Caroline Elkins - Colonial War Crimes in Kenya

Harvard University assistant professor of History an Afrian Studies, Caroline Elkins, discusses her Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya."

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Kenya
• Britain
• British
• colonial
• war
• crimes
• mau

[SinhaHelaya]

Fuck Britannia.

[PrometheanRunGood]

Kudos to her, if nothing else for pissing off the closet proponents of British Empire.

[Octavius0]

Garbage. This women is a charlatan

[JFSebastian74]

Her study has been widely criticised and discredited as sensationalist, simplistic and inaccurate. Elkins calls herself an historian but her primary role is political activist, two mutually exclusive activities. This isn't an objective documentation of facts but a polemic; propaganda to further her biased viewpoint. Unfortunately, controversy attracts attention and no doubt many will swallow her one-sided guff.

[JFSebastian74]

Her study has been widely criticised and discredited as sensationalist, simplistic and inaccurate. Elkins calls herself an historian but her primary role is political activist, two mutually exclusive activities. This isn't an objective documentation of facts but a polemic; propaganda to further her biased viewpoint. Unfortunately, controversy attracts attention and no doubt many will swallow her one-sided guff.

[jonoessex]

@maureenOWW Completely agree with you. Us Brits had no right in Kenya and we did wrong but dishonest and hateful are good words to describe her. British colonialism is kenya was wrong but Elkins book is obviously propaganda designed to spread hate against the british.

[maureenOWW]

I just forced myself to watch this all the way through (warning: the mouthbreathing aspergers presentation continues throughout it's length) and she comes out with a true classic at the end. She says that eyewitness accounts are 'empirical evidence'. Pardon? They are nothing of the sort. Empirical evidence in this case would be film of the atrocity taking place, or bullets recovered from bodies that can be matched to guns. Heresay is NOT empirical evidence. How can this person be a 'historian'?

[maureenOWW]

She is the David Irving of Mau Mau apologists, and deserves an equal level of bile and ridicule. For those who want a balanced view of the Emergency I would recommend 'Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization' by David Branch. This book focuses on the true victims of this period, the loyalists who fought against the mau mau terror and who were successful in defeating them. Turning this complex civil war into something akin to Star Wars is pathetic.

[maureenOWW]

How this dishonest, hateful creature won a Pulitzer is beyond me. Not only is her writing tedious, one-sided, and often laughable, but her insane leaps of imagination (assuming 300,000 people were killed by the british based on nothing but census data) disqualify her from the title 'historian'. She has an extremist political agenda and a thirst for publicity (and of course money) which led to her publishing a work which has been soundly thrashed by every other historian of the period.

[JaysalP]

the british empire = institutionalised theft (and other crimes), slavery, and mass extermination. Rule Britannia - go to hell!