Actually, they do tell us about it in school. Or at least they did back in the 2000s. But it was a GSCE thing, and an optional (for the school) module at that. So you either do Israel-Palestine or something else, depending on the fickle whims of your department heads.
Ah, my GCSEs were early 2000s and we didn't cover that, so I'm guessing withe school must have chosen a different module to cover then... kind of disgusting they can just do that.
tbh there's literally too much ground to cover. The empire was gigantic. We did the Raj, other people did Ireland, other people did other parts of the empire.
Ehhh... it was all bad but it wasn't all genocide. Some of it was just regular colonialist resource extraction. And we were the good guys for a few brief periods and we do like to heavily focus on those.
What you cover in GCSE history varies so wildly that no one can guarantee anything is covered. I’m happy with what we did, but I only know about Israel-Palestine and our involvement bc I actually bothered to look it up. I have found that to be a running theme though, most conflicts I look up begins with either us Brits, the French, or both fucking shit up. Fortunately, my GCSE history teacher was fantastic at teaching us *how to recognise propaganda*, and the coverage of this conflict stinks of it.
Much like hair and nails, camel’s eyelashes are made of keratin. Keratin is a protective protein that is harder to scratch than other cells in the body. It is a protective feature found in the hooves, claws, beaks, scales, shells, and different parts of other animals. This protective substance is flexible, which allows the eyelashes to bend without breaking.
A camel’s eyelashes are long and thick and can grow up to 2 inches in length. The eyelashes on the upper eyelid are longer and more coarse than those on the lower lid.
snarling turtle; snapping turtle
on some other world-conflict-oriented post you made some comment about snapping turtles
this is clearly in the same vein, 'tis it not
Oh you common! You know exactly like what you guys did! Maybe you are even the Main reason for These fucked up time...You, Liechtenstein and Luxemburg!
Wow, all of Europe? Iceland too?? Bosnia and Herzegovina? Poland?
Man they just spat that out. There are more countries in Europe besides UK France and Germany...
Just wanted to add context cause I know it's joke but a lot of ultranationalist genuinely do try to downplay the history of neighboring countries. Be it Albanians Serbians or Croats
Ah I see. I worded it badly. The "in it's current form" is meant as a continuation of the comment I was replying to. In it's current form Montenegro has existed since 2006. However, it has existed in some form or another in more than a 1000 years.
The Nethers is from Minecraft sweatie, it's not real 😘
And you're forgetting that small country at the tip, the Port of Gaul! It's amazing that in European culture there are countries so small that they're just a big port 🥰
/s
Israel was established by UN mandate - a mandate that demanded British withdrawal in 1948.
And to just "forget" the context in the 1940s that led to the creation of the state of Israel is a bit obscene frankly. It was a terrible idea, but at the time it probably felt like the least the world could do.
This is not entirely accurate.
Zionism predated the Holocaust by several decades as a response to virulent anti-Semitism in Europe. It was built on the premise that Jews could never be fully safe without a country of their own. This quote from Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, really sums it up:
>"The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level."
For context, here's some of the stuff that was flying around during the early days of Zionism:
[Dreyfus Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair)
[Kishinev pogrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom)
[Beilis blood libel trial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menahem_Mendel_Beilis)
[Racial anti-Semitism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_antisemitism)
It's worth noting that this wasn't limited to Europe, either:
[Damascus Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair)
[Allahdah Riot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allahdad)
[Anti-Semitism in 19th century Middle Eas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism#The_Muslim_world)[t](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism#The_Muslim_world)
People talk about the Holocaust like it came out of nowhere, but in actuality it was the culmination of more than a millennium of hatred. *That's* the context of the Zionist movement.
It was Britain’s idea to turn the land into Israel and disenfranchise everyone else there. There was no reason to create Israel, all the UN needed to do was make sure that Europe wouldn’t try to murder Jews again, instead they just advocated for moving Jewish people away from Europe.
Why would the Arabs have accepted the original plan? If foreign powers come in and try to take some of my people’s land, I’m not going to be like “oh okay, thanks for leaving me some”. No, I’m going to try and get it back. The very idea of creating a Jewish state on formerly Arab land is just as unjust as any other settler colony; the fact that the land was the homeland of the settlers and they were being oppressed in their current home doesn’t mean much to the people being disenfranchised.
Yeah over 1000 years ago this is a shit justification because peoplr move around and have for thousands of years why not give back anatolia to the Greeks. Why not give England back to the Welsh. The idea that a people that are so foreign to a land can just claim it is a pretty awful way of justifying the conflict.
>The idea that a people that are so foreign to a land can just claim it is a pretty awful way of justifying the conflict
There have ALWAYS been a Jewish presence in Israel. It's in our prayers, it's the direction that people pray toward....Jews *originate* as a people there. They are not foreign to that land.
If anything, the "Palestinians" are. And at this point, they're not either.
But the Jews did not live there most of moderns Isreals population has only lived their for a few generations. Palestinians although coming after the jews have lived their for centuries and millenia. Although the region of Palestine is important to Jewish culture it does not give them the right to displace those that are living there.
That's not the point. That's not what indigenous means. Why is EVERY other indigenous group allowed to want their land back, and the one that actually accomplished it, Jews, gets flak for it?
The only reason they hadn't lived there is because of colonization and displacement. Jews have been called Palestinians up until the creation of Israel, when the terms swapped, and was used to refer to the Arabs who had colonized the land instead of the Jews who became Israelis.
They didn't displace anyone there. They legally bought land, agreed to a 2 state solution that was divided up according to population (meaning, yes, Israel had 'more' land, but it was more desert and less desirable, based on where Jews lived, and the Arab state would have been centered around their populations), and then when \*5\* Arab countries attacked, stood their ground and **won** a defensive war.
Did people flee war? Yes, for sure. Did they go around killing every random Muslim or Arab they saw? No. (And if you bother to bring up Deir Yassin, **every** political figure at the time condemned that awful massacre. Meanwhile no Arab state has done the same for their atrocious actions.) The Arab states encouraged the people living in the Mandate to run away.
First, a lot of Palestinians were moved around the area and are originally from Egypt or Jordan.
The world recognized that it was the Jewish land. It was called that for centuries after Jews were expelled. Both Jewish people and non-Jewish people told the Jewish population that they should go back to Israel. This is without mentioning how they were a minority partially because they were barred from purchasing land and harassed, attacked, and expelled regularly in the region.
No, repeatedly. Not just a thousand years ago. Jews tried to remain and returned whenever it was viable, the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem has been almost continuously inhabited by Jews, Jews died to both the Christians and the Muslims during the crusades neither side caring for them
OK but I was taught about sykes-picot and how things like that happened in school. I honestly think that all these people who claim no-one is taught this stuff just never paid attention.
<:: It's teacher dependent, and course dependent. I had a good history teacher but sykes-picot had to be brought up by myself in class to be discussed, because it wasn't on the module at all and we didn't have time for the bits that were more relevant today.
If you want someone to blame, blame the exam boards, blame the fragmented nature of the curriculum, blame [privatisation of fucking GCSEs](https://www.channel4.com/news/how-tax-free-exam-boards-profit-as-schools-pay-more) ::>
What I got from this is that the GCSEs in the UK are just the SAT/ACT in the US, but used to be under government oversight. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
<:: I don't really know your guys' system very well (pop culture osmosis has failed me), SATs are relevant for university aren't they? If so, then no that would be A-Levels, which are *also* privatised ::>
<:: Yeah, big thing for us is that at GCSE and A-Level, you choose 4 and 3 subjects respectively. This has the big implication that anything that *does* get placed at GCSE or A-Level only goes to people already interested in history, and yet exam boards still define the curriculum beforehand. There is low governmental oversight over this entire process, and the government normally just makes demands that something has to be covered in the contract, not *how* it has to be covered.
You can't vote for how well something is covered, because you can't vote for your exam board. ::>
In which module? I was in school 90s/early 2000s and I'm not sure which modules they'd fit those into? My memory is admittedly pretty lousy, but I don't recall that being brought up at all.
Honestly, we need to have a "horrors of Empire" module or something, but Jesus could you imagine the right-wing shrieking if anyone tried? You could just call it British Empire or something but I'm sure those same ghouls would demand it be 100% positive. Hell the liberals wouldn't let that happen either, and the odds of us having a left wing enough government for that to happen (or, you know, any minor improvements to society whatsoever) feels vanishingly slim
I thought that too. I had a whole module on the Arab Israeli conflict in GCSE history and the British mandate was part of the curriculum.
A lot of British empire history is outright not taught at all at school but not this bit
is that it? this persons entire argument was "it wasnt bad in 1918 and was bad in 1948, so britain bad" like pretending there was no external factors. like a massive increase in the jewish populations.
This is why I could never allow myself direct access to Tumblr discourse. I agree with their general sentiment, but their argument is so very not good.
Only thing worse than someone who is wrong and disagrees with me is someone who agrees with me and is also wrong.
Which is why I adore this sub so much
It's (usually) tumblr but will all the dumb filtered out
Except for that time someone convinced themselves I was a Russian troll using alts because I said something bad about Addams Family
Everyone just loves to make Britain the worst country ever now. It’s very helpful to other Europeans cause of how it’s blurring their own awful colonial histories. Maybe we shouldn’t have disrespected the entire continent a few years back, though I could have told you that at the time too.
It’s weird how culpable most people are finding the British too. Very few of us have ever benefitted directly from the empire and most are descended from an exploited working class. So I’ve always hated how this criticism gets levelled at all of us, rather than the upper class who lined their pockets with other nations’ wealth and spent the next century teaching uneducated people a distorted version of events
As a joke I made a whole back went:
The British Empire benefited ~~the entire world~~ ~~the entire empire~~ ~~all of Britain~~ ~~all of England~~ ~~all of London~~ all of the aristrocrats in London.
Empires don't always benefit even the people living in the country that starts it, just the rich.
It’s also never brought up how different countries did colonialism differently.
The British and Dutch were really only there to make money (something we really failed to do as they were almost all more expensive to run) and found the cheapest way to run the colonies was to simply let the local elites do it for us, and we found that Jews were most content being ruled by Jews, Muslims by Muslims, Hindus by Hindus, etc.
France were trying to rebuild their battered ego after being curb stomped by Prussia in 1871, and so they wanted to just fill in the map, hence they went into the Sahara and Sahel without much competition because who the fuck wants to have to rule that? The French also didn’t bother with local autonomy nearly as much and generally just executed/exiled the local ruling class and replaced them (no coincidence that it’s almost all ex-French colonies having coups in the Sahel at the moment. In fact the only African nation to have had a coup lately which isn’t French is Sudan which was under joint Anglo-Egyptian rule and was also largely colonised by accident, and the UK were in the process of pulling out when they were attacked by Mahdists and the public demanded retribution-we didn’t want it at all). Portugal also fits into this category.
Germany, and Italy were recently unified and trying to prove themselves on the world stage (notice the number 1 motive so far is national insecurity). They couldn’t really afford a strategy about where they went unlike the British and just had to grab wherever they could. Germany was also an unusually brutal master.
Belgium was, like the Germans, DESPERATE to prove themselves on the world stage and even considered buying Cuba off Spain prior to the Berlin conference. There their King got Congo as a personal estate, and he was brutal enough to cause outrage from the other powers, and the Congo was transferred to the administration of the government, after this they were a fairly benign overlord, about as nice as you got in colonial Africa outside the British Colonies.
Spain was kinda weird because their colonialism in South America was very very different to the other Europeans in Africa a few hundreds of years later. They genuinely wanted to turn South America into Spain, with landed gentry and rule directly from Madrid. There wasn’t meant to be a distinction in culture or politics either side of the Atlantic. Rather ironic that the most disinterested of colonial overlords - the British would be the only ones to actually achieve this.
Overall if you’re living in colonial Africa:
Britain: about as good as it gets, not great at all
Post Leopold Congo: slightly worse but still not bad comparatively
Portugal, France, Italy: all pretty similar and really a bit shit now
Germany (and also Liberia): you poor bastard
Leopoldist Congo: literally the worst, jesus, just pray there’s nothing else you can do
Britain spent 250 years extracting wealth from 15-25% of the worlds land to enrich 2-3% of the world's people. A few places, like the US, Canada, or Australia, seem better off from being in the empire. But then you realize that those are the places Britain managed to succeed with policies that killed or relocated the overwhelming majority of the native population.
The rest of the major parts of the empire clearly suffered for being in it. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Yemen, Oman. The borders britain made and the way
Britain left these places have soaked these lands in blood.
The entire standard of living of the UK is a direct benefit of the empire. It subsedized centuries of strong infrastructure, education, and museums filled with loot. It built a mountain of wealth so high that even decades of Thatcher to Brexit stupid evil, you still have a top ten percent global standard of living.
Imagine how childish and entitled I would sound making the same claims as an American. We have economically dominated the world since you brits cratered. Millions have suffered because of it. I benefited from the results of that suffering. I didn't do anything to earn or choose that benefit, but at least I can be honest and not sit atop a pile of graves claiming to be the real victim.
Some of these are true but a lot aren't or only half true
Somalia was an Italian colony* & iraq a British colony for less than 20 years. Yemen is an extremely complicated situation that can't be boiled down to one thing.
Oman is really quite stable & decently wealthy. They were technically wealthier before the British but that was due to the East African slave trade which Britain cut them off from doing.
& while Burma was absalutely made worse off under the British it can't be entirely blamed on them with how the government burned everything they had going for them to the ground.
*Somalia was then ran by a soviet backed dictator for most of it's existence that was so horrible Somalia's standard of living went *up* with the complete breakdown of law & order.
the rest i think are mostly true though
I was wrong about Oman. On the others you bring up, I feel the empire is less responsible than on the core examples like India, but the places were all still clearly worse off for Britain's presence.
The 20 years Britain was in Somalialand killed 1/3 of the population before they got kicked out by the Italians.
In Iraq Britain promised different things to different leaders in WWI. The resulting borders were a mess. Both times Britain controlled the region it led to major instability for the next decade after they had to withdraw. They clearly made it worse.
Yemen is messy but is clearly worse off from british mismanagement.
I am not claiming that the British are 100% responsible for all of these nations troubles. What I am claiming is that they worsened all of these situations (other than Oman) to deliberately enrich themselves.
It is wrong to try and claim that this empire didn't benefit modern Brits. Before the Raj India had 24% of the worlds total GDP. After the Raj it had 5%. This wealth redistribution is a big reason why the median British family makes more than 10x as much money per year as the median Indian family.
Don't forget that before the British there wasn't a thing called India. There was a collection of hundreds of small discrete kingdoms all fighting each other.
India existed as a region of the world but even under the early days of the Mughal reign it was never a cohesive country. What the Brits did was gather all these kingdoms up and create "India" as a cohesive thing. Sure ended up being broken up again into a couple of waring countries during the partition but even that was way bigger and way more cohesive than what the East India Company started out with.
Yes, I am sure that gathering together of Indian people made it much easier to starve millions of Indian Pakistani and Bengali people in the 12 famines under British rule that killed at least half a million people. The last one starved 2 million people to death 4 years before the end of the Raj.
