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Okay, just so everyone knows we're all on the same page: Imperialism is bad. Colonialism is bad. Paternalism is bad, patriarchalism is bad, anything else beginning with pat and ending in ism is probably bad. Arrogance is definitely bad, in fact it may be the eighth deadly sin. I'm aware of all this, and I'm aware that in future centuries, when Reagan and both Bushes are footnotes in history, the British Empire will still be vilified for its brutal subjugation and exploitation of other countries, who should have been left alone to subjugate and exploit each other as they did before and are doing now. I know all that. There is no need to repeat any of it, or to go into detail. I know.
Okay?
So why does it still get me on the raw when someone takes another whack at us for the evil things that a bunch of dead strangers did a century ago?
Perhaps because I know that it was also during that period of imperial arrogance that we did just about every good thing that we have to be proud of. British achievements in science and engineering changed the shape of the world. British explorers, expanding the nasty Empire, mapped bits of it that had never been mapped before. This twenty-first century of ours, like it or not, is still to a very great extent built on the good that we did when we were being the bad guys for the future. We've never been great since, and probably never will be again. Perhaps you can't have the good without the bad.
Perhaps because I've never known what it's like to live in a nation that's truly proud to be what it is. All my life has been spent in a country ashamed. We tried to be happy about being us briefly in the seventies, but we couldn't sustain it, and the demons of punk rose up to hound us back into the shadows. When we stopped being evil imperialists, we lost our nerve, and our patriotism (oh look, there's another one) has rung hollow and hysterical ever since. And yet there still seems to be just as much evil imperialism in the world as there ever used to be. It's just that other nations are unrepentantly reaping the benefits of it, while we're still saying sorry every time someone looks at us.
Perhaps because I look back on the designs of that time, the clothes, the buildings, the machinery, the art, the typography, the very language, and I see something else that seems to have been thrown out with the imperial bathwater, an idea that things could be, should be, interesting and beautiful, colourful and daring, as well as functional. I guess we don't feel we deserve that any more.
And perhaps because I look to the future and I see far worse empires to come, many and many of them. Till the human race is perfected, nation will try to dominate and conquer and exploit nation, often with the best of intentions, and some of them will succeed. Those who do not learn from history are compelled to repeat it, and the lesson to be drawn from British imperialism and arrogance, and from its guilt-stricken aftermath, is "there but for the grace of gods go you."
Okay?
So why does it still get me on the raw when someone takes another whack at us for the evil things that a bunch of dead strangers did a century ago?
Perhaps because I know that it was also during that period of imperial arrogance that we did just about every good thing that we have to be proud of. British achievements in science and engineering changed the shape of the world. British explorers, expanding the nasty Empire, mapped bits of it that had never been mapped before. This twenty-first century of ours, like it or not, is still to a very great extent built on the good that we did when we were being the bad guys for the future. We've never been great since, and probably never will be again. Perhaps you can't have the good without the bad.
Perhaps because I've never known what it's like to live in a nation that's truly proud to be what it is. All my life has been spent in a country ashamed. We tried to be happy about being us briefly in the seventies, but we couldn't sustain it, and the demons of punk rose up to hound us back into the shadows. When we stopped being evil imperialists, we lost our nerve, and our patriotism (oh look, there's another one) has rung hollow and hysterical ever since. And yet there still seems to be just as much evil imperialism in the world as there ever used to be. It's just that other nations are unrepentantly reaping the benefits of it, while we're still saying sorry every time someone looks at us.
Perhaps because I look back on the designs of that time, the clothes, the buildings, the machinery, the art, the typography, the very language, and I see something else that seems to have been thrown out with the imperial bathwater, an idea that things could be, should be, interesting and beautiful, colourful and daring, as well as functional. I guess we don't feel we deserve that any more.
And perhaps because I look to the future and I see far worse empires to come, many and many of them. Till the human race is perfected, nation will try to dominate and conquer and exploit nation, often with the best of intentions, and some of them will succeed. Those who do not learn from history are compelled to repeat it, and the lesson to be drawn from British imperialism and arrogance, and from its guilt-stricken aftermath, is "there but for the grace of gods go you."