How England Sees Itself

[droid]

In Holland here festivities are getting underway for St. Nicholas's day on 5th December. I've already seen several people walking around the town centre dressed up as his little darky helper, Zwarte Piet:

Can you imagine someone walking around a British city like that in this day and age?!

Can you imagine a bunch of Germans (outside the extreme right) setting up 'the best Jewish jokes are about ovens' group on facebook in the 'just for fun' category?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=224820440896&v=info

 

[Slothrop]

Can you imagine a bunch of Germans (outside the extreme right) setting up 'the best Jewish jokes are about ovens' group on facebook in the 'just for fun' category?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=224820440896&v=info

That's pretty sickening. Although given that we've also had at least one very notable British public schoolboy actually dressing up as a Nazi for a fancy dress party, it perhaps needs to be seen in the context of the fact that some teenagers are utter twats.

And do you believe that Nazi actions during the holocaust and British actions during the Potato Famine ought to have the same weight in their respective national consciousnesses?

 

[droid]

And do you believe that Nazi actions during the holocaust and British actions during the Potato Famine ought to have the same weight in their respective national consciousnesses?

The question of whether or not the Potato famine was genocide is controversial even in Ireland I admit. For years I would have leant to the other side, but when you take into account the tens of millions of dead in the Indian famines, American revolutionary prisoners starved to death, and the fact that the policies seen in the Irish famine were repeated on numerous occasions previously, I think a strong case can be made against Britain that it repeatedly and consciously practiced ethnic cleansing through famine and starvation, with a death toll as high as possibly 50 million from the 1770's onwards. Stalin and Mao are condemned outright for the same crimes.

I stop short of describing it as genocide myself, because that implies deliberate intent, rather Britain created situations in which natural food shortages became famines, continued to export food at gunpoint and consciously stymied attempts to aid the victims.

Lets say a man takes over anothers house. Locks the family in the basement, steals all their food and possessions and pours petrol all over the walls and floors. Then, when the inevitable happens, fans the flames and refuses to allow any water near the blaze whilst most of the original inhabitants burn to death. Is that murder or manslaughter?

A caveat - the holocaust is seen as a condemnation of German society as a whole due to its complicity and support of the Nazis => all of German society should share the guilt. Whilst that assertion has been questioned, I wouldn't argue that British society at the time could even have had the same awareness that the Germans could have had in regard to the Holocaust.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Can you imagine a bunch of Germans (outside the extreme right) setting up 'the best Jewish jokes are about ovens' group on facebook in the 'just for fun' category?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=224820440896&v=info

Droid, are you interested in actual debate here or just out to prove that Britain is objectively worse than any other country?

And I've already talked about German postwar contrition so I'm not even arguing the toss about whether Germans (outsidetheextremeright) would set up a page like that.

 

[droid]

Droid, are you interested in actual debate here or just out to prove that Britain is objectively worse than any other country?

Tea, are you interested in actual debate here, or are you just out to prove that Britain is no worse than other countries?

There's a real whiff of irrational defensiveness in many of your posts on this thread, including some very bizarre accusations. Im just waiting on you to accuse me of 'anti-britishness'.

 

[hmg]

At my school, we had a history teacher nicknamed 'Hitler'. He was very stern. Rumour has it he was jilted and turned to the darkside. Anyway, our year had a sponsored bed push around Castle Donington race circuit for some reason, possibly Comic Relief. Someone suggested the Third Reich as a theme, as our form master was the aforementioned Hitler, and this came to be a reality - a bed on wheels decorated with swastikas, portraits of Hitler, etc. It was disturbing - history does not relate what the parents, governors, other schoolmasters thought of this spectacle. I cannot recall if it was manned by my fellow students dressed up as Hitlerjugend or not. I just turned up in fancy dress as a quack doctor with a jar of giblets in order to put some distance between me and the Nazi bed. This was in 1987, so not too dim or distant to be even remotely acceptable.

 

[hucks]

I think a lot of the stuff Droid is saying re famines is pretty far from common knowledge in the UK. We've just about accepted there was a potato famine. Christ, I'm not even sure that most people in the uk see famines as anything other than natural disasters.

As an aside, I'm visiting a Russian frie in New York right now. He took me to see a monument that accuses the Red Army of massacring Polish civilians in 1939. He was very annoyed at the lack of gratitude it showed. And he hates everythin about the soviet union but is still very defensive of its history viz foreign policy. As are a lot of British people, evidently.

 

[Mr. Tea]

This isn't debate at all, it's just an endless round of "What about...?".

With practically every point I've tried to raise with regard to any other country in either the past or the present, you've just tried to trump it with something apparently proving that Britain is even worse. For the record, no, I don't think Britain's empire was qualitatively worse than the other big empires or totalitarian regimes (taking into account Nazi Germany, Japan, the USSR, Maoist (and modern-day) China, Cambodia...) - it just lasted longer and was greater in size. And even that's debatable when you take into account the history of China. Note that I'm saying it was necessarily any better, either. To reiterate zhao's point in the first post, comparing one holocaust to another is largely pointless.

You don't have to keep banging on about the terrible things that happened because no-one here is denying any of them.

 

[Lichen]

Mummers Day, Padstow

 

[Slothrop]

There may be other examples where this isn't true, but I think the sort of 'blackface' used in that sort of folk tradition has more in common with ritual masks or clown facepaint than with, say, minstrel shows. As far as I know, it's a sort of self-transformation by altering your appearance rather than taking on the character of an ethnic other.

That's getting distinctly off topic, though.

 

[droid]

This isn't debate at all, it's just an endless round of "What about...?".

With practically every point I've tried to raise with regard to any other country in either the past or the present, you've just tried to trump it with something apparently proving that Britain is even worse..

Er.. no I havent. The fact that you see it this way is quite revealing.

For the record, no, I don't think Britain's empire was qualitatively worse than the other big empires or totalitarian regimes (taking into account Nazi Germany, Japan, the USSR, Maoist (and modern-day) China, Cambodia...) - it just lasted longer and was greater in size. And even that's debatable when you take into account the history of China. Note that I'm saying it was necessarily any better, either.

Ok, so it lasted longer and was greater in size... so whats the logical corollary of that - that it killed more pople and caused more harm perhaps? Theres also the fact that it continued well into the 20th century and employed modern, industrial methods of control and coercion.

Im not saying that there is something uniquely evil about Britain. Im certainly not saying that the British people are particularly exceptional in terms of culpability, but there is something exceptional about the scale, duration and efficacy of British colonialism.

You don't have to keep banging on about the terrible things that happened because no-one here is denying any of them.

So you already knew and would agree that Britain was responsible for 50million+ deaths over the last 250 years, used famine as a weapon of pseudo-genocide on multiple occasions and is responsible for the deaths of 10 million people since WW2?

Sorry. How terribly impolite of me to bring it up.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Pretty sure Zwarte Piet is specifically meant to be an African. Red lips, Afro wig...

 

[baboon2004]

When I was doing GCSEs in the mid-90s, the British Empire certainly was part of the curriculum and did not glorify or endorse it in the slightest. In fact, Roberts and Niall largely write in response to the opposite senario, a perceived left-liberal cultural assault on British history that takes place precisely at school level.

My GCSE course put a heavy premium on "bias" and "propaganda" and knwoing how to spot it, who uses it and why; we learnt more about that than any actual history, from what I remember.

In my lifetime, the mainstream mood has not been smugness about Empire, it's been a glorification of deteating tyranny and reverance for the fallen of two World Wars; whatever you think of that (and it's more extreme now than, say, 10 or 15 years ago), it's a different thing.

OK, probably shows the disparity between curricula (?) for different exam boards in that case. And your GCSE board sounds a lot better than mine! I'm sure Niall Ferguson is responding to exactly the perceived scenario you assert, but I have to say that the 'we gave them railways' school of thought has been fairly strong among people I've known, when they even knew empire existed. The way some people I talked to saw the suggestion of reparations for empire when it came up as a major issue (I remember it in 2001, I think) was incredibly revealing, I thought at the time - it brought out some ugly attitudes (which is also an interesting facet of the Tory government, as shifting political conditions allow people to say things that they may have thought twice about otherwise).