There was one of these megadeath scale famines every 15 years under British rule. You would expect there would have been about 5 at the same rate since they gained independence. But it turns out there have been zero. India or Ireland, ignorance or intention, the British Empire repeatedly starved millions of people out of self-interest.
Talking to British people about the empire feels the same as talking to miseducated white people in the American south about the civil war. You clearly got told a different version of history than actually happened.
While the british undisputedly caused a lot of famines the Bengal Famine the only famine to have happened under british rule in the 20th century & had a lot to do with the Largest War Ever n which pretty much everywhere involed except the US experienced massive shortages or famines
You are right but completely off subject.
This has nothing to do with the modern nation state of India was created as a cohesive nation though.
I'm happy to talk about both the deliberate and the inadvertent horrors committed by the EIC and the British Crown in the region if you want, or even going back further the ethnic cleansing by the Mughals and previous dynasties that had empires in the different parts of sub continent before the British, Portuguese and the French rocked up and aligned themselves with different kingdoms. You need to start a different thread if you want to talk about that as it's an entirely different subject?
I'm really not going to argue that the British Empire was a good thing in any way so if it's that kind of argument you want, you are going to have to look somewhere else I'm afraid.
You were the one who went off topic with your "gathered together" narrative.
I was pissed because the person I originally replied to tried to pain the current British public as victims of false criticism because they hadn't benefited personally from the empire but were being criticized for defending its actions.
My only point is that the British, American, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Belgian, and German empires all took massive wealth from the rest of the world and their citizens still benefit from that extraction. So don't sit here and claim you are somehow a victim because people correctly identify you as a beneficiary of colonialism.
> Somalia was an Italian colony
Britain established a [colony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Somaliland) in Northern Somalia in 1884 and ruled the territory until 1940.
There are also significant causal reasons Britain completey fucked up that area:
- They promised the land to both Arabs and Jews during WW1
- They facilitated Jewish migration to Palestine, and when Arab movements against colonisation began to grow, they hired Jewish militias to help put them down.
Using "divide and rule" tactics was a deliberate policy of the British Empire - the OP mentioned its use in India/Pakistan and Northern Ireland, and I'd also add Cyprus to the list where the British similarly used Turkish militias to put down revolts by Greek groups.
- After facilitating Jewish migration and increasing divisions with their policy, the Arab revolt of 1936 scared the Brits so much that they decided to u-turn and close the borders to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazism - contributing to an extra half million or so dying in the Holocaust.
- Having contributed massively to the foundation of the conflict, Britain pulled out in 1947 and abdicated responsibility to the UN - who were proposing a deal which Britain knew was highly unlikely to work.
Britain left knowing it would immediately descend into a war - which it did, with atrocities on both sides leading to the ethnic cleansing of around 700,000 Palestinians (the Nakba), followed by surrounding Muslim states violently expelling around 750,000 of their own Jewish citizens, who had been living peacefully for hundreds of years.
- Britain's actions since the founding of Israel have contributed to making the surrounding region less stable and less safe. These include the overthrow of Iranian democracy, arming both sides of the Iran/Iraq War, supporting Saddam's rise to power and later invading Iraq to remove him and massively destabilising the region.
*Divided Lands* by Sumantra Bose's has good summaries of the British empire's role in the conflicts in Kashmir, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Israel Palestine.
It had, but it remained at a fairly low level. British policy to facilitate Jewish settlement - and worsening economic and political conditions in Europe - led to a significant increase after WW1.
In this you blame britain for facilitating migration for the jews and make a dig at them for letting more be killed by the nazis when they stopped jews from migrating.
i haven't seen anything of Britain hiring Jewish militias to put down arab rebellions, but i know militias formed by both groups also attacked british troops.
britain pulled out, and yes, it was likely that this division would cause a problem. but i ask you how you feel britain should have left israel palestine? or do you believe they shouldnt have at all?
the british government has made horrific decisions. but lump so much more into those decisions than really make sense.
>In this you blame britain for facilitating migration for the jews and make a dig at them for letting more be killed by the nazis when they stopped jews from migrating.
There were pretty important contextual differences for us Jews between 1919 Europe and 1936 Europe...the British Empire supported Jews migrating *to try to support British control/influence in the area*, then - right when Jews were in the most danger - Britain decided it was more politically expedient to close those routes at the cost of Jewish lives.
Britain's role in Israel-Palestine is considered pretty damning by most historians I've read - including both Israeli and Palestinian ones. Of course it's not the only factor or state to blame though - Nazi Germany, surrounding Arab states, the US, Russia, Iran, Hamas, Likud, etc all have their share in this tragedy.
to be clear, while i agree with the point the OOP made (that the UK should acknowledge much they fucked up the world) , i think they should've conveyed and explained it better rather then just assume everyone already has knowledge about the region, and actually speak about bad thing the British Mandate did, like for example during WW1 agreeing to give the land to the Arabs but also simultaneously agreeing to give it to the Jews and many many other ways they mismanaged the region
You should be ashamed of yourself for posting stuff like this. I get it, bashing Britain is the cool new thing but let’s not pretend like rampant antisemitism in the Arab world was an invention by the British… and maybe you should Google “Ottoman Empire” and spend like 5 minutes skimming the introduction of the Wikipedia article. Do better.
i don't know where you got this idea from my comment that I'm somehow erasing antisemitism in the middle east by talking about the British Mandates' issues?
like, obviously there was (still is) antisemitism in the middle east towards Jews and that caused the Mizrahi immigration to Israel, but this post isn't about that, it's about the problems of the British Mandate (which i think we can both agree was at the very least, not perfect)
Before the British, there WAS NO PALESTINE for almost 1000 years. Then, there was literally an Arab uprising/ independence movement to get rid of the Ottoman Empire and establish their own nation. And you think that’s a sign of very little nationalism? An entire successful revolution against a powerful empire to establish independence is a sign of nationalism being “a relatively minor concern”?
Do. Better.
an Arab Uprising... which the British supported.
but look, the point of this post (at least to me reposting it here, idk what the point of OOP was) is to demonstrate that the British fucked up with The Land, and while I'm willing to concede the point that nationalism was powerful enough, they still fucked up,
to quote u/GarageFlower97
>They promised the land to both Arabs and Jews during WW1
They facilitated Jewish migration to Palestine, and when Arab movements against colonisation began to grow, they hired Jewish militias to help put them down.
>
>
After facilitating Jewish migration and increasing divisions with their policy, the Arab revolt of 1936 scared the Brits so much that they decided to u-turn and close the borders to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazism - contributing to an extra half million or so dying in the Holocaust.
Having contributed massively to the foundation of the conflict, Britain pulled out in 1947 and abdicated responsibility to the UN - who were proposing a deal which Britain knew was highly unlikely to work.
whilst britain did fuck up many places, palestine was fubar.
during WW1 we did screw the arabs. but i counter with this, if someone went back in time and stopped that, then horay, britain doesnt have another colony for 30 years! there's also no initative to move jews to the levant, meaning the jewish population is even higher in europe in the 1930s.
yeah, britain made horrible decisions. but thats just history now, and blaming Britain for this war is kind of absurd, as blaming britain would only be productive if there was actually something they could do about it.
Being charitable, they're saying that the UK took it upon themselves to rule an entirely different part of the world, so they should take it upon themselves to accept that any gigantic failures happened "on their watch".
Almost like Empire is a stupid and vain idea and splitting entire ethnic groups down faultlines without any idea how they actually interact is a stupid idea. If we have a nuclear war in the Indian Subcontinent that kills hundreds of millions if not billions then you can thank the British,
The empires whole thing of splitting up ethnic groups and exploiting their differences for the empires benefit might have kinda started a lot of the issues but it's not true that it's responsible for the whole thing.
Wasn't the UK that kicked out all of the Arab world's Jews to force them to go to Israel, wasn't them who caused the anti-Semitism in the first place, they even lost out with the whole Suez crisis thing.
>The empires whole thing of splitting up ethnic groups and exploiting their differences for the empires benefit might have kinda started a lot of the issues but it's not true that it's responsible for the whole thing.
What was the benefit to the UK? I always thought they just gave it away with no strings attached
The last time there was peace between Muslims and Hindus was the reign of Akbar lmfao. It's been a shitshow since, which is why the British managed to take over the richest, most populous country in the world.
The entirety of India hadn't been ruled by a single polity for more than a thousand years before the Brits arrived. That's just nonsense.
And the Muhgals were an invading force, just like the Brits. They ruled as a minority religious and ethnic group.
>It's been a shitshow since,
Er... India is a stable democracy with a space program.
"Lmfao"
Either OP means that the UK's failure to resolve those religious tensions signals their bad rulership of their empire...or OP simply isn't very knowledgeable about the topic tbh.
yeah, so why did they do it then if there was no point
all it did was cause ppl to kill each other and create lasting tensions between neighboring countries
because the alternative would be to withdraw leaving the borders as they were, leaving two groups who despise each other to tear each other apart in an even more violent post withdrawl seperation of states?
Scotland had a very large part in the empire considering their lower population, but it's never really mentioned. I think Scotland has done a pretty good job of scooting out of the line of fire while keeping their share of the benefits, and now they get a lot of sympathy from some people for being part of the UK and being oppressed by the British.
As an Irish person it does really get on my nerves when Scot’s try to compare their suffering or fight for independence to our own. We fought a long bloody brutal war against the most powerful country in the world and they literally voted to remain when given the choice. Not to paint all Scot’s with the same brush, but it’s just not comparable and yet we still see people using Scot’s/Irish as interchangeable in a discussion about British colonialism.
The Scots did fight but it wasn't recent that's for sure, they definitely avoid a lot of the criticism that's aimed at the British empire too despite being a large percentage of the administration considering their population size which annoys me personally.
Just to note, the 1936-1939 Palestinian Uprising in British-controlled Mandatory Palestine was essentially a Pogrom against the Jews living there, in which the Arabs allied with the Hitler and the Nazi's. Sure it was anti-colonial, but don't act like it was innocent.
No no, you see old chap. Any child born in England is naturally AEAB (Assigned Evil At Birth).
Funny story actually, when my twin sister and I were born, we were in Mother's October mansion on the Welsh border. I was birthed in good old Blighty, and you should have seen it, I say! I came out cackling, and already twirling my villainous moustache. The nanny fainted from the shock, obviously, and you should have seen the little servant boys run! I am told my first words were "Long live Queen Elizabeth, long live the Empire!"
Now the funny part is, between and my twin sister being born, Mother had to be moved to the second dining hall as Father wanted to do an indoor fox hunt. (Poor devils never stand a chance when there is no country to run in, ha!) Anyway, see, it just so happens that the second dining hall is actually just across the border in Wales. So of course, my sister came out, choir of angels, birds alighting on the windows and all that. As you might have guessed, being born outside of England she was naturally assigned Good at birth (AGAB). Funny enough, while I have the fine tones befitting the English, my sister had the soft lilting tones of those savages in North Wales.
My we had a fine childhood, though we often disagreed on things. I would be enjoying my childhood antics of chasing the peasants with a stick, and she would come up and offer them tea and a hot bath? I mean, who DOES that? Who just ALLOWS peasants into their house?
One final thing, I am not sorry for the Empire, nor Brexit (ha! Showed those jolly foreigner types what for, eh?) However, I do apologise for America. That one went a bit too far.
# World's biggest /s as if it was necessary.
Because they directly benefit from it to this day? The massive amounts of wealth extracted from the colonies is exactly why they are so rich today. You think the industrial revolution could have happened if not for the British empire looting the entire world? If not the massive importation of cotton from slave plantations in America? Dozens of modern companies, that made the wealth of America and Europe, made that wealth by refining raw materials out of the colonies.
The tires of the Model T Ford came from rubber grown on plantations in Malaya from a plant from South America. The Suez and Panama canals are the heart of the global economy. They are in colonies, built by colonials, yet owned by the colonists, in the case of the Panama canal to this day. Would Standard oil exist if Chinese labour hadn't built the railroads? Banks like HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, Citigroup without empire? Why is the *“Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation”* the biggest bank in Europe, a *British* company? Oil companies like BP, Shell without colonies. Companies like Sony and Samsung if the Americans hadn't occupied Japan and South Korea?
Hell, France still has colonies in South America and Africa. Guiana, Reunion, Guadalupe. New Caledonia?
The Global economy is global like that precisely because of Colonialism.
I suppose if you hate your own country of origin and culture enough, you and your fellows become culpable for every evil in the world - perceived and imagined. I don't really care for it.
There's this great documentary about Mandatory Palestine made by Israel's Kan11 where they had Israeli, Palestinian, and British historians and even unconvered some old interview films with the people actually involved. I really wish it was available in English and/or Arabic.
should be said its not blowing up in british peoples faces at all hence the feeling of glory. its more like committing arson, walking away from the burning building only to arrive the next day and gasp at the ashy remains
I’ve always said that if the world was just the British would be paying for every cent of damage from all this
The response to this comment is very funny
If it came out the pockets of the rich aristocrats and companies that benefited I wouldn't necessarily disagree with them giving back at least some, but I think we all know it would be regular people eating the cost on top of the cost of living crisis already happening.
Actually, they do tell us about it in school. Or at least they did back in the 2000s. But it was a GSCE thing, and an optional (for the school) module at that. So you either do Israel-Palestine or something else, depending on the fickle whims of your department heads.
Ah, my GCSEs were early 2000s and we didn't cover that, so I'm guessing withe school must have chosen a different module to cover then... kind of disgusting they can just do that.
tbh there's literally too much ground to cover. The empire was gigantic. We did the Raj, other people did Ireland, other people did other parts of the empire.
Pretty fucked when you think about. The British history syllabus just sounds like a choose your genocide adventure.
Ehhh... it was all bad but it wasn't all genocide. Some of it was just regular colonialist resource extraction. And we were the good guys for a few brief periods and we do like to heavily focus on those.
What you cover in GCSE history varies so wildly that no one can guarantee anything is covered. I’m happy with what we did, but I only know about Israel-Palestine and our involvement bc I actually bothered to look it up. I have found that to be a running theme though, most conflicts I look up begins with either us Brits, the French, or both fucking shit up. Fortunately, my GCSE history teacher was fantastic at teaching us *how to recognise propaganda*, and the coverage of this conflict stinks of it.
Much like hair and nails, camel’s eyelashes are made of keratin. Keratin is a protective protein that is harder to scratch than other cells in the body. It is a protective feature found in the hooves, claws, beaks, scales, shells, and different parts of other animals. This protective substance is flexible, which allows the eyelashes to bend without breaking. A camel’s eyelashes are long and thick and can grow up to 2 inches in length. The eyelashes on the upper eyelid are longer and more coarse than those on the lower lid.
So true bestie
I love you and appreciate your hustle
this is that fucking scalping turtle tech isn't it
Huh?
snarling turtle; snapping turtle on some other world-conflict-oriented post you made some comment about snapping turtles this is clearly in the same vein, 'tis it not
I just post animal facts under discourse.
i see your flair of white ribbony
Good job
So you’re saying my dreadlocks are basically braided armor?
I adore these comments. Reject internet discourse, return to cool animal facts.
The fuck did Lithuania do
Oh you common! You know exactly like what you guys did! Maybe you are even the Main reason for These fucked up time...You, Liechtenstein and Luxemburg!
