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I don’t expect today’s Germans to feel ashamed of the Nazis.
perfect godwin. Perhaps re read that? How should they feel about swastikas?
Swiss Guard were mercenaries hired to originally guard the Vatican.
They were bastard tough troops with good pike skills from the late thirteenth century. Despite their renowned ferocity they started to lose their edge as the Germans caught up with their tactics and so withdrew from fighting and became internationally neutral. The Swiss Guard as Vatican Army was relatively late shift in their career at around 1506.(Just in time for afternoon tea and biscuits).
I’ve never had any slaves and neither, I imagine, have any of you, so we have no reason to feel ashamed of anything.
The present day wealth of this country is intrinsically linked to slavery and colonial exploitation. This is worth thinking about also though https://www.dressember.org/blog/how-many-slaves-do-you-own
But if you want to wave that flag- if you want to take pride in things the country has done, which you were not personally responsible for, then how can you also say I don’t feel any shame for things the country has done which I was not personally responsible for?
TBF, if you do that, you’re not proud of your country at all. You’re proud of the fictional version of your country in your head- like Boris Johnston loves his fictional version of Churchill not the real one.
Well put.
I don’t expect today’s Germans to feel ashamed of the Nazis.
You may not expect them to, but a lot of them do. And because of that they are very keen not to repeat the mistakes of history and have welcomed many thousands more refugees than we have in recent years.
While those Brits feeling no shame for past mistakes have voted for Brexit, with a rise in hate crime since.
I'm ashamed of Britain's past, though I don't wallow in it. I just try and educate myself, and others where I can, so we remember what was done in our country's name.
The present day wealth of this country is intrinsically linked to slavery and colonial exploitation.
So what ? Are we supposed to be embarrassed by that.
Slavery was a fact of life until it was accepted that is was an abhorrent practice. We are not responsible for it having happened.
While those Brits feeling no shame for past mistakes have voted for Brexit, with a rise in hate crime since.
That is rubbish.
Are we supposed to be embarrassed by that.
Yes. We are not to blame for it, we are not responsible for it… but we absolutely should be cognisant of it… embarrassed by it… ashamed of it… maybe even a little bit apologetic about it. Absolutely not proud of it.
So what ? Are we supposed to be embarrassed by that.
So what? We should be aware of it and use it as a warning against the dangers of racism, jingoism and British exceptionalism.
That is rubbish.
Which part? If you see the yougov polling I voted earlier Brexit voters are much more likely to view the empire fondly.
Not being embarrassed by it does not make you proud of it by the way.
It’s not something to be neutral about. Just as Germans aren’t neutral about what the Nazis did.
There seems to be lack of understand of the difference between feeling embarrassed and feeling guilty.
My 90 year old step dad a few months before his death congratulated a young mother in the street on her delightful little piccaninny. Yep, she looked horrified and I was hoping for the ground to open.
Did I feel guilty? No.
Other people did this. I feel embarrassed but not guilty. I didn't do it. And I sure as **** don't do anything to enable it.
And I hope I'll do something to stop it happening in future.
Slavery was a fact of life until it was accepted that is was an abhorrent practice. We are not responsible for it having happened.
No-one's saying we are. But it's blinkered to celebrate our heritage yet ignore large sections of it.
(It took us a long time to decide slavery was abhorrent, by the way - didn't really start to think about it until we lost America, and it took another 50 years to abolish it ourselves, and that was an uphill struggle. Would we have abolished it if we still had a massive colony where slave labour built fortunes...? )
I feel embarrassed but not guilty. I didn’t do it.
This.
the dangers of racism, jingoism and British exceptionalism.
You’re probably overstating that tbh grum. No danger of any of that these days.
@northwind - I tend to agree with you. But it's good to get some of the folk who have massively one sided views of these things thinking. 😃
You can rightly be proud of what your country stands for today.
Waving a flag does not mean you have to condone or be proud of its past.
It’s only a flag ffs.
The Union Jack and St George flag will only shout BNP if the rest of you don’t reclaim them.
(And no my limited wealth hasn’t come from past slavery. Most of it has come out of the North Sea.)
What distinguishes trans Atlantic slavery from slavery in ancient times is that is was done during the age of humanism, the age of reason and the age of the enlightenment. The things that absolutely underpin the society we live in today.
Not only was this atrocity conducted during this enlightened period, it was both justified and excused by the greatest thinkers of the day. It is not enough to say that these thinkers and actors were of their time, they defined their time and used eugenics and scientism to lend legitimacy to racism and therefore justify the nature of the Atlantic slave trade.
