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Well, you can see from the Wikipedia edit history that the user who wrote essentially the entire article has been banned from editing. They kept making contentious edits to articles about Northern Ireland, generally in support of IRA/Sinn Fein, and when they were told to stop, they created multiple accounts in a failed account to get around the restrictions. The article is generally backed up by the sources cited, but there are some distortions. For example, the article claims that the filtering was done by Special Branch or MI5, which is not supported by the sources cited. AFAIK MI5 rarely operated in colonies (unless there was a definite Soviet angle), because most colonies had their own counter-intelligence organizations. I think the editor has wrongly assumed the setup in post-1972 Northern Ireland was used in other times and places.
It seems this purging process had multiple goals and the press (inevitably and appropriately) focus on the shocking ones. There seems clear evidence of a conspiracy to cover up illegal and immoral actions. It's also a terrible loss for historians and for post-colonial healing/reconciliation/justice that so many documents were destroyed rather than relocated. But this process also seems to have intended to protect people who worked for the British from extrajudicial recriminations by the new governments. That seems like good intelligence work, using "good" in both the senses of ethics and effectiveness. Indians who had informed on S.C. Bose (who worked for the Japanese militarist regime), and Kenyans who informed against the Mau-Mau terrorists, deserved to have their details kept confidential.
Like so much in politics, a confused mixture of great good and great evil.
It seems this purging process had multiple goals and the press (inevitably and appropriately) focus on the shocking ones. There seems clear evidence of a conspiracy to cover up illegal and immoral actions. It's also a terrible loss for historians and for post-colonial healing/reconciliation/justice that so many documents were destroyed rather than relocated. But this process also seems to have intended to protect people who worked for the British from extrajudicial recriminations by the new governments. That seems like good intelligence work, using "good" in both the senses of ethics and effectiveness. Indians who had informed on S.C. Bose (who worked for the Japanese militarist regime), and Kenyans who informed against the Mau-Mau terrorists, deserved to have their details kept confidential.
Like so much in politics, a confused mixture of great good and great evil.
Nothing out of the ordinary, secret files get destroyed all the time. That's why they're secret. Hell, it wasn't even necessarily anything dirty, official stuff is secret for the sake of it.
As for how well the work was done. Well, there's an amusing story about the SOE files after the Second World War. Supposedly they were given to two officers to sort through and decide what needed destruction and what needed keeping. They decided this by placing half the files (roughly) on desks at opposite ends of the room. A waste paper basket was then placed in between, and any throw that made it in was a destruction, anything that missed was a keeper.
Yes, destroying secret files isn't necessarily dirty, but there is very clear evidence that the LEGACY files were actually dirty. The press reports quote from instructions that examples of racial or religious prejudice by the British authorities were to be destroyed. In other words, the intention was to cover up actions that were known to be wrong.
If the SOE anecdote rings true, it's because it's reminiscent of some of the worst aspects of British intelligence work in the mid-20th century. Public school japes by public schoolboys with very unfortunate consequences for brave people later on. I wonder how many of those files contained information that would have been helpful for MI5 molehunts, war crimes trials, etc., later on. I really hope it was made up by some drunk.
Don't you have a Noam Chomsky rally to attend?
Why is it that the government/intelligence services are always considered incompetent and working for a evil conspiracy to 'do something' (nobody seems to know what that something really is).
The intelligent services aren't always incompetent (the infiltration of the IRA, the Malayan Communist Party, and the Chinese side of the Hong Kong negotiations were all stunning successes for British intelligence), but I don't know what better evidence of incompetent intelligence work you could want than the Cambridge spy ring and the theft of nuclear weapons designs.
Various colonial officers destroyed documents about unethical and criminal activities. That is a very precise something. It wasn't a 'conspiracy' either: it was a mixture of official orders and widespread racism/abuse of power.
I have walked past a Noam Chomsky rally and deliberately not gone in....
It's difficult to sink lower than his malign influence on linguistics, but his political views manage it comfortably!So, here is the question. How do you know that the destroyed documents contained evidence of unethical or illegal activities? The assumption you are making is that those people must have undertaken immoral or illegal activities. Your preposition is that you simply know better ... But I strongly suspect that you don't. If illegal activities were undertaken on such a wide spread scale, please show me the evidence of people being brought to either civil or legal proceedings because of this the recent Bloody Sunday and Hilsborough trials should be sufficient indicators that the government is happy to bring people to account for crimes committed decade ago, even if they are soldiers or policemen.
There is a mass of evidence and reports about British abuses that those files contained. I have read numerous reports in the media that site large numbers of eye witness reports and that sometimes included attempts at court cases. However, the British government has always stonewalled such attempts and has successfully stymied most attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/29/revealed-bonfire-papers-empire
The suviving papers that have recently be revealed show that there was a systematic attempt to destroy papers that discussed illegal or unethical practices by the colonial government. This is not a case of:
but rather the government and intelligence services deliberately covering up evidence of wrongdoing. This is not a left wing conspiricy, it is a classic case of governments and intelligence agencies using their power to hide embarrassing truths, with plenty of public domain information to demonstrate its truth (even the British government doesn't deny that this occured).
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/29/revealed-bonfire-papers-empire
The suviving papers that have recently be revealed show that there was a systematic attempt to destroy papers that discussed illegal or unethical practices by the colonial government. This is not a case of:
but rather the government and intelligence services deliberately covering up evidence of wrongdoing. This is not a left wing conspiricy, it is a classic case of governments and intelligence agencies using their power to hide embarrassing truths, with plenty of public domain information to demonstrate its truth (even the British government doesn't deny that this occured).
So what those reports suggest is that there is no actual evidence, because if it did exist, it was destroyed. The question comes to 'why' it was destroyed and it is important at this point to note that the destruction of 'protectively marked' documentation is very very standard. In terms of the definition of a protective marking take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_Kingdom
The material was destroyed (and it says so in your links) because it would likely have compromised intelligence sources, led to loss of life or undermined the UK government. There is nothing particularly nefarious in such material, just that it is considered not generally releasable.
Infact, it doesn't - lets actually read the statements:
Your Article said:
Note, that it generally reads that materials which compromise UK officials, compromise the UK government in the eyes of the post colonial government; or jeopardise intelligence sources should be destroyed ... again standard practice for protectively marked materials. I might also add that the rest of your news article has many words like 'reportedly' and allegedly in it. It is all hearsay and conjecture and in my opinion people who have never worked with, and do not understand the reason for keeping such materials protected.
Therefore, I again challenge you to provide a source which shows that the UK undertook a process to destroy material which 'discussed illegal or unethical practices'. You will find that this is standard procedure for handling protectively marked material.
Now, this doesn't mean that I deny that wrong doing occurred, the UK governent has admitted to doing so*. I do however, object to the general Chomskyest assertion that the government and intelligence services are all incompetent abusers of power bent on world domination.
* http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the-mau-mau-litigation-justice-at-last/
Easy-Kill, your reasoning would be right if I was working from assumptions, but I am relying on evidence in the sources cited by WP:
The Independent said:
The key words, which a national newspaper said were taken from a primary source were "racial prejudice or religious bias”, because they are bad things and any British official using those words since WWII (before WWII is different) must have seen them as bad things.
The same article also raises the Batang Kali case, where records were destroyed:
The relatives asked HMG for an investigation, but they said it was too long ago. The relatives used all to the way to the Supreme Court, which said the ECHR didn't apply to the 1950s. to A Guardian article notes:
So we have a crime and a conspiracy to cover-up. I'm not talking about an Empire-wide conspiracy to cover up (my language on this has been confusing, apologies). The general rule of 'cock-up not conspiracy' applies here as elsewhere. But there were many local conspiracies around particular events which form a general pattern of racism, incompetence and cover-up. One of those was high-up in London, with Empire-wide effects.
The Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough inquiries happened because there was political pressure within the UK (Andy Burnham deserves particular credit for the latter). There isn't similar pressure for some colonial atrocities, so there is no inquiry.
And BTW I completely support protecting material that would have got local informants into danger. But the destruction of material related to former terrorists to protect people's careers was terrible intelligence work.