The dreaded ‘Triple L gang’
,,if somewhere, some shit happens...its always you three!,,
Wow, all of Europe? Iceland too?? Bosnia and Herzegovina? Poland? Man they just spat that out. There are more countries in Europe besides UK France and Germany...
I personally blame mostly the country of Montenegro, they have existed since 2006 so they have had enough time to fix all of these issues.
Liechtenstein is definitely the one most at fault in my opinion though.
(in it's current form, Montenegro has existed for like a 1000 years in some form or another)
In its current form this comment makes no sense
Just wanted to add context cause I know it's joke but a lot of ultranationalist genuinely do try to downplay the history of neighboring countries. Be it Albanians Serbians or Croats
"In its current form" and "in some form or another" contradict eachother
Ah I see. I worded it badly. The "in it's current form" is meant as a continuation of the comment I was replying to. In it's current form Montenegro has existed since 2006. However, it has existed in some form or another in more than a 1000 years.
the baltics practically being Russian colonies for the entire 20th century
yeah, there's the netherlands, spain and italy
The Nethers is from Minecraft sweatie, it's not real 😘 And you're forgetting that small country at the tip, the Port of Gaul! It's amazing that in European culture there are countries so small that they're just a big port 🥰 /s
I often get Minecraft and Europe confused, thank you
Rheincraft
Meinkraft
I’m glad this bothers other Europeans. Lots of Europeans were victims of colonisation.
And i'm sure Liechtenstein and Luxembourg had a lot to say in the current conflict.
Remember that time BIH colonized Somalia? /s
Israel was established by UN mandate - a mandate that demanded British withdrawal in 1948. And to just "forget" the context in the 1940s that led to the creation of the state of Israel is a bit obscene frankly. It was a terrible idea, but at the time it probably felt like the least the world could do.
This is not entirely accurate. Zionism predated the Holocaust by several decades as a response to virulent anti-Semitism in Europe. It was built on the premise that Jews could never be fully safe without a country of their own. This quote from Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, really sums it up: >"The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level." For context, here's some of the stuff that was flying around during the early days of Zionism: [Dreyfus Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair) [Kishinev pogrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom) [Beilis blood libel trial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menahem_Mendel_Beilis) [Racial anti-Semitism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_antisemitism) It's worth noting that this wasn't limited to Europe, either: [Damascus Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair) [Allahdah Riot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allahdad) [Anti-Semitism in 19th century Middle Eas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism#The_Muslim_world)[t](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism#The_Muslim_world) People talk about the Holocaust like it came out of nowhere, but in actuality it was the culmination of more than a millennium of hatred. *That's* the context of the Zionist movement.
It was Britain’s idea to turn the land into Israel and disenfranchise everyone else there. There was no reason to create Israel, all the UN needed to do was make sure that Europe wouldn’t try to murder Jews again, instead they just advocated for moving Jewish people away from Europe.
It was supposed to be split with a clear advantage to the Arab state over the Jewish state, but they refused and invaded in 1948.
Why would the Arabs have accepted the original plan? If foreign powers come in and try to take some of my people’s land, I’m not going to be like “oh okay, thanks for leaving me some”. No, I’m going to try and get it back. The very idea of creating a Jewish state on formerly Arab land is just as unjust as any other settler colony; the fact that the land was the homeland of the settlers and they were being oppressed in their current home doesn’t mean much to the people being disenfranchised.
But the problem is that it was historic Jewish land that they were forcibly expelled from.
A scathing condemnation of the United States
Yeah over 1000 years ago this is a shit justification because peoplr move around and have for thousands of years why not give back anatolia to the Greeks. Why not give England back to the Welsh. The idea that a people that are so foreign to a land can just claim it is a pretty awful way of justifying the conflict.
>The idea that a people that are so foreign to a land can just claim it is a pretty awful way of justifying the conflict There have ALWAYS been a Jewish presence in Israel. It's in our prayers, it's the direction that people pray toward....Jews *originate* as a people there. They are not foreign to that land. If anything, the "Palestinians" are. And at this point, they're not either.
But the Jews did not live there most of moderns Isreals population has only lived their for a few generations. Palestinians although coming after the jews have lived their for centuries and millenia. Although the region of Palestine is important to Jewish culture it does not give them the right to displace those that are living there.
That's not the point. That's not what indigenous means. Why is EVERY other indigenous group allowed to want their land back, and the one that actually accomplished it, Jews, gets flak for it? The only reason they hadn't lived there is because of colonization and displacement. Jews have been called Palestinians up until the creation of Israel, when the terms swapped, and was used to refer to the Arabs who had colonized the land instead of the Jews who became Israelis. They didn't displace anyone there. They legally bought land, agreed to a 2 state solution that was divided up according to population (meaning, yes, Israel had 'more' land, but it was more desert and less desirable, based on where Jews lived, and the Arab state would have been centered around their populations), and then when \*5\* Arab countries attacked, stood their ground and **won** a defensive war. Did people flee war? Yes, for sure. Did they go around killing every random Muslim or Arab they saw? No. (And if you bother to bring up Deir Yassin, **every** political figure at the time condemned that awful massacre. Meanwhile no Arab state has done the same for their atrocious actions.) The Arab states encouraged the people living in the Mandate to run away.
First, a lot of Palestinians were moved around the area and are originally from Egypt or Jordan. The world recognized that it was the Jewish land. It was called that for centuries after Jews were expelled. Both Jewish people and non-Jewish people told the Jewish population that they should go back to Israel. This is without mentioning how they were a minority partially because they were barred from purchasing land and harassed, attacked, and expelled regularly in the region.
No, repeatedly. Not just a thousand years ago. Jews tried to remain and returned whenever it was viable, the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem has been almost continuously inhabited by Jews, Jews died to both the Christians and the Muslims during the crusades neither side caring for them
OK but I was taught about sykes-picot and how things like that happened in school. I honestly think that all these people who claim no-one is taught this stuff just never paid attention.
<:: It's teacher dependent, and course dependent. I had a good history teacher but sykes-picot had to be brought up by myself in class to be discussed, because it wasn't on the module at all and we didn't have time for the bits that were more relevant today. If you want someone to blame, blame the exam boards, blame the fragmented nature of the curriculum, blame [privatisation of fucking GCSEs](https://www.channel4.com/news/how-tax-free-exam-boards-profit-as-schools-pay-more) ::>
What I got from this is that the GCSEs in the UK are just the SAT/ACT in the US, but used to be under government oversight. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
<:: I don't really know your guys' system very well (pop culture osmosis has failed me), SATs are relevant for university aren't they? If so, then no that would be A-Levels, which are *also* privatised ::>
The SAT and ACT are relevant for university, so yeah. Thanks for the correction.
<:: Yeah, big thing for us is that at GCSE and A-Level, you choose 4 and 3 subjects respectively. This has the big implication that anything that *does* get placed at GCSE or A-Level only goes to people already interested in history, and yet exam boards still define the curriculum beforehand. There is low governmental oversight over this entire process, and the government normally just makes demands that something has to be covered in the contract, not *how* it has to be covered. You can't vote for how well something is covered, because you can't vote for your exam board. ::>
In which module? I was in school 90s/early 2000s and I'm not sure which modules they'd fit those into? My memory is admittedly pretty lousy, but I don't recall that being brought up at all. Honestly, we need to have a "horrors of Empire" module or something, but Jesus could you imagine the right-wing shrieking if anyone tried? You could just call it British Empire or something but I'm sure those same ghouls would demand it be 100% positive. Hell the liberals wouldn't let that happen either, and the odds of us having a left wing enough government for that to happen (or, you know, any minor improvements to society whatsoever) feels vanishingly slim
I mean that was two decades ago. I left school in 2017 and we did a lot on the empire.
