1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Sweden meanwhile has just given the far right Sweden Democrats 20% of the vote and the balance of power in the Swedish Parliament
A stupid example, even for you. One lunatic does not define the attitude of a whole country. Indeed at the time of the attacks I said it was ridiculous given how well integrated the immigrant population was into Norwegian society.
And it's not as if the terrorist was a foreigner anyway!
As usual HYUFD doesn't care about facts or logic. That is exemplified by his using the example of Sweden when the whole point of my posting was that it is specifically the Norwegian system of dealing with integration which allows them to have such an effective immigration policy.
24% of Sweden now are non native Swedes while only 17% of Norway are non native Norwegians
Again, given I was comparing Norway with UK and didn't once mention Sweden, your point is... pointless.
Oh and 25% of Norwegians are now first or second generation immigrants. Though you would never know it if you spent time there.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about and argue purely on the basis of your own anti-immigrant bigotry. The idea that it is possible for a country to have a successful policy that allows large scale immigration without causing all the problems you expect (and I suspect want) is anathema to your world view.
If you would never know it if you spent time there presumably that can only be because the ethnic non Caucasians are kept discreetly out of view, which is not necessarily something to celebrate
All this yay! Diversity! stuff is a bit naive. The stowaway immigrants of the 1950s would probably have been better off if we had left their ancestors in West Africa. Similarly nobody leaves the subcontinent for the UK for the weather, the cuisine or the culture, they come because after centuries of abusive colonisation this is where the money is.
Actually, they probably do come for the culture. And also the cuisine is far superior. And these days, they might even come for the climate
Other pull factors would be not being murdered for being the wrong race/religion/sex etc.
Which, ironically, also forms a solid basis on which to claim asylum.
When the jolly old Raj invaded and stole the whole of bloody India and for that matter Australia and north America do you think they did it by weaseling their way round the asylum legislation? I think that is where the bulk of the irony is.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Why should I try to put myself in the shoes of my >15-greats ancestors rather than other people's?
Of course slavery was and is wrong. All dehumanisation of people on the basis of race, or for that matter on any other basis, is wrong. It's not sanctimonious to think that. I think that because I love humanity. Slavery in the Americas and everywhere else was a crime against humanity. It should be called that more. And no, there shouldn't be any monuments to slaveowners or slave traders any more than there should be monuments to Hitler.
"I thank thee Lord, that I am not as other men ..."
Rather than push for historical honesty and an illuminating discussion there are always a small minority, sadly, who see such conversations as an opportunity for trolling or virtue-signalling.
Anyway, ok, the British Empire, a malign endeavour driven by greed and white supremacy racism with a toxic legacy, widespread and persisting to today ... BUT NOT UNIQUELY EVIL.
That's a wrap.
Works for me. The level of the legacy and how persistent it is is still up for debate (given some places have developed well those that have not probably cannot blame all their ills on the legacy), but I don't think most people have a problem accepting Empires are not charitable enterprises.
That's why its ok to contextualise it, since it doesn't excuse it, unless someone is a fool.
Anyway, ok, the British Empire, a malign endeavour driven by greed and white supremacy racism with a toxic legacy, widespread and persisting to today ... BUT NOT UNIQUELY EVIL.
That's a wrap.
"You are the Diet Coke of EVIL. Only one calorie, not EVIL enough!"
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Sweden meanwhile has just given the far right Sweden Democrats 20% of the vote and the balance of power in the Swedish Parliament
A stupid example, even for you. One lunatic does not define the attitude of a whole country. Indeed at the time of the attacks I said it was ridiculous given how well integrated the immigrant population was into Norwegian society.
And it's not as if the terrorist was a foreigner anyway!
As usual HYUFD doesn't care about facts or logic. That is exemplified by his using the example of Sweden when the whole point of my posting was that it is specifically the Norwegian system of dealing with integration which allows them to have such an effective immigration policy.
24% of Sweden now are non native Swedes while only 17% of Norway are non native Norwegians
Again, given I was comparing Norway with UK and didn't once mention Sweden, your point is... pointless.
Oh and 25% of Norwegians are now first or second generation immigrants. Though you would never know it if you spent time there.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about and argue purely on the basis of your own anti-immigrant bigotry. The idea that it is possible for a country to have a successful policy that allows large scale immigration without causing all the problems you expect (and I suspect want) is anathema to your world view.
If you would never know it if you spent time there presumably that can only be because the ethnic non Caucasians are kept discreetly out of view, which is not necessarily something to celebrate
All this yay! Diversity! stuff is a bit naive. The stowaway immigrants of the 1950s would probably have been better off if we had left their ancestors in West Africa. Similarly nobody leaves the subcontinent for the UK for the weather, the cuisine or the culture, they come because after centuries of abusive colonisation this is where the money is.
Actually, they probably do come for the culture. And also the cuisine is far superior. And these days, they might even come for the climate
Other pull factors would be not being murdered for being the wrong race/religion/sex etc.
Which, ironically, also forms a solid basis on which to claim asylum.
When the jolly old Raj invaded and stole the whole of bloody India and for that matter Australia and north America do you think they did it by weaseling their way round the asylum legislation? I think that is where the bulk of the irony is.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Etc.
1. The world is long and complex, sure we did bad things but so did lots of others and we did good too. Plus some of the people and places we oppressed and exploited would likely have been even worse off if we hadn't bothered.
2. Colonialism was a fundamentally malign endeavour driven by white supremacy racism and we were the leading exponent of it in recent times. Rather than just own that plain fact we too often seek to contextualise and 'big picture' it away by talking as in 1.
The thing is, one can't avoid the context of the times in which people lived.
They did not think as we do.
Thank goodness we can dispense witth self-exculpating bleating about the virtuous British resisting the slave trade after being such enthusiastic participants. These people just did not think as we do.
Well, no they did not. Most 19th century abolitionists would come over as appallingly bigoted by the standards of 2022 (Abraham Lincoln, for example). Progress comes by fits and starts. What else would you expect?
I have low expectations about a lot of stuff, they’re mostly confirmed by those who like to attach their nation (for want of a better word) to the virtuous parts of its history while averting their eyes from the crappy bits.
Well, the point of Dominic Sandbrook's article is that people (especially children) enjoy reading about the crappy bits. Try to teach a classroom about the subjunctive tense, and you'll have endless disruption. Teach them about medieval torture techniques, and they'll listen with rapt attention.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
I think it goes without saying that we'd all prefer to live under modern liberal democracies.
Well, we would. Surprising numbers wouldn't, though I'd like to think more would prefer it if they got the chance to.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Isn't that just BJP anti-Muslim propaganda?
I was interested to read about Modhi denouncing "five hundred years of foreign occupation" which must be a real swipe at the Muslim population.
It's quite a common refrain in Indian households.
And yet India's #1 tourist attraction, the Taj, was built by those naughty Muslim folks!
I'm guessing Polands equivalent is probably Auschwitz, so I am not sure where that leaves your point.
An interesting moment was when Blair praised an Aztec bowl at an exhibition at a museum. It was a really nice piece of art. That had been used to hold the human hearts cut from their sacrificial victims.
Interesting in that a number of people who would have been first to denounce the actual actions of the British Empire (or Spanish) devolved into excuses such as "there were no sacrifices", "it was all exaggerated".
All empires are shit for the people being imperialised.
Anyway, ok, the British Empire, a malign endeavour driven by greed and white supremacy racism with a toxic legacy, widespread and persisting to today ... BUT NOT UNIQUELY EVIL.
That's a wrap.
It is surely valid to ask whether we know of a power, even in this enlightened age, that having become powerful enough to dominate and exploit other peoples, did not do so? I don't. America is at this very moment (as one example) looting millions of barrels of oil a year from Syria.
A squeaker. Joe Biden (with help from Trump) has had a great midterm.
If the SC hadn't put its finger on the scales by allowing 4 GOP gerrymanders to stand whilst striking down 1 Dem gerrymander this might have been a Dem blowout.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Etc.
1. The world is long and complex, sure we did bad things but so did lots of others and we did good too. Plus some of the people and places we oppressed and exploited would likely have been even worse off if we hadn't bothered.
2. Colonialism was a fundamentally malign endeavour driven by white supremacy racism and we were the leading exponent of it in recent times. Rather than just own that plain fact we too often seek to contextualise and 'big picture' it away by talking as in 1.
The thing is, one can't avoid the context of the times in which people lived.
They did not think as we do.
Thank goodness we can dispense witth self-exculpating bleating about the virtuous British resisting the slave trade after being such enthusiastic participants. These people just did not think as we do.
Well, no they did not. Most 19th century abolitionists would come over as appallingly bigoted by the standards of 2022 (Abraham Lincoln, for example). Progress comes by fits and starts. What else would you expect?
I have low expectations about a lot of stuff, they’re mostly confirmed by those who like to attach their nation (for want of a better word) to the virtuous parts of its history while averting their eyes from the crappy bits.
Well, the point of Dominic Sandbrook's article is that people (especially children) enjoy reading about the crappy bits. Try to teach a classroom about the subjunctive, and you'll have endless disruption. Teach them about medieval torture techniques, and they'll listen with rapt attention.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
I think it goes without saying that we'd all prefer to live under modern liberal democracies.
Well, we would. Surprising numbers wouldn't, though I'd like to think more would prefer it if they got the chance to.
Plenty of those who like to condemn the behaviour of those in our past, and use that to virtue-signal today, would actually secretly quite like authoritarianism tomorrow as long as it's their kind of authoritarianism.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
The current borders in Europe, were in part, set at the end of the Second World War. By massive ethnic cleansing - whole populations were moved around like game of Risk. The death toll was staggering.
A squeaker. Joe Biden (with help from Trump) has had a great midterm.
If the SC hadn't put its finger on the scales by allowing 4 GOP gerrymanders to stand whilst striking down 1 Dem gerrymander this might have been a Dem blowout.
I'm sure the fine legal minds on the SC entirely ignored political ramifications, as they do on all their judgements.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Why should I try to put myself in the shoes of my >15-greats ancestors rather than other people's?
Of course slavery was and is wrong. All dehumanisation of people on the basis of race, or for that matter on any other basis, is wrong. It's not sanctimonious to think that. I think that because I love humanity. Slavery in the Americas and everywhere else was a crime against humanity. It should be called that more. And no, there shouldn't be any monuments to slaveowners or slave traders any more than there should be monuments to Hitler.
"I thank thee Lord, that I am not as other men ..."
Rather than push for historical honesty and an illuminating discussion there are always a small minority, sadly, who see such conversations as an opportunity for trolling or virtue-signalling.
The most irritating aspect of that is when people give apologies for things done by people long dead to people long dead.
It's all about feeling superior to those who lived in the past, rather than acknowledging any personal wrongdoing, which is when an apology counts for something.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Isn't that just BJP anti-Muslim propaganda?
I was interested to read about Modhi denouncing "five hundred years of foreign occupation" which must be a real swipe at the Muslim population.
It's quite a common refrain in Indian households.
And yet India's #1 tourist attraction, the Taj, was built by those naughty Muslim folks!
I'm guessing Polands equivalent is probably Auschwitz, so I am not sure where that leaves your point.
An interesting moment was when Blair praised an Aztec bowl at an exhibition at a museum. It was a really nice piece of art. That had been used to hold the human hearts cut from their sacrificial victims.
Interesting in that a number of people who would have been first to denounce the actual actions of the British Empire (or Spanish) devolved into excuses such as "there were no sacrifices", "it was all exaggerated".
All empires are shit for the people being imperialised.
I think it's more that non-democratic forms of government are shit.
Empires were the normal way of organising human politics and governance - including in Europe - until well into the 19th Century.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Why should I try to put myself in the shoes of my >15-greats ancestors rather than other people's?
Of course slavery was and is wrong. All dehumanisation of people on the basis of race, or for that matter on any other basis, is wrong. It's not sanctimonious to think that. I think that because I love humanity. Slavery in the Americas and everywhere else was a crime against humanity. It should be called that more. And no, there shouldn't be any monuments to slaveowners or slave traders any more than there should be monuments to Hitler.
"I thank thee Lord, that I am not as other men ..."
Rather than push for historical honesty and an illuminating discussion there are always a small minority, sadly, who see such conversations as an opportunity for trolling or virtue-signalling.
