What the Empire doesn’t want you to know

Thoughts for India’s Independence Day

*Trigger Warning* Indian colonial trauma, Hindu colonial trauma

World map showing the height of the British empire. Countries controlled by the British are in red. The British empire spanned the Indian subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand, parts of southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, many countries in Africa and the Middle East, and parts of the Caribbean, parts of South America, and Canada.

I published this piece on my website 2 years ago:

To my Indian community: Happy 75th Independence Day.

To my non-Indian community: Did you know that the British burned many empire papers when India attained Independence? They did it to hide all their past criminal acts, and also to hide all the plans they’d already put in motion to continue to harm us, plots and deceptions that still bleed India to this day.

Just like any other gang, Britain set fire to the evidence of their criminal activities.

This is why comedians like Eddie Izzard can make jokes about how the British empire somehow wasn’t as brutal as other empires — because Eddie Izzard’s ancestors burned the evidence that they were in fact the most brutal empire the world has ever seen. Eddie Izzard can therefore gaslight everyone into thinking that the British were a “gentle empire” and make money while doing so.

Local news reports in Delhi told of the great “pall of smoke” that hung over the city in the run up to Independence, because of all of the years and years of empire records the British were…