Resuming transmission: Karl Marx on the London bombings

Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857

The Indian Revolt

The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India are indeed appalling,hideous, ineffable — such as one is prepared to meet – only in wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion; in one word, such as respectable England used to applaud when perpetrated by the Vendeans on the “Blues,” by the Spanish guerrillas on the infidel Frenchmen,by Servians on their German and Hungarian neighbors, by Croats on Viennese rebels, by Cavaignac’s Garde Mobile or Bonaparte’s Decembrists on the sonsand daughters of proletarian France.

However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last tenyears of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule ofhistorical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself....