10+Downing+Street+-+Andreiescu+Raul


 * THE HISTORY OF No 10 DOWNING STREET.**
 * No. 10 Downing Street stands on an ancient site where traces of both Roman and Saxon buildings have been found.**
 * In the Middle Ages, a succession of buildings stood on this site, including the brew-house of the Abbey of Abingdon.**
 * In 1530, Henry VIII built an enormous rambling palace that filled the site from St James's Park to the Thames and from Westminster to Charing Cross.**
 * The palace - named Whitehall - took in the whole area either side of the street named after it. It was the official residence of the kings and queens of the 16th and 17th centuries, (Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II, William and Mary) until it was destroyed by fire in 1698.**
 * The Banqueting House is the only building that survives from those days.**
 * The modest aspect of the Prime Minister's official residence, No. 10 Downing Street, and the unpretentious front, are deceptive: there are, in fact two houses.**
 * That facing Downing Street is a typical late 17th century town house (re-fronted in the 18th and enlarged in the 20th centuries).**
 * Downing Street was developed by speculator George Downing, who returned from America during the English Civil War and became Cromwell's Scoutmaster (or Chief of Intelligence). He realised that the closeness to the Palace of Westminster made the site potentially valuable to build on. The street was built in 1684.**
 * [|10 Downing Street is the residence and office of the][|Prime Minister of the United Kingdom] and the headquarters of [|Her Majesty's Government]. It is situated on [|Downing Street] in the [|City of Westminster] in [|London], [|England]. It is actually the official residence of the [|First Lord of the Treasury], but in modern times this post has always been held simultaneously with the office of Prime Minister.**
 * Downing Street is the street in [|London], [|England], which for over two hundred years, has contained the official residences of two of the most senior British cabinet ministers, the [|First Lord of the Treasury], an office held by the [|Prime Minister of the United Kingdom], and the [|Second Lord of the Treasury], an office held by the [|Chancellor of the Exchequer]. The most famous address in Downing Street is [|10 Downing Street], the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury—and thus, in modern times, the residence of the Prime Minister, since the two roles have usually been filled by the same person (exclusively so since 1902). As a result of this "Downing Street" or "Number 10" is often used as a [|metonym] for the Prime Minister or his or her office, whilst "Number 11" is likewise a term for the Chancellor of the Exchequer or his or her office.**