The most irritating aspect of that is when people give apologies for things done by people long dead to people long dead.
It's all about feeling superior to those who lived in the past, rather than acknowledging any personal wrongdoing, which is when an apology counts for something.
An apology without action doesn't make a lot of difference, it could just be words. So does it even make the target of the apology feel better? And action without apology gets the job done too.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Isn't that just BJP anti-Muslim propaganda?
I was interested to read about Modhi denouncing "five hundred years of foreign occupation" which must be a real swipe at the Muslim population.
It's quite a common refrain in Indian households.
And yet India's #1 tourist attraction, the Taj, was built by those naughty Muslim folks!
I'm guessing Polands equivalent is probably Auschwitz, so I am not sure where that leaves your point.
An interesting moment was when Blair praised an Aztec bowl at an exhibition at a museum. It was a really nice piece of art. That had been used to hold the human hearts cut from their sacrificial victims.
Interesting in that a number of people who would have been first to denounce the actual actions of the British Empire (or Spanish) devolved into excuses such as "there were no sacrifices", "it was all exaggerated".
All empires are shit for the people being imperialised.
I went to a very good exhibition on the Aztecs at the Royal Academy twenty years ago.
The Aztec deities were very plainly not nice people.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
The current borders in Europe, were in part, set at the end of the Second World War. By massive ethnic cleansing - whole populations were moved around like game of Risk. The death toll was staggering.
Millions of Germans civilians were carted around like cattle in 1945-1946 after Yalta/Potsdam - from places that had been German for centuries, in some instances.
He jests, but this sort of thing probably has saved a lot of embarrassing hiccups. Not enough actual checking of drafting by MPs in my opinion.
UNSUNG HEROES
Deep in the Gormenghast of the Palace of Westminster there’s a parliamentary body called the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.
Seven MPs and seven peers meet weekly “to assess the technical quality” of Statutory Instruments (the parliamentary instructions from ministers that pass unopposed through the House). Legislative elves read these regulations and critique them for error. When they find something wrong, they report it and write to departments with their requests for correction.
They say things like this:
'Explain how an obligation to take “such measures as are appropriate and proportionate” (regulation 3) amounts to “specified measures or measures of a specified description” in accordance with section 105B of the Communications Act 2003 (as opposed to specifying the purpose of those measures)'.
Observing, critiquing, pointing out ambiguities or uncertainties in secondary legislation. Guido is in awe.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Etc.
1. The world is long and complex, sure we did bad things but so did lots of others and we did good too. Plus some of the people and places we oppressed and exploited would likely have been even worse off if we hadn't bothered.
2. Colonialism was a fundamentally malign endeavour driven by white supremacy racism and we were the leading exponent of it in recent times. Rather than just own that plain fact we too often seek to contextualise and 'big picture' it away by talking as in 1.
The thing is, one can't avoid the context of the times in which people lived.
They did not think as we do.
Thank goodness we can dispense witth self-exculpating bleating about the virtuous British resisting the slave trade after being such enthusiastic participants. These people just did not think as we do.
Well, no they did not. Most 19th century abolitionists would come over as appallingly bigoted by the standards of 2022 (Abraham Lincoln, for example). Progress comes by fits and starts. What else would you expect?
I have low expectations about a lot of stuff, they’re mostly confirmed by those who like to attach their nation (for want of a better word) to the virtuous parts of its history while averting their eyes from the crappy bits.
Ahahahahahahaha
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Fluent as ever. Better than your deep insights into the voters of Maricopa County I guess.
The Spectator have an absolutely brilliant podcast episode, today, which explores a crucial debate at the centre of the Tory party - and post-brexit British politics;
Fraser is absolutely morally and politically correct in his analysis. The economic argument for more low skilled immigration is also, I believe, fundamentally wrong in the very long term, but also - crucially - irrelevant.
My Tory MP is very much on the other side of this debate. The makes him unvoteablefor.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Isn't that just BJP anti-Muslim propaganda?
I was interested to read about Modhi denouncing "five hundred years of foreign occupation" which must be a real swipe at the Muslim population.
It's quite a common refrain in Indian households.
And yet India's #1 tourist attraction, the Taj, was built by those naughty Muslim folks!
I'm guessing Polands equivalent is probably Auschwitz, so I am not sure where that leaves your point.
An interesting moment was when Blair praised an Aztec bowl at an exhibition at a museum. It was a really nice piece of art. That had been used to hold the human hearts cut from their sacrificial victims.
Interesting in that a number of people who would have been first to denounce the actual actions of the British Empire (or Spanish) devolved into excuses such as "there were no sacrifices", "it was all exaggerated".
All empires are shit for the people being imperialised.
I went to a very good exhibition on the Aztecs at the Royal Academy twenty years ago.
The Aztec deities were very plainly not nice people.
There's a reason native allies were swiftly found.
Mastodon @joinmastodon · 4h Over 1 million people have joined Mastodon since October 27. Between that and those who returned to their old accounts, the number of active users has risen to over 1.6 million today, which, for context, is over 3 times what it was just about two weeks ago!
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
The current borders in Europe, were in part, set at the end of the Second World War. By massive ethnic cleansing - whole populations were moved around like game of Risk. The death toll was staggering.
Millions of Germans civilians were carted around like cattle in 1945-1946 after Yalta/Potsdam - from places that had been German for centuries, in some instances.
But, no-one cared about them by then.
Savage Continent, by Keith Lowe, is very good on that. Czech partisans in particular, had no qualms about massacring German civilians. In one of the very rare cases that was brought to trial, a group of partisans were charged with removing 260 Germans who were being expelled from the Sudetenland from a train, and shooting them on the spot. 60 were children. The leader told the court he couldn't see the point of turning the children loose after the parents and other adults had all been killed.
But, it's hard to blame people who felt no pity for Germans in June 1945.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
What will J. D. Vance do in the Senate? He is a most unusual politician, famous for saying that his own people are worse off in large part because of their own poor behavior.
"Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled, especially combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia’s overall political swing from strong Democratic Party to strong Republican affiliations. Likewise, he recounts stories intended to showcase a lack of work ethic including the story of a man who quit after expressing dislike over his job’s hours and posted to social media about the “Obama economy”, as well as a co-worker, with a pregnant girlfriend, who would skip work." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy
Although his analysis may be largely correct, it is, to say the least, unusual for a politician to blame his voters for their own problems. Moreover, there is no obvious way for government to tackle the central problems he identifies, though there are things governments can do — and can stop doing.
(One pleasant surprise that suggests he may make positive contributions: I read that, after his Senate victory, he thanked many people, but not the orange loser.)
What will J. D. Vance do in the Senate? He is a most unusual politician, famous for saying that his own people are worse off in large part because of their own poor behavior.
"Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled, especially combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia’s overall political swing from strong Democratic Party to strong Republican affiliations. Likewise, he recounts stories intended to showcase a lack of work ethic including the story of a man who quit after expressing dislike over his job’s hours and posted to social media about the “Obama economy”, as well as a co-worker, with a pregnant girlfriend, who would skip work." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy
Although his analysis may be largely correct, it is, to say the least, unusual for a politician to blame his voters for their own problems. Moreover, there is no obvious way for government to tackle the central problems he identifies, though there are things governments can do — and can stop doing.
(One pleasant surprise that suggests he may make positive contributions: I read that, after his Senate victory, he thanked many people, but not the orange loser.)
(Cross posted at Patterico's Potifications.)
Vance thought Trump could be US Hitler a few years ago and then decided he was the best POTUS in his lifetime.
So I think we can be assured that he will flop and flip as required and, so, if the Loser is now losing JD will dump on him faster than the moonshine still is hidden in the howlers of Appalachia.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
The current borders in Europe, were in part, set at the end of the Second World War. By massive ethnic cleansing - whole populations were moved around like game of Risk. The death toll was staggering.
Millions of Germans civilians were carted around like cattle in 1945-1946 after Yalta/Potsdam - from places that had been German for centuries, in some instances.
But, no-one cared about them by then.
Savage Continent, by Keith Lowe, is very good on that. Czech partisans in particular, had no qualms about massacring German civilians. In one of the very rare cases that was brought to trial, a group of partisans were charged with removing 260 Germans who were being expelled from the Sudetenland from a train, and shooting them on the spot. 60 were children. The leader told the court he couldn't see the point of turning the children loose after the parents and other adults had all been killed.
But, it's hard to blame people who felt no pity for Germans in June 1945.
Similar things were done to various populations. Not all were citizens of Axis countries - many Poles were brutally expelled from revised Russian territories, for example.
Within Russia, ethnic Germans were equally brutally treated. There are stories of Red Army soldiers returning to their homes, only to deported.
Anyway, ok, the British Empire, a malign endeavour driven by greed and white supremacy racism with a toxic legacy, widespread and persisting to today ... BUT NOT UNIQUELY EVIL.
That's a wrap.
It is surely valid to ask whether we know of a power, even in this enlightened age, that having become powerful enough to dominate and exploit other peoples, did not do so? I don't. America is at this very moment (as one example) looting millions of barrels of oil a year from Syria.
The US is about as close as one can get to a benign hegimon. Certainly more benign than we were when we ran things. Of course even the US is mostly out for itself. Empires are self interested. But they can bring stability and facilitate exchange - that's always been the trade-off. I'm an anti imperialist, but chaos is worse.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
The current borders in Europe, were in part, set at the end of the Second World War. By massive ethnic cleansing - whole populations were moved around like game of Risk. The death toll was staggering.
Millions of Germans civilians were carted around like cattle in 1945-1946 after Yalta/Potsdam - from places that had been German for centuries, in some instances.
But, no-one cared about them by then.
Savage Continent, by Keith Lowe, is very good on that. Czech partisans in particular, had no qualms about massacring German civilians. In one of the very rare cases that was brought to trial, a group of partisans were charged with removing 260 Germans who were being expelled from the Sudetenland from a train, and shooting them on the spot. 60 were children. The leader told the court he couldn't see the point of turning the children loose after the parents and other adults had all been killed.
But, it's hard to blame people who felt no pity for Germans in June 1945.
I blame people for killing children, whatever the circumstances.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
I never realised Ghulam Qadir, ingrate of ingrates, was British!
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Isn't that just BJP anti-Muslim propaganda?
I was interested to read about Modhi denouncing "five hundred years of foreign occupation" which must be a real swipe at the Muslim population.
It's quite a common refrain in Indian households.
And yet India's #1 tourist attraction, the Taj, was built by those naughty Muslim folks!
I'm guessing Polands equivalent is probably Auschwitz, so I am not sure where that leaves your point.
An interesting moment was when Blair praised an Aztec bowl at an exhibition at a museum. It was a really nice piece of art. That had been used to hold the human hearts cut from their sacrificial victims.
Interesting in that a number of people who would have been first to denounce the actual actions of the British Empire (or Spanish) devolved into excuses such as "there were no sacrifices", "it was all exaggerated".
All empires are shit for the people being imperialised.
I think it's more that non-democratic forms of government are shit.
Empires were the normal way of organising human politics and governance - including in Europe - until well into the 19th Century.
They still are. China, the USA, Russia and the EU are all empires
rottenborough - You are right in your criticism of Senator-elect Vance, but we don't know, yet, what he will do as senator, And it helps to remember that his senate term is six years. By November 2028, much may have changed and, until then, conventional Republicans like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine can do far more for him than Trump can.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
The current borders in Europe, were in part, set at the end of the Second World War. By massive ethnic cleansing - whole populations were moved around like game of Risk. The death toll was staggering.
Millions of Germans civilians were carted around like cattle in 1945-1946 after Yalta/Potsdam - from places that had been German for centuries, in some instances.
But, no-one cared about them by then.
Savage Continent, by Keith Lowe, is very good on that. Czech partisans in particular, had no qualms about massacring German civilians. In one of the very rare cases that was brought to trial, a group of partisans were charged with removing 260 Germans who were being expelled from the Sudetenland from a train, and shooting them on the spot. 60 were children. The leader told the court he couldn't see the point of turning the children loose after the parents and other adults had all been killed.
But, it's hard to blame people who felt no pity for Germans in June 1945.
The British rulers massacred German civilians in Dresden. It's not braver when done from the air.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
The current borders in Europe, were in part, set at the end of the Second World War. By massive ethnic cleansing - whole populations were moved around like game of Risk. The death toll was staggering.
Millions of Germans civilians were carted around like cattle in 1945-1946 after Yalta/Potsdam - from places that had been German for centuries, in some instances.
But, no-one cared about them by then.
Savage Continent, by Keith Lowe, is very good on that. Czech partisans in particular, had no qualms about massacring German civilians. In one of the very rare cases that was brought to trial, a group of partisans were charged with removing 260 Germans who were being expelled from the Sudetenland from a train, and shooting them on the spot. 60 were children. The leader told the court he couldn't see the point of turning the children loose after the parents and other adults had all been killed.
But, it's hard to blame people who felt no pity for Germans in June 1945.
The British rulers massacred German civilians in Dresden. It's not braver when done from the air.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.[10] A minority view holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.[11]
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Isn't that just BJP anti-Muslim propaganda?
I was interested to read about Modhi denouncing "five hundred years of foreign occupation" which must be a real swipe at the Muslim population.
It's quite a common refrain in Indian households.
And yet India's #1 tourist attraction, the Taj, was built by those naughty Muslim folks!
I'm guessing Polands equivalent is probably Auschwitz, so I am not sure where that leaves your point.
An interesting moment was when Blair praised an Aztec bowl at an exhibition at a museum. It was a really nice piece of art. That had been used to hold the human hearts cut from their sacrificial victims.
Interesting in that a number of people who would have been first to denounce the actual actions of the British Empire (or Spanish) devolved into excuses such as "there were no sacrifices", "it was all exaggerated".
All empires are shit for the people being imperialised.
I think it's more that non-democratic forms of government are shit.
Empires were the normal way of organising human politics and governance - including in Europe - until well into the 19th Century.
They still are. China, the USA, Russia and the EU are all empires
That's wordplay! Does St Petersburg get to play the role of Budapest? Macron, what a satrap.
On topic, generally a politician will run for president if they can find people who will pay for them to run for president. Despite everything, there are millions of people who will pay Donald Trump to run for president. I think this will be true for Trump, who is unscrupulous enough that he can make heavy personal profits from running, and surrounds himself with grifter advisers who will also be looking to take a cut. So I think he runs. He can always drop out later and keep the money.
That said the media vibes aren't great so he may decide to make the big announcement on Tuesday be that he's returning to Twitter or introducing a new line of steaks or whatever.
Anyway, ok, the British Empire, a malign endeavour driven by greed and white supremacy racism with a toxic legacy, widespread and persisting to today ... BUT NOT UNIQUELY EVIL.
That's a wrap.
It is surely valid to ask whether we know of a power, even in this enlightened age, that having become powerful enough to dominate and exploit other peoples, did not do so? I don't. America is at this very moment (as one example) looting millions of barrels of oil a year from Syria.
The US is about as close as one can get to a benign hegimon. Certainly more benign than we were when we ran things. Of course even the US is mostly out for itself. Empires are self interested. But they can bring stability and facilitate exchange - that's always been the trade-off. I'm an anti imperialist, but chaos is worse.
No, it's not - I don't blame you for seeing things through the lense of our time and culture, but you don't have to lift the brick up much to see that that isn't true. Take Covid for example. Following a ban on gain of function research in the US (because of the inherent danger) the US decides to continue GOF research overseas - leading to a global plague killing as many people as the holocaust. Our ancestors would have looked upon that as little short of satanic, and perhaps our descendents will feel the same.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.[10] A minority view holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.[11]
It was caused by 3 monsoons simultaneously falling. It was exacerbated by lack of investment in granaries and heavy taxes (preventing peasant farmers from building up reserves). The EIC did not respond effectively - in some places they performed well, in others they were negligent at best, depending on the resident.
Anyway, ok, the British Empire, a malign endeavour driven by greed and white supremacy racism with a toxic legacy, widespread and persisting to today ... BUT NOT UNIQUELY EVIL.
That's a wrap.
It is surely valid to ask whether we know of a power, even in this enlightened age, that having become powerful enough to dominate and exploit other peoples, did not do so? I don't. America is at this very moment (as one example) looting millions of barrels of oil a year from Syria.
The US is about as close as one can get to a benign hegimon. Certainly more benign than we were when we ran things. Of course even the US is mostly out for itself. Empires are self interested. But they can bring stability and facilitate exchange - that's always been the trade-off. I'm an anti imperialist, but chaos is worse.
No, it's not - I don't blame you for seeing things through the lense of our time and culture, but you don't have to lift the brick up much to see that that isn't true. Take Covid for example. Following a ban on gain of function research in the US (because of the inherent danger) the US decides to continue GOF research overseas - leading to a global plague killing as many people as the holocaust. Our ancestors would have looked upon that as little short of satanic, and perhaps our descendents will feel the same.
Even if your conspiracy theory was true, and there's no real evidence for it, the idea that doing risky research is equivalent to the human trafficking several million people across an ocean, with a death rate of 30%, is ridiculous.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.[10] A minority view holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.[11]
It was caused by 3 monsoons simultaneously falling. It was exacerbated by lack of investment in granaries and heavy taxes (preventing peasant farmers from building up reserves). The EIC did not respond effectively - in some places they performed well, in others they were negligent at best, depending on the resident.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.[10] A minority view holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.[11]
rottenborough - You are right in your criticism of Senator-elect Vance, but we don't know, yet, what he will do as senator, And it helps to remember that his senate term is six years. By November 2028, much may have changed and, until then, conventional Republicans like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine can do far more for him than Trump can.
For what's worth, I think JD Vance will run for President in next ten to twenty years and he might well win.
Anyway, ok, the British Empire, a malign endeavour driven by greed and white supremacy racism with a toxic legacy, widespread and persisting to today ... BUT NOT UNIQUELY EVIL.
That's a wrap.
It is surely valid to ask whether we know of a power, even in this enlightened age, that having become powerful enough to dominate and exploit other peoples, did not do so? I don't. America is at this very moment (as one example) looting millions of barrels of oil a year from Syria.
The US is about as close as one can get to a benign hegimon. Certainly more benign than we were when we ran things. Of course even the US is mostly out for itself. Empires are self interested. But they can bring stability and facilitate exchange - that's always been the trade-off. I'm an anti imperialist, but chaos is worse.
