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Showing posts with the label "Clive of India"

Britain

"It is not just that this statue [of Robert Clive ] stands as a daily challenge to every British person whose grandparents came from the former colonies. Perhaps more damagingly still, its presence outside the Foreign Office encourages dangerous neo-imperial fantasies among the descendants of the colonisers. In Britain, study of the empire is still largely absent from the history curriculum. This still tends to go from the Tudors to the Nazis, Henry to Hitler, with a brief visit to William Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale along the way. We are thus given the impression that the British were always on the side of the angels. We remain almost entirely ignorant about the long history of atrocities and exploitation that accompanied the building of our colonial system. Now, more than ever, we badly need to understand what is common knowledge elsewhere: that for much of history we were an aggressively  racist and  expansionist force  responsible for violence, injustice and war c

UK: Statues of Slave Traders

The question is: why have the British accepted statues of slave traders (and also killers for the Empire) for so long? Miseducation and ignorance, imperial pride, or indifference? Personally, I am against statues. I didn't like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, for example, having one after his death. Hopefully, what is happening will provoke a dew British people to read the history of the British empire so they know theirs before poiting to Arab or Chinese histories and know that violence and plunder played a significant role in making "Great" Britain what it is today. After Colston, figures such as Drake and Peel could be next Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts movement The history of British slave ownership has been buried Related The Blood Never Dried by John Newsinger Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor