Yeah, I was totally being a complete racist by pointing out that the gentle, kind, decent English quite literally forgot to even tnoice the suffering, dying, and misery of the people right on their doorstep. :rolleyes: Every people may do evil, but the way and how they do is always their own. England’s manifests itself in a kind of freakish callousness, very genteel and proper, which is so absolutely certain of its own superiority it fails to even think of its enemies as human.
Whether you think this better or worse than than some other evils, such as the Nazi’s dehumanization of their perceived enemies so they could kill them, or America’s often shameful treatment of AmerIndians as a weird foreign people (but who were obviously human) who had stuff we wanted, is really a personal matter. I’m not convinced that the people involved were neccesarily any better or worse man-for-man. And certainly the people on the receiving end of British indifference, Nazi hate, or American aggression wouldn’t care much.
Tolstoy was wrong about families. Unhappy families are always unhappy in the same way: it’s the happy ones which are beautifully diverse. But in the realm of nations, he did get it right. What’s good in America is not the same as what’s good in Britain (or England). And what’s wrong with either isn’t the same as what’s wrong with germany, or the Dem. Rep. of Congo, or what not. It may be unkind, but it isn’t dishonest to remember that.
Historian John Keegan has described the origin of the theory of “area bombing” in the frustrations of the First World War.
After lengthy passages detailing the horrors of area bombing (the practice of drenching the living quarters of a city with explosives and incendiaries), Keegan sums up the difficulty the British had, after the war, in acknowledging how low they’d sunk.
The leader of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, was the only senior leader in Britain not to be singled out for honors after the war, and he remains controversial – in 1992 a statue of him was unveiled in London and within 24 hours, someone had poured red paint over it.
I worked with a Jewish bloke for a year when I was young and only discovered that he was Jewish when I offered him a bacon sandwhich after he said that he was hungry.
I and the other employees probably would never have known if it hadn’t been for that.
Well, you are painting the attitude of some onto an entire nation. Call that what you will.
It’s also a typical mistake made by peopel who will tie themselves into pretzel shaped knots to pretend class has no influence, and to maintain history as a top-down subject. It’s much easier to think of countries as monolithic entities, rather than accepting that the actions udnertaken in a country’s name may have incredibly negative consequences, often deliberate, on social groupings within that country itself.
Take the Great Potato Famine, for example. You can portray it as “the kind, decent English quite literally [forgetting] to even (sic) [notice] the suffering, dying, and misery of the people right on their doorstep.”
Alternatively, you can realize that the Potato Famine resulted from the Irish and British upper classes being willing to sit back and watch the Irish working class starve. That the effect on the English, and more noticeably the Scottish working class was hardly a positive - Irish workers came into the market place, and were used as scab labor by British employers, thus undermining unionization in Britain. It also had the long term effect of increasing sectarian distinctions, particularly again in Scotland though also in some areas of England, with a similar (unplanned) beneficial for the upper classes effect of retarding working class unity.
Now, I know one is a little more complex a viewpoint than the other. But it’s very childish to think of history in terms of black and white.
Hey, don’t be overly harsh on the Brits. They’ve gone to great lengths over the years to develop humane weapon to kill ingrates who resisted colonization. It also saved on bullets, which is good for the environment.;):rolleyes:
I find it so heartening that there are people who are so deeply affected by the plight of long dead people from history.
I can almost see them agonising over their fates on a daily basis.
Of course those a lot more cynical then myself might believe them to be crying crocodile tears in an effort to have a stick to beat the Brits with, any stick.
Why should they wish to do so ?
Well a hatred born of envy: springs to mind.
I of course am not one of them, not a day passes by without me feeling bad about the lives of the Indians under the tyranny of the Moghul empire or the Bushmen wiped out the Zulus, or the West Africans sold into slavery by their Black brothers to the Americans and Europeans.
Thank god that there are other people like me out there .
I see no reason to suspect people wanting to discuss the more shameful aspects of Britain’s past as wanting to “beat the Brits with a stick”. Most of the events discussed in this thread are hundreds of years old (in the case of the expulsion of the Jews, we’re talking about the best part of a millennium). Modern Brits have no connection with the people who carried out many of these atrocities.
I’m a little late to the thread here, but relieved to see that nobody so far has mentioned two of my “favorite” episodes of British perfidy:
After the Armistice ended the fighting in WW1, the British maintained their blockade of Germany for eight more months, killing thousands of civilians through starvation.
I grew up in a town named after this villain, who was an avid practitioner of germ warfare against the Native Americans.
As someone with 1/2 Irish, 1/4 East Indian, and 1/4 German ancestry, believe me - I have more than enough reasons to hate the British. However, since they also gave us penicillin, the Who, and the world’s greatest breakfasts, I’m inclined to let bygones be bygones.
Well, if the blockade was justifiable (and I think it probably was) then the war was still going on. Germany was allowed to import food - I think it is pretty reasonable that the Allies wanted to ensure it was only food that was coming in, and Germany was not seeking to gain advantage of a respite to prepare to continue war.
As far as I was aware, I didn’t meet a single Jewish person the entire time I lived in Britain. That is to say, I’m sure I did, but they didn’t mention it (or I was sufficiently unaware of Jewish culture to know what they meant).
I lived within a few miles of the Solihull synagogue, for one thing.
I’m a bit confused here - I thought the whole point of the Armisitice was to signal the end of the fighting? I understand that the treaties were not signed 'til the following summer, but I still fail to see the justification in maintaing the blockade. The British could hardly be unaware of the suffering inflicted upon the German populace.
However, in a somewhat related vein, I wouldn’t describe the RAF’s (and USAAF’s) bombing out of Germany’s largest cities as evil, or at least not anymore evil necessarily than war itself. When I visited Hamburg, Cologne, Bremen, and Munich and saw for myself just how many of the old buildings were gone, I didn’t get mad at the Allies - I got mad at Herr Schickelgruber.
I would have thought the point of continuing the blockade was obvious: force the Germans to agree to more favorable treaty terms (as well as ensuring they didn’t get back on a war footing in the meantime).
The Armistice was merely a cease fire. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but there was definite fear amongst the British and French military that Germany was simply biding time to rebuild its forces. It wasn’t known how well beld Germany had been, and while the German Army had been soundly beaten, it hadn’t been routed.
And remember, they did allow food to be imported. So it wasn’t business as usual in toto.
Irish republicans for one, use amongst other things, Britains actions during the Potato Famine as justification for I.R.A. atrocities, also the so called hundreds of years of oppression of Ireland.
So at least one group use historical “sticks” to beat Brits with, and I would not be stunned with amazement if there are other groups out there using the same tactics.(Though not just against Britain)
Actually, it’s a good bet that a lot of them were. You can’t seriously think that all of the CSA was made up of Gone with the Wind-esque plantation owners? :dubious:
Lust4Life – so because the IRA is anti-British, that means that Britain DIDN’T oppress the Irish for centuries?
Only the Nazis were Nazis- the British were their own special class. This thread has been very informative in terms of viewing British history in a variety of different lights. But where the Native Americans were concerned, yeah, they treated them pretty much like sub-humans.
First, from Columbus’ diary (all these quotes are from A People’s History of the United States). Yeah, I realize he isn’t a Brit, this is to give an idea of what the people were like before the Europeans showed up:
Fast forward to the British Invasion:
The behavior in the Northeast probably takes the cake:
That is just the beginning. Indian acts of retaliation for this were treated as cause for total war. The English set out to starve or kill them all, and it was no matter of inattention or negligence.
The hell they didn’t want to destroy anyone. And they were not out to bring the light of civilization to all, at least not in all cases. Again from the same source:
There is quite a bit more. Point is, I don’t know what else it would look like to treat people as sub-humans to be destroyed. So, maybe these events deserve consideration as the winner.
I think you are at least partially correct, but I hardly see that as obviating the depravity of this action.
After the Armistice, the UK was under no military threat at all from Germany. To continue to starve civilians at this point is morally indefensible, in my opinion.