So again, it's not really smugness about empire that I've noticed, more a complete lack of knowledge about it one way or the other.

 

[baboon2004]

This is an interesting assertion. Are you basing it on people from other European countries you've met? In which case how do you know it's not the same selection bias (i.e. liberal-leftwing types are unlikely to voluntarily hang out with raving nationalists) that applies in the UK?

I ask because, whatever prejudices people might harbour in private, I think it's fair to say there's a lot more open racism displayed in certain other European countries than in the UK. And that's the west European countries that had overseas empires, never mind eastern Europe.

Can you imagine someone walking around a British city like that in this day and age?!

True, I'd agree that racism is officially (as in what it's supposed 'polite' to do) more frowned on in Britain than in Spain or France, or indeed the Netherlands from your experience. But (i) I think Britain is a past master at outward pretence, and there's a lot of very ugly racism in this country (and it's getting noticeably worse, i.m.e.) which lots of people tend to turn a blind eye to, and (ii) I think this is a different question, though obviously related in some way (and this linkage is a tricky one, i think), from the one about the crimes of empire. I've found French/German/Portuguese etc people tend to know a lot more about such crimes, but it's true that my sample size is relatively low to be going on anything than my personal experiences.

 

[Mr. Tea]

So you already knew and would agree that Britain was responsible for 50million+ deaths over the last 250 years, used famine as a weapon of pseudo-genocide on multiple occasions and is responsible for the deaths of 10 million people since WW2?

Dunno if I could have quoted figures for you but yes, I was broadly aware of these things.

 

[droid]

Dunno if I could have quoted figures for you but yes, I was broadly aware of these things.

But you dont think the fact that the death toll from British imperialism in the modern age far surpasses that of any other nation, worse than Stalin or Mao, far worse than the Nazis - is exceptional?

 

[...]

This isn't debate at all, it's just an endless round of "What about...?".

That's a bit unfair, I tried to start a debate about GCSE history curriculums!

 

[...]

But you dont think the fact that the death toll from British imperialism in the modern age far surpasses that of any other nation, worse than Stalin or Mao, far worse than the Nazis - is exceptional?

What the fuck?? Are you going on about this again? I let you off last time, this time I won't -- post the figures, matey.

 

[vimothy]

This thread eh. Just like the old days.

From what I recall of my own childhood experience, to the extent that we were taught anything about Britain, the period was treated as ghastly and shameful. Certainly there was never even the remotest hint of glorification of empire.

The history teachers at my school were cigarette smoking Marxists with outrageous mustaches and 70s rocker mullets. I took this to be the norm. Did I grow up in a parallel universe, or what?

And in fact, scorn for the past is a key plank in whatever you call the dominant ideology of the age. Certainly, there is nothing radical about denigrating Britain's imperial past.

I mean, it's not like it's some great accident that Chatham House types (them again!) are writing this stuff. Liberalism: we didn't find it in the jungles of Borneo...

 

[Mr. Tea]

But you dont think the fact that the death toll from British imperialism in the modern age far surpasses that of any other nation, worse than Stalin or Mao, far worse than the Nazis - is exceptional?

Huh? You've quoted 50 million over the course of 250 years. I've heard figures in excess of that for both the USSR and Maoist China, over 70 million for Mao even, over the course of a few decades. The standard figure quoted for WWII is 60 million, over the course of six years. What do you suppose the Third Reich's death toll might have been if it had lasted 250 years, let alone 1,000? To say nothing of WWI.

And we're back to the genocide pissing contest...

Edit: no, I don't think you're anti-British, otherwise you wouldn't post on a forum used mainly by Brits. We met once, remember? I have a distinct memory of you not personally accusing me of war crimes. You just seem very resistant to any comparison between the British empire and any country or regime with a comparably murky past, almost as if Britain really was 'uniquely terrible', although you've denied this.