How England Sees Itself

[zhao]

this British co-worker in management once announced in a loud and cheerful voice to the entire restaurant bar where staff was having drinks, when the topic turned to the English breakfast: "Beans and Toast! WE BUILT AN EMPIRE ON THAT!" (and i drily added "and tea. don't forget about tea.") Somehow i have a hard time picturing a Belgian, Dutch, German, or citizen of any other former power making quite such a proud proclamation in public...

And it's of course not only about direct violence. the British empire gets credit for a slew of important innovations which were used subsequently through out the colonial era by many toward their ends, in terms of divide and rule, in terms of building bureaucratic framework for systematic exploitation, in terms of establishing legal parameters and legislation which justified atrocities.

Side note: my South African friends have on different occasions expressed the same sentiment: that the Boers were out right horrible, but the Brits would smile, shake your hand, and as soon as you turn around stab you in the back. And they were also more interested in economic control rather than the overt racism of apartheid...

Also: has the British complicity in the Palestine/Israel conflict EVER been properly addressed?

 

[luka]

oliver craners intellectual hero backs gove reforms
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/history-teaching-curriculum-gove-right

 

[Mr. Tea]

Now I want to hear a version of 'We Built This City On Rock And Roll' that goes 'We Built This Empire On Beans On Toast'.

 

[jorge]

'Somehow i have a hard time picturing a Belgian, Dutch, German, or citizen of any other former power making quite such a proud proclamation in public... '

I think I would agree, I definetly haven't sensed much pride or nostalgia from dutch people when talking to them about their colonial past. Plenty of english people I have met, and even members of my family often hold the time of the empire in high regard and have a strange kind of reverance for our colonial ancestors.

I only took history until GCSE's (4-5 years ago) and the british empire was hardly mentioned.

as a side note in my experience there is more casual racism in the netherlands, particularly towards morrocan and turkish immigrants. The words Allochtoon and autochtoon are still in common usage and they differentiate between those who originate in Holland or from another country, regardless of where you have grown up or lived your life, which basically mean that if you have dark skin you cant really be a dutch person, you will always be other.

 

[craner]

I would like to make clear that Niall Ferguson is not my intellectual hero.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I only took history until GCSE's (4-5 years ago) and the british empire was hardly mentioned.

Maybe this is something that's changed in the decade or so between your GCSEs or mine, as I remember studying the British empire quite extensively. Or maybe it's something that varies a bit between different exam boards? I can't imagine there's all that much variation across the country, since a common criticism of the national curriculum is that it's so prescriptive.

But yeah, it's conceivable that the syllabus these days is closer to what it was in the '50s than it was when I was in high school in the '90s. There certainly was far less talk about "Britishness" back then.

as a side note in my experience there is more casual racism in the netherlands, particularly towards morrocan and turkish immigrants. The words Allochtoon and autochtoon are still in common usage and they differentiate between those who originate in Holland or from another country, regardless of where you have grown up or lived your life, which basically mean that if you have dark skin you cant really be a dutch person, you will always be other.

Yeah, I think this illustrates how you can't really use a one-dimensional metric to say this country is more racist or less racist than that country. I've posted in another thread about the 'Zwarte Piet' phenomenon...

 

[Patrick Swayze]

this British co-worker in management once announced in a loud and cheerful voice to the entire restaurant bar where staff was having drinks, when the topic turned to the English breakfast: "Beans and Toast! WE BUILT AN EMPIRE ON THAT!" (to which i drily replied "and tea. don't forget about tea.") Somehow i have a hard time picturing a Belgian, Dutch, German, or citizen of any other former power making quite such a proud proclamation in public...

I think it's fairly obvious why almost all Germans don't bother with patriotic proclamations about their collective past....


and I think that the reverse of that is the reason British people do, because even though when I learnt about the empire at A-Level is was largely focussed on what Britain got wrong + the reasons Indians wanted independence, in our culture & media in general the overarching 'fact' is that the British Empire - and its perceived 'values' - won WW2.

 

[Patrick Swayze]

the Adam Curtis documentary The Living Dead is worth watching in relation to this.

 

[jorge]

Yeah, I think this illustrates how you can't really use a one-dimensional metric to say this country is more racist or less racist than that country. I've posted in another thread about the 'Zwarte Piet' phenomenon...

Im not sure that the use of Allochtoon is that one dimensional. It reflects an attitude and perpetuates the same attitude through its us. I didnt mean to say that this alone makes dutch people more racist than others its just a telling example.
Its probably not very useful to try and compare the racism of entire countries anyway.
It is interesting to look at the different attitudes and how they manifest themselves though.

An article posted in the thread you mentioned talks about allochtoon

http://discoatemybaby.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/tunnel-vision-racial-politics-in-the-netherlands/

Black people from former Dutch colonies travelled to The Netherlands as Dutch citizens but we arrived as immigrants. We did not cross during our migration any political parameters, nor did our nationality, through some mystical transitive relation, transmute into another . However, we are considered “not of this land” (Allochtoon). This intramural diaspora complicates the ideological grid that underlines the Dutch conception of one homogeneous nation with one homogeneous culture; a belief that underpins the central argument in the current political discourse that pits the Dutch against the foreigner, native against the immigrant. Furthermore, many of us, Black folks, were born in The Netherlands proper but we are still regarded as ‘foreigners’ as not of this land. Nationality therefore is not of itself a determining factor in establishing the Dutch identity; or in other words, being Dutch by birth doesn’t mean a thing. Although there have been a lot of social improvements in the conditions of Black people in The Netherlands, the truth is we are Dutch by law but immigrants (Allochtoon) in fact.

 

[Sectionfive]

Ferguson is an ass

it's not just the defective content of the old national curriculum that is the problem. It's the way history has been taught in British schools ever since the advent of the schools history project in the 1970s and the rejection of historical knowledge in favour of "source analysis"

sweetjesus

 

[IdleRich]

"Im not sure that the use of Allochtoon is that one dimensional. It reflects an attitude and perpetuates the same attitude through its us. I didnt mean to say that this alone makes dutch people more racist than others its just a telling example."

But that's exactly what Tea was saying - one country is more proud of its colonial past and another is more prone to using words which appear casually racist. It's hard to say from that that one country is more racist than another, just that both have bad things about them.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yes, that's exactly what I meant.

It's probably also worth mentioning that the British empire was much bigger than most of the other European overseas empires and lasted longer than many of them, so there's simply that much more empire to be ashamed/proud of, depending on your politics. I mean, the roles that their respective overseas empires played in the history of e.g. Germany and Belgium are just that much less important than the role Britain's empire played in British (and wider world) history.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The Swedes probably don't go on about their overseas empire as much as the British do because - apart from that fact that they're all impeccably right-on social democrats - it was tiny and only existed for a few years in the middle of the 17th century.

 

[luka]

but craner you described him as 'one of the few serious minds of his generation. an incisive and acute scholar, a deep and profound thinker and a man of impeccable moral sense. truly someone not just to look up to but to learn from'

 

[jorge]

Yes, that's exactly what I meant.

oh ok, slightly misunderstood you there. Yeah, I agree.

I think perhaps it reflects the dutch tendency to not beat around the bush as much as the british. Whereas many British people may feel similarly they tend not to express it so bluntly.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well yeees, possibly - from my experience so far I'd say the Dutch are generally a pretty blunt lot, a bit like the Germans - but if you take this logic far enough you end up with a situation like an old woman being thrown into a river to see if she's a witch. I mean, of course someone who says nakedly racists things is obviously a racist, but if you assume that someone who doesn't say racist things is probably a racist anyway, just a sneaky, dishonest one, where does that leave someone who genuinely isn't racist? It's a rather inquisitorial attitude.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Guess this kind of belongs here - I just started work in a new department and my new line manager is called Geert. Cue me referring to him to a colleague as Geert Wilders...thankfully he wasn't in earshot at the time.

 

[jorge]

Well yeees, possibly - from my experience so far I'd say the Dutch are generally a pretty blunt lot, a bit like the Germans - but if you take this logic far enough you end up with a situation like an old woman being thrown into a river to see if she's a witch. I mean, of course someone who says nakedly racists things is obviously a racist, but if you assume that someone who doesn't say racist things is probably a racist anyway, just a sneaky, dishonest one, where does that leave someone who genuinely isn't racist? It's a rather inquisitorial attitude.

oh of course, I was merely suggesting that the seperation of autochtoon and allochtoon is a pretty blunt way to do things and extrapolating to why perhaps the british dont do this in the same way.

You're taking it pretty far there, just because racism is expressed differently doesnt mean its not apparent. And I dont really think the reserved and inward brit is a particularly accurate stereotype either (less so than the blunt dutch at least). was just thinking outloud

 

[craner]

but craner you described him as 'one of the few serious minds of his generation. an incisive and acute scholar, a deep and profound thinker and a man of impeccable moral sense. truly someone not just to look up to but to learn from'

That was Alex Ferguson, Cloth Ears. (Talking of British Empires...)

 

[zhao]

of course someone who says nakedly racists things is obviously a racist, but if you assume that someone who doesn't say racist things is probably a racist anyway, just a sneaky, dishonest one, where does that leave someone who genuinely isn't racist?

This false dichotomy of who is or isn't a racist is largely besides the point. Because racism is institutional and structural in our western world, in the sense that even the world view of "non-racists" are shaped, fundamentally, by deeply ingrained ideologies of racial difference and the slew of stereotypes it engenders. For instance we constantly engage in ethnocentric valuations of "human progress", complete with the conceit of western education and "civilization", constantly judging other cultures and ways of life by standards of our own.