=**10 Downing Street's Gulag**=


 * In October 1952, the British governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, declared a state of emergency. Mau Mau rebels were attacking and killing African loyalists and white settlers in a quest for "land and freedom." Whites were in a panic, and the empire needed a swift show of force. What began as a military operation turned into an eight-year campaign of terror against Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu. British soldiers herded nearly one million of them into detention camps and "emergency villages," where they endured forced labor, starvation, torture, and disease. At least 100,000 died. When the British left Kenya in 1963, they destroyed all official files relating to their crimes. The Kikuyu story was effectively buried until assistant professor of history Caroline Elkins provided a thorough historical documentation of the capital crimes in her new book, //Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya//.**
 * Elkins didn't set out to uncover British war atrocities. Based on her early research in the official archives, she planned to write a history of the success of Britain's "civilizing mission" -- including civics courses and home-craft classes -- in the detention camps of Kenya during the Mau Mau conflict. But private archives and interviews with former colonial officers produced material that didn't match the official account. "It wasn't adding up," she says. "Then, I turned it upside-down and suddenly it all made sense."**
 * [[image:http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/03-images/09_002.jpg width="300" height="207"]] ||
 * Kikuyu survivors, most in their seventies and eighties, told harrowing tales of life in the camps. The detention system, officially named the "Pipeline," meticulously sorted people according to their Mau Mau sympathies. "Whites" -- mostly women and young children -- were viewed as the least dangerous; their only crime was being ethnic Kikuyu. The government shipped them on trains and lorries to the overcrowded reserves, where they lived and worked under armed guard. "Greys" were guilty of Mau Mau involvement and drew stints in moderately punitive labor camps. "Blacks" -- hard-core insurgents -- were banished to the harshest prisons.**
 * Detainees moved "up" or "down" the Pipeline depending on their degree of resistance or acquiescence. But brutality was common and took place at every level, ranging from electrocution and mutilation to beatings and various forms of sexual assault and humiliation. Many of the women forced to labor on so-called "poor relief" projects on the reserves died of exhaustion and disease. Others found their babies had died while strapped to their backs during work brigades. Both British officers and loyalist African guards raped women with impunity.**
 * Elkins spends much of her book trying to account for how a brief British military operation turned into a systematic assault on an entire people. By the early 1950s, Kenya was Britain's remaining prize colony. The Indian subcontinent had gained independence, and the British looked to Africa to help finance the homeland's postwar reconstruction. As Conservative Party governments funneled investment into white settlers' estates, the Kikuyu saw their already diminished landholdings and economic opportunities shrink further. The Mau Mau rebellion, like so many anticolonial uprisings, sprang from a reservoir of popular suffering and anger that the authorities had long managed to ignore.**
 * [[image:http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/03-images/10_001.jpg width="300" height="286"]] ||
 * **British soldiers guard Mau Mau suspects on their way to a detention camp.** ||
 * But the Mau Mau were also qualitatively different from any insurgents the British had faced. Although only 32 whites in total were killed, the rebellion's "primitive" symbolism shocked colonial society. Mau Mau leaders relied on elaborate "oathing" rituals, involving the blood and body parts of sacrificial goats, to bind new recruits to the struggle. Government authorities viewed these ceremonies as evidence of backwardness. They called in J.C. Carothers, a famous ethnopsychiatrist, who diagnosed the Kikuyu with a form of "mass psychosis" arising from "a crisis of transition between primitive and modern worlds." Confession was eventually determined to be the only path to recovery: once the Kikuyu had renounced their oaths they could begin their moral reeducation under British tutelage. Many detainees resisted, and forced confession became an end in itself.**
 * Most British citizens saw little reason to question their government's line on the internment camps. The newspapers had helped stir up racist fears during the rebellion by printing gory photographs of murdered settlers and detailing the "bestial" and "degraded" practices of the insurgents. The sensational coverage made //Mau Mau// a household word, synonymous with savagery. "There was a sense," Elkins points out, "that [the Mau Mau] got what they deserved." The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, and his party's prime ministers, including Winston Churchill, continued to tout the system's successes despite mounting evidence of abuses. "It was," Elkins writes, "as if by insisting loudly enough and long enough, [the authorities] could somehow revise the reality of their campaign of terror, dehumanizing torture, and genocide."**
 * As disturbing reports trickled out of Kenya, a handful of Labour Party MPs led by Barbara Castle began to press for an independent investigation into the detention system. But not until 1959, after the fatal beating of 11 detainees in Hola prison, were the detention camps finally closed, heralding the end of British rule in Kenya. Still, the full story never came out. The political focus in England shifted quickly enough to allow the perpetrators time to cover their tracks. Kenyans recall seeing bonfires around Nairobi in the final days before the British departure in 1963; former colonial officers have acknowledged receiving orders to destroy hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the Pipeline's victims.**
 * When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke last summer, Elkins was completing the final chapter of her book. She found the parallels unnerving. The excuses for torture given by American officials closely resembled those that British prime minister Harold Macmillan and his colonial secretary gave in 1959 when they were confronted with the 11 beating deaths. "Whether it's Britain's 'civilizing mission' or America's 'freedom and democracy,'" she says, "the dark side of Western imperialism and the official wisdom behind it have not changed much in the last 50 years."**
 * Most British citizens saw little reason to question their government's line on the internment camps. The newspapers had helped stir up racist fears during the rebellion by printing gory photographs of murdered settlers and detailing the "bestial" and "degraded" practices of the insurgents. The sensational coverage made //Mau Mau// a household word, synonymous with savagery. "There was a sense," Elkins points out, "that [the Mau Mau] got what they deserved." The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, and his party's prime ministers, including Winston Churchill, continued to tout the system's successes despite mounting evidence of abuses. "It was," Elkins writes, "as if by insisting loudly enough and long enough, [the authorities] could somehow revise the reality of their campaign of terror, dehumanizing torture, and genocide."**
 * As disturbing reports trickled out of Kenya, a handful of Labour Party MPs led by Barbara Castle began to press for an independent investigation into the detention system. But not until 1959, after the fatal beating of 11 detainees in Hola prison, were the detention camps finally closed, heralding the end of British rule in Kenya. Still, the full story never came out. The political focus in England shifted quickly enough to allow the perpetrators time to cover their tracks. Kenyans recall seeing bonfires around Nairobi in the final days before the British departure in 1963; former colonial officers have acknowledged receiving orders to destroy hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the Pipeline's victims.**
 * When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke last summer, Elkins was completing the final chapter of her book. She found the parallels unnerving. The excuses for torture given by American officials closely resembled those that British prime minister Harold Macmillan and his colonial secretary gave in 1959 when they were confronted with the 11 beating deaths. "Whether it's Britain's 'civilizing mission' or America's 'freedom and democracy,'" she says, "the dark side of Western imperialism and the official wisdom behind it have not changed much in the last 50 years."**