Are we in a new world Empire? A NWO?

[darkbeaver]

I've found whilst posting on this forum that many Canadians and Americans don't realise that their countries won't exist were it not for the British Empire. They seem to think their countries were already there, fully formed, before the British suddenly turned up on the scene and invaded them. But that's not the case. You are obviously not taught in your schools and colleges and universities that you all owe your entire existence to the British Empire. I think a national holiday in which you show national gratitude towards the British Empire - to recognise the fact you owe your very existence to it - would be the right and proper and decent thing to do. But it won't happen, because that would mean you all having to face up to what is, for you, an inconvenient truth.
And the world is a much better place for it today.
A rather unfortunate turn of events for everybody.

Have Englishmen been crushed are the Irish not still Irish is a Scot just another imperial lapdog? Where's the order in this new world? Let's say you conquer the planet, at last, the world will only crush you as reward. As empires go you bean lucky to get this far, how ever far that is. I think having your hand in every purse is quite an achievement, good luck, may God win. A few hundred years and thier heads got so big. I like UK comedy for the tragedy. Shakespear would like it to. Imperial clown. Yer food sucks, I had an English aunt, she couldn't cook for a dog. Yes the world is a much better place. I have a lot of ancestors wanting thier due, you can get in line, if you'd like. One of them invented fire, another beer.

 

[Ludlow]

Hey I judge all Brits by that prick in the movie Patriot. ,,,and Longstanks in the movie Brave Heart

 

[darkbeaver]

I apologize to English aunt's, your cooking is fine.

 

[Blackleaf]

Speak English??

Mon ami, tu fais des farce.

Les Englais parle seulement une lange. Les plus intelligent parle 2 langue.

Je suis encore plus intelligent parse que je parle 3 lange.

English, Francais et, Franglais.

The great English language is the Mother Tongue of 60% of Canadians. French is the Mother Tongue of just 21% of Canadians. French is also a native language of Canada thanks to another global empire - the French Empire (which wasn't as benign as the British Empire). So you should be a bit thankful to the French Empire, too.

As to how much looting England did to India, including stealing the word loot from them. Listen and learn.

Regards
DL

I want an apology from every power that has ever invaded England or Britain in recorded history - Rome, Denmark, Normandy etc - and a huge compensation pay out.

I want India to pay Britain for the current terrible state of its railways, which the British built for them.

I'm afraid Mr Tharoor is talking out of his curry-burned arsehole.

Sorry, Shashi Tharoor, but Britain doesn’t owe India any reparations

Patrick French
5 August 2015
The Spectator

As one of a parade of speakers debating the British empire at the Oxford Union, Shashi Tharoor cannot have expected his short speech to be viewed more than three million times. Reparations, he told his audience, ‘are a tool for you to atone for the wrongs that have been done. Let me say with the greatest possible respect: it’s a bit rich to oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.’ Tharoor, an MP in the opposition Congress party, was lauded by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who said, ‘What he spoke there reflected the sentiments of the citizens of India.’ It was an inauspicious omen for Modi’s visit to Britain later this year, the first by an Indian prime minister in nearly a decade.

Reparations for war have a long history – the British liked to impose them at the drop of a hat, for example billing the Tibetan government Rs. 2.5 million after invading Tibet in 1904. Compensation for larger and more nebulous crimes is, like many ideas now floating in the intellectual ether, American in origin. In Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial, he said the promise of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ was not being fulfilled: ‘It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.’ Ta-Nehisi Coates returned to the theme last year with an influential article in the Atlantic suggesting the US needed a ‘national reckoning’ over the debts of slavery. Coates has a point: anyone who passes time in the southern states of America or in the Caribbean will notice the enduring consequences of chattel slavery.

Tharoor’s demand that Britain should pay reparations to India for historic damage rests, though, on insecure foundations. He observed that India’s share of the world economy dropped from 23 to 4 per cent during the centuries of informal and formal British rule. This change had more to do with the rapid economic transformation of western Europe by the Industrial Revolution than it did with adjustments inside India: a largely agricultural economy could not match an industrialising one. His claim rests on the ‘drain theory’ — that Britain sucked away India’s prosperity — proposed by late 19th century nationalists like the Liberal MP Dadabhai Naoroji. When India gained independence and the ‘drain’ stopped, there was no sign of the promised surplus.

