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Acaila posted:It feels like this has been a post-2001 thing. I did a lot of Remembrance Day services as a kid, lugging a Girl Guide flag around at local parades and church services, and it always seemed more of a "Never again" thing. Lots of Wilfred Owen and what not on the horrors of war. It's more recent than that, I want to say around 2005 - not coincidentally around the time the general public perception of Iraq and Afghanistan started to turn sour. It's easy to paint it purely as Government banging the Jingo drum to deflect from the senselessness of the deaths we were suffering, but it's more complex than that - it's much more of a feedback loop between public perception and government reaction and I think that the public perception has been the leader in most of it. There's a couple of factors. The first is the dissonance and guilt a lot of people feel about the fact that we have troops on the other side of the world in a war, and a war that we're told is for our very survival, but there's literally no sacrifice being asked on the Home Front - indeed, the mid-naughties boom - illusory as it may have been - made a lot of people feel better-off than they ever had before, which is hard to square with the traditional rhetoric of a struggle for existence. People compensate for that by talking about how proud they are of ARE BOYS and how they absolutely needed to be supported. I don't actually recall a whole lot of US-style IF YOU DON'T SUPPORT THE TROOPS YOU'RE A TERRORIST-type talk from the top. Then of course you had, around 2005, the whole military covenant thing. This has basically always been an illusion (ask any soldier returning from any war in history) with occasional sops like pensions thrown at people. However in 2005 there was a real problem with rehabilitation of wounded soldiers - modern body armour and trauma medicine means that a lot more people were surviving wounds that would have killed them, but left them needing long term care, with the MoD just wasn't providing, which mixed with the general sense of resentment the Forces were feeling over things like the selloff of MoD housing, and the generally lovely conduct of the first few years of the war (not enough armour, vehicles completely inappropriate for the terrain and threats they faced, etc) and led to the emergence of Help For Heroes as basically a militant wing of the Royal British Legion - but one that (ironically) disrupted the RBL's work. H4H funded two specialist physio and prosthetic rehabilitation wards - something the MoD really should have been loving paying for - and as a result catapulted themselves into the limelight. RBL have - shamefully - allowed themselves to co-opt some of H4H's more American-esque rhetoric and that's where you end up with "FUTURE SOLDIER" shirts. Thankfully H4H seem to be withering away a bit now and I guess the 100th anniversary has made the RBL realise that they don't have to bang the drum quite so hard (poppy hijabs are a nice touch though, IMO). The bigger worry now is that the Government do finally seem to be cottoning on (after all the Permanent Conflict model is pretty loving tempting to any politician) and that's why we're seeing these more... celebratory remembrance ceremonies, along with the current drive to rebrand WWI as FOR FREEDOM!!!11!!!. If the RBL don't call them out on this poo poo (and why should they? it gets them more money in, after all) there's basically no-one else who can without it sounding partisan and inappropriate. (Do we really need this post to have a '18 history snype?)
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Nov 9, 2014 20:20
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nopantsjack posted:That's somewhat hopeful though, the political tools are there. There's no legal barrier to nationalisation, just to legislating "Yeah we own all this poo poo we sold you now". If they really wanted to stir poo poo up they can pass a law saying the Government can purchase any business for, say, 20 times the profits they paid Corporation Tax on in the last financial year. That's totally a fair price to pay, right? After all a company paying no Corporation Tax can't be making a profit so we'd be doing them a favour taking it off their hands, right? Of course, the last country that tried that was Guatemala with United Fruit and... well I won't spoil the ending.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:26
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Malcolm XML posted:Yeah what else is new in history? So was any given empire. If people celebrate the British Empire then it is clear that it is indeed news to some people and thus needs to be said.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:29
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goddamnedtwisto posted:There's no legal barrier to nationalisation, just to legislating "Yeah we own all this poo poo we sold you now". I'm imagining the government taking over Starbucks for nothing and it's pretty funny
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Nov 9, 2014 20:30
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I wonder who would coup the government if that happened, would it the British establishment? An oligarch coup like Honduras or perhaps a US or EU puppet? Probably all of the above with quite a lot of squabbling over who got the spoils.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:33
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Acaila posted:It feels like this has been a post-2001 thing. I did a lot of Remembrance Day services as a kid, lugging a Girl Guide flag around at local parades and church services, and it always seemed more of a "Never again" thing. Lots of Wilfred Owen and what not on the horrors of war. There's a weird fetishism over the poppy that has been going on for a while - it's stopped being anything more than a symbol for 'SUPPORT ARE TROOPS UK WERE NO 1' at this point, for all the elderly veterans selling them in supermarkets. (This year we have the poppy hijab!) Any anti-war message is definitely being lost. Fake edit: Ugh lol beat in style. goddamnedtwisto posted:
I'm not sold on the poppy hijab thing. It does kind of give the impression that Muslims have more to prove.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:41
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Kegluneq posted:I'm not sold on the poppy hijab thing. It does kind of give the impression that Muslims have more to prove. It seems to have come from a genuine demand from Muslim women (itself representative of women starting to see the hijab as much more of a medium of self-expression), along with what seems to be a genuine upswing in demand from Muslims areas generally for poppies. I'm sure some Muslim people wearing poppies is a deliberate attempt to prove something, but I'm also sure for some they're wearing them for the same reasons that almost everyone else does - a combination of a vague sense that this is the right thing to do and general pressure to conform that everyone feels. (I'm basing all of this on personal observations, I've no idea if it's a genuine nationwide trend or not)
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Nov 9, 2014 20:52
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ReV VAdAUL posted:I wonder who would coup the government if that happened, would it the British establishment? An oligarch coup like Honduras or perhaps a US or EU puppet? isn't there a film about this exact scenario where it's the yanks it's always the yanks, they love a coup. Kegluneq posted:There's a weird fetishism over the poppy that has been going on for a while - it's stopped being anything more than a symbol for 'SUPPORT ARE TROOPS UK WERE NO 1' at this point, for all the elderly veterans selling them in supermarkets. (This year we have the poppy hijab!) Any anti-war message is definitely being lost. The veterans hated it but who gives a gently caress, they're dead anyway.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:55
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ReV VAdAUL posted:If people celebrate the British Empire then it is clear that it is indeed news to some people and thus needs to be said. I reckon the British empire was probably the most humane at the time and beneficial in the long term, but that's only to be expected as it was most recent.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:00
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I expected the hijab to look hilarious but it actually looks quite nice. Jesus Christ, the comments though. The majority of people asking why Muslims refuse to integrate and wear an actual poppy... I thought Huffpo was meant to be relatively lefty (I don't read it)?
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Nov 9, 2014 21:01
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goddamnedtwisto posted:There's no legal barrier to nationalisation, just to legislating "Yeah we own all this poo poo we sold you now". Once the TTIP is agreed, we're hosed from this perspective. The amount of damage it's going to do to the NHS alone is utterly frightening let alone the wider implications for all public services. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/us-trade-deal-full-frontal-assault-on-democracy http://www.patients4nhs.org.uk/eu-us-free-trade-agreement-or-ttip/
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Nov 9, 2014 21:03
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Spangly A posted:isn't there a film about this exact scenario where it's the yanks nopantsjack posted:I expected the hijab to look hilarious but it actually looks quite nice. Huffington initially pitched it as an American left wing publication but swung to full on populism as soon as it was established.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:06
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Burqa King posted:I reckon the British empire was probably the most humane at the time and beneficial in the long term, but that's only to be expected as it was most recent. It really wasn't, we like to think that and we perhaps weren't the worst empire but we still killed absolutely shitloads of people and acted dispicably. We just don't hear about the Military Police massacring civilians and returning home to a heroes welcome. The European empires were particularly savage and we didn't conquer half the world through being nice. I'm assuming you're also British, like me, and we have to factor in that of course our perspective and history will be biased towards us being reasonable. Its pretty inconceivable though that Empires throughout history are universally (to my knowledge) incredibly violent and the more violent you are the bigger you are; it doesn't make much sense that the biggest one would be the nicest. Its not that long ago we defended "Britain's right to bomb niggers" or drew up plans to gas civilians or immediately backtracked on slavery when we realised it could make us money. e: or invented the internment camp or drove half the population of a country in a death march or turned national agriculture into cash-crop monocultures. You could also have a look at the condition of the Middle East after we imposed arbitrary states on them, the world is still pretty much reeling from the effects of the British Empire. Communist Thoughts fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 21:09
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nopantsjack posted:It really wasn't, we like to think that and we perhaps weren't the worst empire but we still killed absolutely shitloads of people and acted dispicably. We just don't hear about the Military Police massacring civilians and returning home to a heroes welcome. The European empires were particularly savage and we didn't conquer half the world through being nice. Most of the deaths caused by the British Empire were through famine rather than bullets though. I'm sure that the Bengals and Irish, as they starved the death to protect the economic interests of the mother country, were well pleased that they weren't getting slaughtered by King Leopold.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:14
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nopantsjack posted:It really wasn't, we like to think that and we perhaps weren't the worst empire but we still killed absolutely shitloads of people and acted dispicably. We just don't hear about the Military Police massacring civilians and returning home to a heroes welcome. The European empires were particularly savage and we didn't conquer half the world through being nice. The impact of the British Empire is so significant you can't really describe it as bad or good. It lead to the creation of the USA, the westernisation of Japan, the spread of the anglo-saxon legal system, the use of English as a global language, and the unification of India; among plenty of other things. Look at the GDP per capita of Hong Kong vs mainland China for an example of the influence English Common Law can have on a civilisation.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:17
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Burqa King posted:I reckon the British empire was probably the most humane at the time and beneficial in the long term, but that's only to be expected as it was most recent. Almost four million Indians starved to death in 1944 alone because Churchill genuinely hated Indians. When asked to stop he asked if Gandhi was dead yet. http://www.tehelka.com/remembering-indias-forgotten-holocaust/ Oh, and we invented concentration camps. http://listverse.com/2014/02/04/10-evil-crimes-of-the-british-empire/ We were cartoon villains that got to write the history books. Any benefit that may have befallen the nations we enslaved was entirely coincidental to our own goals.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:21
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This article is a great case study of how evil the British Empire was: http://exiledonline.com/when-pigs-fly-and-scold-brits-lecturing-sri-lanka/ Sadly not easy to summarise with a quote but well worth a read. It describes how Britain subjugated Sri Lanka, including how Tamils were imported en masse to be the hated collaborator class to take the heat from the native Sinhalese while the British took all the spoils. The brutal and long running Sri Lankan civil war was a direct result of this but, of course, Britain never takes any blame for that.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:21
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Aromatic Stretch posted:Look at the GDP per capita of Hong Kong vs mainland China for an example of the influence English Common Law can have on a civilisation. Hongers were pretty lucky to get English Common Law while mainlanders got opium and brutal repression from the European powers.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:24
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Burqa King posted:I reckon the British empire was probably the most humane at the time and beneficial in the long term, but that's only to be expected as it was most recent. Troll harder.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:37
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As I understand it, the British Empire must take the blame for the negative unintended consequences of its actions but not for the positive ones.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:39
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Burqa King posted:As I understand it, the British Empire must take the blame for the negative unintended consequences of its actions but not for the positive ones. Sure he raped and killed all those children but people so often overlook what a wonderful baker he was.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:41
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I don't think that's a very good analogy. My biggest regret about the British Empire is that ended all too soon.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:46
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Burqa King posted:I don't think that's a very good analogy. My biggest regret about the British Empire is that ended all too soon. Yeah, I think the Indians have the exact same regret.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:47
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Burqa King posted:I don't think that's a very good analogy. My biggest regret about the British Empire is that ended all too soon. Funny, I have the opposite feeling about your posting.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:59
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Call me a crazy PC gone mad lefty if you like, but I think that enslaving and murdering people is wrong.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:01
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Junior G-man posted:Yeah, I think the Indians have the exact same regret. You say that, but there's an awful lot of Indians who *do* feel that way. Nostalgia is a very powerful thing.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:03
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goddamnedtwisto posted:You say that, but there's an awful lot of Indians who *do* feel that way. Nostalgia is a very powerful thing. Nostalgia, terrible living conditions and a upper class that received British educations.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:08
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goddamnedtwisto posted:(Do we really need this post to have a '18 history snype?) 2018 - war were declared
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Nov 9, 2014 22:11
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marktheando posted:Call me a crazy PC gone mad lefty if you like, but I think that enslaving and murdering people is wrong. I agree, however let's stick to issue at hand: was the British Empire evil?
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Nov 9, 2014 22:13
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Yes.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:16
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Yup.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:17
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Yes.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:20
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Yep.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:22
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Voting no as British Imperialism in India has directly led to the creation of jobs in Solihull, and anything that helps create jobs outside of London is A Good Thing. They even have a union.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:23
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And look at what human enslavement did for Liverpool and iconic Beatles song titles!
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Nov 9, 2014 22:25
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I reckon it was a force for good with some regrettable excesses that it would be a mistake to judge from a nowadays perspective.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:26
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There is absolutely no legal requirement from the EU on privatisation of railways, it simply requires a separation of accounts between infrastructure and operations so there can be fair international access. The "EU wants privatisation rail services" was an excuse and is a load of old bollocks. The British Empire was Bad.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:38
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Burqa King posted:I reckon it was a force for good with some regrettable excesses that it would be a mistake to judge from a nowadays perspective. No.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:40
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Aromatic Stretch posted:Voting no as British Imperialism in India has directly led to the creation of jobs in Solihull, and anything that helps create jobs outside of London is A Good Thing. They even have a union.  This somehow balances out the mass murders etc?
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Nov 9, 2014 22:50
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Empire biscuits are pretty nice, though I imagine without the empire we'd still have them and just call them something else. Probably not worth all the murder.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:53
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