Something of a ding dong in The Guardian. Monbiot:
These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and
organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they
include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective
punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in
North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger
a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people
would have no idea what I’m talking about. Max Hastings, on the
opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and
Mao’s crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.
Max Hastings:
It should not be difficult to broaden the agenda for pupils who want to
specialise in modern tyranny. They might, for instance, undertake
comparative studies of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, the 20th
century’s great mass murderers.
Stalin and Mao command less interest
than Hitler because no pictures exist of their crimes comparable with
movie images of the Holocaust. In an age dominated by visual images,
many find it hard to acknowledge any reality unless they see it on
screen. There may be a second reason for this relative lack of
interest. More than a few academics harbour a visceral reluctance to
acknowledge that what was done in the name of communism should be
judged by the same standard as the deeds of fascism.
Here’s a radical thought. Why not actually teach what happened? In the round? Yes, parts of the story of the Empire, as Georges tells us, were indeed foul (and I’m aware of all of the stories he uses although have slightly diferent interpretations of some of them). As were most of the stories of both communism and fascism. When people are educated like that (as I pretty much assume all of you darling readers are, aware of all of these things) then perhaps they’d be able to spot what is wrong with this phrase:
(Compare this to Mike Davis’s central finding, that "there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947",….
Students of economic history will know that that is the normal state of matters. Per capita income has been, over most of the globe for most of history, static. It’s really only since the Industrial Revolution that this has not been true everywhere. But then acknowledgement of that would destroy one of the Moonbat’s basic beliefs, that that is exactly where we went wrong.
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