Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: L'impero Britannico, per la sua crudelta', si compara a Hitler e Stalin.  E' ora che si smetta di farne apologia

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1807649,00.html
The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale
Neocon ideologues are being given free rein by the media to rewrite the
history of Britain's empire and whitewash its crimes
Priyamvada Gopal
Wednesday June 28, 2006
The Guardian
Aresurrection is haunting the British media, the bizarre apparition of
"benevolent empire". It takes the form of documentaries and discussions
steered towards the conclusion that colonialism was not such a bad
thing after all and that something of a celebration is in order.
Trouble is, to get there, some creative reworking of the facts is
needed. After a recent brouhaha about Britain's imperial history on
Radio 4's Start the Week - in which I took part - the presenter Andrew
Marr worried that the debate had been "pretty biased" against empire:
there was a lot of enthusiasm and a "warm nostalgia" for empire, he
suggested in the subsequent phone-in, even in former colonies, "still
something there, absolutely".
Only the desire to recover some imaginary good from the tragedy that
was empire can explain the elevation of the neoconservative ideologue
Niall Ferguson to chief imperial historian on the BBC and now Channel
4. His aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic
fantasies of the American right, is being presented as a new
revelation. In fact, Ferguson's "history" is a fairytale for our times
which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic
action. Colonialism - a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption,
land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour,
impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement - is
rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few
unfortunate accidents and excesses.
Soundbite culture thrives on these simplistic grand narratives.
Half-truths and fanciful speculation, shorn of academic protocols such
as footnotes, can sound donnishly authoritative. The racism
institutionalised by empire also seems to be back in fashion. The book
accompanying Ferguson's current Channel 4 series on 20th-century
history, The War of the World, tells us that people "seem predisposed"
to "trust members of their own race", "those who are drawn to 'the
Other' may ... be atypical in their sexual predilections" and that
"when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are
relatively high ... that only the first child they conceive will be
viable." Not far from the pseudo-scientific nonsense that once made it
possible to punish interracial relationships.
Behind such talk and the embrace of the broadcasters is the insistence
that we are being offered gutsy truths that the "politically correct"
establishment would love to suppress. This is the neo-conservative as
spunky rebel against liberal tyranny. Yet Ferguson peddles nothing more
than the most hackneyed, self-aggrandising myths of empire, canards
once championed by old imperialists such as Macaulay and Mill and
rehashed now by the Bush administration: western imperialism brings
freedom, democracy and prosperity to primitive cultures. The myth
decorates US and British foreign policy spin while trendier versions
have also emerged in platforms such as the Euston Manifesto. By
anointing Ferguson and his fellow imperial apologists such as Andrew
Roberts as semi-official historians, the British media are colluding in
a dangerous denial of the past and lending support to contemporary US
imperial propaganda .
The evidence - researched by scholars such as Amartya Sen, Nicholas
Dirks, Mike Davis and Mahmood Mamdani, Caroline Elkins and Walter
Rodney - shows that European colonialism brought with it not good
governance and freedom, but impoverishment, bloodshed, repression and
misery. Joseph Conrad, no radical, described it as "a flabby,
pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly". Good
governance? More famines were recorded in the first century of the
British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including 17-20 million
deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone. While a million Indians a year died
from avoidable famines, taxation subsidising colonial wars, and relief
often deliberately denied as surplus grain was shipped to England.
Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict ethnic/religious
identities and governed through these divisions. As with the partition
of India when 10 million were displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries
between "tribes" in Africa resulted in massive displacement and
bloodshed. Freedom and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers
appropriated 12,000 square miles and pushed 1.25 million native Kikuyus
to 2,000 restricted square miles. Resistance was brutally crushed
through internment in detention camps, torture and massacres. Some
50,000 Kikuyus were massacred and 300,000 interned to put down the Mau
Mau rebellion by peasants who wanted to farm their own land. A thousand
peaceful protesters were killed in the Amritsar massacre of 1919.
A collective failure of the imagination now makes it difficult for us
to think about the globe before European and American domination. Greed
and violence are hardly exclusive to one culture. But colonialism
destroyed or strangled possibilities and potential for progress, such
as Mughal Emperor Akbar's "sul-e-kul" or "universal good" which
underpinned his governance. The scale of European imperialism
inaugurated a new chapter in the history of greed which still shapes
all our lives. Natural resources - cotton, sugar, teak, rubber,
minerals - were plundered in gigantic quantities. The Indian textile
industry was the most advanced in the world when the British arrived;
within half a century it had been destroyed. The enslaved and
indentured (at least 20 million Africans and 1.5 million Indians) were
shipped across the globe to work on plantations, mines and railroads.
The stupendous profits deriving from this enabled today's developed
world to prosper.
The point isn't for Europeans to feel guilt, but a serious
consideration of historical responsibility isn't the same thing as a
blame game. Forgetting history is tempting but undermines a society's
capacity for change.
Among the many facile assumptions encouraged by these imperial
apologists is that those who criticise colonialism are absolving
tyrants and bigots in Asia and Africa from responsibility for their
crimes. Of course it is possible and absolutely necessary to condemn
both. Indians must acknowledge their culpability for atrocities during
the partition, for example. But that in no way exonerates the British
Raj from its pivotal role in the tragedy that led to over a million
deaths.
A wilful ignorance of other people's cultures and histories encourages
the notion that freedom, democracy and tolerance are intrinsically
western. As Amartya Sen has argued, the subcontinent has long been home
to traditions of free-thinking and debate. Participatory governance was
not Britain's gift (recall Gandhi's indigenous village republics), even
if parliamentary democracy as an institutional form was adopted in some
ex-colonies. Free trade is another mythical western contribution to
world history. Amitav Ghosh has reconstructed the forgotten history of
a vibrant trade culture between medieval India and Africa. When the
Portuguese arrived, they demanded that the Hindu ruler of Calicut expel
Muslims, "enemies of the Holy-Faith", from his kingdom. He refused and
was subjected to two days of bombardment.
Indeed, one legacy of European colonialism that we all reckon with is
the self-fulfilling prophecy of the "clash of civilisations". The claim
that east and west are bound to come into conflict is merely an
extension of imperial practice which found it useful to seal off porous
cultures into fixed categories. This tragic "lie of the colonial
situation", as Frantz Fanon called it, rebounds on us tragically in the
terror unleashed in the name of Islam and Bush's "war on terror". If we
are to undo the destructive legacies of empire, it won't do to invest
celebratory falsifications with credibility. To make sense of a shared
present and look towards a more humane future, we need to start with a
little informed honesty about the past.
· Priyamvada Gopal teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge
University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender,
Nation and the Transition to Independence

Stalin.
Peccato che una simile comparazione la fa solo quel *FESSO* di un
Torrieri e pochi fessi come lui :)
-Stefano

riassumendo qualsiasi stato è una merda e quindi tendiamo alla merda?

 riassumendo qualsiasi stato è una merda e quindi tendiamo alla merda?
tu da tempo hai raggiunto l'obiettivo diciamolo eh...
-- 
visitate 
http://www.comunisti-italiani.it/frames/index.htm
 
http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/Berlin.jpg
5 per mille all'Associazione di amicizia Italia-Cuba cod.fis. 96233920584
amalrictonibaruch: "per fortuna non c'e' stato nessun Abu Ghraib in
Afghanistan"
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 riassumendo qualsiasi stato è una merda e quindi tendiamo alla merda?
tu da tempo hai raggiunto l'obiettivo diciamolo eh...


 The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale
tu cosi' manderai di traverso i fish&chips al tarato russofobo :)


 
luno...@hotmail.com
 ha scritto:
Ormai è vero amore.
Lui suona la tastiera. E lei pure.
Tb

....
 5 per mille all'Associazione per la ricerca del cervello che sergio
non ha mai avuto cod.fis. 123456789

 Ormai è vero amore.
toh, un rosapugnettaro omofobo?


 toh, un rosapugnettaro omofobo?
LOL, oggi sei piů sconclusionato del solito.
[SBONG!]
E questo era un calcio nel portatastiera, palla di pezza.
Rotola pure altrove.
Tb

 Nation and the Transition to Independence
Eh, appunto. Conoscendo quei bastian contrari di sinistrorsi diCambridge 
sono sicuro che vanno assai fieri del loro residente indiano 
nazionalista. Del resto l'universita' pullula di indiani e pakistani. Le 
classi dirigenti di quei paesi non sentono ragioni per la scelta di 
altre universita'.
Consiglio anche la lettura di 'Soldiers, Sahibs' di Charles Allen per 
mostrare come Sikhs, Bengali e Gurkha, e sparsi ufficiali britannici  
affrontarono assieme la minaccia Talibana sulle frontiere del Nord Ovest 
indiano a cavallo del 1850. 
Una lettura istruttiva per capire come domare le fiere ma labili tribu' 
Pashtun. La consiglio ai militari italiani che metteranno il naso fuori 
da Kabul.
Am.

