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   From: alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com   
      
   Britain doesn't just glorify its violent past: it gets high   
   on it   
      
   The defensive, patriotic narrative of empire has become a   
   drug. Like all addicts, those hooked on it cannot stomach   
   critique   
      
   By Afua Hirsch   
   The Guardian, theguardian.com   
   Thursday, May 31, 2018   
      
   'One respected academic was advised that, if he pursued the   
   study of Churchill's responsibility for the Bengal famine,   
   his career would be compromised.' Photograph: PA   
      
   It feels like I live in the middle of a culture war. On one   
   side is a kind of state-sponsored amnesia. It's pervasive.   
   It's an Oscar-winning movie perpetuating the idea that   
   Winston Churchill stood alone, at the Darkest Hour, as Nazi   
   fascism encroached, with Britain a small and vulnerable   
   nation isolated in the north Atlantic. In reality the   
   United Kingdom was at that moment an imperial power with   
   the collective might of Indian, African, Canadian and   
   Australian manpower, resources and wealth at its disposal.   
      
   It's also Poland passing a law so that errant historians,   
   survivors or Auschwitz guides who raise the inconvenient   
   fact of Polish complicity in atrocities now risk up to   
   three years' imprisonment. It's Tennessee in the US   
   legislating against the removal of Confederate statues   
   when, as the former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu puts   
   it, they "purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitised   
   Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement,   
   and the terror that it actually stood for".   
      
   On the other side are those who understand that historical   
   narratives, monuments and statues are not some pristine   
   record of history, but projects -- often created long after   
   the event they remember -- that have weaponised history   
   against specific groups. This is why South Africans   
   question statues that glorified apartheid, why Native   
   Americans protest against Thanksgiving, why indigenous   
   Australians required a correction to the ludicrous ideas   
   that Captain Cook "discovered" their continent or that they   
   should celebrate the intrepid explorers who massacred their   
   ancestors.   
      
   The bronze statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes   
   is removed from the Cape Town University campus, South   
   Africa. Photograph: Schalk van Zuydam/AP   
      
   There are the New Yorkers who removed the statue of J   
   Marion Sims, the gynaecologist who experimented on enslaved   
   black women without anaesthetic; . . .   
      
   Continues at:   
      
   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/29/britain-gl   
   rify-violent-past-defensive-empire-drug   
      
   Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi   
   Om Shanti   
   http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)