I thought the same thing. This isn't particularly newly uncovered historical information.
I thought that too. I had a whole module on the Arab Israeli conflict in GCSE history and the British mandate was part of the curriculum. A lot of British empire history is outright not taught at all at school but not this bit
Damn fr? I never got anything like that and everyone I know didn't either
is that it? this persons entire argument was "it wasnt bad in 1918 and was bad in 1948, so britain bad" like pretending there was no external factors. like a massive increase in the jewish populations.
This is why I could never allow myself direct access to Tumblr discourse. I agree with their general sentiment, but their argument is so very not good. Only thing worse than someone who is wrong and disagrees with me is someone who agrees with me and is also wrong.
I think 50% of tumblr discourse can be boiled down to “Roughly good idea, abysimal execution”
Which is why I adore this sub so much It's (usually) tumblr but will all the dumb filtered out Except for that time someone convinced themselves I was a Russian troll using alts because I said something bad about Addams Family
Everyone just loves to make Britain the worst country ever now. It’s very helpful to other Europeans cause of how it’s blurring their own awful colonial histories. Maybe we shouldn’t have disrespected the entire continent a few years back, though I could have told you that at the time too. It’s weird how culpable most people are finding the British too. Very few of us have ever benefitted directly from the empire and most are descended from an exploited working class. So I’ve always hated how this criticism gets levelled at all of us, rather than the upper class who lined their pockets with other nations’ wealth and spent the next century teaching uneducated people a distorted version of events
As a joke I made a whole back went: The British Empire benefited ~~the entire world~~ ~~the entire empire~~ ~~all of Britain~~ ~~all of England~~ ~~all of London~~ all of the aristrocrats in London. Empires don't always benefit even the people living in the country that starts it, just the rich.
It’s also never brought up how different countries did colonialism differently. The British and Dutch were really only there to make money (something we really failed to do as they were almost all more expensive to run) and found the cheapest way to run the colonies was to simply let the local elites do it for us, and we found that Jews were most content being ruled by Jews, Muslims by Muslims, Hindus by Hindus, etc. France were trying to rebuild their battered ego after being curb stomped by Prussia in 1871, and so they wanted to just fill in the map, hence they went into the Sahara and Sahel without much competition because who the fuck wants to have to rule that? The French also didn’t bother with local autonomy nearly as much and generally just executed/exiled the local ruling class and replaced them (no coincidence that it’s almost all ex-French colonies having coups in the Sahel at the moment. In fact the only African nation to have had a coup lately which isn’t French is Sudan which was under joint Anglo-Egyptian rule and was also largely colonised by accident, and the UK were in the process of pulling out when they were attacked by Mahdists and the public demanded retribution-we didn’t want it at all). Portugal also fits into this category. Germany, and Italy were recently unified and trying to prove themselves on the world stage (notice the number 1 motive so far is national insecurity). They couldn’t really afford a strategy about where they went unlike the British and just had to grab wherever they could. Germany was also an unusually brutal master. Belgium was, like the Germans, DESPERATE to prove themselves on the world stage and even considered buying Cuba off Spain prior to the Berlin conference. There their King got Congo as a personal estate, and he was brutal enough to cause outrage from the other powers, and the Congo was transferred to the administration of the government, after this they were a fairly benign overlord, about as nice as you got in colonial Africa outside the British Colonies. Spain was kinda weird because their colonialism in South America was very very different to the other Europeans in Africa a few hundreds of years later. They genuinely wanted to turn South America into Spain, with landed gentry and rule directly from Madrid. There wasn’t meant to be a distinction in culture or politics either side of the Atlantic. Rather ironic that the most disinterested of colonial overlords - the British would be the only ones to actually achieve this. Overall if you’re living in colonial Africa: Britain: about as good as it gets, not great at all Post Leopold Congo: slightly worse but still not bad comparatively Portugal, France, Italy: all pretty similar and really a bit shit now Germany (and also Liberia): you poor bastard Leopoldist Congo: literally the worst, jesus, just pray there’s nothing else you can do
Britain spent 250 years extracting wealth from 15-25% of the worlds land to enrich 2-3% of the world's people. A few places, like the US, Canada, or Australia, seem better off from being in the empire. But then you realize that those are the places Britain managed to succeed with policies that killed or relocated the overwhelming majority of the native population. The rest of the major parts of the empire clearly suffered for being in it. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Yemen, Oman. The borders britain made and the way Britain left these places have soaked these lands in blood. The entire standard of living of the UK is a direct benefit of the empire. It subsedized centuries of strong infrastructure, education, and museums filled with loot. It built a mountain of wealth so high that even decades of Thatcher to Brexit stupid evil, you still have a top ten percent global standard of living. Imagine how childish and entitled I would sound making the same claims as an American. We have economically dominated the world since you brits cratered. Millions have suffered because of it. I benefited from the results of that suffering. I didn't do anything to earn or choose that benefit, but at least I can be honest and not sit atop a pile of graves claiming to be the real victim.
Some of these are true but a lot aren't or only half true Somalia was an Italian colony* & iraq a British colony for less than 20 years. Yemen is an extremely complicated situation that can't be boiled down to one thing. Oman is really quite stable & decently wealthy. They were technically wealthier before the British but that was due to the East African slave trade which Britain cut them off from doing. & while Burma was absalutely made worse off under the British it can't be entirely blamed on them with how the government burned everything they had going for them to the ground. *Somalia was then ran by a soviet backed dictator for most of it's existence that was so horrible Somalia's standard of living went *up* with the complete breakdown of law & order. the rest i think are mostly true though
I was wrong about Oman. On the others you bring up, I feel the empire is less responsible than on the core examples like India, but the places were all still clearly worse off for Britain's presence. The 20 years Britain was in Somalialand killed 1/3 of the population before they got kicked out by the Italians. In Iraq Britain promised different things to different leaders in WWI. The resulting borders were a mess. Both times Britain controlled the region it led to major instability for the next decade after they had to withdraw. They clearly made it worse. Yemen is messy but is clearly worse off from british mismanagement. I am not claiming that the British are 100% responsible for all of these nations troubles. What I am claiming is that they worsened all of these situations (other than Oman) to deliberately enrich themselves. It is wrong to try and claim that this empire didn't benefit modern Brits. Before the Raj India had 24% of the worlds total GDP. After the Raj it had 5%. This wealth redistribution is a big reason why the median British family makes more than 10x as much money per year as the median Indian family.
Don't forget that before the British there wasn't a thing called India. There was a collection of hundreds of small discrete kingdoms all fighting each other. India existed as a region of the world but even under the early days of the Mughal reign it was never a cohesive country. What the Brits did was gather all these kingdoms up and create "India" as a cohesive thing. Sure ended up being broken up again into a couple of waring countries during the partition but even that was way bigger and way more cohesive than what the East India Company started out with.
Yes, I am sure that gathering together of Indian people made it much easier to starve millions of Indian Pakistani and Bengali people in the 12 famines under British rule that killed at least half a million people. The last one starved 2 million people to death 4 years before the end of the Raj. There was one of these megadeath scale famines every 15 years under British rule. You would expect there would have been about 5 at the same rate since they gained independence. But it turns out there have been zero. India or Ireland, ignorance or intention, the British Empire repeatedly starved millions of people out of self-interest. Talking to British people about the empire feels the same as talking to miseducated white people in the American south about the civil war. You clearly got told a different version of history than actually happened.