Tharoor argued that Britain owed a debt of £1.25 billion to the Indian government at the end of the second world war for the 2.5 million volunteers who had fought the Axis powers, but it was ‘never actually paid.’ Not only was this debt honoured, but it formed an essential part of Jawaharlal Nehru’s early economic planning. The governor of the Reserve Bank of India later complained that the new prime minister had run through the sterling balances ‘as if there was no tomorrow.’

Tharoor concluded his witty and entertaining speech by saying his concern was not monetary value, but ‘the principle that reparations are owed’ – saying he would be happy for India to be paid £1 a year by Britain for the next 200 years. It was here that he betrayed the essential frivolity of his case. He was appealing not for the rebalancing of entrenched global financial structures that date to the 18th century, but for moral victory. Like a surface-to-air missile, he locked on to the spot where he knew his well-heeled Oxford Union audience would be most vulnerable: postcolonial guilt. It did the speaker no harm that his voice is of the orotund type heard in early television documentaries about the royal family. Tharoor told an Indian TV anchor that so many of the audience trooped through the yes lobby in support of his reparations motion that the ‘swank dinner’ following the debate was delayed.

The irony of the case for compensation is that it would have made little sense to those who were actually subjects of the British empire. Indian politicians in the 21st century sometimes appear to be more anti-imperialist than their predecessors who risked their lives for independence in the 1930s and 40s. For much of his public career, Gandhi viewed the empire as a guarantor of his civil rights. Even after spending eleven years in British jails, Nehru was happy to toast the King Emperor and to make sure the Union Jack was not lowered when the Indian tricolor was raised. The Indian National Congress, the forerunner of Tharoor’s party, was for most of its existence a collaborationist movement. India’s hereditary princes were almost without exception imperialists. Only a small number of people in the 20th century sought the violent overthrow of British rule in India. Even nationalists who were infuriated by the structural racism inherent in the empire often saw empire as a progressive force. British rule in India was an act of complicity, a joint venture between the elites of the two nations. Today, all of that historical complexity has been forgotten: an attack on the empire by a politician is a risk-free way of ensuring cross-party unity and vigorous applause.

Paying a token reparation of £1 a year would be an absurdity. It presupposes that the government which might have arisen in India in the absence of the British would have been preferable to the one that resulted. Particularly, it supposes that the alternative regime would have produced comparable stability for the growth of internal trade. At the start of the 18th century after the depredations of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the subcontinent was in a state of bitter, broken conflict. In its wake, outsiders from Europe were able to pay mercenaries to assert dominance on their behalf. Looking forward towards the period after independence in 1947, there is nothing in the conduct of the Congress party during their long decades in power to suggest they might have used compensation wisely or well. The 1970s marked a growth rate in India of below 1 per cent. Nor is there the slightest chance that an expression of British remorse for long forgotten political choices, which occurred at a different time and in an entirely different historical context, would engender any respect in India, a country with no tradition of contrition. Being an Indian politician means never having to say you’re sorry.


Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait (Penguin)


Sorry, Shashi Tharoor, but Britain doesn’t owe India any reparations - Spectator Blogs

 

[French Patriot]

Sorry, Shashi Tharoor, but Britain doesn’t owe India any reparations - Spectator Blogs

Our issue was not reparations.


It was the impact the British made in India.


Focus buddy focus. Nice that you did not dispute the amounts he spoke of.


Regards
DL

 

[Blackleaf]

Hey I judge all Brits by that prick in the movie Patriot. ,,,and Longstanks in the movie Brave Heart

So you judge Britons by fantasy films which have no basis in historical reality?

Also, the great Edward I (whose invasions of Scotland are fully justifiable) wasn't British - not in the sense of a British nation. There was no nation of Great Britain at the time Edward I lived. Great Britain wasn't formed until 1707 by the Union of the Kingdom of England (England & Wales) with the Kingdom of Scotland - so the bloody Scots are very much British, too. As Edward I was a Plantagenet, he was of French descent.

They were. Even before the Vikings got here, natives had names for their regions, governments of sorts, cultures and societies. But then you are just some Brit with very little education that seems to think the universe was not invented until England slithered out from under the rock. THAT is an "inconvenient" fact, whether you think it is truth or not. As the adage says, one man's truth is another's lie. But facts have no bias.

