[OPE-L] On recent events in London and elsewhere

From: Asfilho@AOL.COM
Date: Fri Jul 08 2005 - 09:19:32 EDT 

 
 
Karl Marx in the New-York Daily Tribune, September 16,  1857 
The Indian Revolt
 
____________________________________
London, Sept. 4, 1857 
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  
Servians on their German and Hungarian neighbors, 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.

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