A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

own laws. Various foreigners annexed slices of territory - the British, the French, the Russians, the
Germans, even the Japanese. In 1899, a patriotic secret society called the Order of Harmonious
Fists - which the British derisively nicknamed the Boxers - began tearing up railways and killing
foreigners and Chinese Christians. The Boxer rebellion was as bloody and cruel as the Indian
mutiny, and was stamped out as ruthlessly - by an international force that included the Japanese.
The Chinese government had to pay a third of a billion dollars in compensation, and to make more
concessions. The result was an upsurge of Chinese nationalism, which led to the overthrow of the
Manchu dynasty in 1911, by rebels headed by Sun Yat-sen. When Sun tried to get the foreigners
out of China, most of them flatly refused to co-operate. Sun turned to the Soviet Union for aid. The
long-term result was present-day communist China - another product of western stupidity and
western greed.
Japan had similar problems with the west. In 1853, America established peaceful contact with
Japan, when American warships steamed into Yedo (later Tokyo) harbour. Trade links were
formed, and the Japanese also opened ‘treaty ports’. They soon found, like the Chinese, that
foreigners expected to live according to their own laws, and to impose their own rules of trade. In
1862, an Englishman who had accidentally broken a rule of politeness was killed by the followers
of a local lord. With one voice, the western powers - British, American, French and Dutch -
protested, and sent a naval force to bombard coastal towns; they also humiliated the emperor - who
was regarded by the Japanese as a god - by threatening to bombard Kyoto unless he signed treaties.
The Japanese decided it was time to modernise. So began the remarkable success story which
resulted in modern industrialised Japan. But the humiliations which the west had inflicted - and
continued to inflict - on Japanese pride led eventually to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December
1941. To the west it was an appalling example of Japanese treachery and ruthlessness. To the
Japanese, it was an attempt to avenge a century of insults and humiliations.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the western powers also parcelled out Africa. The
Dutch had already discovered that its southernmost tip had a pleasant climate and settled there. The
Spanish and Portuguese had settled an area of the west coast, which became known as the Gold
Coast, the Ivory Coast and the Slave Coast. In the late 1870s, King Leopold of Belgium financed
the American explorer Stanley, who presented the king with a large area of the Congo Basin, which
became known as the Belgian Congo. The cruelties committed in the rubber plantations there
became legendary; natives were flogged to death and, if they tried to escape, tortured and mutilated.
The French claimed portions to the north of the Congo; the Portuguese seized a stretch from the
east to the west coast; while the Germans concentrated their attention on the east coast around
Zanzibar. Italy seized Somaliland, Eritrea and Ethiopia in the north. The British, more ambitious
than any of the others, schemed to make Africa British from the Cape to Cairo, and succeeded in
taking a large area from the Dutch - known as the Boers - in the Boer war 1899-1901. Clearly, it
never struck anyone for a moment that the Africans themselves had a certain right to their own
country. But when, after the Second World War, some African states succeeded in achieving
independence, many became communist simply because communist ideology seemed to be at the
opposite extreme from western imperialism.
* * *
All this then, seems to support the anarchist view that government is to blame for mankind’s
problems. But the anarchist view rests on the notion that there are two classes in the world: the