No, it's not - I don't blame you for seeing things through the lense of our time and culture, but you don't have to lift the brick up much to see that that isn't true. Take Covid for example. Following a ban on gain of function research in the US (because of the inherent danger) the US decides to continue GOF research overseas - leading to a global plague killing as many people as the holocaust. Our ancestors would have looked upon that as little short of satanic, and perhaps our descendents will feel the same.
Even if your conspiracy theory was true, and there's no real evidence for it, the idea that doing risky research is equivalent to the human trafficking several million people across an ocean, with a death rate of 30%, is ridiculous.
You do yourself and your argument an immense disservice by trotting out 'conspiracy theory' criticisms of lab leak.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
But that's possibly because we weren't the only world power of significance. If we had been, possibly we'd have been far more tyrannical. Absolute power and all that.
I don't think it's hugely necessary for people to tie themselves into knots over the issue. There have been worse Empires, but all things considered the subjugated generally would have preferred not to have been subjugated*. So context setting about the scale of the historical actions is fine, without endorsing imperium.
*there's bound to be some cases to the contrary, since the very formation of states wasn't usually a democratic exercise of where people on the ground wanted to end up, yet many ended up happy with our nation state boundaries.
England was certainly forged by the sword.
I was trying to think of how many countries (even ones within a wider grouping like England) cleave fairly accurately to boundaries as they were forged/identified around 1000 years ago (even without concepts of the nation state to make it directly equivalent).
It cannot be many, not least due to the interference of external forces.
The current borders in Europe, were in part, set at the end of the Second World War. By massive ethnic cleansing - whole populations were moved around like game of Risk. The death toll was staggering.
Millions of Germans civilians were carted around like cattle in 1945-1946 after Yalta/Potsdam - from places that had been German for centuries, in some instances.
But, no-one cared about them by then.
Savage Continent, by Keith Lowe, is very good on that. Czech partisans in particular, had no qualms about massacring German civilians. In one of the very rare cases that was brought to trial, a group of partisans were charged with removing 260 Germans who were being expelled from the Sudetenland from a train, and shooting them on the spot. 60 were children. The leader told the court he couldn't see the point of turning the children loose after the parents and other adults had all been killed.
But, it's hard to blame people who felt no pity for Germans in June 1945.
The British rulers massacred German civilians in Dresden. It's not braver when done from the air.
Dresden was a legitimate military target.
In his biography of Attlee and Churchill, Leo McKinstry wrote: "When Churchill arrived at Yalta on 4 February 1945, the first question that Stalin put to him was: ‘Why haven’t you bombed Dresden?’ His enquiry reflected the importance that the Soviet Union attached to an attack on the city, following intelligence reports that Germany was moving large numbers of troops towards the Breslau Front. Churchill was able to assure Stalin that just such an Allied attack was imminent."[49]
rottenborough - You are right in your criticism of Senator-elect Vance, but we don't know, yet, what he will do as senator, And it helps to remember that his senate term is six years. By November 2028, much may have changed and, until then, conventional Republicans like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine can do far more for him than Trump can.
For what's worth, I think JD Vance will run for President in next ten to twenty years and he might well win.
One to watch as they say.
I had a stab at what RDS' possible VP partners would be yesterday but forgot to mention Vance. Thinking about it, there could be clear advantages especially if Biden runs again.
It's gone rather unnoticed today, but Hobbs has extended her lead in AZ
There was a drop from Pima and Cococino, which would have helped Hobbs . Looking at Lake's votes, her share is tracking Trump's 2020 performance very closely although she has outperformed by 7 in Yuma. What might also worry Hobbs is that Lake's share now in many of these countries ex-Maricopa is pretty close to where Trump ended up in 2020 at the end.
I think Lake still will be Governor (but not Masters for Senator)
rottenborough - You are right in your criticism of Senator-elect Vance, but we don't know, yet, what he will do as senator, And it helps to remember that his senate term is six years. By November 2028, much may have changed and, until then, conventional Republicans like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine can do far more for him than Trump can.
For what's worth, I think JD Vance will run for President in next ten to twenty years and he might well win.
One to watch as they say.
I had a stab at what RDS' possible VP partners would be yesterday but forgot to mention Vance. Thinking about it, there could be clear advantages especially if Biden runs again.
It's gone rather unnoticed today, but Hobbs has extended her lead in AZ
There was a drop from Pima and Cococino, which would have helped Hobbs . Looking at Lake's votes, her share is tracking Trump's 2020 performance very closely although she has outperformed by 7 in Yuma. What might also worry Hobbs is that Lake's share now in many of these countries ex-Maricopa is pretty close to where Trump ended up in 2020 at the end.
I think Lake still will be Governor (but not Masters for Senator)
The Senate race in AZ has already been called, that is not in doubt
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.[10] A minority view holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.[11]
It was caused by 3 monsoons simultaneously falling. It was exacerbated by lack of investment in granaries and heavy taxes (preventing peasant farmers from building up reserves). The EIC did not respond effectively - in some places they performed well, in others they were negligent at best, depending on the resident.
Um, the EIC weren't around in 1943!
I assume you were talking about the Great Bengal Famine (1770). My mistake
It's gone rather unnoticed today, but Hobbs has extended her lead in AZ
There was a drop from Pima and Cococino, which would have helped Hobbs . Looking at Lake's votes, her share is tracking Trump's 2020 performance very closely although she has outperformed by 7 in Yuma. What might also worry Hobbs is that Lake's share now in many of these countries ex-Maricopa is pretty close to where Trump ended up in 2020 at the end.
I think Lake still will be Governor (but not Masters for Senator)
The Senate race in AZ has already been called, that is not in doubt
NBC projecting R 219-217 D in the last hour, CNN even saying there's a potential pathway for the Dems to have 218, albeit slim (though less slim than an hour ago).
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.[10] A minority view holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.[11]
It was caused by 3 monsoons simultaneously falling. It was exacerbated by lack of investment in granaries and heavy taxes (preventing peasant farmers from building up reserves). The EIC did not respond effectively - in some places they performed well, in others they were negligent at best, depending on the resident.
The East India Company ceased to exist in 1874. Whoever's, or whatever's, fault the poor famine response was, it certainly wasn't theirs.
CNN starting the hour with Wolf Blitzer excitedly showing live images of the election count in Pima County, AZ, only for the room to be completely empty. Not an advert for a smooth and speedy count.
RH1992 said: "WA03 flips to the Democrats according to CNN, ABC and NBC."
Until the August primary that knocked out (by a close margin) the Republican incumbent, this was considered a safe seat. The Trumpista, Joe Kent, couldn't hold the district. Another loss for the orange loser.
So Lake needs to win remaining count by approx 12%
FWIW, Garrett doesn't think that the full 290k will end up getting counted, as some are provisional and some need curing. He thinks the real "remaining" may be more like 250k.
So Lake needs to win remaining count by approx 12%
FWIW, Garrett doesn't think that the full 290k will end up getting counted, as some are provisional and some need curing. He thinks the real "remaining" may be more like 250k.
That's a lot of ballots out.
Re Lake, yes she can do it but harder. Some suggestion this batch was from more Blue areas. Next batch (haven't we heard that before) supposedly a lot more R friendly
RH1992 said: "WA03 flips to the Democrats according to CNN, ABC and NBC."
Until the August primary that knocked out (by a close margin) the Republican incumbent, this was considered a safe seat. The Trumpista, Joe Kent, couldn't hold the district. Another loss for the orange loser.
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.[10] A minority view holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.[11]
It was caused by 3 monsoons simultaneously falling. It was exacerbated by lack of investment in granaries and heavy taxes (preventing peasant farmers from building up reserves). The EIC did not respond effectively - in some places they performed well, in others they were negligent at best, depending on the resident.
The East India Company ceased to exist in 1874. Whoever's, or whatever's, fault the poor famine response was, it certainly wasn't theirs.
The EIC did play a significant part in earlier Bengal famines, for example:
1) It wasn't until the 1970s we joined the EU, and until the 00s there wasn't a massive imbalance in the wealth of countries with freedom of movement. 2) Immigration (especially from the third world) grows exponentially. Each immigrant generates more immigrants as potential immigrants have mpre contacts in the host country. 3) Immigrants need a certain amount of resource to get started. Back in the 50s, much of the world was simply too poor to move.
Yes. In the days of the Empire, hundreds of millions of people from the colonies had the legal right to reside in the UK, but couldn't afford to pay the fare. Quite a substantial proportion of immigrants from the colonies came as stowaways.
And whilst I know a lot of people will vehemently disagree with me I would contend that Britain was and is a better place for those stowaways (or however else they got here)
Perhaps so, but there is an upper limit on the foreign born population above which the country ceases to have a sense of national community and solidarity. You end up feeling like Dubai or Manhattan or central London, where everyone is packed in and says they like the dynamism, but they almost all have social isolation and rates of depression/anxiety rocket.
Of course the upper limit is fuzzy depending on how quickly the immigrants integrate, which is largely a function of education and proximity of their culture of origin.
Indeed so what we should be doing is not concentrating on how many are arriving but on our abilities to integrate them. Look at a country like Norway which has a massively successful system for integrating immigrants. They have a much larger number of migrants in proportion to their population settling each year (equivalent to around 1% of their population every year) and yet have few of the issues or antipathy that we have in the UK.
Or you can do an "all of the above" approach. Keep a close eye on levels of integration and immediately limit immigration for a few years when tensions get so high. Observe integration levels by country of origin group (e.g. clustering in residence, intermarriage rates, adoption of democratic values) and filter immigration to those that are already integrated. Within national groups, filter towards those most likely to integrate (high education, religiously secular).
Yep I can see the point with that, although I am more in favour of immigration than others arguing here and think Norway shows that you don't have to do that if you have a strong enough integrationist policy. The trouble is we don't even start to try to do that. We work from a policy of immigration being bad and do nothing to encourage or facilitate integration. We set ourselves up to fail.
But this is just another chapter in the Sanders of the River self aggrandisement narrative. First we enslave millions of them, yay us! Then we stop enslaving them, Wilberforce, west Africa squadron, yay us!!! Then we welcome and integrate them as immigrants, yay us * 3!!!! And let them drive buses! Whereas unreconstructed racists like me think west Africans are probably best left in West Africa in the first place, unless they have a voluntary wanderlust.
I think there are many things we would all do differently, if we could travel back five hundred years back in time. But, we are where we are.
Should our ancestors have settled the Americas? Or Australia or New Zealand?
Well, it honestly doesn't matter now. It happened. GM Fraser put it best "When frightened, selfish, men, that is, the majority of humanity, meet in the wilderness, the weakest go under."
Sure we can't unwind the past, but we do have a duty to be honest about it.
Emulate our ancestors' virtues, and avoid their vices. That's all we can do.
But emulate and avoid often becomes lionise and ignore.
All nations lionise their great military leaders. That's just a fact of life. And, that's as true of non-Europeans as it is of Europeans. But, gradually, the view has taken hold that right of conquest is not a good basis upon which to found one's rule.
Yes. But I meant more generally about our colonialism. I realize we aren't unique in having such a history but it's quite recent and it is ours - hence of most relevance to us - and we were massive in the imperial exploitation space, with correspondingly deep legacy. I think we tend to twist and strain to avoid admitting that the legacy is overwhelmingly negative on the people and places colonized.
Nonsense. It's a weird kind of English exceptionalism
Yes, lots of countries built empires, but ours was exceptionally evil!
About two centuries before the British took India, the racist supremacist Muslim Mughals took India, and built pyramids out of skulls. The Mughals were far far worse than the British. By some estimates they killed 40-80 million Indians. Others go higher
Ours was actually exceptionally unevil.
Tell that the folks of Amritsar and Derry! Oh and Tasmania. Oh, I forgot, the native Tasmanians are no longer with us!
Yes, and it's interesting you can't name any other examples.
They were shocking precisely because they were so rare compared to other empires.
That's hardly of consolation to the families of the dead.
It's very hard to console those whose family members have been killed through any injustice.
Such atrocities were routine in the Japanese, Chinese, Russian and even German empires and not only would they have passed without much comment but they wouldn't even have been recorded; Gandhi and Nehru - and others - would have been shot early on.
In the British Empire it went against what we said the empire stood for and, whilst in the case of both Amritsar and Bloody Sunday (both of which were renegade actions) the inquiries were whitewashes they also led to political change in fairly short order.
The fact the Indians have to make up a false story about the Bengal Famine being a genocide, shows the lack of truly horrendous actions. The most widespread damage the Brits did to India was using monopolistic power to underpay farmers, which doesn't exactly stand out as especially evil by historical standards. The most obviously evil things the British did, such as Amritsar, were largely small scale.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.[10] A minority view holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.[11]
It was caused by 3 monsoons simultaneously falling. It was exacerbated by lack of investment in granaries and heavy taxes (preventing peasant farmers from building up reserves). The EIC did not respond effectively - in some places they performed well, in others they were negligent at best, depending on the resident.
The East India Company ceased to exist in 1874. Whoever's, or whatever's, fault the poor famine response was, it certainly wasn't theirs.
The EIC did play a significant part in earlier Bengal famines, for example:
Comments
FWIW, Reps won't go below 217 seats and not above 221 seats so it should be 219 +/-2.
That's why its ok to contextualise it, since it doesn't excuse it, unless someone is a fool.
Interesting in that a number of people who would have been first to denounce the actual actions of the British Empire (or Spanish) devolved into excuses such as "there were no sacrifices", "it was all exaggerated".
All empires are shit for the people being imperialised.
It's all about feeling superior to those who lived in the past, rather than acknowledging any personal wrongdoing, which is when an apology counts for something.
Empires were the normal way of organising human politics and governance - including in Europe - until well into the 19th Century.
The Aztec deities were very plainly not nice people.
But, no-one cared about them by then.
UNSUNG HEROES
Deep in the Gormenghast of the Palace of Westminster there’s a parliamentary body called the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.
Seven MPs and seven peers meet weekly “to assess the technical quality” of Statutory Instruments (the parliamentary instructions from ministers that pass unopposed through the House). Legislative elves read these regulations and critique them for error. When they find something wrong, they report it and write to departments with their requests for correction.
They say things like this:
'Explain how an obligation to take “such measures as are appropriate and proportionate” (regulation 3) amounts to “specified measures or measures of a specified description” in accordance with section 105B of the Communications Act 2003 (as opposed to specifying the purpose of those measures)'.
Observing, critiquing, pointing out ambiguities or uncertainties in secondary legislation. Guido is in awe.
https://order-order.com/2022/11/12/saturday-shorts-us-mid-terms-climate-reparations-tory-whips-avoid-humiliation-clown-car-crown/
Better than your deep insights into the voters of Maricopa County I guess.
“Was Lord Woodson right?”
https://audioboom.com/posts/8195627-was-lord-wolfson-right
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/coffee-house-shots/id1101754136
For me, the answer is a definite “No.”
Fraser is absolutely morally and politically correct in his analysis. The economic argument for more low skilled immigration is also, I believe, fundamentally wrong in the very long term, but also - crucially - irrelevant.
My Tory MP is very much on the other side of this debate. The makes him unvoteablefor.
Well worth 25 minutes of anyone’s time, imo.
@joinmastodon
·
4h
Over 1 million people have joined Mastodon since October 27. Between that and those who returned to their old accounts, the number of active users has risen to over 1.6 million today, which, for context, is over 3 times what it was just about two weeks ago!
https://twitter.com/intelpointalert/status/1591522833121021952?s=61&t=7JS4xlSQK5RO9L1Q9B0nww
But, it's hard to blame people who felt no pity for Germans in June 1945.
If you go outside India to all acts done by the British, it's a similar story from around 1800s onwards. The truly horrific things were small scale, and the big damaging things weren't that horrific. The act that most stands out as both widescale and evil was the 18th Century slave trade.
"Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled, especially combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia’s overall political swing from strong Democratic Party to strong Republican affiliations. Likewise, he recounts stories intended to showcase a lack of work ethic including the story of a man who quit after expressing dislike over his job’s hours and posted to social media about the “Obama economy”, as well as a co-worker, with a pregnant girlfriend, who would skip work."
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy
Although his analysis may be largely correct, it is, to say the least, unusual for a politician to blame his voters for their own problems. Moreover, there is no obvious way for government to tackle the central problems he identifies, though there are things governments can do — and can stop doing.
(One pleasant surprise that suggests he may make positive contributions: I read that, after his Senate victory, he thanked many people, but not the orange loser.)
(Cross posted at Patterico's Potifications.)
So I think we can be assured that he will flop and flip as required and, so, if the Loser is now losing JD will dump on him faster than the moonshine still is hidden in the howlers of Appalachia.
Within Russia, ethnic Germans were equally brutally treated. There are stories of Red Army soldiers returning to their homes, only to deported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
That said the media vibes aren't great so he may decide to make the big announcement on Tuesday be that he's returning to Twitter or introducing a new line of steaks or whatever.
One to watch as they say.
And they're still dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
Had the good fortune to turn on CNN right as it said a projection was imminent.
.
Looking at Lake's votes, her share is tracking Trump's 2020 performance very closely although she has outperformed by 7 in Yuma. What might also worry Hobbs is that Lake's share now in many of these countries ex-Maricopa is pretty close to where Trump ended up in 2020 at the end.
I think Lake still will be Governor (but not Masters for Senator)
But two white blokes though?
Hobbs 41k
Lake 44k
Hobbs AZ lead falls from 38k to 35k
Post above now edited - was based on roundings (!)
Approx 85k will be counted tomorrow.
Will be very close to finished by Tuesday.
Until the August primary that knocked out (by a close margin) the Republican incumbent, this was considered a safe seat. The Trumpista, Joe Kent, couldn't hold the district. Another loss for the orange loser.
Maricopa - 190k
Other Counties - 100k
Hobbs leads by 35k
So Lake needs to win remaining count by approx 12%
But slightly harder than it was at beginning of today.
Re Lake, yes she can do it but harder. Some suggestion this batch was from more Blue areas. Next batch (haven't we heard that before) supposedly a lot more R friendly
Cortez nets 5,845!
Now leads by 4,982
Democrats have minimum 50 seats and retain control of the Senate
Cortez 14,084 (60%)
Laxalt 8,234 (35%)
NB. Already projected that Republican wins NV Governor (was previously a Democrat).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
Cortez lead now up to 6,556.