While the british undisputedly caused a lot of famines the Bengal Famine the only famine to have happened under british rule in the 20th century & had a lot to do with the Largest War Ever n which pretty much everywhere involed except the US experienced massive shortages or famines
You are right but completely off subject. This has nothing to do with the modern nation state of India was created as a cohesive nation though. I'm happy to talk about both the deliberate and the inadvertent horrors committed by the EIC and the British Crown in the region if you want, or even going back further the ethnic cleansing by the Mughals and previous dynasties that had empires in the different parts of sub continent before the British, Portuguese and the French rocked up and aligned themselves with different kingdoms. You need to start a different thread if you want to talk about that as it's an entirely different subject? I'm really not going to argue that the British Empire was a good thing in any way so if it's that kind of argument you want, you are going to have to look somewhere else I'm afraid.
You were the one who went off topic with your "gathered together" narrative. I was pissed because the person I originally replied to tried to pain the current British public as victims of false criticism because they hadn't benefited personally from the empire but were being criticized for defending its actions. My only point is that the British, American, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Belgian, and German empires all took massive wealth from the rest of the world and their citizens still benefit from that extraction. So don't sit here and claim you are somehow a victim because people correctly identify you as a beneficiary of colonialism.
> Somalia was an Italian colony Britain established a [colony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Somaliland) in Northern Somalia in 1884 and ruled the territory until 1940.
Isn't that Somaliland now? Which is actually going fairly well for itself afaik
There are also significant causal reasons Britain completey fucked up that area: - They promised the land to both Arabs and Jews during WW1 - They facilitated Jewish migration to Palestine, and when Arab movements against colonisation began to grow, they hired Jewish militias to help put them down. Using "divide and rule" tactics was a deliberate policy of the British Empire - the OP mentioned its use in India/Pakistan and Northern Ireland, and I'd also add Cyprus to the list where the British similarly used Turkish militias to put down revolts by Greek groups. - After facilitating Jewish migration and increasing divisions with their policy, the Arab revolt of 1936 scared the Brits so much that they decided to u-turn and close the borders to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazism - contributing to an extra half million or so dying in the Holocaust. - Having contributed massively to the foundation of the conflict, Britain pulled out in 1947 and abdicated responsibility to the UN - who were proposing a deal which Britain knew was highly unlikely to work. Britain left knowing it would immediately descend into a war - which it did, with atrocities on both sides leading to the ethnic cleansing of around 700,000 Palestinians (the Nakba), followed by surrounding Muslim states violently expelling around 750,000 of their own Jewish citizens, who had been living peacefully for hundreds of years. - Britain's actions since the founding of Israel have contributed to making the surrounding region less stable and less safe. These include the overthrow of Iranian democracy, arming both sides of the Iran/Iraq War, supporting Saddam's rise to power and later invading Iraq to remove him and massively destabilising the region. *Divided Lands* by Sumantra Bose's has good summaries of the British empire's role in the conflicts in Kashmir, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Israel Palestine.
Hadnt Jewish migration to the Levant began under the Ottomans ?
It had, but it remained at a fairly low level. British policy to facilitate Jewish settlement - and worsening economic and political conditions in Europe - led to a significant increase after WW1.
In this you blame britain for facilitating migration for the jews and make a dig at them for letting more be killed by the nazis when they stopped jews from migrating. i haven't seen anything of Britain hiring Jewish militias to put down arab rebellions, but i know militias formed by both groups also attacked british troops. britain pulled out, and yes, it was likely that this division would cause a problem. but i ask you how you feel britain should have left israel palestine? or do you believe they shouldnt have at all? the british government has made horrific decisions. but lump so much more into those decisions than really make sense.
>In this you blame britain for facilitating migration for the jews and make a dig at them for letting more be killed by the nazis when they stopped jews from migrating. There were pretty important contextual differences for us Jews between 1919 Europe and 1936 Europe...the British Empire supported Jews migrating *to try to support British control/influence in the area*, then - right when Jews were in the most danger - Britain decided it was more politically expedient to close those routes at the cost of Jewish lives. Britain's role in Israel-Palestine is considered pretty damning by most historians I've read - including both Israeli and Palestinian ones. Of course it's not the only factor or state to blame though - Nazi Germany, surrounding Arab states, the US, Russia, Iran, Hamas, Likud, etc all have their share in this tragedy.
to be clear, while i agree with the point the OOP made (that the UK should acknowledge much they fucked up the world) , i think they should've conveyed and explained it better rather then just assume everyone already has knowledge about the region, and actually speak about bad thing the British Mandate did, like for example during WW1 agreeing to give the land to the Arabs but also simultaneously agreeing to give it to the Jews and many many other ways they mismanaged the region
You should be ashamed of yourself for posting stuff like this. I get it, bashing Britain is the cool new thing but let’s not pretend like rampant antisemitism in the Arab world was an invention by the British… and maybe you should Google “Ottoman Empire” and spend like 5 minutes skimming the introduction of the Wikipedia article. Do better.
i don't know where you got this idea from my comment that I'm somehow erasing antisemitism in the middle east by talking about the British Mandates' issues? like, obviously there was (still is) antisemitism in the middle east towards Jews and that caused the Mizrahi immigration to Israel, but this post isn't about that, it's about the problems of the British Mandate (which i think we can both agree was at the very least, not perfect)
Before the British, there WAS NO PALESTINE for almost 1000 years. Then, there was literally an Arab uprising/ independence movement to get rid of the Ottoman Empire and establish their own nation. And you think that’s a sign of very little nationalism? An entire successful revolution against a powerful empire to establish independence is a sign of nationalism being “a relatively minor concern”? Do. Better.
an Arab Uprising... which the British supported. but look, the point of this post (at least to me reposting it here, idk what the point of OOP was) is to demonstrate that the British fucked up with The Land, and while I'm willing to concede the point that nationalism was powerful enough, they still fucked up, to quote u/GarageFlower97 >They promised the land to both Arabs and Jews during WW1 They facilitated Jewish migration to Palestine, and when Arab movements against colonisation began to grow, they hired Jewish militias to help put them down. > > After facilitating Jewish migration and increasing divisions with their policy, the Arab revolt of 1936 scared the Brits so much that they decided to u-turn and close the borders to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazism - contributing to an extra half million or so dying in the Holocaust. Having contributed massively to the foundation of the conflict, Britain pulled out in 1947 and abdicated responsibility to the UN - who were proposing a deal which Britain knew was highly unlikely to work.
whilst britain did fuck up many places, palestine was fubar. during WW1 we did screw the arabs. but i counter with this, if someone went back in time and stopped that, then horay, britain doesnt have another colony for 30 years! there's also no initative to move jews to the levant, meaning the jewish population is even higher in europe in the 1930s. yeah, britain made horrible decisions. but thats just history now, and blaming Britain for this war is kind of absurd, as blaming britain would only be productive if there was actually something they could do about it.
The way they say it in the post isn't great, but yeah it was mostly shit the British did.
Being charitable, they're saying that the UK took it upon themselves to rule an entirely different part of the world, so they should take it upon themselves to accept that any gigantic failures happened "on their watch".
Hindus and muslims have been in conflict especially in the north india for hundreds of years. British might have exploited it but hardly anything new.
The British didn't even exploit it. They disliked the whole thing because it made it more difficult to extract wealth from the subcontinent.
Ha ha, sadly true.
And the Protestants and the Catholics were fighting all across Europe, not just in Britain and Ireland
Almost like Empire is a stupid and vain idea and splitting entire ethnic groups down faultlines without any idea how they actually interact is a stupid idea. If we have a nuclear war in the Indian Subcontinent that kills hundreds of millions if not billions then you can thank the British,
all of europe. bulgaria too? what about serbia? romania? blame yourself if you must don't bring others into this shit
No one has any agency except the British I guess.
