How The British Government Covered Up Evidence Of Atrocities [Long Shorts]
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- Sources and further reading:
Cobain, I. 2020. Lying about our history? Now that's something Britain excels at. www.theguardia...
Dahlgreen, W. 2014. The British Empire is "something to be proud of". yougov.co.uk/p...
Jasanoff, M. 2020. Misremembering the British Empire. www.newyorker....
Milmo, C. 2013. Revealed: How British Empire's dirty secrets went up in smoke in the colonies. www.independen...
Sato, S. 2017. "Operation Legacy": Britain's Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide. doi.org/10.108...
Smith, M. 2020. How unique are British attitudes to empire? yougov.co.uk/i...
The fact you have to advise people not to get their information on war crimes from the same place they get their makeup tutorials and viral dance videos is profoundly disturbing.
Not great, perhaps, but not nearly as disturbing as the British state's cynical management of our education, the complicity of our great free press, and the illegal destruction of evidence detailing myriad atrocities.
Any claim made anywhere, that a person takes seriously, should be fact checked using other sources. This is critical thinking 101. Everybody can make a mistake, typos happen and new evidence found.
@ivanterrible7362 there are gems amongst the rocks you just have to be diligent to find them.
@lynnfisher3037 If I have to sift through mountains of unverified, thinly sourced pseudo-information with no journalistic standards. And trust the algorithm to sort fact from fiction based on what is driving viewers engagment. I'm fairly sure I should be looking elsewhere for trustworthy news providers.
Honestly, Tiktok might not be the worst for finding specifically british and American atrocities. It is a Chinese psyop, but it's not like they'd need to fabricate anything to make England or America's history look bad. Kinda how you can trust Al Jazera to report all the shady stuff Israel does, just don't expect the same attention to detail when it comes to Qatar
…so maybe that's why we didn't really learn about the British Empire in schools, at least not to the extent of revealing everything that actually happened. stunning to hear about it now.
Yes. All German school students spend years in their history classes studying the actions of the Reich. The colonial era deserves as much attention and introspection.
@@jacklav1 And yet so many Germans still are supporting far-right parties. The teaching should be much more harsh and detailed, we focus too much on wars instead of how the parties get into power slowly through slow and steady propaganda.
@@jacklav1 should Turkey teach their youth of the crimes of the Ottomans. Should Russia teach their children about the Gulags. Should the Chinese teach their young about the crimes of the cultural revolution. What about Crimes of native Americans both north and south. Should Japan teach the rape of Nanking to their kids. What about the Mongols. Or the Arab colonisation of North Africa. What about Pol pot. You could go on and on and on. When is this continuous season of confessions going to end.
@@karlarcher8773 _"When is this continuous season of confessions going to end."_
When there's nothing outrageous to confess?
@@PastPresented so the entire world should confess to the sins of the past.
Thank for your consistent and yeoman efforts to tell us about British History. You are an inspiration to thousands who like 'deep-diving' into history. A vital subject uncovering humanity's past. Congratulations❤
I wish you would do more long-form videos on the subject
I am confused as to what is meant by yeoman in this context, either that or you've got an incredibly posh autocorrect 😅
@@EdgyShooterA yeoman's effort is a term used to describe hard, valuable, and successful work, especially when supporting a cause or helping a team. It's not a term you see very often.
When the French celebrated Liberation after WWII, the people of Algeria also celebrated thinking Liberation would apply to them too. How wrong they were. somewhere between 20,000 (French numbers) and 50,000 (Algerian numbers) were killed in the struggle that ensued. So much for Liberation.
Not free but also purportedly not French as so many keep being treated like they are not French with France. It’s appalling. Colonialism never ended.
On Mel C's episode of Who Do You Think You Are, she went to the west of Ireland and found out her ancestors had left for Liverpool in the 1840s and DIDN'T KNOW WHY. History is SO selectively taught here.
Everyone knows about the potato famine and if not they weren't listening in school.
Wow, I thought it was mostly american schools that did this. 🤨
@@otterofdespair3387 I was not taught about the potato famine in history lessons in England. It might be taught universally in America and Ireland, but it's not in the national curriculum in England.
The only formal education I got on the potato famine in Biology. It was presented only as an example of why you shouldn't have a monoculture of a single crop verity. We were not taught about the political choices which exacerbated the famine.
