The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ...
Compare that with this:
"When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor...
Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on the government of Italy for feedings Christains to the lions.' Amusing, but indefensible. The British Raj is scarcely ancient history. It is part of the memories of people still alive. According to a recent UN Population Division report, the number of Indians over the age of eighty is six million. British rile was an inescapable part of their childhoods. If you add to their number, their first-generation descendants, Indians their fifties and sixties, whise parents would have told them stories about their experience of the Raj, the numbers with an intimate knowledge of the period would swell to over 100 million Indians.
It is getting late for atonement, but not too late: I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre that was perpetrated at the site a century earlier. David Cameron's rather meatly-mouthed description of the massacre in 2013 as a 'deeply shameful event does not, in my view constitute an apology. Nor does the ceremonial visit to the site in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, which merely left their signatures in the visitors' book, without even a redeeming comment."
Two words summarize the above: imperialist arrogance.
"Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools. The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to the subject peoples. These days there appears to be a return in England to yearning for the Raj: the success of the telivision series Indian Summers, building upon earlier Anglo-nostalgia productions like The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, epitomize what the British domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English 'of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little England.' If British school children can learn how those dreams of the English turned out to be nightmares for their subject people, true atonement—of the purely moral kind, involving a serious consideration of historical responsibility rather than mere admission of guilt—might be achieved."
— Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 2017, Preface, xxiv-xxv.
Blair once said that Britain was "the greatest nation on earth." The arrogance of such a ruling class prevents her from issuing an apology to one victim of rendition. What about the destruction of Iraq and what it unleashed?
Given the highly filtered school curriculum of the history of the British Empire, this must resonate well in public ears. It must even play a signifant role in today's support or passivity of imperialist adventures and the type of friends the British [read English] ruling class has. It must enforce the belief that "we" are a force of good among "the international community": foreign aid and loans mechanisms, for instance.
Inglorious Empire should be an essetial reading in British schools. It should be produced as series and read out on the radio.
* Brandt in fact was a social democrat with contradictory positions, including his support of the US in its war in Vietnam.
Compare that with this:
"When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor...
Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on the government of Italy for feedings Christains to the lions.' Amusing, but indefensible. The British Raj is scarcely ancient history. It is part of the memories of people still alive. According to a recent UN Population Division report, the number of Indians over the age of eighty is six million. British rile was an inescapable part of their childhoods. If you add to their number, their first-generation descendants, Indians their fifties and sixties, whise parents would have told them stories about their experience of the Raj, the numbers with an intimate knowledge of the period would swell to over 100 million Indians.
It is getting late for atonement, but not too late: I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre that was perpetrated at the site a century earlier. David Cameron's rather meatly-mouthed description of the massacre in 2013 as a 'deeply shameful event does not, in my view constitute an apology. Nor does the ceremonial visit to the site in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, which merely left their signatures in the visitors' book, without even a redeeming comment."
Two words summarize the above: imperialist arrogance.
"Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools. The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to the subject peoples. These days there appears to be a return in England to yearning for the Raj: the success of the telivision series Indian Summers, building upon earlier Anglo-nostalgia productions like The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, epitomize what the British domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English 'of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little England.' If British school children can learn how those dreams of the English turned out to be nightmares for their subject people, true atonement—of the purely moral kind, involving a serious consideration of historical responsibility rather than mere admission of guilt—might be achieved."
— Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 2017, Preface, xxiv-xxv.
Blair once said that Britain was "the greatest nation on earth." The arrogance of such a ruling class prevents her from issuing an apology to one victim of rendition. What about the destruction of Iraq and what it unleashed?
Given the highly filtered school curriculum of the history of the British Empire, this must resonate well in public ears. It must even play a signifant role in today's support or passivity of imperialist adventures and the type of friends the British [read English] ruling class has. It must enforce the belief that "we" are a force of good among "the international community": foreign aid and loans mechanisms, for instance.
Inglorious Empire should be an essetial reading in British schools. It should be produced as series and read out on the radio.
* Brandt in fact was a social democrat with contradictory positions, including his support of the US in its war in Vietnam.
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