bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

As a side note, I've met countless Canadians of English descent who genuinely believe that, on balance, the British Empire was ultimately a force for good.

patriotism/shame is a stupid choice, if you're going to have a nonsense irrational connection to power on the basis of imagined volkisch belonging, you may as well be happy about it

"If we hadn't done it someone worse would've" is a position you find a lot, including on old ILX threads!

Mind you I feel like most ex-colonial powers have their own version of why their imperialism was more defensible than everyone else's - Portugal certainly does.

xpost

I like to think it's possible to experience a fuzzy sense of national belonging without devolving into neo-fascist fantasies but I'm not so sure anymore. As for shame, I have no idea what the alternative could have been for (say) postwar Germany, although in light of the Alternative für Deutschland's (pun intended) rise to prominence in recent years, perhaps a more solid long-term solution ought to have been considered, assuming such a thing is conceivable in the first place.

xp

It's depressing what a long shadow colonialist propaganda leaves, for generations after the empire has gone

when I was a kid I have vague memories of peak empire maps at school and our headmaster who was definitely in the first stages of senile dementia telling us a fairyland tale of a benign stewardship of other nations until they had become technologically advanced enough to look after themselves..

patriotism/shame is a stupid choice, if you're going to have a nonsense irrational connection to power on the basis of imagined volkisch belonging, you may as well be happy about it

Eh, I'll take the nonsense irrational connection that isn't a slap in the face to everyone in the countries that got colonized, thanks.

Yeah pom I really don't believe in a benign patriotism.

The PM is to appoint the controversial former Cabinet minister to sit on Parliament’s esteemed Intelligence and Security Committee.

good week to sneak Chris Grayling into a job and do it for maximum lols as well

Yeah pom I really don't believe in a benign patriotism.

It gets trickier when you're dealing with historically oppressed/colonized minorities that have had no choice but to cling to a more or less loose sense of (counter-)identity, but yeah.

It does, and I'm aware of a kind of privilege when I say it. I'd draw some heavy lines between cultural and linguistic affinities and belief in the nation state I guess.

Maybe it's possible for a non-chauvinist patriotism to exist depending on the history of "your people" but I wonder if, on a micro or macro level, patriotism always ends up becoming chauvinist

Yeah, postcolonial ressentiment can easily lead to its own kind of subconscious (I'm being generous here) fascism so this needs to be handled with great discursive care.

the conflation of anti-imperialism or sometimes any sort of leftism with a distaste for your local area and culture is v widespread, but serves the right more than the left.

lots of germans felt the shame of defeat in 1945 (were the mass suicides good or inevitable?), idk how many of these ppl became morally ashamed, or how, or to what end. there was ofc lots of continuity and war itself didn't necessarily change ppl's ideas abt race. some younger ppl grew up feeling ashamed of their parents, others just distanced, w/ many in between. no german I've ever spoken to has expressed guilt or shame abt the third reich any more than any other discussion of history

I think framing the british empire as something to have feelings abt is regressive and potentially harmful

"colonialism" would be considered as dark a word as murder or rape to most children if the job has been done properly and they weren't given the propagandist version of history in school or picking up their knowledge from mediocre trash like Dan Snow on the bbc.

I don't think you can really understand Britain's history or current place in the world without learning about Empire and i don't think you can / should teach kids about Empire in a value-neutral way. Whether there's a deep sense of shame or not, i've never met a German who was completely ignorant about the Third Reich or who equivocated about whether it was a bad thing.

There's a case for saying 'Britain is rubbish, lol' does more to help the right than the left but drawing a massive veil over what Empire actually meant, positioning it as pretty good in a lot of respects, selling the idea of British exceptionalism, etc, is massively more helpful to them.

Accepting the existence of historical crimes does not have to translate into "distaste for your local area and culture", it just means that your fondness for your area isn't uncritical or delusional.

I might be an outlier but my parents taught me about the Third Reich pretty early on and the historical burden of what happened was definitley a big thing for them. Just on a basic level seeing nazis in pop culture/history documentaries and etc and knowing "my grandparents fought for that" was a very sobering thing and I'd reckogn a near-universal experience for Germans of my age. It's not about self-flagellation but about understanding that this immense evil came from ordinary people and could again, the impossibility of viewing the baddies as an Other for us was I think good not bad. As the war generation dies off so does historical memory, which imo is why there's a ressurgence in far right thought in Germany and elsewhere right now.

xposts

understanding that this immense evil came from ordinary people and could again, the impossibility of viewing the baddies as an Other

This is key.

the impossibility of value-neutral history is kind of what this comes down to imo. ideological critique that goes deeper than looking at individual instances and looks to make a case abt systemic and structural features of state and empire is where a lot of authoritarian/RWers check out and deem the whole practice to be overly negative and an affront to their love & deep spiritual connection to pies, cricket, & all that is familiar. as a result normality and common, straightforward patriotism develops in opposition to any sort of remotely serious imperial history or even basic awareness. the more you understand about imperial mechanisms and logic, the more comparative history you can bring to bear, the less susceptible you are to getting sucked into tying personal feelings of pride or disgust to vast historical systems and accidents of power

i think the problem w/ shame is that it's ripe for reversal. you see this with ppl who seem to be trying to feel genuine pride that britain abolished slavery. I think in these cases, looking at what happened in british-run west africa in the 1830s, 40s and beyond is more instructive than offering one intense personal response as an antidote to another

Eventually you run into the problem of defining 'Britain'. I was at a pub quiz on Monday and one of the questions asked was what year the union between England and Scotland - i.e. the actual foundation of the nation - being Scottish I knew it but there was a hell of a lot of puzzled faces around the pub!

https://www.scotsman.com/images-e.jpimedia.uk/imagefetch/http://www.scotsman.com/webimage/Prestige.Item.1.50563009!image/image.jpg?width=640

never forget

Fucking hell, even I know the Act of Union argghhhhhh.

You're not English though.

It must be all those idle hours trying to barrel through mock Life In The UK in under three minutes....

It's 1706, the date of the Union with Scotland act, everyone knows that.

Uhhhhh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1707

Real answer is "it depends, lots of things were agreed over a number of years... but pub quizzes always go with 1707"

I think it's a shame scottish ppl don't take more pride in their nation's decisive contributions to the development of the speculative global boom&bust capitalism that underpinned not just the british empire, but the dutch and french too

1707 is the right answer! I'm making an annoying joke which might as well just be me scrawling "Get The Union Done" and running away.

The Darien scheme deserves more props for inventing the present, true dat

Well, that and the Scottish Parliament deciding they wanted the power to choose their own king if they disagreed with England's choice.

I think it's a shame scottish ppl don't take more pride in their nation's decisive contributions to the development of the speculative global boom&bust capitalism that underpinned not just the british empire, but the dutch and french too

'Adam Smith' sounds more English than anything, so Scots are golden.

Smith is the most common name in Scotland too, I think?

shhh, I'm trying to help.

Whether there's a deep sense of shame or not, i've never met a German who was completely ignorant about the Third Reich or who equivocated about whether it was a bad thing.

I was going to suggest they erect a giant statue of John Law outside RBS HQ in Edinburgh but I see they've already got a massive pillar with Henry Dundas on top, which is another level of pride in imperial fuckery

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES0qPg7WsAADqIw?format=jpg&name=small

it was very kind of Eric Pickles to donate one of his toilet rolls to the national toilet roll repository.

Unpopular opinion: Grayling may end up being a good pick as ISC chair. He was a very effective opposition politician which is why he ended up in Cabinet in first place and the skillsets of being a good minister and scrutiniser don't necessarily overlap.

— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) March 11, 2020

challop of the day from Bush

Michael Gove was so pleased with his attempt at humour at the FREU committee he poured water onto his own phone and papers pic.twitter.com/Jkvj83vipQ

— Alain Tolhurst (@Alain_Tolhurst) March 11, 2020

alcohol duties frozen, business rates cut for pubs, brb off to join the Tory party

it's the party of the workers now

Hoping we'll be so drunk we won't notice the next recession.

Isn't it 60% alcohol concentration that's best? Couple of pints of that and no need to worry about recession or coronavirus.

i like your thinking

it's such a great time to be a semi-impoverished functional alcoholic, if they put up carer's allowance as well I'd be almost ready to switch my membership to the tories!

It will be blamed on the Corona virus but I'm not sure this is right. The economy has been flat for a decade?

Sunak suggesting that the UK is heading for a Corona-recession, cleverly defecting from the fact that the economy was already flatlining before this epidemic.

— Aditya Chakrabortty (@chakrabortty) March 11, 2020

It started growing reasonably quickly when Osborne stoked up another housing bubble around 2013-15 but the referendum result killed that.

I think most of the UK has been in recession for a while, London & SE the exception