   Conoscendo quei bastian contrari di sinistrorsi diCambridge 
tarato, parli lo stesso linguaggio dei benedetti (zaccariani e non), dei
charlie e romanati. 
ciccio, te ne rendi conto?


 indiano a cavallo del 1850.
Molto interessante.   Potresti specificare se, per trasportare i Sikhs,
Bengali e Gurkha dal 1850 al 2001 gli ufficiali britannici hanno dovuto
costruire una macchina del tempo o hanno usato un ponte di
Einstein-Rosen?     Grazie.
GT

Sikhs, Bengali e Gurkha dal 1850 al 2001
Ca**o c'entra il "trasportarli dal 1850 al 2001" sai anche spiegarlo?
Oppure vuoi far finta di non capire che la "crudelta'" dell'impero
britannico e' frutto solo della tua fervente *IDIOZIA* e della tua mania
di *FARE DISINFORMAZIONE*?
-Stefano

 ciccio, te ne rendi conto?
Perche'? Dare ospitalita' al dissenso terzomondista e' una nobile 
tradizione nelle universita' dei paesi ex-imperialisti. Mica come 
'Italiani, Brava Gente?' che c'ha messo 70 anni ad emergere. LOL. 
Un altra occasione persa per starti zitto, fascista e revanscista 
dipinto di rosso.
Am.

 Einstein-Rosen?  
Ironia un po' fiacca. Spesso i britannici usano gli stessi reggimenti, 
come le Guardie o i Gurkha, e anche le vecchie mappe tornano utili, 
quando non ce ne sono altre.
 I posti infatti non sono cambiati, e neanche i Pashtun. Sempre predoni 
integralisti e anarchici. Camorra asiatica che protegge Osama. Non a 
caso si e' ficcato li'.
Un libro interessante quello di Allen: da raffrontare a 'Ghost Wars' di 
Coll, del NY times sull'Afghanistan degli ultimi vent'anni.
Ora pero'gli inglesi  usano gli aerei 'Harrier' al posto della 
cavalleria, ma sempre con discriminazione, al contrario degli americani.
Am.

 cavalleria, ma sempre con discriminazione, al contrario degli americani.
Ma certamente.   L'impero Inglese e' sempre stato molto piu'
"discriminante" degli Americani.   Gli abitanti di Dresda, Derry e
Bassora testimoniano.  <g>
GT

 integralisti e anarchici.
-----------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtun#Ethnic_definition
 The ethno-linguistic definition is the most prominent and accepted
view as to who is and is not a Pashtun. Generally, this most common
view holds that Pashtuns are defined within the parameters of having
mainly eastern Iranian ethnic origins, sharing a common language,
culture and history, living in relatively close geographic proximity to
each other, and acknowledging each other as kinsmen.
....
However, Pashtun society is not entirely homogenous in the religious
sense, as Pashtuns, who are predominantly Sunni Muslims, can also
followers of the Shia sect among others. In addition, the Pashtun
Jewish population (once numbering in the thousands) has largely
relocated to Israel.
...
 The Pashtun have a legend of being descended from one of the Ten Lost
Tribes of Israel. The claim that the name Kabul is derived from "Cain
and Abel", and the name Afghanistan from Afghana, a grandson of King
Saul.
-----------------------------------------------------
Vabeh che a essere razzista contro i popoli Musulmani, nei nostri
giorni, e' culturalmente accettabile, ma i Pushtun sono anche Ebrei (e
sembra che *tutti* i Pashtun hanno un'identita' Ebraica molto piu'
solida che certi ultrasionisti su questo NG).   Stai accusando un
gruppo di Ebrei, solo perche' tali, di essere predoni e anarchici.
Roba da Der Sturmer!
GT

 sembra che *tutti* i Pashtun hanno 
Abbiano, Giorgio Torrieri Ph.D... abbiano.
Tb

 Perche'? 
a tarato ovviamente non te ne puoi rendere conto. sei quasi giustificato
clone di romanato londinese.


 clone di romanato londinese.
Ti fai le domande e ti rispondi da solo, epigono piu' fesso e ridicolo 
di Beria... LOL.
Am.

 > clone di romanato londinese.
riquoto. Ormai imiti perfino il linguaggio di un cretino come il camaerata
mirco.
