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Originally Posted by Gordon Booth
MargaretR, oh,COME ON!!Your'e on about the big bad British Empire? When the overall costs/benifits to the UK of its empire were measured the UK actually made a LOSS in financial terms.
Who left them with good government, roads,huge railway systems,who stopped them killing each other in tribal wars,selling each other as slaves?
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The transport systems were built, (usually by slaves or a conquered people who had no choice if they wished to eat), not out of British altruism, but were built to facilitate troop transport and to quickly carry the goodies back to port and back to dear old Blighty.
As for tribal wars, what normally happened was that the British invaders usually aligned themselves with the stronger tribe and assisted them to overcome the lesser tribe, often to the point of extinction, thereby easing the conquest of the area.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gordon Booth
We never did what the Germans did in Namibia-ethnic extermination of the two main tribes(that's where Hitler got his Big idea from).Similarly Belgium and a few other countries.
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I think you will find that Hitler got the idea from the country that actually created the idea of ethnic cleansing and concentration camps, which incidentally happens to be...yeah you guessed it, good old Blighty.
During the Boer War, General Roberts (an underling of Kitchener), fighting in the Transvaal realised he could not win a guerilla war against the Afrikaaners. He used a 'scorched earth' policy, burning every farm and village in his path, keeping all prisoners, including women and children in internment camps. Camps without adequate food, water and medical supplies, thus around 25-30,000 Afrikaaners died in them. The first concentration camps.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gordon Booth
We may have been pompous and arrogant but we left them ALL better than we found them,
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Tell that to the Aborigine, the Afrikaaners, the Irish, the American Indian etc..etc..
There's a really great scene in the David Niven film 'A Matter of Life and Death', when he's put on trial and they bring in people of the world to stand as his jury, even back in the forties when this film was made, the Brits realised how they had stripped the assets of the empire and treated the conquered appalingly.
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Originally Posted by Gordon Booth
and it didn't take long for many of them to fall back 200 years as soon as we left.This Political Correctness about the wicked British Empire makes me sick. And they are NOT seeking retribution,they're seeking money, which in many cases their dictators and governments immediatly salt away in their Swiss banks.
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No argument there my friend, all I'll say is look back one year in British politics, look how many of those illustrious parliamentarians in government were quietly salting away the blood, sweat and tears of the ordinary man in the street.
One last thing, I don't believe the sins of the fathers should be paid for, or apologised by, the current generation, history is history.
Sorry for the thread wander