Everyone did it, until it was decided - largely because of Enlightenment values - that it was morally (and often economically) unsustainable.
I’m not even sure I’d call it fundamentally evil, unless one believes humans to be fundamentally evil.
Did they?
If they could, most attempted it to some degree.
I'm mulling this over, and I don't think it's true. Not when you look to the individual level. Many historical empires did not have proper democracies even in the home country. To what extent to we hang that on the farmers, coopers, and joiners who rarely even set foot outside their own county? I hope you don't find this an overly pedantic question, because I think it plugs into fundamental questions about the dynamics that drive imperialism. Motives and opportunities vary widely within a society.
I think cultures that reach a certain size come into conflict with others, and seeking dominance where this is an option for them is normal human behaviour. The individual may not care about such things, but even small islands have been racked by inter tribal conflicts. Imperialism is only different in scale, and that's around ability to project power when the opportunity arises, technologically or otherwise. The precise details vary and some will be worse than others.
I won't call anything overly pedantic on PB, but I don't see the value of looking 'to the individual level'. Humans as a group vs humans as individuals react in different ways, like huge masses vs tiny particles.
Yes but again you're talking about what you think is a normal pattern for societies (I'm still dubious about that even) and mapping it to the individual level. The people who lead tend to be (in the neutral sense) extraordinary, and above the tribal level even those who actively fight are a small minority in almost all cases. Even in the 18th-20th century world of levees en masses and general conscription, it was still a minority under arms. The original thesis was that "Enlightenment values" have impaired imperialism because of a changing morality. That Enlightenment ethic, made concrete in documents such as The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the American Declaration of Independence, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, and the Geneva Conventions amongst others, emphasise individual agency and rights. Surely, in this spirit, it makes sense for us to then at least look through the lens of the individual and decide whether the evidence of inter-group conflict is really evidence about the nature of humans in general. And if the evidence isn't there, we needn't assume that this how people are.
The question is meaningful and not abstract. We have made huge improvements in the systems that govern us and the way we make our choices felt. Peace is attainable because, fundamentally, most people want it. It depresses me that someone can look at the behaviour of a minority and use it to draw conclusions about human nature when it seems, to me at least, that the conclusions really apply to societies and VERY much depends on the way those societies are organised. You only need to see the very variable levels of violence in the world today to know that this is true.
Staving another human's head in is, fundamentally, a waste of time and calories. Most people most of the time aren't inclined to try.
The instinct for dominance is within all of us, and competition between states is ultimately a product of this. It is not something that is limited to a wayward minority of violent individuals. Nor can it be overcome by thought and reason. It will always exist, as it is essentially the engine of evolution and human history. If a society tries to withdraw from this competition, it may succeed for a short while, but will eventually get defeated or colonialised by a stronger force.
You think violence between states is inevitable, but how about between towns? Are Blackpool and Preston destined to fight a war at some point? If not, why not?
‘When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.’
I'm not in favour of cancellation, but it's pretty repulsive. Substitute 'gays' for 'Gypsies' and a lot more would be offended.
That is pretty gruesome, when you consider the horrific experiments the Nazis did on Roma people in the camps, for instance.
Personally I find Jimmy Carr unfunny and the joke as written offensive in the extreme.
But free speech…
Free speech? No one stopped him saying it. That is what free speech is - he can say what he likes. And he did so.
However, if I was hiring a comedian, I would hire one that made me and my audience laugh, not one that would offend and upset them.
No one has to hire an ar*ehole just because he likes running his mouth ...
Quite an interesting debate.
I find the joke quite seriously offensive, to the extent that I would not go to a Jimmy Carr performance.
I'm quite OK with puns and quips, even about the holocaust. For me the part here that is over the line is the suggestion that killing is desirable.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
I've just found out today from some family history research that my favourite elderly relative of my childhood, my great grandma Elsie (my mum's mum's mum) was largely, or possibly entirely, of gypsy stock.
I've so far found court and prison records for five of her grandparents and great grandparents. Three of them also have press cuttings attached to them describing them as gypsies. I don't know if this necessarily makes them Roma, or if that was just used as a generic term for the traveller community, but I'm suddenly feeling an eighth "gypsy" either way. I didn't find Jimmy Carr's joke particularly funny anyway, he's done much better, but I still don't want him cancelled for it.
Most of my jailed gypsy ancestors were inside for larceny, but there are some other interesting stories that come up. My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather Vandelo (!?!?!?) Stanley was arrested for many things (lighting a fire on a public road, living with his family in a tent by a public road, chopping branches off an oak tree belonging to a Duke, with his daughter attacking a beer seller's wife after a race meeting at Goodwood, and there was a story about him being attacked by someone else wielding a sledgehammer), but for some reason this one stuck.
In 1864 he was charged and fined (and paid immediately) for cutting somebody else's grass!
He was later jailed for larceny and died inside.
Here's the story about the Goodwood incident with his daughter
It was mentioned yesterday how incestuous politics / media is yesterday, the whole CNN Zucker and his lover scandal, its the same again, with connections ranging from giving Trump the Apprentice job to working as spin doctor for Andrew Cuomo and hiring his brother.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Everyone did it, until it was decided - largely because of Enlightenment values - that it was morally (and often economically) unsustainable.
I’m not even sure I’d call it fundamentally evil, unless one believes humans to be fundamentally evil.
Did they?
If they could, most attempted it to some degree.
I'm mulling this over, and I don't think it's true. Not when you look to the individual level. Many historical empires did not have proper democracies even in the home country. To what extent to we hang that on the farmers, coopers, and joiners who rarely even set foot outside their own county? I hope you don't find this an overly pedantic question, because I think it plugs into fundamental questions about the dynamics that drive imperialism. Motives and opportunities vary widely within a society.
I think cultures that reach a certain size come into conflict with others, and seeking dominance where this is an option for them is normal human behaviour. The individual may not care about such things, but even small islands have been racked by inter tribal conflicts. Imperialism is only different in scale, and that's around ability to project power when the opportunity arises, technologically or otherwise. The precise details vary and some will be worse than others.
I won't call anything overly pedantic on PB, but I don't see the value of looking 'to the individual level'. Humans as a group vs humans as individuals react in different ways, like huge masses vs tiny particles.
