Skip to main content

UK: The Telegraph Facebook Page (5)

The Telegraph: Clive must not fall. The arch-imperialist deserves his place in Whitehall

Ned Ma

Clive, Havelock, Gordon, Churchill and many more must fall.


John Money
Ned Ma why??

John Burton
Ned Ma Then you must fall. Or leave if you haven't already

Ned Ma

John Money
Like in many other countries, there are things omitted from the school curriculum on purpose. Let's start with Clive / Clive of India. He was a colonial figure. If you are a supporter of the British empire then the discussion will end soon. While celebrated for his military successes in establishing British dominance, Robert Clive is also criticized for amassing a vast personal fortune through corruption and for policies that led to the Bengal famine of 1770, which resulted in the deaths of millions. Horace Walpole, Whig politician and author, said of the “sovereigns of Bengal”: “They starved millions in India by monopolies and plunder, and almost raised a famine at home by the luxury occasioned by their opulence raising the price of everything, till the poor could not purchase bread.” More or we proceed to Havelock?

Ned Ma
John Burton Do you have the minimum intelligence and knowledge to engage with what I have posted about Clive? I doubt it. Your comment is of an arrogant, ignorant bigot. At least John Money asked why.

Ned Ma
John Burton If you hate Britain? And you consider critical reading of history, national icons, etc. 'hate'? Is that a scholastic knowledge? And what do you mean by Britain? Is Britiain one clean entity or a mix like many or most countries of progressive and reactionary, good and bad? What do you mean by 'lefty'? I hear the word thrown up so often when someone someone disagrees with another on this page.


John Burton
Ned Ma "He was a colonial figure", "If you are a supporter of the British Empire then the discussion ends here". Great arguments. He's "criticised" by certain people because a fortune he amassed by supporting Mir Jafar

Ned Ma
John Burton It is a fact that he was a colonial figure, corrupt
Ned Ma
John Burton And here is what happened when Evelyn Baring was governor of Kenya between 1952 and 1959. Facts, not hate. “White and Black agents of empire perpetrated horrific crimes in defense of British rule in Kenya. They used electric shock and hooked suspects up to car batteries. They tied suspects to vehicle bumpers with just enough rope to drag them to death. They employed burning cigarettes, fire, and hot coals. They thrust bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, sticks, and hot eggs up men’s rectums and into women’s vaginas. They crushed bones and teeth; sliced off fingers or their tips; and castrated men with specially designed instruments or by beating a suspect’s testicles “till the scrotum burst,” according to Anglican church officials. Some used a kiboko, or a rhino whip, for beating; others used clubs, fists, and truncheons. “Bucket fatigue” was a routine practice, as were various forms of human excrement torture. Mau Mau suspects and detainees were forced to clean nightsoil buckets barehanded and run for hours around a compound holding a full nightsoil bucket aloft, which then spilled over, encrusting the person holding it with feces and urine. No Kikuyu—man, woman, or child—was safe.” 
–Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence, 2022, pp. 1036-37 in the ebook version, and implemented policies that led to a famine. Those are not arguments. Prove otherwise.

John Burton
Ned Ma You are not an aurguer, hence why you say your opinions aren't arguments, so you're not worth much of my time. Still, forgetting the very severe drought, the policies at the time probably did contribute, but you've got the idea in your head that it was intentional. You probably also blame Churchill for the famine in 1943 when there was another drought, Japan had invaded Burma and Britain was fighting a war in Europe, the Atlantic, North Africa South Asia and the Pacific etc. You'll also ignore the multiple (although less severe) famines that have happened since, and the fact that despite plenty of time to correct the mistakes of the past, 194 million of 810 million impoverished people live in India - nearly 80 years since independence. Odd that you're still raw about so far in the past. Maybe you should move to India or somewhere else and help.


Ned Ma
John Burton You digressed on purpose. We can talk about India and 1943 after 1. you answer my questions, very basic ones, 2. Clive's legacy. 3. you argue with what Caroline Elkins wrote about Kenya. Here are my questions again. If you hate Britain? And you consider critical reading of history, national icons, etc. 'hate'? Is that a scholastic knowledge? And what do you mean by Britain? Is Britiain one clean entity or a mix like many or most countries of progressive and reactionary, good and bad? What do you mean by 'lefty'? I hear the word thrown up so often when someone someone disagrees with another on this page. Who are you to ask me to leave? Am I in your proprtery? I must fall? Then you blame of desribing you this or that? Why?

No more replies from Burton.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...
Post a Comment
Read more
John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis...
Post a Comment
Read more

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened
Read more
Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war
Post a Comment
Read more
"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond.  Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package.  It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...
Post a Comment
Read more
"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.”  In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people.  Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Europe's Refugee Camps

"Just three and a half years after the signing of the refugee deal, these camps have become symbols of Europe's failure to protect those who knocked on its door for help. These camps, with Moria chief among them, are now places where already traumatised people are stripped off their dignity." The invisible violence of Europe's refugees camps
Read more