http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/images/la_image_11.jpgIn January 2016, I attended Tate Britain's Artist and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past, a disappointing exhibition that in spite of its title did not face Britain's past in any meaningful way. On the contrary, as I argued in my review, it shied away from this bloody history in favour of quasi-glorification, non-committal wording and vague descriptions that resulted in an exhibition sorely lacking any critical analysis of the realities of colonialism and imperial rule. A few days after I visited this exhibition, the results of a survey concerning the UK public's attitude towards the British Empire were announced. This survey found that 44 percent of the public were proud of their country's colonial past and 43 percent believed that the British Empire was a good thing. A similar survey in 2014 discovered that a staggering 59 percent of the public believed that the Empire was something to be proud of and that 34 percent would like it if Britain still had one; a paltry 19 percent saw it as something to be ashamed of. With these statistics in mind, I began to think about how Britain's violent past, as well as its present, is portrayed in other museums and cultural institutions around the country and how these depictions may have contributed to the public holding such ill-informed ideas about Britain's history of imperialism. Aware that I had not visited the Imperial War Museum since a school trip there almost two decades ago, I decided to visit its main site in South London in order to discover how it depicts the violence of Britain and the British Empire. The IWM, as the museum is now known, re-opened in 2014 after an extensive £40m refurbishment funded by -- amongst others -- Lord Ashcroft, Sir David Barclay (owner of the Daily Telegraph), Lord Rothermere (owner of the Daily Mail) and Evgeny Lebedev (owner of the Evening Standard and the Independent). Spotting the names of this assortment of Conservative Party donors and media mogul billionaires listed prominently as funders of the museum did not serve to increase my expectations of how it would portray Britain's role in the world. What I discovered upon my visit in April 2016 was a confusing mixture of typical -- at times blatant -- state-friendly propaganda in the museum's permanent galleries, and something very different and unexpected in its temporary exhibition space. A striking aspect of the IWM, particularly so given its name, is the glaring lack of references to British Imperial warfare it contains. Aside from a few cursory references to conflicts related to the end of Empire and the transition towards the Commonwealth, the British Empire is conspicuously absent from much of the museum. . . . A section of the museum entitled 'Secret Soldiers' that follows the MI5 display, unashamedly venerates Britain's elite special forces unit, the Special Air Service (SAS), for its "skill and determination" in "confront[ing] communist guerrillas" in the so-called Malayan Emergency (1948-1960). This heroic picture hides a different reality: that Britain's supposed anti-insurgency operation in Malaya was in fact a brutal war of mass murder, aerial bombardment (including the use of chemical weapons), torture and collective punishment, which was waged ruthlessly against the local population in order to ensure British companies maintained ownership and control of the region's natural resources, notably its rubber and tin. This shameful episode, though far from unique, is described in grim detail by the historian Mark Curtis in this piece, in which he quotes a British conscript who served in Malaya recalling that "when we had an officer . . . out with us on patrol I realised that he was only interested in one thing: killing as many people as possible". The role of the SAS in Oman is similarly white-washed by the exhibit's text, which describes the force's interventions in the Jabal al-Akhdar revolt in the 1950s and in the later Dhufar Revolution. According to the text, in 1970, the SAS helped to defend Dhufar "against Yemeni-backed rebels" and used its "tried and trusted 'hearts and minds' policy" to win over the local population and defeat the rebels. According to Professor Abdel Razzaq Takriti, author of Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976,the notion that the SAS won over the local population in this manner is "pure propaganda" which ignores that the strategy it utilised was "premised on augmenting and enhancing internal social divisions and fostering what amounted to an internal civil war within Dhufar". Takriti also comments that by reducing the Dhufari revolutionaries to "Yemeni-backed rebels", the IWM text totally obscures the popular character of the revolution; the reader is not told that Dhufar was actually being 'defended' against its own people on behalf of a pro-British "monarchical regime that was becoming increasingly absolutist in character". Takriti concludes that ultimately "the role of the SAS as a fundamentally colonial force is completely ignored" by the text. . . . On the day of my visit, the museum's main galleries were crowded with families and I found myself depressed at the thought of the thousands of school children who visit the museum every year being exposed to such an inaccurate and manipulative depiction of Britain's recent past. After all, ideas instilled in a person's mind at such a young age often become so deeply engrained as to become conceptualized merely as 'common sense' as opposed to a specific and self-serving set of ideas propagated by the ruling class. Notwithstanding this depressing thought, on the museum's third floor, I found something that served to complicate my impression of the institution as a whole and provided a small but welcome relief from the barrage of propaganda that I had faced elsewhere in the museum. At the time of my visit, the IWM was hosting a retrospective of the artist Peter Kennard entitled Unofficial War Artist. . . . After I left Kennard's retrospective, I walked out past the museum's gift shop where, amongst numerous posters reflecting the ongoing and widespread nostalgia in Britain for an idealised 1940s, I saw one that depicted Winston Churchill -- a man who while serving in Sudan shot at least five men whom he described as "simple-minded savages" -- holding a Thompson submachine gun. Indeed, the IWM's online gift shop actually has an entire section devoted to Churchill-related paraphernalia. This deep-rooted veneration, not to mention monetisation, of Churchill, callous racist that he was, speaks to the heart of the problem in this country. It is a damning indictment of the UK that Churchill remains widely cherished and in 2002 was even voted the 'greatest Briton of all time'. As I walked out of the museum, past the enormous naval guns that sit in front of its main entrance, it struck me that until it is completely unthinkable for Churchill's image to be marketed in this way, Britain will not have sufficiently come to terms with the reality of the British Empire and the role that 'great' men like Churchill played in the racist violence that was inherent to it.

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