Yes but again you're talking about what you think is a normal pattern for societies (I'm still dubious about that even) and mapping it to the individual level. The people who lead tend to be (in the neutral sense) extraordinary, and above the tribal level even those who actively fight are a small minority in almost all cases. Even in the 18th-20th century world of levees en masses and general conscription, it was still a minority under arms. The original thesis was that "Enlightenment values" have impaired imperialism because of a changing morality. That Enlightenment ethic, made concrete in documents such as The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the American Declaration of Independence, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, and the Geneva Conventions amongst others, emphasise individual agency and rights. Surely, in this spirit, it makes sense for us to then at least look through the lens of the individual and decide whether the evidence of inter-group conflict is really evidence about the nature of humans in general. And if the evidence isn't there, we needn't assume that this how people are.
The question is meaningful and not abstract. We have made huge improvements in the systems that govern us and the way we make our choices felt. Peace is attainable because, fundamentally, most people want it. It depresses me that someone can look at the behaviour of a minority and use it to draw conclusions about human nature when it seems, to me at least, that the conclusions really apply to societies and VERY much depends on the way those societies are organised. You only need to see the very variable levels of violence in the world today to know that this is true.
Staving another human's head in is, fundamentally, a waste of time and calories. Most people most of the time aren't inclined to try.
The instinct for dominance is within all of us, and competition between states is ultimately a product of this. It is not something that is limited to a wayward minority of violent individuals. Nor can it be overcome by thought and reason. It will always exist, as it is essentially the engine of evolution and human history. If a society tries to withdraw from this competition, it may succeed for a short while, but will eventually get defeated or colonialised by a stronger force.
You think violence between states is inevitable, but how about between towns? Are Blackpool and Preston destined to fight a war at some point? If not, why not?
Well this is a very interesting question, raising questions of when and at what scale groups coalesce. I think there are answers connected to levels of communication, scales at which politics can operate, shared history etc . But one which could be explored for hours.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Siberia is also Russia’s empire. They peopled it around the same time the UK people Australia/NZ and the USA the “West”.
I wonder if the Jimmy Carr thing is because of the whoopi "I culturally appropriated my stage name" goldberg, the holocaust, it wasn't about race, all them whites can fight it out among themselves controversy?
Very convenient timing that there is a bit scandal over that and 2 days later a special that was released 6 weeks ago that has a dodgy joke about the holocaust suddenly becomes problematic.
I notice also see initially just asked to apologise, messed that up, got 2 week suspension. Sharron Obsorne got canned from the same show for saying Piers Moron wasn't a racist.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
Everyone did it, until it was decided - largely because of Enlightenment values - that it was morally (and often economically) unsustainable.
I’m not even sure I’d call it fundamentally evil, unless one believes humans to be fundamentally evil.
Did they?
If they could, most attempted it to some degree.
I'm mulling this over, and I don't think it's true. Not when you look to the individual level. Many historical empires did not have proper democracies even in the home country. To what extent to we hang that on the farmers, coopers, and joiners who rarely even set foot outside their own county? I hope you don't find this an overly pedantic question, because I think it plugs into fundamental questions about the dynamics that drive imperialism. Motives and opportunities vary widely within a society.
I think cultures that reach a certain size come into conflict with others, and seeking dominance where this is an option for them is normal human behaviour. The individual may not care about such things, but even small islands have been racked by inter tribal conflicts. Imperialism is only different in scale, and that's around ability to project power when the opportunity arises, technologically or otherwise. The precise details vary and some will be worse than others.
I won't call anything overly pedantic on PB, but I don't see the value of looking 'to the individual level'. Humans as a group vs humans as individuals react in different ways, like huge masses vs tiny particles.
Yes but again you're talking about what you think is a normal pattern for societies (I'm still dubious about that even) and mapping it to the individual level. The people who lead tend to be (in the neutral sense) extraordinary, and above the tribal level even those who actively fight are a small minority in almost all cases. Even in the 18th-20th century world of levees en masses and general conscription, it was still a minority under arms. The original thesis was that "Enlightenment values" have impaired imperialism because of a changing morality. That Enlightenment ethic, made concrete in documents such as The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the American Declaration of Independence, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, and the Geneva Conventions amongst others, emphasise individual agency and rights. Surely, in this spirit, it makes sense for us to then at least look through the lens of the individual and decide whether the evidence of inter-group conflict is really evidence about the nature of humans in general. And if the evidence isn't there, we needn't assume that this how people are.
The question is meaningful and not abstract. We have made huge improvements in the systems that govern us and the way we make our choices felt. Peace is attainable because, fundamentally, most people want it. It depresses me that someone can look at the behaviour of a minority and use it to draw conclusions about human nature when it seems, to me at least, that the conclusions really apply to societies and VERY much depends on the way those societies are organised. You only need to see the very variable levels of violence in the world today to know that this is true.
Staving another human's head in is, fundamentally, a waste of time and calories. Most people most of the time aren't inclined to try.
The instinct for dominance is within all of us, and competition between states is ultimately a product of this. It is not something that is limited to a wayward minority of violent individuals. Nor can it be overcome by thought and reason. It will always exist, as it is essentially the engine of evolution and human history. If a society tries to withdraw from this competition, it may succeed for a short while, but will eventually get defeated or colonialised by a stronger force.
You think violence between states is inevitable, but how about between towns? Are Blackpool and Preston destined to fight a war at some point? If not, why not?
When I lived in Malmesbury, if people from the town bumped into people from Tetbury, on a Friday night, there was always a ruck.
Something about a battle in the English Civil War, where both towns were sending contingents to the same side and then one switched IIRC.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
I've just found out today from some family history research that my favourite elderly relative of my childhood, my great grandma Elsie (my mum's mum's mum) was largely, or possibly entirely, of gypsy stock.
I've so far found court and prison records for five of her grandparents and great grandparents. Three of them also have press cuttings attached to them describing them as gypsies. I don't know if this necessarily makes them Roma, or if that was just used as a generic term for the traveller community, but I'm suddenly feeling an eighth "gypsy" either way. I didn't find Jimmy Carr's joke particularly funny anyway, he's done much better, but I still don't want him cancelled for it.
Most of my jailed gypsy ancestors were inside for larceny, but there are some other interesting stories that come up. My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather Vandelo (!?!?!?) Stanley was arrested for many things (lighting a fire on a public road, living with his family in a tent by a public road, chopping branches off an oak tree belonging to a Duke, with his daughter attacking a beer seller's wife after a race meeting at Goodwood, and there was a story about him being attacked by someone else wielding a sledgehammer), but for some reason this one stuck.
