The British came to India as traders and stayed for hundreds of years as colonisers and rulers. Bizarrely, they thought that they were somehow civilizing us even as they plundered and exploited India’s wealth and resources; repatriating it back to their own country. Is there an acknowledgement of Britain’s exploitative, imperialist past that literally bled dry colonized lands like India?
The struggle for Irish self-determination and independence has been a long and bloody one. It is something that the Irish feel Britain should be ashamed of – but isn't.
The British colonised about ruled about one-third of the globe at one point. Nations struggled for and achieved their freedom through different means at different points in time.
The IRA's struggle has been a bloody one, with many characterising it as a terrorist organisation. However, what the British did in the past was as heinous – on a much larger scale.
The Irish struggle for self-determination has been a very long one, dating back to before the IRA which was founded over a hundred years ago.
According to this view, there is no need to be ashamed of history for something that one’s ancestors did.
The way that future generations of the British benefited from colonization is plain to see even today.
Though today’s Germans didn’t participate in the holocaust they are still deeply aware of and sorry for that horrific chapter of their history.
British imperialism and its colonial past are not adequately taught in their history books feel a lot of the Brits themselves.
They have started wars in various parts of the world to perpetuate their own ideologies or for political commercial gain: Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan. American interference has often left those countries far worse off than before.
They divided and ruled. They collected taxes from Indians looted Indian kingdoms and repatriated wealth back to England to fuel their own industrial revolution. In pre-colonial periods, India’s GDP was about 27% of the world according to some sources, but when the British finally left, India was reduced to dire poverty.
The ‘British’ museum is full of artefacts not from Britain. The precious cultural heritage of so many countries was looted by the British – and then admittedly looked after and preserved – but what they did was still theft and they have not tried to return this wealth to us have they?
A lot of the British don’t acknowledge the terrible injustices that they meted out to so many countries that they colonized. They still speak of ‘giving’ India the railways or the civil services or the education system. The fact is that whatever ‘development’ happened during colonial times happened because it was profitable for the East Indian Company and the Empire. The railways to ferry raw materials and goods and workers, the civil services for vast swathes of the local populace to do their bidding and an education system to ensure that they didn’t have to learn the local languages. So should the British today be ashamed of their history? If not ashamed they should at least acknowledge that their prosperity today owes itself to poverty deliberately created elsewhere.
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