Just sayin'
Hilarious angst ridden STW at its finest, quinoa smoothies all round.
chrispo
Free MemberYou can rightly be proud of what your country stands for today.
Why? Even if you agree with it, even if you feel you voted for it, you didn't create it, you're not responsible for it.
So why can you be rightly proud of what your country stands for or what it's achieving now, when you aren't responsible for it, but also feel no guilt or connection to what your country did a hundred years ago because you weren't responsible for it?
I don't feel ashamed of Britain's past because if you can't be PROUD of something you're not responsible for then surely you cant be ASHAMED of something you're not responsible for either.
The shame lies in the desire to take credit in what those before you did whilst assuming no responsibility. We can admire or appreciate something whilst still offering it up to scrutiny, we can be objective about someone or something whilst acknowledging that virtue and ,meaning change with the times.
Pride kind of cancels scrutiny, there's no objectivity in pride, only emotion. Thats why we should always be extra careful when we feel pride, it could just be emotion suppressing reason.
You can rightly be proud of what your country stands for today.
What's that then?
I dunno, stuff like peace, freedom, fairness, law and order. It’s a much better country than most for all its flaws.
Well put inkster, I think we're on similar lines but you explain it in ways that make me think differently.
I dunno, stuff like peace, freedom, fairness, law and order. It’s a much better country than most for all its flaws.
Ah, well - if supporting the Union flag means a blinkered celebration of all the good things, conveniently forgetting that some of the good things aren't actually as good as you're making out, and ignoring all the crap bits, then fill your boots. I'm out.
I reckon the front cover of this months GQ must be causing some sleepless night on STW lol.
Doubt it, you have to be a bit of a tool to read GQ.
I reckon the front cover of this months GQ must be causing some sleepless night on STW lol.
Do you lol.
I dunno, stuff like peace, freedom, fairness, law and order. It’s a much better country than most for all its flaws.
While it's good to appreciate stuff like that it doesn't make us particularly special, certainly in Europe we are probably behind several nations on most if not all of those measures.
What a dull, dismal, frightened little people you have become.
Scared to wave a flag, scared to cheer a team, scared to show allegiance in case someone, somewhere takes offence.
The chattering classes indeed.
While it’s good to appreciate stuff like that it doesn’t make us particularly special, certainly in Europe we are probably behind several nations on most if not all of those measures.
Do you have to be special to love your country?
Do you get uptight about, say, Greek people being proud to be Greek?
It only seems to be the English who torture themselves like this.
I think it’s weird.
What a dull, dismal, frightened little people you have become.
Scared to wave a flag, scared to cheer a team, scared to show allegiance in case someone, somewhere takes offence.The chattering classes indeed
How desperate for an argument are you?
What a dull, dismal, frightened little people you have become.
U ok hun?
Do you get uptight about, say, Greek people being proud to be Greek?
It only seems to be the English who torture themselves like this.
I think it’s weird.
I know nothing about Greek nationalism but those Golden Dawn fellas didn't sound too nice.
We've spent hundreds of years going around the world invading countries justified by our supposed superiority, so I think it's understandable that some people are rather wary of British chauvinism.
I think it's weird to take pride in stuff that you had no part in, each to their own I guess.
Do you have to be special to love your country?
Let's check - no-one's said that...
Do you get uptight about, say, Greek people being proud to be Greek?
... no-one's suggested that, and...
It only seems to be the English who torture themselves like this.
I think it’s weird.
... no-one's torturing themselves. Contorting themselves, to try and provoke an argument, yes there's a bit of that going on, but that's about it.
brads
Full MemberI reckon the front cover of this months GQ must be causing some sleepless night on STW lol.
maybe you do, people imagine all sorts of weird stuff.
HAHA couldn’t have put it better!
You cannot simultaneously be proud of your country's historical good bits (that you had no part in) whilst rejecting its bad bits (that you had no part in) on the same grounds. You can totally go "wasn't me" or alternatively you can acknowledge that history actually happened, but cherry-picking is monumentally hypocritical.
I would love to see Germany shed its Nazi legacy. Few people alive today had anything to do with it. So long as we all learn from those mistakes, we surely cannot blame them for it any more. But, ditto British Empire revisionism. Right? If we're still nailing modern-day Germans to the mast then our own skeletons ain't much deeper. We're in glass houses.
What a dull, dismal, frightened little people you have become.