In 1864 he was charged and fined (and paid immediately) for cutting somebody else's grass!
He was later jailed for larceny and died inside.
Here's the story about the Goodwood incident with his daughter
I've subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk which is a huge library of semi-text-searchable newspapers, and a great resource.
By 'semi-text-searchable' I mean the text has been automatically interpreted from some some often rather dodgy print quality images so can be a bit hit and miss. Still miles better than trawling through the microfiche, page by page, edition by edition, publication by publication, though.
Recommended for anyone doing family research if you think your ancestors may have been in the (mainly regional) news.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
Exactly - the Tsars explicitly saw themselves as the heirs of the Roman Empire. Rulers of a vast, polyglot Empire, held to together by the wonders of *their* civilisation and the force of *their* armies. All blessed by God....
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
It is. Although from Peter the Great's time they were officially titled Imperator. (And the classical scholars will tell you that didn't mean emperor in Latin either)
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Siberia is also Russia’s empire. They peopled it around the same time the UK people Australia/NZ and the USA the “West”.
The Nazi empire was quite contiguous too.
There does seem to be a broad PB consensus appearing that all empires are intrinsically exploitative, expropriative and violent. Just a bit of debate as to whether all state violence is Imperialistic in nature.
As I said, a rather odd sort of defence of the British Empire.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
Ditto Kaiser. It all means emperor
Same deal - Calling on the heritage of Ceaser as the First Emperor, as rulers of a vast empire of nationalities, but One People*, One Culture, One State.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Siberia is also Russia’s empire. They peopled it around the same time the UK people Australia/NZ and the USA the “West”.
The Nazi empire was quite contiguous too.
There does seem to be a broad PB consensus appearing that all empires are intrinsically exploitative, expropriative and violent. Just a bit of debate as to whether all state violence is Imperialistic in nature.
As I said, a rather odd sort of defence of the British Empire.
Not really. Back then, people did that sort of shit. Countries invaded each other. Doesn't mean they should sti do it.
I've just found out today from some family history research that my favourite elderly relative of my childhood, my great grandma Elsie (my mum's mum's mum) was largely, or possibly entirely, of gypsy stock.
I've so far found court and prison records for five of her grandparents and great grandparents. Three of them also have press cuttings attached to them describing them as gypsies. I don't know if this necessarily makes them Roma, or if that was just used as a generic term for the traveller community, but I'm suddenly feeling an eighth "gypsy" either way. I didn't find Jimmy Carr's joke particularly funny anyway, he's done much better, but I still don't want him cancelled for it.
Most of my jailed gypsy ancestors were inside for larceny, but there are some other interesting stories that come up. My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather Vandelo (!?!?!?) Stanley was arrested for many things (lighting a fire on a public road, living with his family in a tent by a public road, chopping branches off an oak tree belonging to a Duke, with his daughter attacking a beer seller's wife after a race meeting at Goodwood, and there was a story about him being attacked by someone else wielding a sledgehammer), but for some reason this one stuck.
In 1864 he was charged and fined (and paid immediately) for cutting somebody else's grass!
He was later jailed for larceny and died inside.
Here's the story about the Goodwood incident with his daughter
I've subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk which is a huge library of semi-text-searchable newspapers, and a great resource.
By 'semi-text-searchable' I mean the text has been automatically interpreted from some some often rather dodgy print quality images so can be a bit hit and miss. Still miles better than trawling through the microfiche, page by page, edition by edition, publication by publication, though.
Recommended for anyone doing family research if you think your ancestors may have been in the (mainly regional) news.
I've registered but not subscribed yet. I expect I will; I'm really enjoying the family research so far.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Siberia is also Russia’s empire. They peopled it around the same time the UK people Australia/NZ and the USA the “West”.
The Nazi empire was quite contiguous too.
There does seem to be a broad PB consensus appearing that all empires are intrinsically exploitative, expropriative and violent. Just a bit of debate as to whether all state violence is Imperialistic in nature.
As I said, a rather odd sort of defence of the British Empire.
There is a broad PB consensus that you have made a sequence of embarrassingly misinformed remarks that you are now hastily but stealthily trying to walk back.
And fair enough. We all say utterly foolish things. This was your special night
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
I think if the prime minister - you know, the guy who basically runs the country - is shown to have broken the law, then not many places he can hide. Apart from a fridge, of course
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
I think if the prime minister - you know, the guy who basically runs the country - is shown to have broken the law, then not many places he can hide. Apart from a fridge, of course
Well they did have one delivered. Oh, you don’t mean that one!
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
Splashed on front pages "He partied while we suffered" is very damaging. Until now it's all been brushed off as potentially work related events but a picture will really be worth a thousand words.
If the Daily Mail gets the picture they will publish with a highly damaging headline and it will hit home with lots of natural small c conservatives who pride themselves on playing by the rules.
I've just found out today from some family history research that my favourite elderly relative of my childhood, my great grandma Elsie (my mum's mum's mum) was largely, or possibly entirely, of gypsy stock.
I've so far found court and prison records for five of her grandparents and great grandparents. Three of them also have press cuttings attached to them describing them as gypsies. I don't know if this necessarily makes them Roma, or if that was just used as a generic term for the traveller community, but I'm suddenly feeling an eighth "gypsy" either way. I didn't find Jimmy Carr's joke particularly funny anyway, he's done much better, but I still don't want him cancelled for it.
Most of my jailed gypsy ancestors were inside for larceny, but there are some other interesting stories that come up. My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather Vandelo (!?!?!?) Stanley was arrested for many things (lighting a fire on a public road, living with his family in a tent by a public road, chopping branches off an oak tree belonging to a Duke, with his daughter attacking a beer seller's wife after a race meeting at Goodwood, and there was a story about him being attacked by someone else wielding a sledgehammer), but for some reason this one stuck.
In 1864 he was charged and fined (and paid immediately) for cutting somebody else's grass!
He was later jailed for larceny and died inside.
Here's the story about the Goodwood incident with his daughter
I've subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk which is a huge library of semi-text-searchable newspapers, and a great resource.
By 'semi-text-searchable' I mean the text has been automatically interpreted from some some often rather dodgy print quality images so can be a bit hit and miss. Still miles better than trawling through the microfiche, page by page, edition by edition, publication by publication, though.
Recommended for anyone doing family research if you think your ancestors may have been in the (mainly regional) news.
I've registered but not subscribed yet. I expect I will; I'm really enjoying the family research so far.