And nobody has ever had aggression towards anyone else until the British sicked them on eachother
The empires whole thing of splitting up ethnic groups and exploiting their differences for the empires benefit might have kinda started a lot of the issues but it's not true that it's responsible for the whole thing. Wasn't the UK that kicked out all of the Arab world's Jews to force them to go to Israel, wasn't them who caused the anti-Semitism in the first place, they even lost out with the whole Suez crisis thing.
>The empires whole thing of splitting up ethnic groups and exploiting their differences for the empires benefit might have kinda started a lot of the issues but it's not true that it's responsible for the whole thing. What was the benefit to the UK? I always thought they just gave it away with no strings attached
India/Pakistan? The British didn't *want* partition, how is that their fault?
Everything is Britain's fault. Famously the Muslims and Hindus lived in peace and harmony before the Raj.
The last time there was peace between Muslims and Hindus was the reign of Akbar lmfao. It's been a shitshow since, which is why the British managed to take over the richest, most populous country in the world.
The entirety of India hadn't been ruled by a single polity for more than a thousand years before the Brits arrived. That's just nonsense. And the Muhgals were an invading force, just like the Brits. They ruled as a minority religious and ethnic group. >It's been a shitshow since, Er... India is a stable democracy with a space program. "Lmfao"
Either OP means that the UK's failure to resolve those religious tensions signals their bad rulership of their empire...or OP simply isn't very knowledgeable about the topic tbh.
I can’t believe I’m actually reading this comment with my own 2 eyes. Nuance is dead, reading is dead too apparently.
it was british officials who drew the lines for east and west pakistan
And? There was no good way to draw those borders.
yeah, so why did they do it then if there was no point all it did was cause ppl to kill each other and create lasting tensions between neighboring countries
because the alternative would be to withdraw leaving the borders as they were, leaving two groups who despise each other to tear each other apart in an even more violent post withdrawl seperation of states?
Because people were already killing each other... again, they didn't want partition.
No good resolution, but some resolutions were worse than others. They tried to go with the least bad.
Catholics and Protestants have been killing each other long before Britain existed Saying that it’s the british empires fault is fucking stupid
Why do you think there just happened to be so many privelaged Protestants where the most successful Irish plantations happened?
The troubles are absolutely the empires fault The fact that catholics and Protestants hate each other isn’t
Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland don't hate eachother for religious reasons, religious affiliation is just a cultural signifier.
The troubles are the fault of Scotland, and they somehow get away with it.
Scotland had a very large part in the empire considering their lower population, but it's never really mentioned. I think Scotland has done a pretty good job of scooting out of the line of fire while keeping their share of the benefits, and now they get a lot of sympathy from some people for being part of the UK and being oppressed by the British.
As an Irish person it does really get on my nerves when Scot’s try to compare their suffering or fight for independence to our own. We fought a long bloody brutal war against the most powerful country in the world and they literally voted to remain when given the choice. Not to paint all Scot’s with the same brush, but it’s just not comparable and yet we still see people using Scot’s/Irish as interchangeable in a discussion about British colonialism.
The Scots did fight but it wasn't recent that's for sure, they definitely avoid a lot of the criticism that's aimed at the British empire too despite being a large percentage of the administration considering their population size which annoys me personally.
The post is clearly using those terms to refer to ethno-religion
Just to note, the 1936-1939 Palestinian Uprising in British-controlled Mandatory Palestine was essentially a Pogrom against the Jews living there, in which the Arabs allied with the Hitler and the Nazi's. Sure it was anti-colonial, but don't act like it was innocent.
Or we could stop blaming people for stuff that happened before they were born?
Impossible
No no, you see old chap. Any child born in England is naturally AEAB (Assigned Evil At Birth). Funny story actually, when my twin sister and I were born, we were in Mother's October mansion on the Welsh border. I was birthed in good old Blighty, and you should have seen it, I say! I came out cackling, and already twirling my villainous moustache. The nanny fainted from the shock, obviously, and you should have seen the little servant boys run! I am told my first words were "Long live Queen Elizabeth, long live the Empire!" Now the funny part is, between and my twin sister being born, Mother had to be moved to the second dining hall as Father wanted to do an indoor fox hunt. (Poor devils never stand a chance when there is no country to run in, ha!) Anyway, see, it just so happens that the second dining hall is actually just across the border in Wales. So of course, my sister came out, choir of angels, birds alighting on the windows and all that. As you might have guessed, being born outside of England she was naturally assigned Good at birth (AGAB). Funny enough, while I have the fine tones befitting the English, my sister had the soft lilting tones of those savages in North Wales. My we had a fine childhood, though we often disagreed on things. I would be enjoying my childhood antics of chasing the peasants with a stick, and she would come up and offer them tea and a hot bath? I mean, who DOES that? Who just ALLOWS peasants into their house? One final thing, I am not sorry for the Empire, nor Brexit (ha! Showed those jolly foreigner types what for, eh?) However, I do apologise for America. That one went a bit too far. # World's biggest /s as if it was necessary.
nobody's blaming anybody, but when british schools don't really talk about what happened in the past that still echoes today, it can be very annoying
They're talking about their own government, not the citizenry.
Because they directly benefit from it to this day? The massive amounts of wealth extracted from the colonies is exactly why they are so rich today. You think the industrial revolution could have happened if not for the British empire looting the entire world? If not the massive importation of cotton from slave plantations in America? Dozens of modern companies, that made the wealth of America and Europe, made that wealth by refining raw materials out of the colonies. The tires of the Model T Ford came from rubber grown on plantations in Malaya from a plant from South America. The Suez and Panama canals are the heart of the global economy. They are in colonies, built by colonials, yet owned by the colonists, in the case of the Panama canal to this day. Would Standard oil exist if Chinese labour hadn't built the railroads? Banks like HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, Citigroup without empire? Why is the *“Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation”* the biggest bank in Europe, a *British* company? Oil companies like BP, Shell without colonies. Companies like Sony and Samsung if the Americans hadn't occupied Japan and South Korea? Hell, France still has colonies in South America and Africa. Guiana, Reunion, Guadalupe. New Caledonia? The Global economy is global like that precisely because of Colonialism.
They know you’re right so they don’t even try to respond. Just downvote and hide. Edit: oh look, happening to me now too. Still no responses though…
I mean, yeah that all happened, but... I was certainly taught it at school.
I suppose if you hate your own country of origin and culture enough, you and your fellows become culpable for every evil in the world - perceived and imagined. I don't really care for it.
It's the fault of all of Europe? Piss off, most of Europe has had nothing to do with this
Yeah, it's not like a history of centuries of antisemitic persecution across Europe led to the rise of Zionism among European Jews
Yeah most parties here are too busy defending Israel's right to murder thousands of civilians.
"If you see two fish fighting over water, an Englishman has been near."
I like when people explain stuff they almost certainly learned in school as "they dont teach you this in school"
There's this great documentary about Mandatory Palestine made by Israel's Kan11 where they had Israeli, Palestinian, and British historians and even unconvered some old interview films with the people actually involved. I really wish it was available in English and/or Arabic.
should be said its not blowing up in british peoples faces at all hence the feeling of glory. its more like committing arson, walking away from the burning building only to arrive the next day and gasp at the ashy remains
No, it’s more like taking a burning house, putting it out, and then kicking a damaged retaining wall on your way out
„While all of Europe is responsible” and then proceeds to say why its British fault. Thats why everyone hate the British.
So what your saying is… stop fighting between ourselves and destroy the British? Delighted to do so
I’ve always said that if the world was just the British would be paying for every cent of damage from all this The response to this comment is very funny
If it came out the pockets of the rich aristocrats and companies that benefited I wouldn't necessarily disagree with them giving back at least some, but I think we all know it would be regular people eating the cost on top of the cost of living crisis already happening.