The inconvenient history truth the Alta-Left in the UK hate to hear about our great country the UK
We all know about the British Empire or we think we do. How bad it was how evil it was how it oppressed the people in the country’s it took over, What if I showed you that what you think you know of the Empire is a half-truth . What if I showed you that it was actually a force for good in many respects.
To do so we must first start at home were the British Empire first started the United Kingdom. And we must take a look at what the United Kingdom was like before it had an Empire. We have had a form of Democracy for hundreds of years in fact long before the Normans came a long in 1066 but that form of Democracy was for the elite in in Britain. The Kings and Princes that ruled different areas of Britain. From the South of what became England to the Northern areas of Scotland not forgetting Wales and Ireland elite family’s ruled their areas with their own form of democracy that left out the likes of you and me.
The ordinary people like you and me were seen as a means to an end, we were used to feed the elite family’s as serfs if the elite family land was attacked by another elite family we were expected to form an army to defend the elite family’s land none of us had a right to any kind of vote. We had little freedom to do as we wished, even our religion was forced on us. After 1066 we were expected to turn up at the masters church which was Catholic and listen to the service in Latin which the elite could understand as they were French and had always worshiped at their churches where their priests and bishops spoke Latin but we poor Serfs had no idea what was being said. We were ignorant of the world outside Britain and that was just fine and dandy for the elite family’s because it meant we poor Serfs relied on that family or family’s for everything.
That began to change over the years People began to think for themselves they began to think why should we have to worship in those churches and we began to see breakaway different churches springing up all of Britain which were persecuted for being a little different. People were tried in church courts as heretics found guilty then executed for the crime of being a little different in their religious beliefs’.
However that was not the only thing that was changing the whole world was beginning to open up and from that we can see the beginning of the British Empire. People who were oppressed saw an opportunity to get away and worship as they wished not as the elite wanted them to worship and they set sail to what became the greatest country on earth America.
Our Empire began to grow rapidly, however even in the 1800s only the elite could vote in our Parliament. A series of bills passed by Parliament between 1832 and 1918 eventually allowed everybody in the country to vote, women included. This represented the step from an oligarchy into what can truly be called a modern democratic state, and the British Empire oversaw it. So that was the first step for good in our own country.
So what comes next. Well slavery was a big issue for years. In Africa Arab slavers were raiding African village’s and taking Africans. Men women children. They were sold not only to British traders trading in slaves but Portuguese, French, Spanish, Dutch to work in the West Indies all had a stake in the West Indies and people also forget the French, Spanish, had a big stake in North America where along with the British slaves were sold to men like George Washington and many of the Founding Fathers of America.
So what made the UK who by now had the largest Empire the world had ever seen different from the other smaller Empire’s such as the French, Dutch and the declining Spanish Empire which by the way was far more nasty than the British one ever was? Well again it was slavery. By now in the 1800s Britain ruled the waves. From its shores in and around the British isles to the far off Continents’ of Australia and the Antarctic Britain policed the entire seas. Britain began to see that slavery was wrong and anti-slavery movement was taking place. Britain brought in laws outlawing the buying of slaves by British citizens although it took a little longer to free the slaves in her West Indian Colony’. Britain’s Royal Navy began to patrol the seas around most of coast of Africa especially around the coast and many inlets of what is now Liberia where the African Slave trade was prevalent. For sixty years the Royal Navy patrolled the high seas stopping and boarding and freeing the slaves of any ship of any nation that was trading in slaves. Thousands of slaves were freed and taken back to their homeland and also thousands of British Royal Navy sailor’s from the officers down to the ordinary sailor’s died from diseases associated with the swampy African inlets where slave trade routes brought their human cargo. This could have only happened if the Empire was in existence in the first place. We British were top dogs in the world and as such we were perfectly placed to hound the slave traders from all the other countries and put a stop to the evil trade. We tend to forget that piece of our Empire history and it’s a part of it that should be shouted from every rooftop in the world.
How about sport? What’s Sport got to do with the British Empire, how on earth can sport be linked to the Empire. Sports bring people together. Wherever we are from, we all like to support our sporting idols, whether that is a team or individual, either national or local. And thanks to the British Empire, people across the entire world have been united by their love of the same sport. Six of the world’s 10 most popular sports — soccer, cricket, tennis, hockey, golf, and table tennis — were invented by the British and consequently spread throughout the Commonwealth by the Empire. Even games such as American football and baseball were originally British sports — rugby and cricket, respectively. Without the Empire, many people all around the world would not be playing or watching the sports they love, which unites them with others from different cultures and continents in a way which few other things can.
We can see how sport has united all the people in the old British Empire when we all get together in this modern era in what is now called the Commonwealth games and compete against each other in the games. We see how even today how various ex Empire country’s compete against each other in Cricket, Rugby, which unites everyone in a healthy friendly competitive way.
How about language? How is a language a force for good and what has it to do with the British Empire. English is spoken in 106 countries, and 1.5 billion people worldwide have either learned it or are in the process of doing so. Furthermore, it is the language of the Internet, with over 500 million people using English as their language of choice online, while three-quarters of online content is in English as well. .English is even used by 90 percent of airlines around the world, while the majority of scientific papers, music, television, and mail correspondence are all in English. And the British Empire is to thank for this. As the native language of, unsurprisingly, England, English was transported across the globe by Britain over the last two centuries, making travel, commerce, and the Internet easier in 2017. We tend to forget about this when we talk about the British Empire and how bad it was.
There are many things we take for granted in the world today, such as instantaneous communication and rapid transport. But things were not always this way — before the British Empire, the speed of communication and travel had hardly changed since Roman times. However, two key inventions were spread throughout the world by the British. The first of these was the train, invented in 1830, and the other was the telegraph, invented around the same time. These inventions suddenly made the world a far more connected place. People who had never travelled before could suddenly journey great distances, and quickly to boot. Not only this, but the telegraph brought the globe closer together, making administration, commerce, travel, and general communication far easier. The ambitious Victorians even went so far as to stretch a cable all the way between the United States and Ireland. From all that we have what we have today.
Not many people have heard of the ancient Hindu practice known as sati, or suttee, and that is largely thanks to the British Empire. This is a good thing because of what sati entailed. It was a ritual sacrifice whereby, when a married man died, his widowed wife was expected to burn herself on his funeral pyre. Between 1823 and 1828 alone, at least 8,000 women died when performing sati, and even those figures are believed to be a gross underestimation. This practice was outlawed by Lord Bentinck, governor-general of India, in 1829. Although some considered this an affront to Indian religious traditions, many people welcomed the ban. Now there is no doubting that India is a better place without widow-burning. Was this a good or bad thing to outlaw I will leave that to you the reader. However there was also one other practice that was outlawed in India which was Thuggees, a Sanskrit word meaning concealment, were an organized gang of professional assassins — sometimes described as the world’s first mafia — who operated from the 13th to the 19th centuries in India. Members of the fanatical religious group, who were infamous for their ritualistic assassinations carried out in the name of the Hindu Goddess Kali, were known as Thugs, a word that passed into common English during the British occupation of India.
Thuggees worked by joining groups of travellers and gaining their trust before surprising them in the night and typically strangling them with a handkerchief or noose, a quick and quiet method, which left no blood and required no special weapons. They would then rob their victim and bury them carefully.
Sir William Henry Sleeman was a sober, no-nonsense Bengal Army officer who from early on dedicated his career to the eradication of Thuggee. Faced with a wall of disbelief and indifference from his superiors, he transferred to the Civil Service where he could gain enough authority to wage his war personally. As a district magistrate by the 1820s, he gathered a force of Indian policemen under him and set to rooting out the cult with a variety of innovative policing methods. By examining common attack sites and listening for reports of suspicious figures, Sleeman and his men formulated predictions of where the next large attack was likely to occur. They would then turn the Thugs’ own methods against them — disguised as merchants, the officers would wait at the chosen site for a group of Thugs to approach, and ambush them. Information obtained from the prisoners was used to plan the next strike. With informants pouring in at an ever-increasing rate, Sleeman’s campaign against the Thugs gained ground beyond anyone’s expectations. Within a few years the cult was crippled, and by the end of the 19th century the British declared Thuggee extinct. Sleeman was hailed as a hero by most of India, and in many parts of the country he is still revered. Thanks to the British Empire both these practises ended and thousands of Indian lives saved.
