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#britishempire

1 post1 participant0 posts today
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"We should study the British Empire today because its history demonstrates human beings’ fantastic capacity for self-delusion. Noam Chomsky notes that John Stuart Mill, having written powerful tracts on both logic and liberty, was one of the most rational and freedom-loving intellectuals of his day. Yet even Mill, who had worked in the East India Company, was entirely hypocritical when it came to applying his libertarian principles to India, claiming that British rule was “angelic” and lamenting the “obloquy” heaped upon Britain by those who didn’t understand that it tyrannized over Indians for their own good. If even Mill, whose writings were elsewhere filled with humane and thoughtful paeans to human freedom, could justify something so horrendous as the empire, we should all be wary of the possibility that we may be unwittingly siding with an oppressive government or rationalizing indefensible acts.

The excuses for the British Empire, such as the claim that Britain built wonderful railroads and freed the enslaved, are feeble, and writers like Tharoor and Sanghera make short work of them. They are clung to in part because it is difficult to admit that one’s country was on the “wrong side of history” and that what was felt to be an act of charity and benevolence was in fact a terrible crime. I am struck, looking back on Zulu, by how easy it was for me as a child to accept without question the idea that my people must be the heroes of the situation simply because they were the heroes of the film. Was Michael Caine not dashing? Were the British not outnumbered?

The British Empire is dead. The sun finally set on it. Britain’s monarchy is decrepit, and it will never again “rule the waves.” (...) But a large percentage of the British population still believes that there was something good, rather than shameful, about tyrannizing over a huge percentage of the world’s population."

currentaffairs.org/news/the-im

www.currentaffairs.orgHow Empires ThinkThe imperial mentality sanctions some of the worst imaginable crimes in the name of progress, enlightenment, and civilization.
#Empires#Imperialism#BritishEmpire
NotImpressed

#Israel #BritishEmpire
@palestine

Joti Brar, chair of the UK Communist Party, is an unbelievable speaker. Here's 4 min of her explaining "the so-called Palestinian Israeli problem" Nothing to do with religion. It didn't start on the Oct 7. It started with the invention of Zionism and the decision to establish a settler colonial project in Palestine.
British imperialism is the inventor of Israel.

youtube.com/watch?v=1NojDBGNRS

YouTubeGerman MP Kicked Out for Palestine Shirt | Joti BrarBy Proletarian TV
Continued thread
Annales HSS

What can Pitcairn, a minuscule island in the middle of the Pacific, teach us about British imperialism? Quite a lot, when examined by Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow. Delving into the fluctuating relationship between the British Crown and that small territory, the authors explore the multiple makeshift arrangements and unexpected juridical twists that made up Britain's "informal empire."

▶️ Lauren BENTON & Adam CLULOW, How Not to Possess an Island: Pitcairn and the Legal Circuits of British Empire in the Pacific World
👉 doi.org/10.1017/ahsse.2024.21

#annalesinenglish @histodons #histodons #britishempire #informalempire #pitcairn #pacificislands

Cambridge CoreHow Not to Possess an Island: Pitcairn and the Legal Circuits of British Empire in the Pacific World | Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition | Cambridge CoreHow Not to Possess an Island: Pitcairn and the Legal Circuits of British Empire in the Pacific World
Continued thread
Estelle Platini

Wilderness wildfires

"Beyond introducing foreign species to the landscape, the settler population sought to rid the land of any trace of what had existed before. Prior to the Nakba, the area of the Jerusalem Hills that last week’s fires tore through was heavily populated, with many villages spread across the landscape. Indeed, the expansive "Ayalon-Canada" forest, planted by the KKL in 1972 and now nearly entirely burnt to the ground, had already suffered two waves of devastation, albeit of another kind, in both 1948 and 1967.

"Beneath the remains of its trees may be found the ruins of four Palestinian villages: approximately 6,000 people once lived, farmed, and played there. With olive groves, fruit orchards, fields of grain, terraced farms and vegetable plots aplenty, the Jerusalem Hills were quite productive."

vashtimedia.com/land-tells-tru @palestine @israel

Vashti Media · The land tells the truthThe Jerusalem Hills wildfires were settler-colonialism-made.
#landManagement#landscape#Zionism
Replied in thread
Félicien Breton 🍉 🔻 🌱

Malm noted: “1840 was a pivotal year in history, for both the Middle East and the climate system. It marked the first time the British Empire deployed steamboats in a major war. Steam power was the technology through which dependence on fossil fuels came into being: Steam engines ran on coal, and it was their diffusion through the industries of Britain that turned this into the first fossil economy.

“Only by exporting it to the rest of the world and drawing humanity into the spiral of large-scale fossil fuel combustion,” Malm writes, “did Britain change the fate of this planet: The globalization of steam was a necessary ignition. The key to this ignition, in turn, was the deployment of steamboats in war. It was through the projection of violence that Britain integrated other countries into the strange kind of economy it had created — by turning fossil capital, we might say, into fossil empire.”

systemchangenotclimatechange.o

System Change Not Climate Change · Massive-Scale Genocide and Ecocide Are Close Relations - System Change Not Climate ChangeSCNCC’s Ken Boettcher reviews a lecture by Andreas Malm that draws chilling parallels between Israel’s annihilation of Palestine and capitalism’s global destruction of ecosystems.
#preying#predation#brutalization
Assoc for Scottish Literature

A very happy birthday salute to Brigadier-General Sir Harry Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE, etc. etc. – born #OTD, 5 May, 1822. As his extraordinary entry in WHO’S WHO (c.1908, below) shows, Sir Harry embodied all those qualities that built & sustained the British Empire 🇬🇧 🫡

@bookstodon

1/3

Sir Harry’s storied career is too long for the ALT-text, but you can read it here:

sblazak.wordpress.com/sir-harr

#Scottish#literature#19thcentury
Continued thread
Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈

The Yanks had a secret plan to fight the British too.

Have they ever really been allies or just opportunists? That 'American Exceptionalism' which makes them untrustworthy liars when it comes to us Forrins.
Copied that off us British because original ideas get shot at in the States.....

#Cdnpoli#CanPol#US
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