I'm sorry, love, but the Vikings didn't found Canada. Britain did. That's why you speak English and not Norse or Swedish. That's why Elizabeth II is your monarch and not Carl XVI Gustav. That's why you have the Westminster parliamentary system rather than being governed by a Riksdag. You owe your existence as a nation to the British Empire, not the Vikings. Now it's time you recognised that and stop being so ungrateful.

It was the impact the British made in India.

And it was a good impact. India wouldn't be the country it is today without the British. We gave them, amongst other things, the railways, the all-important English language and cricket, which is a religion in India.

Focus buddy focus. Nice that you did not dispute the amounts he spoke of.

Tharoor talks out of his ****. His figures are meaningless because Britain doesn't owe India anything and India is not getting anything. Ever. Maybe Britain should start demanding reparations from Rome, Normandy and Denmark.

 

[French Patriot]

You say that even when I showed that the French had a much greater impact in the early days.


The self-blinded refusing to see.


The predominance of English here is because our huge neighbor to the south was English. French is what most spoke in the days of the construction of Montreal and as I showed you and what you chose to conveniently ignore of York being constructed many years later.


You want to win so badly that you will ignore many facts to maintain your uneducated mindset.


Oh well. Moving on.


Regards
DL

 

[Blackleaf]

You say that even when I showed that the French had a much greater impact in the early days.

Which country has left the far greater mark on Canadian culture, Canadian politics, Canadian style of governance and the Canadian military system? Britain or France?

Why is your Head of State Elizabeth II and not Francois Hollande? Why do you have the Westminster style of governance and not that of the Fifth Republic? Why do your army regiments have British-style names? Why is Canada overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon rather than Gallic?

 

[French Patriot]

Which country has left the far greater mark on Canadian culture, Canadian politics, Canadian style of governance and the Canadian military system? Britain or France?

The U.S..


Regards
DL

 

[Blackleaf]

The U.S..
Regards
DL

Nope. Sorry. But you can't be more wrong. Britain - which founded the US like it founded Canada - has had far more influence on the US than the US has had on Canada.

English is Canada's official language. Elizabeth II, not Obama Barack, is your Head of State. You have the Westminster style of governance, not the US style (and even that was partially influenced by the British). Your military, including the names of your army regiments, are based on the British model, not the US model. Many of your cities and towns were founded by, and named after, Britons.

Canada is a nation founded by the British Empire whose national institutions are British in origin. The US was also founded by the British Empire.

 

[French Patriot]

Ok. I do not mind giving the Brits credit for decimating the native population.


If you think they should be proud of that then pile it on.


Regards
DL

 

[Blackleaf]

Ok. I do not mind giving the Brits credit for decimating the native population.


If you think they should be proud of that then pile it on.


Regards
DL

The Canadians and Americans treated the Red Indians far more brutally than the British ever did.

 

[French Patriot]

The Canadians and Americans treated the Red Indians far more brutally than the British ever did.

You have been saying that the Brits were the controllers or main force for both nations for all the good parts and now you are shifting the blame for all the bad parts on Canadians and Americans.


Go away with your hypocrisy.


I am out of this off topic issue.


Regards
DL

 

[Blackleaf]

You have been saying that the Brits were the controllers or main force for both nations for all the good parts and now you are shifting the blame for all the bad parts on Canadians and Americans.

Go away with your hypocrisy.

I am out of this off topic issue.

Regards
DL

The Americans and Canadians treated the Red Indians far more brutally than the British ever did. Take a look at Yankeeland. As soon as they got their independence they started to expand their country westwards into Indians lands - lands that the British had granted to the Indians - and underwent a systematic campaign of slaughter. Just look at events like Wounded Knee.

By the time it was over, more than 200 men, women, and children of the Lakota had been killed and 51 were wounded (4 men, 47 women and children, some of whom died later); some estimates placed the number of dead at 300. Twenty-five soldiers also died, and 39 were wounded (6 of the wounded later died). At least twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor. In 2001, the National Congress of American Indians passed two resolutions condemning the awards and called on the U.S. government to rescind them.