Ahh… bless.
We’ve spent hundreds of years going around the world invading countries justified by our supposed superiority, so I think it’s understandable that some people are rather wary of British chauvinism.
Balanced, perhaps, by the fact that for a thousand years or so, regular waves of invaders have swarmed across these islands imposing their views on the inhabitants.
Often those invaders took the inhabitants as slaves, and at least a million inhabitants of the British Isles were taken as slaves and sold across the Mediterranean and North Africa.
While our history of taking advantage of an existing slave trade to further our colonial enterprises is nothing to be proud of, we can at least be fairly proud of the fact that we stopped the trade and took steps to stop others from indulging in it, like the Portuguese, for example.
The Americans still don’t seem to have got the memo...
It was only in the 1950s when 'we' savagely put down the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya:
Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". Castration by British troops and denying access to medical aid to the detainees were also widespread and common.[218][219][220] Among the detainees who suffered severe mistreatment was Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of Barack Obama, the former President of the United States. According to his widow, British soldiers forced pins into his fingernails and buttocks and squeezed his testicles between metal rods and two others were castrated.[221]
The historian Robert Edgerton describes the methods used during the emergency: "If a question was not answered to the interrogator's satisfaction, the subject was beaten and kicked. If that did not lead to the desired confession, and it rarely did, more force was applied. Electric shock was widely used, and so was fire. Women were choked and held under water; gun barrels, beer bottles, and even knives were thrust into their vaginas. Men had beer bottles thrust up their rectums, were dragged behind Land Rovers, whipped, burned and bayoneted... Some police officers did not bother with more time-consuming forms of torture; they simply shot any suspect who refused to answer, then told the next suspect, to dig his own grave. When the grave was finished, the man was asked if he would now be willing to talk."[222]
I blame Jeremy Clarkson for all this shit.
I wasnt a fan after it was hijacked by the BNP.
Then was getting used to it being ok most of the time... Then it was hijacked by another thing beginning with B.
Basically they are all B's!😐
The think I find the absolute oddest is when a home owner suddenly decides to put a huge flagpole in the garden with the Union flag on it. The flags are invariably bought from eBay cheaply, made in China (the irony) and look as if shot at with artillery after a few months.😁
CountZero,
Have a look at my earlier post as to why I think it's unreasonable to compare the slavery of the modern era, (last 400 years, age of science and reason etc) With the pre modern age of feudalism, fear and superstition.
If you are looking for ballance in this situation I suggest you are seeking to ballance reason with superstition, or in the light of 'pride' being an emotion (not a falsifiable or quantifiable thing) you are seeking to ballance facts with feelings.
I don't think ballance is the appropriate word, it can imply false equivalence or category error. If you're looking to provide context however, then look no further than grum's reply regarding Kenya. Something that occured during some of our lifetimes.
For a little more context, consider that those atrocities were committed whilst Churchill was Prime minister and the Governor of Kenya was Dominic Cummings grandfather in law.
I can feel admiration for William Wilberforce but any pride I might feel for Britain in the whole affair is tempered by the fact that when the slaves were released from ownership compensation was paid. Not to them but to the thousands of British slave owners. It was the biggest cheque ever signed by the British government, in relative terms, greater than the cost of lend / lease in WW2.
Rather like the thread that got closed the other day that descended into arguments about wether England or Scotland is the more racist, any time we seek to make such comparisons between nations, or between different eras and empires we run the risk of rationalizing racism. It's two bald men arguing over a comb.
As Santan Dave said at the Brit's last year, "The least racist is still racist". That line has run through my head a few times and caused me to pause and consider what I might be about to say or post and wether I may be just offering up a distraction.
It's the Union Flag isn't it?
Flags are great. But pride in the coincidence that you were born in a particular location or have a particular genetic trait is a bit odd really. The more you travel, the more you realise we're all pretty much the same. And yet any perceived difference between one set of people seems to be enough to cause a problem, especially if it's used as a lever by the unscrupulous.
I met the Turkish owner of a kebab shop a few years ago and complimented him on the photos of his home region of Turkey. I told him that it was where my great grandmother was from and that i'd never been there. He was overjoyed (didn't giver me a free kebab though) and told me how special it was. We laughed at how different we look given we might share some ancestry, and he explained in broken English how we're all the same and that world leaders should better realise this. It was a lovely moment, so I didn't tell him that all of the rest of my ancestors were killed by Turks in the Armenian genocide and she was smuggled to Africa.