Ian Cobain > Quotes

“As a consequence, some historians would in future be able to enjoy the smell of the first rains in Kenya and the ripe mangoes, and the singing of the Kikuyu women, rather than concern themselves with the castrations, and the water-boarding, and the roasting alive.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

“Operation Legacy allowed the British to nurture a memory of Empire that was deeply deceptive – a collective confabulation of an imperial mission that had brought nothing but progress and good order to a previously savage world, unlike the French, Italians, Belgians, Germans and Portuguese – those inferior colonial powers whose adventures had been essentially brutal, cynical and exploitative.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

“Slavery had been abolished in Bahrain in 1937, in Kuwait in 1949 and in Saudi Arabia in 1962.32 In Oman, it flourished. The Sultan himself owned around 500 slaves. An estimated 150 of them were women, whom he kept at his palace at Salalah; a number of his male slaves were said to have been physically deformed by the cruelties they had suffered.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

“If the interrogations at Kandahar were brutal, those at Bagram were pitiless. At least two Afghans died under interrogation after being chained from the ceiling of their cells for several days while being beaten about the legs. Post-mortem examinations showed that their injuries were so severe that, had they survived, their legs would have had to be amputated.”
― Ian Cobain, Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture

“The people of Oman despised and feared both their Sultan and the British who kept him in place and colluded with his policy of non-development. Ranulph Fiennes had been in the country for just a few hours when he began to sense how deep this enmity ran. He walked to a town near his base, ‘and everywhere saw poverty and dirt; disease and squalor’. His fellow officers, he noticed, carried revolvers at their waists as they strolled around the market. ‘The people jostled past and spat and stared from dark, proud eyes, with hate I thought.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

“The official British position was that the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was a fully sovereign and independent state.25 In truth, it was a de facto British colony. As such, successive British governments were responsible for the woeful political, social and economic conditions that the Sultan’s subjects endured, and which both created and fuelled the popular revolt.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

“By early April 1946 British soldiers had handed over to French troops, but the campaign that they fought had already kick-started the thirty-year conflict now known as the Vietnam War.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

“So MI5 and MI6 officers should not be seen to condone torture and must certainly not torture any prisoners themselves. But, crucially, they could continue to question people whom they knew were being tortured. The door that could have been shut upon the use of torture during British operations against Islamist terrorism had been left open just a crack. A crack was all that was needed. Over the years to come, all manner of horrors would slip quietly through.”
― Ian Cobain, Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture

“In their determination to put down a popular rebellion against the cruelty and neglect of a despot who was propped up and financed by Britain, British-led forces poisoned wells, torched villages, destroyed crops and shot livestock.40 During the interrogation of rebels they developed their torture techniques, experimenting with noise, the infliction of which became the fifth of the so-called Five Techniques that would later be used in Northern Ireland and condemned by the European courts.41 And areas populated by civilians were turned into free-fire zones. Little wonder that Britain wanted to fight this war in total secrecy.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

“In fact, the Foreign Office staff at the ‘clear-the air’ conference were aware that it was not some small and barely significant collection of papers that the department had been concealing; it had been struggling with a shameful and unlawful secret of colossal proportions. There were not thousands of files of public documents being held there, but anything up to 1.2 million, containing millions and millions of individual pages. Far from taking up a few hundred feet, or even a few hundred yards, of shelving, the Foreign Office’s invisible cache of historical records took up fifteen miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

“In fact, this was not a new lesson: by 1914, it was apparent to governments across Europe that the management of public opinion was an inescapable element of large-scale wars. On the Western Front, six correspondents had been ‘embedded’ within the British Army; they produced what some believe to be the worst reporting of any war, before or since, and all were knighted for their services.79 Their editors knew that these correspondents were concealing the horrors of trench warfare: the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, told C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: ‘If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship would not pass the truth.”
― Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation