Age of Emergency by Erik; Linstrum

Author:Erik; Linstrum [Linstrum, Erik;]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mr. [Tom] Driberg (Labour) asked what enquiries had been made into the methods used by police officers in interrogating suspects in Malaya. Mr. [Alan] Lennox Boyd said there had been many rather wild accusations of ill-treatment and it was clearly in the Communists’ interests to propagate those stories. He said any specific allegations had been investigated, and in a few cases where cause had been shown, stern action had been taken. Mr. Driberg said the Colonial Secretary should be asked to investigate this subject. Mr. Lennox Boyd replied that more time and trouble should be devoted to considering the problem of the police officers themselves in their appallingly difficult task. He said much time spent in checking ill-founded allegations could have been better employed in helping to bring the dreadful war to an end.138

Apologists for colonial violence, in turn, exploited distaste for partisan squabbling to deflect scrutiny.

For critics of colonial war, the journalistic hesitance to take sides created a quandary. They recognized that allegations carried the most weight when “serious and responsible” outlets reported them, as Anti-Slavery Society activist Thomas Fox-Pitt observed in 1956. But because the most influential media institutions were also the most cautious, news of wrongdoing usually ended up in the pages of “sensational and emotional” publications “with a strong party bias.”139 Colonial violence was thus marked as a cause rather than a story. The papers that covered it most consistently, like the Daily Worker and Peace News, were those that had the least credibility with the public or the establishment.

Whether politically aligned or ostensibly neutral, British news organizations presented a mixed and uncertain picture of what was happening in the colonies. Reports of atrocity appeared regularly but in ways that diminished their urgency: framed as allegation rather than fact, counterbalanced with steadfast denials, contradicted by other stories, played down by opinion writers, and buried on inside pages. In an age when sights and sounds traveled rapidly across time and space, colonial violence was no secret. But neither was it treated as a moral emergency.

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