My great-great-grandfather got into a fight with his bunkmate doing the dishes. Humorous enough, I suppose... until you realise he did the same to my great-great-grandmother.... all covered in newsprint (in Montana).
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
I think if the prime minister - you know, the guy who basically runs the country - is shown to have broken the law, then not many places he can hide. Apart from a fridge, of course
If the No 10 wine fridge is big enough to hide in they must be downing a hell of a lot of booze.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Don't worry, shortly it will reach the point that USSR was just acting as "alpha males" do...
Sunak spokesman has previously said he was there 'for a covid strategy committee meeting'
He probably was.
To be fair, I’m probably relatively more sympathetic to Sunak. Only because I want something vaguely competent in charge, and can’t bear the idea of that being someone like Truss.
Only others I can think of are Wallace - who seems quite capable - but not many more
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
Careful, you'll trigger him and he'll start spouting off about how he understands that as a Scotsman....
I've just found out today from some family history research that my favourite elderly relative of my childhood, my great grandma Elsie (my mum's mum's mum) was largely, or possibly entirely, of gypsy stock.
I've so far found court and prison records for five of her grandparents and great grandparents. Three of them also have press cuttings attached to them describing them as gypsies. I don't know if this necessarily makes them Roma, or if that was just used as a generic term for the traveller community, but I'm suddenly feeling an eighth "gypsy" either way. I didn't find Jimmy Carr's joke particularly funny anyway, he's done much better, but I still don't want him cancelled for it.
Most of my jailed gypsy ancestors were inside for larceny, but there are some other interesting stories that come up. My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather Vandelo (!?!?!?) Stanley was arrested for many things (lighting a fire on a public road, living with his family in a tent by a public road, chopping branches off an oak tree belonging to a Duke, with his daughter attacking a beer seller's wife after a race meeting at Goodwood, and there was a story about him being attacked by someone else wielding a sledgehammer), but for some reason this one stuck.
In 1864 he was charged and fined (and paid immediately) for cutting somebody else's grass!
He was later jailed for larceny and died inside.
Here's the story about the Goodwood incident with his daughter
I've subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk which is a huge library of semi-text-searchable newspapers, and a great resource.
By 'semi-text-searchable' I mean the text has been automatically interpreted from some some often rather dodgy print quality images so can be a bit hit and miss. Still miles better than trawling through the microfiche, page by page, edition by edition, publication by publication, though.
Recommended for anyone doing family research if you think your ancestors may have been in the (mainly regional) news.
I've registered but not subscribed yet. I expect I will; I'm really enjoying the family research so far.
I use it almost daily for local history work. The search comes up with gibberish but it really isn't as bad as that - persevere.
Not impressed with the search function - it is not great. Sometimes if there is an obvious gap the only thing to do is to look up the likely issue and work through it page by page.
But it is on balance a massive improvement on what was there before. It's not as if one could search a microfiche electronically.
Two further points arise from the fact that new issues and/or new periodicals are always being added -
1. Sign up to the emails - a weekly one says what has been uploaded that week. Well worth eyeballing.
2. If you are doing a discrete project such as a publication - repeat the search as late as reasonably possible to catch any new stuff.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I saw an interesting video that worked through an essay Putin wrote on this.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
I.e. emperor.
Exactly.
Actually it more means you are a (usually adopted) member of the legitimate Julian dynasty.
The Romans didn't really have a word for Empire or Emperor.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Siberia is also Russia’s empire. They peopled it around the same time the UK people Australia/NZ and the USA the “West”.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Even swifter for PBUnionists: from 'The British empire was wonderful' to 'Look at those Jocks being involved in such a terrible thing'.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
Splashed on front pages "He partied while we suffered" is very damaging. Until now it's all been brushed off as potentially work related events but a picture will really be worth a thousand words.
If the Daily Mail gets the picture they will publish with a highly damaging headline and it will hit home with lots of natural small c conservatives who pride themselves on playing by the rules.
Yes maybe, I just wonder - from polls and Southend - if partygate has run out of steam, entirely
I mean, if you are outraged by Boris and Co breaking lockdown, then surely you’ve made the mental leap, already, to supporting someone else, or abstaining. Or you have forgiven him, or you think Labour etc are still an inferior choice. Will a photo really make all the difference with another chunk of the electorate?
I have my doubts. It might depend on the vividness of the image. If he is quietly enjoying a beer - as in the Starmer photo - I think the damage is minimal
If he is hoisting it to the camera and saying whey-hey!!! In his inimitable style, then yes it could be another nasty blow
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Yes, I really am not sure what was objected to here. A side point that not all empires are equally as bad as one another is perfectly true, and not a suggestion they are, as a result, good. By their nature they are about enrichment of the controlling part. For some reason putting those points together is pretended to be the same as being some kind of neo-imperial apologist.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
I think if the prime minister - you know, the guy who basically runs the country - is shown to have broken the law, then not many places he can hide. Apart from a fridge, of course
If the No 10 wine fridge is big enough to hide in they must be downing a hell of a lot of booze.
Now that we have Brexited we can simply remove these unsuitable people from being in charge!
Jacob Rees-Mogg is a strict Roman Catholic and the Pope and Vatican are opposed to contraception and the morning after pill, so his views are no surprise
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Siberia is also Russia’s empire. They peopled it around the same time the UK people Australia/NZ and the USA the “West”.
The Nazi empire was quite contiguous too.
With the notable exception of Norway.
You could reach that by crossing the sea from Nazi occupied territory...
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Even swifter for PBUnionists: from 'The British empire was wonderful' to 'Look at those Jocks being involved in such a terrible thing'.
I don't think it can be swifter, since I don't think that one has come up yet.
I think a fundamental problem here is when people confuse things for a defence of imperialism as if it was still something that should be practiced now or was without flaw previously, and I think the number of people who go that far is pretty damn few. But is funny to pretend otherwise.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
Splashed on front pages "He partied while we suffered" is very damaging. Until now it's all been brushed off as potentially work related events but a picture will really be worth a thousand words.
If the Daily Mail gets the picture they will publish with a highly damaging headline and it will hit home with lots of natural small c conservatives who pride themselves on playing by the rules.
Yes maybe, I just wonder - from polls and Southend - if partygate has run out of steam, entirely
I mean, if you are outraged by Boris and Co breaking lockdown, then surely you’ve made the mental leap, already, to supporting someone else, or abstaining. Or you have forgiven him, or you think Labour etc are still an inferior choice. Will a photo really make all the difference with another chunk of the electorate?
I have my doubts. It might depend on the vividness of the image. If he is quietly enjoying a beer - as in the Starmer photo - I think the damage is minimal
If he is hoisting it to the camera and saying whey-hey!!! In his inimitable style, then yes it could be another nasty blow
I don't think the bottom has been reached for Tory support. There's lots of people who are "waiting for evidence" and the picture will undoubtedly be him holding the beer up saying cheers to the camera man. Since when has Boris not been about capturing the moment?
I've just found out today from some family history research that my favourite elderly relative of my childhood, my great grandma Elsie (my mum's mum's mum) was largely, or possibly entirely, of gypsy stock.
I've so far found court and prison records for five of her grandparents and great grandparents. Three of them also have press cuttings attached to them describing them as gypsies. I don't know if this necessarily makes them Roma, or if that was just used as a generic term for the traveller community, but I'm suddenly feeling an eighth "gypsy" either way. I didn't find Jimmy Carr's joke particularly funny anyway, he's done much better, but I still don't want him cancelled for it.
Most of my jailed gypsy ancestors were inside for larceny, but there are some other interesting stories that come up. My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather Vandelo (!?!?!?) Stanley was arrested for many things (lighting a fire on a public road, living with his family in a tent by a public road, chopping branches off an oak tree belonging to a Duke, with his daughter attacking a beer seller's wife after a race meeting at Goodwood, and there was a story about him being attacked by someone else wielding a sledgehammer), but for some reason this one stuck.
In 1864 he was charged and fined (and paid immediately) for cutting somebody else's grass!
He was later jailed for larceny and died inside.
Here's the story about the Goodwood incident with his daughter
I've subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk which is a huge library of semi-text-searchable newspapers, and a great resource.
By 'semi-text-searchable' I mean the text has been automatically interpreted from some some often rather dodgy print quality images so can be a bit hit and miss. Still miles better than trawling through the microfiche, page by page, edition by edition, publication by publication, though.
Recommended for anyone doing family research if you think your ancestors may have been in the (mainly regional) news.
I've registered but not subscribed yet. I expect I will; I'm really enjoying the family research so far.
You can find astonishing things in ancestry research. Recently my sister discovered that we had a hitherto unknown uncle, our father's half brother, of whom he was, we believe, unaware. Not only that, but he was famous (or notorious) for having been scapegoated for the biggest man-made explosion before nuclear bombs - Halifax 1917.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
Plenty of people from left and right have pointed out that Mao and Stalin had a lot in common with absolute monarchies - perhaps more than with socialism.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
I believe Dr Foxy brought up the Russian Empire of the 18th and 19th century in comparison to Axis power empires of the twentieth - transitioning into discussion of the continuation of that Russia Empire into the 20th century, whatever its name, seems to pretty relevant in that case, as he made the point about the former being different 'more in time than intent', and that seems to also apply to the empire of the later 20th century too, as due to the time it was called something else, but it was still acting as an empire.
In which case I am confused which types of empire or imperialism it would be acceptable to talk about in a discussion about empire and imperialism if some some are not to be brought up.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
He was literally known as “the Red Tsar” and claimed the title for himself
EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, Vol. 50, No. 5. 1998,
"The People Need a Tsar': The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931-1941
“Equally important--and distinct from the cult--is the development of a state-oriented patriotic ideology reminiscent of tsarist 'great power' (velikoderzhaunye) and russocentrie traditions, something which M. N. Ryutin referred to as 'national Bolshevism'." Statements of Stalin's typically associated with the personality cult-'don't forget that we are living in Russia, the land of the tsars ... the Russian pcople like it when one person stands at the head of the state and 'the people need a tsar”
I've just found out today from some family history research that my favourite elderly relative of my childhood, my great grandma Elsie (my mum's mum's mum) was largely, or possibly entirely, of gypsy stock.
I've so far found court and prison records for five of her grandparents and great grandparents. Three of them also have press cuttings attached to them describing them as gypsies. I don't know if this necessarily makes them Roma, or if that was just used as a generic term for the traveller community, but I'm suddenly feeling an eighth "gypsy" either way. I didn't find Jimmy Carr's joke particularly funny anyway, he's done much better, but I still don't want him cancelled for it.
Most of my jailed gypsy ancestors were inside for larceny, but there are some other interesting stories that come up. My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather Vandelo (!?!?!?) Stanley was arrested for many things (lighting a fire on a public road, living with his family in a tent by a public road, chopping branches off an oak tree belonging to a Duke, with his daughter attacking a beer seller's wife after a race meeting at Goodwood, and there was a story about him being attacked by someone else wielding a sledgehammer), but for some reason this one stuck.
In 1864 he was charged and fined (and paid immediately) for cutting somebody else's grass!
He was later jailed for larceny and died inside.
Here's the story about the Goodwood incident with his daughter
I've subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk which is a huge library of semi-text-searchable newspapers, and a great resource.
By 'semi-text-searchable' I mean the text has been automatically interpreted from some some often rather dodgy print quality images so can be a bit hit and miss. Still miles better than trawling through the microfiche, page by page, edition by edition, publication by publication, though.
Recommended for anyone doing family research if you think your ancestors may have been in the (mainly regional) news.
I've registered but not subscribed yet. I expect I will; I'm really enjoying the family research so far.
The only negatives with the British Newspaper Archive are:
- The search facility can be a bit clunky at times but once you get used to the advanced search, and remember that not all printed words will necessarily have been interpreted, it is pretty good. - Annoyingly, if you download a selected newspaper page as a pdf the quality is not nearly as good as you get by zooming in and screen-shotting an article; you cannot subsequently zoom into the pdf and get the same quality.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
Indeed. The Russia Empire explicitly went out and conquered the neighbourhood. They quite explicitly called it an empire (etymology of Tsar, anyone?) and banged on about civilising the savages. With steel etc etc.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
I thought the etymology of Tsar is Czar is Ceaser.
I.e. emperor.
Exactly.
Actually it more means you are a (usually adopted) member of the legitimate Julian dynasty.
The Romans didn't really have a word for Empire or Emperor.
Quite rapidly it became an honorific meaning "Current Emperor" - certainly only the first few emperors had even a vague claim to the name by birth or adoption.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
Plenty of people from left and right have pointed out that Mao and Stalin had a lot in common with absolute monarchies - perhaps more than with socialism.
Simon Sebag Montefiore has definitely not entered the chat.
I'm currently reading Russia: People and Empire: 1552-1917 by Geoffrey Hosking, what's really striking about it is how much of Soviet and modern Russian history appears to be a continuation of the same conflicts that preceded them. Suffice to say I find the notion that there were not imperial ambitions in the Soviet Union and modern Russia a tad hard to understand.
Those who attack, or even more bizarrely, are 'ashamed' of, the British empire never seem to get round to telling us what counterfactual they are comparing it with. Presumably not a French, Dutch, or German empire, so I guess they must be dreaming about some fantasy world where the alternative in all the places the British ended up ruling was a cross between a Rousseauesque noble-savage purity and a Swedish social democracy, magically combining democratic self-rule with the advances of the industrial revolution and the values of the European Enlightenment.
Reader, that wasn't the alternative.
Aren't these two separate questions? Whether something was a good or bad thing in principle, and whether something was better or worse than the thing that would have happened in its place? Personally I think the British empire was a criminal enterprise, built on and sustained by grotesque ideas of racial superiority and driven by greed. I don't feel ashamed of it because it had nothing to do with me in a moral sense. I do think we should learn about it because it shapes the world we live in today - my children wouldn't exist if it hadn't happened. And I am quite willing to believe that other empires were worse, although I think some people are a little too ready to assume that was the case. The sheer reach and longevity of the British Empire means we had ample opportunity to do bad stuff all over the world for a long time.
Indeed. The fact that some other empires wore worse is classic whattaboutery. We weren't responsible for those.
Worth noting too that the excesses of German, Italian and Japanese empires in the Twentieth centuries weren't different in principle to what we, the French, Russian, Spanish, Aztec or Islamic empires had got up to a century or two earlier. They were different more in time than intent.
It's revealing that you write out the atrocities committed in the name of communism from your roll call of 20th century 'excesses'. Is that because the intent was different?
Certainly so. The mass slaughters of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were some of the greatest evils ever, but weren't by any reasonable definition due to those leaders Imperial ideas.
If you visit Moscow, you can see palatial metro stations depicting bucolic scenes of peasant life, built during the Stalin era while said peasants were being starved to death. How does that not fit your definition of imperialism?
Mao and Stalin were Emperors of multinational empires, which they ruthlessly exploited and suppressed. Smashing the various local cultures was apart of what they did - following on from their predecessors. Very Imperialistic - within existing empires.
Pol Pot was, in part, following an agenda of homogenising Cambodia - eliminating all other cultures to create a a single, unified state of slaves subservient to him and his rule.
I think that Stalin, Mao Pol Pot etc could only be considered Imperialists if you consider all state sanctioned mass violence as Imperial in nature.
I think their reasons were to violently reorganise their own societies, not other societies. Evil yes, Imperialist no.
In both cases they were ruling multi-ethnic empires - the *Empires* of Russia and China respectively.
They both carried out racist policies of destroying sub-cultures and giving power to the dominant group.
Just because all of this was happening next door and not overseas.....
What do you call what is *happening now* in Chechnya and Xinjiang? It looks and feels like full on, hard core colonialism.....
Certainly minorities were particularly vulnerable under Communist purges, but the majority of Communist mass expropriation and murder was for internal economic reasons, so perhaps more similar to the Highland clearances or dissolution of the monasteries in intent, though obviously more violent.
It does still strike me that arguing all state sanctioned violence against different ethnicities is Imperialist in motivation is a rather odd defense of British Imperialism.
Do you think the forced migration of ethnic groups in the Soviet union was for economic reasons?
Incidentally, why are you defining 'internal' at the border of the empire in one case but not in the other?
Foxy seems to believe that empires only count as empires if he doesn’t like them. That is his level of argumentation here
The Russian empire happened (and still happens) to be contiguous. So for some reason lefty liberal people don't seem to see it as an empire. But all those Ukrainians, Estonians, Khanty, Tatars, Uzbeks etc have all had pretty much the same experience of imperialism over the years as Bengalis, Lakota, Zulu, Vietnamese, Aymara etc.
In the interests of strict accuracy, there are exclaves of the Russian Empire in Crimea and Kaliningrad.
Siberia is also Russia’s empire. They peopled it around the same time the UK people Australia/NZ and the USA the “West”.
The Nazi empire was quite contiguous too.
With the notable exception of Norway.
You could reach that by crossing the sea from Nazi occupied territory...
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
Why? He specifically purged minorities. Many of the leading lights of the revolution were Jews, Balts, Baltic Germans, Poles. Dzerzhinsky was a Pole. Stalin was a minority and knew that other minorities had allegiances other than to the Communist Party, other than some Georgian and a couple of Azerbaijani and Armenian cronies he stuffed them. The Ukrainians are right that the Holodomor was genocide. What he did to the Polish intelligentsia at Katyn and elsewhere was pure imperialism. The occupation of the Baltic states likewise. The ethnic cleansing of what was previously Eastern Poland likewise.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
Plenty of people from left and right have pointed out that Mao and Stalin had a lot in common with absolute monarchies - perhaps more than with socialism.
Simon Sebag Montefiore has definitely not entered the chat.
Was he the one leaving crappy reviews of his rivals on Amazon?
Edit: Nah, I see that was Orlando Figes. Naughty boy.
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
Plenty of people from left and right have pointed out that Mao and Stalin had a lot in common with absolute monarchies - perhaps more than with socialism.
Simon Sebag Montefiore has definitely not entered the chat.
Was he the one leaving crappy reviews of his rivals on Amazon?
That could have been Orlando Figes.
There are some right weirdos specialise in Russian history.
NEW: PM's loyalists have "safety mechanism" on no confidence letters:
"5 or 10 of the letters are submitted by loyalists. When Brady hits the magic number, he calls around everyone to ask if they wish to withdraw. At that point, we know we’re in trouble"
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
That was always going to be the killer blow, Boris holding a beer or glass of champagne at one of these parties.
Not so sure. We have pix of Starmer drinking from a beer bottle with mates during lockdown - did nothing
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
Splashed on front pages "He partied while we suffered" is very damaging. Until now it's all been brushed off as potentially work related events but a picture will really be worth a thousand words.
If the Daily Mail gets the picture they will publish with a highly damaging headline and it will hit home with lots of natural small c conservatives who pride themselves on playing by the rules.