@@SomeoneBeginingWithI 😮
Its truely embarrassing how much we treated Ireland @SomeoneBeginingWithI
I found a trunk with the words "Harewood Papers" painted on it, so I investigated. This led to learning so much about British plantations and the abolition of slavery and replacing it with a system that really wasn't that different. Oh, and how Lord Harewood and others were paid huge amounts of compensation to 'free' the slaves. The slaves' compensation? Dream on...
Where was this trunk?
@@muradtalukdar4401I am wondering the same thing.
I guess they learned their lesson in Germany: detailed documentation of Nazi war crimes fell into allied hands. Why make the same mistake than the Nazis? 😉
turns out if you put concerted effort into educating your population about your nation's history of [insert terrible thing here] the end result *isn't* just "oh woe is us we're terrible" it's actually more like "well *that* was terrible, good to keep our eye on anyone poised to repeat those evil deeds".
But turns out that would raise a bunch of questions about The Way We Do Things and if we start questioning that, we can't so easily rely on scapegoats and nationalism to justify/cover up the shitty things we're doing *right now*.
Sounds like a fun addendum to that one episode of the Crown about the Marburg Files: "Oh, uh, Tommy? We made sure that all of OUR embarrassing documents were taken care of, right? No? Oh, dear..."
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
@@markaxworthy2508 but piles of the ashes of burned documents are.
@@gargoyle7863 Not if you don't know what is in them!
Not only is there no such thing as "their history and our history," the fact remains that the UK and especially England became wealthy on the backs of those oppressed, tortured, killed, sacked, etc.
It's what the UK's infrastructure was built on, its massive banking system, insurance companies, grand country houses, palaces, etc.
Thanks for your wonderful work❤
Everything the UK are today was built on the broken and raped backs of our ancestors.
And the British government hasn't changed much at all since then, no matter who's "democratically" voted into power, they're all following the same script.
Yah! Another J. Draper video
Edit: Damn. As someone who works in informationmanagement for me keeping information available is very dear to my heart. Keeping information hidden from some population by burning or plain hiding it is just horrible
Yep, I'm data admin/mgt and it's like burning books.
I really like your concept that it "isn't just their history" and I see it as a good argument against people being upset when taking down monuments to the Confederacy. They cry "it's our history", but it isn't Just your history
I should be horrified but I'm not even surprised
@@RossParker1877 exactly. It's extremely British to be a Global empire full of genocide and suppression, and so focused on their PR that they just erase their own history to try and cover-up the atrocities.
Same, 😒.
I'm dutch and its quite horrible to see how high the number is here of people who think having Indonesia and other colonies was a good thing😅
Good for whom should be the question. It was good for the Netherlands, not so much for Indonesians or humanity as a whole.
It's not like us subjects get any say either way. Our governments do whatever they want even if we are opposed to it.
@@EgoChip In the case of the Netherlands and Britain, the governments carefully kept at arm's length while commercial companies seized power in places like Indonesia and India.
@@PastPresented Corporations ruled back then as they do now. So business as usual.
@@EgoChip The East India Company had a larger military as a private company than the British army itself during the 1830s, those corporations wielded power that the likes of Bezos or Musk can only dream of, though they'd sure love to return to. Amazon with a colonial army, it's little wonder it was so horrific.
When I was in Year 8, we covered the slave trade and effort to abolish it and slavery itself. We talked briefly about the abolitionist movement, William Wilberforce (my house was named after him, even), the Slave Trade Act 1807, and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. And I thought the story basically ended there; obviously we had skipped over a great many of the details, but as far as I knew, we had slavery in the empire, and then we didn't. Right?
Well, one day some years later, a David Olusoga documentary happened to be on in the background in my living room, nobody had specifically put it on or anything, and I was half paying attention to it as I was doing whatever else. He started talking about the reparations that we paid... to the SLAVEOWNERS. WE PAID REPARATIONS TO THE *SLAVEOWNERS*. The reparations amounted to an enormous sum of money too.
If this massive coincidence this one random day hadn't happened, who knows when I would have found this out? I felt fucking lied to, and to what end? American conservatives lose their minds over the idea that teaching students about the truth of slavery would make them "feel guilty", and it's complete horseshit. The truth is out there, these atrocities really did happen, and your students are likely to find out eventually. I don't feel guilty about the crime of slavery because it was committed centuries before I was even born, but I *do* feel guilty that I was left unable to confront the extent of that crime in the present day because my history teacher lied to me about it.
