey to burn an Armenian village or to massacre his rebellious subjects. And yet Cardinal Vaughan,* in the name of the Catholic Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury in behalf of the Protestants, and Mr. Hugh Price Hughes for the Nonconformists, of the enlightened Christian nation, piously call down God’s blessing upon the arms which are killing and exterminating a little Christian nation in South Africa. And the United States, Austria, and other Christian nations, equally Christian, enlightened and humane, sell horses and supplies to the power which wages such a war.
…the explanation of this horrible anomaly in the moral standards of the day is not far to seek. England, by her money markets and press and commerce; by her howling hypocrisy in pulpit and Parliament; has successfully mammonized the world. By her rationalistic missionaries, her newspapers, and the influence of her wealth, she has morally debased Christianity, and has enthroned the creed of human cupidity in the Temple out of which the gentle Saviour of Nazareth, with his gospel of love and of justice and humanity, once banished the money changers. That is why Cardinals and Archbishops, papers and stock exchanges, politicians and cabinets, look on as unmoved by the horrors of concentration camps as the Herodian High Priests probably did at the measures which carried out the wholesale murder of the Judean children 1,900 years ago. It also explains why a United States, a France, and a Germany continue, at least in their Governments, the passive spectators or the most dishonourable and unchristian war which has ever disgraced a civilized age.
* “It is now a question of something more than of what is lawful. The question is, Shall the British Empire be allowed to fall to pieces by supineness and by want of determination and self-denial. The answer is, No.
“The
Empire has been raised up by the same Providence that called the Roman Empire
into existence, and as God used the one towards the attainment of His own Divine
purpose of mercy, so does He seem to be using the other…”
Hubert Cardinal Vaughan
If you wish to subscribe to the Irish Political Review, Labour & Trade Union Review, Church & State or Problems Of Capitalism & Socialism please go to our secure sales area. Postal delivery is free within the European Union.