Yes maybe, I just wonder - from polls and Southend - if partygate has run out of steam, entirely
I mean, if you are outraged by Boris and Co breaking lockdown, then surely you’ve made the mental leap, already, to supporting someone else, or abstaining. Or you have forgiven him, or you think Labour etc are still an inferior choice. Will a photo really make all the difference with another chunk of the electorate?
I have my doubts. It might depend on the vividness of the image. If he is quietly enjoying a beer - as in the Starmer photo - I think the damage is minimal
If he is hoisting it to the camera and saying whey-hey!!! In his inimitable style, then yes it could be another nasty blow
Point of order: we have learned nothing from the Southend West by-election. Due to circumstances of which we are all well aware, the Conservative candidate faced no meaningful opposition at all in a non-contest with a derisory turnout.
The polls are a little more interesting. I'm not at all sure what's most responsible for the Labour lead not being larger than it actually is: that much of the public is still not sold on Labour and/or Starmer, or that many recent polls already place the Tories close to their floor of support. It's worth reminding ourselves at this juncture that the Conservative Party has won more than 30% of the vote in every UK GE it has ever contested, going all the way back to 1835. Even John Major in 1997 managed just shy of 31%.
NEW: PM's loyalists have "safety mechanism" on no confidence letters:
"5 or 10 of the letters are submitted by loyalists. When Brady hits the magic number, he calls around everyone to ask if they wish to withdraw. At that point, we know we’re in trouble"
The journey from ‘empires aren’t inherently bad and ours was bloody good by the way’ to ‘the USSR was awful and was so an empire’ has been remarkably swift.
Empires are bad. The USSR was an empire.
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
I’m saying any discussion that is specifically about empires and imperialism that descends into Stalin was evil and an emperor is dumb.
Why? He specifically purged minorities. Many of the leading lights of the revolution were Jews, Balts, Baltic Germans, Poles. Dzerzhinsky was a Pole. Stalin was a minority and knew that other minorities had allegiances other than to the Communist Party, other than some Georgian and a couple of Azerbaijani and Armenian cronies he stuffed them. The Ukrainians are right that the Holodomor was genocide. What he did to the Polish intelligentsia at Katyn and elsewhere was pure imperialism. The occupation of the Baltic states likewise. The ethnic cleansing of what was previously Eastern Poland likewise.
"Yebbut Tsar Alexander reached Paris!" - Stalin in 1945.
Exactly - the Tsars explicitly saw themselves as the heirs of the Roman Empire. Rulers of a vast, polyglot Empire, held to together by the wonders of *their* civilisation and the force of *their* armies. All blessed by God....
NEW: PM's loyalists have "safety mechanism" on no confidence letters:
"5 or 10 of the letters are submitted by loyalists. When Brady hits the magic number, he calls around everyone to ask if they wish to withdraw. At that point, we know we’re in trouble"
Sounds like bullshit designed to discourage others by telling them some of their fellow plotters are double agents.
Additionally, even if it was true it'd be stupid, since you're in trouble regardless when people are publicly calling for your head, and even if the loyalists did do so on your instructions, they might well change their tune if they see the tide is turning - they can claim they withdrew theirs and you'd never know.
I've just found out today from some family history research that my favourite elderly relative of my childhood, my great grandma Elsie (my mum's mum's mum) was largely, or possibly entirely, of gypsy stock.
I've so far found court and prison records for five of her grandparents and great grandparents. Three of them also have press cuttings attached to them describing them as gypsies. I don't know if this necessarily makes them Roma, or if that was just used as a generic term for the traveller community, but I'm suddenly feeling an eighth "gypsy" either way. I didn't find Jimmy Carr's joke particularly funny anyway, he's done much better, but I still don't want him cancelled for it.
Most of my jailed gypsy ancestors were inside for larceny, but there are some other interesting stories that come up. My gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather Vandelo (!?!?!?) Stanley was arrested for many things (lighting a fire on a public road, living with his family in a tent by a public road, chopping branches off an oak tree belonging to a Duke, with his daughter attacking a beer seller's wife after a race meeting at Goodwood, and there was a story about him being attacked by someone else wielding a sledgehammer), but for some reason this one stuck.
In 1864 he was charged and fined (and paid immediately) for cutting somebody else's grass!
He was later jailed for larceny and died inside.
Here's the story about the Goodwood incident with his daughter
I've subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk which is a huge library of semi-text-searchable newspapers, and a great resource.
By 'semi-text-searchable' I mean the text has been automatically interpreted from some some often rather dodgy print quality images so can be a bit hit and miss. Still miles better than trawling through the microfiche, page by page, edition by edition, publication by publication, though.
Recommended for anyone doing family research if you think your ancestors may have been in the (mainly regional) news.
I've registered but not subscribed yet. I expect I will; I'm really enjoying the family research so far.
My great-great-grandfather got into a fight with his bunkmate doing the dishes. Humorous enough, I suppose... until you realise he did the same to my great-great-grandmother.... all covered in newsprint (in Montana).
I've been in touch with my dad's cousin, and his dad - my dad's uncle, had typed out an immediate family history just before he died. His dad, my great grandfather, had regularly beaten his whole family. He had a shotgun that he used to threaten them with (probably no ammo, but nobody knew), and he also regularly used to threaten to burn the house down if they didn't shut up when he'd come home from the pub. He did once accidentally start a house fire with his threats (he'd wave flaming logs from the fire at them) but it got put out quickly and he was only one hurt.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is a strict Roman Catholic and the Pope and Vatican are opposed to contraception and the morning after pill, so his views are no surprise
His views as a private person should have no bearing on his responsibilities in govt. Much like the Queen who has official views and keeps her private views to herself.
Comments
Hyufd probably exploded on reading that, but it's true.
"Carr's programme, titled His Dark Material, was released on the streaming platform on Christmas Day"
Why has it taken 6 weeks for this to blow up?
I find the joke quite seriously offensive, to the extent that I would not go to a Jimmy Carr performance.
I'm quite OK with puns and quips, even about the holocaust. For me the part here that is over the line is the suggestion that killing is desirable.
Vlad recently built a bridge connecting it to the Taman Peninsula.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Crimean+bridge/@45.2500664,36.517106,12z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x40ee9bdf8e015433:0x4075cb7823d1c39c!8m2!3d45.2676733!4d36.5494841
They peopled it around the same time the UK people Australia/NZ and the USA the “West”.
Very convenient timing that there is a bit scandal over that and 2 days later a special that was released 6 weeks ago that has a dodgy joke about the holocaust suddenly becomes problematic.