Then we have the country’s that used to be part of the British Empire that are rich now because of our presence. Although it is often argued that the British Empire simply exploited other countries around the world to make itself rich, certain statistics show this to not be entirely true. Seven of the world’s 10 richest countries — Qatar, Singapore, Kuwait, Brunei, UAE, Hong Kong, and the USA — were once either British colonies or British protectorates. Six of the those countries are in Asia, which also goes to show that the British Empire did not only benefit its North American colonies. In Africa, the world’s poorest continent, five of the richest 10 countries — Egypt, Sudan, South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria — are former British colonies, which at least means that the Empire left its colonies in a better state than other European powers.
What about Democracy? Many people like to criticism democracy as an inherently flawed form of government, but compared to the alternatives, it’s probably the best option we have. In the 21st century, we are used to the vast majority of countries in the world being democratic, but this was not always so. Democracy in the modern world was developed in Britain and France, and during the Age of Empires they spread it across the world. The British Empire brought democracy to countries across all continents, including the US, India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Pakistan, And compared to what we British had before the Empire the United Kingdom itself, and many more. Some detractors compare the British Empire to the Nazis, but if it had been Hitler spreading forms of government around the globe, the world would be a far worse place than it is today.
So when you see people criticising the British and the British Empire just remember those very good things the British Empire brought to the world compared to what all the other European country’s brought in their Empires. Spanish, total destruction of South America and its indigenes people which is still rebounding around the whole of South America today. Show me one country in South America that is actually rich not poverty stricken and without a corruptness that the North American and Italian Mafia would be proud to support. Just ONE.
Take a look at the French Empire second to the British Empire. Take a good look and you will find this..
The French Empire history is soaked with the blood of oppressed peoples across the globe. And its record of perpetrating violence continues.
The size of the territory claimed by the French empire in the 19th and 20th centuries was second only to Britain. From North Africa to South-East Asia, the Middle East to the South Pacific, millions were subjugated, repressed and murdered as French rulers scrambled to secure resources and markets for manufactured goods and profitable investments.
It was only in the face of heroic mass struggles by the colonised determined to win their independence that France was eventually forced to cede control in the 1950s and ’60s. From the outset of French colonialism in Vietnam, any form of political dissent was met with repression. Books and newspapers deemed subversive were confiscated. Anti-colonial political activists were sentenced to death or imprisoned on island fortresses.
The grotesque violence would only escalate.
After the defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific War, the French ruling class was determined to re-establish its control over Vietnam. In 1946, the prime minister ordered the shelling of Haiphong, killing 6,000 Vietnamese.
It wasn’t until the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu that the national liberation forces drove the French out of the country.
Violence was part of the fabric of French rule. The best farmland was concentrated in the hands of the colonialists and their collaborators, leaving the majority of peasants vulnerable to famine. Some 2 million Vietnamese died during the Second World War; there was a famine despite the granaries being full with rice.
Take a look at Belgium. Little Belgium. If you want to see what real colonial atrocity looks like look no further than sweet Belgium who murdered over 10 million Africans. The man who oversaw the Belgium atrocity’s in the Congo was King Leopold II of Belgium. He “owned” the Congo during his reign as the constitutional monarch of Belgium. After several failed colonial attempts in Asia and Africa, he settled on the Congo. He “bought” it and enslaved its people, turning the entire country into his own personal slave plantation. He disguised his business transactions as “philanthropic” and “scientific” efforts under the banner of the International African Society. He used their enslaved labour to extract Congolese resources and services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body mutilations, torture, executions, and his own private army. Most of us aren’t taught about him in school. We don’t hear about him in the media. He’s not part of the widely-repeated narrative of oppression (which includes things like the Holocaust during World War II). He’s part of a long history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide in Africa that would clash with the social construction of a white supremacist narrative in our schools. It doesn’t fit neatly into school curriculums in a capitalist society. Making overtly racist remarks is (sometimes) frowned upon in ‘polite’ society; but it’s quite fine not to talk about genocide in Africa perpetrated by a Belgium monarch.
