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From: alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com

Britain doesn't just glorify its violent past: it gets high
on it

The defensive, patriotic narrative of empire has become a
drug. Like all addicts, those hooked on it cannot stomach
critique

By Afua Hirsch
The Guardian, theguardian.com
Thursday, May 31, 2018

'One respected academic was advised that, if he pursued the
study of Churchill's responsibility for the Bengal famine,
his career would be compromised.' Photograph: PA

It feels like I live in the middle of a culture war. On one
side is a kind of state-sponsored amnesia. It's pervasive.
It's an Oscar-winning movie perpetuating the idea that
Winston Churchill stood alone, at the Darkest Hour, as Nazi
fascism encroached, with Britain a small and vulnerable
nation isolated in the north Atlantic. In reality the
United Kingdom was at that moment an imperial power with
the collective might of Indian, African, Canadian and
Australian manpower, resources and wealth at its disposal.

It's also Poland passing a law so that errant historians,
survivors or Auschwitz guides who raise the inconvenient
fact of Polish complicity in atrocities now risk up to
three years' imprisonment. It's Tennessee in the US
legislating against the removal of Confederate statues
when, as the former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu puts
it, they "purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitised
Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement,
and the terror that it actually stood for".

On the other side are those who understand that historical
narratives, monuments and statues are not some pristine
record of history, but projects -- often created long after
the event they remember -- that have weaponised history
against specific groups. This is why South Africans
question statues that glorified apartheid, why Native
Americans protest against Thanksgiving, why indigenous
Australians required a correction to the ludicrous ideas
that Captain Cook "discovered" their continent or that they
should celebrate the intrepid explorers who massacred their
ancestors.

The bronze statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes
is removed from the Cape Town University campus, South
Africa. Photograph: Schalk van Zuydam/AP

There are the New Yorkers who removed the statue of J
Marion Sims, the gynaecologist who experimented on enslaved
black women without anaesthetic; . . .

Continues at:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/29/britain-glorify-violent-past-defensive-empire-drug

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)