I notice also see initially just asked to apologise, messed that up, got 2 week suspension. Sharron Obsorne got canned from the same show for saying Piers Moron wasn't a racist.
Stalin and Co took over operation of the Empire and turned it up to 11. And Putin is carrying on the tradition.
Or indeed China. The extremely racist idea that all Chinese people are a kind of faked up plastic imitation of Han culture (as invented, largely by the current shitheads running the place) seems remarkably widespread as well.
https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1489652685854892037
He will soon be an ex Prime Minister.
Bombshell picture shows Boris Johnson holding can of beer at lockdown birthday party
Sources said that pictures taken by the official No10 photographer have been handed over to Scotland Yard for their investigation into the Downing Street parties - including one of the PM with a can of beer
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/bombshell-picture-shows-boris-johnson-26144515
Something about a battle in the English Civil War, where both towns were sending contingents to the same side and then one switched IIRC.
Police have a photograph of Boris Johnson holding a can of a beer at his lockdown birthday party in June 2020, the Mirror has been told.
The Prime Minister is pictured standing next to Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who is holding a soft drink, in No10’s Cabinet Room.
By 'semi-text-searchable' I mean the text has been automatically interpreted from some some often rather dodgy print quality images so can be a bit hit and miss. Still miles better than trawling through the microfiche, page by page, edition by edition, publication by publication, though.
Recommended for anyone doing family research if you think your ancestors may have been in the (mainly regional) news.
Why couldn't he have drunk cider like a normal person?
Did we pay for the photographer?
Edit: Funny how professional the Met are at the mo. No photos leaked so far.
Edit2: Could we FOI the photo?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_5u36YFb5E
There does seem to be a broad PB consensus appearing that all empires are intrinsically exploitative, expropriative and violent. Just a bit of debate as to whether all state violence is Imperialistic in nature.
As I said, a rather odd sort of defence of the British Empire.
*Germans only need apply.
Boris has survived this far, I don’t think an image of him suckling on a Heineken is the killer blow. We all now know he went to parties, so this is not OMFG, not any more
And fair enough. We all say utterly foolish things. This was your special night
If the Daily Mail gets the picture they will publish with a highly damaging headline and it will hit home with lots of natural small c conservatives who pride themselves on playing by the rules.
Only others I can think of are Wallace - who seems quite capable - but not many more
What's the problem with that?
Or are you saying that the various minorities and nations which endured that should all shut up and glory in being Russian?
Especially since Russia still seem soo be in the Empire business.
"Jacob Rees-Mogg has been accused by a Labour MP of perpetuating a "harmful clinical falsehood" about the morning after pill.
Asked if he would make time for a debate on sexual and reproductive health, the minister said he would not "speak in favour of abortifacients".
But the World Health Organization says the pill does not induce an abortion, so would not come under that label."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60267025
Not impressed with the search function - it is not great. Sometimes if there is an obvious gap the only thing to do is to look up the likely issue and work through it page by page.
But it is on balance a massive improvement on what was there before. It's not as if one could search a microfiche electronically.
Two further points arise from the fact that new issues and/or new periodicals are always being added -
1. Sign up to the emails - a weekly one says what has been uploaded that week. Well worth eyeballing.
2. If you are doing a discrete project such as a publication - repeat the search as late as reasonably possible to catch any new stuff.
Quite funny, really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJNtfyq3TDE
The Romans didn't really have a word for Empire or Emperor.
I mean, if you are outraged by Boris and Co breaking lockdown, then surely you’ve made the mental leap, already, to supporting someone else, or abstaining. Or you have forgiven him, or you think Labour etc are still an inferior choice. Will a photo really make all the difference with another chunk of the electorate?
I have my doubts. It might depend on the vividness of the image. If he is quietly enjoying a beer - as in the Starmer photo - I think the damage is minimal
If he is hoisting it to the camera and saying whey-hey!!! In his inimitable style, then yes it could be another nasty blow
Err.... they seem to be staying in charge
I think a fundamental problem here is when people confuse things for a defence of imperialism as if it was still something that should be practiced now or was without flaw previously, and I think the number of people who go that far is pretty damn few. But is funny to pretend otherwise.
https://twitter.com/MichaelPDeacon/status/1489698129972809728
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin:_The_Court_of_the_Red_Tsar
Plenty of people from left and right have pointed out that Mao and Stalin had a lot in common with absolute monarchies - perhaps more than with socialism.
In which case I am confused which types of empire or imperialism it would be acceptable to talk about in a discussion about empire and imperialism if some some are not to be brought up.
EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, Vol. 50, No. 5. 1998,
"The People Need a Tsar':
The Emergence of National Bolshevism
as Stalinist Ideology, 1931-1941
“Equally important--and distinct from the cult--is the development of a state-oriented patriotic ideology reminiscent of tsarist 'great power' (velikoderzhaunye) and russocentrie traditions, something which M. N. Ryutin referred to as 'national Bolshevism'." Statements of Stalin's typically associated with the personality cult-'don't forget that we are living in Russia, the land of the tsars ... the Russian pcople like it when one person stands at the head of the state and 'the people need a tsar”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/153897
- The search facility can be a bit clunky at times but once you get used to the advanced search, and remember that not all printed words will necessarily have been interpreted, it is pretty good.
- Annoyingly, if you download a selected newspaper page as a pdf the quality is not nearly as good as you get by zooming in and screen-shotting an article; you cannot subsequently zoom into the pdf and get the same quality.
So there
Edit: Nah, I see that was Orlando Figes. Naughty boy.
There are some right weirdos specialise in Russian history.
"5 or 10 of the letters are submitted by loyalists. When Brady hits the magic number, he calls around everyone to ask if they wish to withdraw. At that point, we know we’re in trouble"
https://www.ft.com/content/74a74d5b-0520-4678-9035-07c69fdc9a7f
The polls are a little more interesting. I'm not at all sure what's most responsible for the Labour lead not being larger than it actually is: that much of the public is still not sold on Labour and/or Starmer, or that many recent polls already place the Tories close to their floor of support. It's worth reminding ourselves at this juncture that the Conservative Party has won more than 30% of the vote in every UK GE it has ever contested, going all the way back to 1835. Even John Major in 1997 managed just shy of 31%.
Additionally, even if it was true it'd be stupid, since you're in trouble regardless when people are publicly calling for your head, and even if the loyalists did do so on your instructions, they might well change their tune if they see the tide is turning - they can claim they withdrew theirs and you'd never know.