Post Az92b3c1SgOO3M1gci by Gabble@spinster.xyz
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 (DIR) Post #Az90F8TiUPBArjYo8e by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
       2025-10-12T20:30:39.575925Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/11/britain-hated-by-many-left-wingers-inspired-by-lenin/What is it about Britain that inspires such dislike from its own people? Not from normal people, obviously, but from a chunk of our intellectual elites. Why is it that flying the national flag has become an act of defiance against our own rulers? Left-wingers in France or Greece or Argentina are generally patriotic, and rightly so. It is natural to feel an attachment to the nation that gave you your birth and infant nurture. Here, though, distaste for this country hovers behind all manner of apparently unconnected political movements. I could go on. The museums rushing to give away legally purchased collections to people who have never owned them, and who will very probably sell them on to private collectors. The diplomats longing to surrender British territories in defiance of the wishes of their peoples. The universities eviscerating the Western canon in the name of decolonising the curriculum. What is it that fills them with such distaste for the country which, other things being equal, they should love the most?Is it that Britain is uniquely despicable? Far from it. By any normal measure, we have been one of the strongest defenders of freedom and fairness in history. When we talk of a country improving, we generally mean that it is becoming more like Britain: that power can change hands peacefully, that dissidents are not imprisoned, that individuals have rights, that disagreeable opinions are tolerated, that the armed forces are under civilian control. To condemn colonialism, everything that came before and followed after must be expunged from the record, and colonised peoples are presented as having lived in prelapsarian bliss. “Colonialism-and-slavery” is proffered as a binomial phrase, like “law-and-order” or “gin-and-tonic”. Few kids in our schools are given the slightest notion that the first, at least in Africa, was driven by the desire to extirpate the second. Even fewer are taught that African kings fought to defend the institution.The Benin Bronzes, which our cultural leaders are so keen to give away, were seized to defray the costs of an 1897 expedition against a state that buried slaves alive. The British Museum, which owns most of them, dares not mention it. Instead it says the carvings were acquired during the “expansion of colonial power”.https://archive.ph/aIfVH
       
 (DIR) Post #Az92b3c1SgOO3M1gci by Gabble@spinster.xyz
       2025-10-12T20:45:14.010048Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @HebrideanHecate Orwell wrote it better, 80 years ago.https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye