Sat, 28/01/2012 - 8:19am — Homer
A withering comment in the Grauniad recently gave me pause for thought:
For reasons that are not all bad, we have turned 1939-45 into a kind of creation myth, the noble story of modern Britain's birth. We vote for Churchill as our Greatest Briton and revere the Queen in part because she is a direct link to that chapter in our history, the moment when we were unambiguously on the side of good. That, of course, is a key difference between us and our fellow Europeans, for whom that period is anything but simple or unambiguous.However, the author, Jonathan Freedland, has somewhat overlooked the fact that dear-old Blighty was unambiguously on the side of "evil", in the form of the most brutal imperialism the world has ever known, for over four centuries, and indeed some of that imperialism continues to this day, in Northern Ireland (a.k.a. the chunk of Éire that was stolen from the Irish), the "Falkland Islands" (a.k.a. the Argentinian Islas Malvinas), and in thirteen other "British" Overseas Territories. As far as I'm aware, the British government has never apologised for invading and conquering these foreign sovereign nations, then brutally murdering the indigenous inhabitants in the name of "God" and the Monarch du jour. If the British government was truly interested in being "unambiguously on the side of good", it'd hand back that which it stole, and apologise for centuries of brutality, instead of being a bunch of sycophants to the American Empire, which by all accounts seems to be shaping up to be even worse than our own. "Great" Britain really doesn't need stereotypes to give it shame, its own history does that quite adequately.
