Part of the political settlement of the war debt, as you know, meant we withdrew from colonial territories on a hugely accelerated basis, and with all that such implies.
The 'Scramble for Africa' was Europe's C19th shame, but let the country which is without sin cast the first stone. If we'd just annexed Hawaii I suppose things might have looked different.
And as a country we do maintain many atavisms, but I would doubt we're alone in that.
And none of this has much bearing on what is right and appropriate now. True, it is always proper to defend the good in a culture, and to criticise the bad in it. Neither your nation nor mine is without sin. We invented concentration camps in the Boer War: you gave out smallpox infected blankets to the aboriginal peoples of America, with whom our monarch had treaties prior to your successful revolution. We were fucking shits to the Irish, you maintained slavery after it had become apparent to most of the rest of the world that such a thing was abhorrent. The list of our respective sins is endless, and to some extent irrelevant.
For a pragmatist, what is right and proper is often not dependent on context: how to achieve it is almost always.
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Date: 4/5/10 16:57 (UTC)The 'Scramble for Africa' was Europe's C19th shame, but let the country which is without sin cast the first stone. If we'd just annexed Hawaii I suppose things might have looked different.
And as a country we do maintain many atavisms, but I would doubt we're alone in that.
And none of this has much bearing on what is right and appropriate now. True, it is always proper to defend the good in a culture, and to criticise the bad in it. Neither your nation nor mine is without sin. We invented concentration camps in the Boer War: you gave out smallpox infected blankets to the aboriginal peoples of America, with whom our monarch had treaties prior to your successful revolution. We were fucking shits to the Irish, you maintained slavery after it had become apparent to most of the rest of the world that such a thing was abhorrent. The list of our respective sins is endless, and to some extent irrelevant.
For a pragmatist, what is right and proper is often not dependent on context: how to achieve it is almost always.