@@cereal_chick2515 There's a quote by Eric Williams, academic on British slavery and the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago:
"The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it"
He wrote a whole book, "Capitalism and Slavery" with the theory that the end of the practice in Britain was primarily economic, not moralistic. This is not a theory without controversy and I don't feel I know enough to weigh in, but that quote, that cultural attitude feels like what you describe.
I wouldn't feel uniquely bad about it. I'm from the USA, and our education on slavery and race well, let's say it can vary heavily by who you hear it from.
The slave owners were paid off because that's what it took to get the abolition of slavery through Parliament. Remember, Britain was not yet a democracy in those days. Wealthy interests controlled things. The alternative to paying them off was not getting slavery abolished - what should they have done instead? What would you have done?
@@aronpuma5962speaking of cultural influences, Locke what's one of the individuals who wrote the colonial Constitution for Carolina. In the Constitution and in Locke's writings, slavery was supported. I it seems safe to say that slavery slavery was supported in America by way of cultural influences.
@@colinslantIf it had to make it through Parliament then the country was a democracy. If oligarchic control denies the definition of democracy, then we don’t yet have democracy today either. Choose one reality, you cannot have both.
@@RingsLoreMaster Slavery was quite foundational to the United States, and that's a very foundational, legal way it began, and of course that was written while Carolina was a British Colony. History connects.
Regardless, our slavery didn't end with an act of Congress, it ended in civil war. Law to end it's brutality had to be achieved by bloodshed and it's hard to say how it could have ended any other way here, just one of those historical hypotheticals
The Mau Mau uprising is quite famous. I love it how this channel is always so informative and educational. The Mau Mau was actually something we learned about in school probably on exactly this subject of how Empires and Imperialism had such massive down sides besides the obvious .
One of the death camps in Kenya had "Work will set you free" over the entrance, a conscious echo of "Arbeit macht Frei" over Auschwitz. No doubt the National Servicemen involved were warned that they would be executed if they talked about it back at home, as those were who saw how native Australians were exposed to radiation at hydrogen bomb tests.
As an Irishman, I must thank you for raising this awareness so respectfully and eloquently. Sadly, history seems doomed to repeat itself with Britain’s disingenuous narrative around its involvement in Israel’s genocide of Palestine.
Although I would absolute,y agree with you - there is plenty of obfuscation on the ‘other side’ too. The Iranian and Saudi governments are hard,y paragons of virtue, and I’ve had many conversations with local Muslims who think that the original invasion and subsequent addition to the caliphate of Palestine was a god thing. I.e. ‘my empire is the civilised one, yours is the aggressor’…I live next to a good friend whose family is from Iranian (left when the shah was deposed) , and I can tell you that aíran can do no wrong and is the perpetual victim
"The Road to Derry" by Seamus Heaney
Along Glenshane and Foreglen
And the cold woods of Hillhead:
A wet wind in the hedges and a dark cloud on the mountain,
And flags like black frost
Mourning that the thirteen men were dead.
The Roe wept at Dungiven and the Foyle cried out to heaven,
Burntollet's old wound opened and again the Bogside bled;
By Shipquay Gate I shivered and by Lone Moor I enquired
Where I might find the coffins where the thirteen men lay dead.
My heart besieged by anger, my mind a gap of danger.
I walked among their old haunts.
The home ground where they bled;
And in the dirt lay justice like an acorn in the winter.
Till its oak would sprout in Derry
Where the thirteen men lay dead.
Covering up atrocities is something many governments do, sadly. Thank you for bringing this part of history to light. It is disheartening to learn so many think colonialism is something to be proud of.
@@GrandmaRose9000 some southern states are trying to erase the truth about slavery. Or trying to change the narrative that it was “a good thing.”
So they are doing it here in the US too
The Chinese Communist Party thinks colonialism is a wonderful thing -- as long as they are the imperialists. /s
It’s always shocking to see demonstrated plainly the amount of willful ignorance a person would have to display in order to minimize or defend the atrocities of empires
States do terrible things routinely. The question is whether "empires" are unusually bad.
Shankar empires are typically worse and leave behind an awful legacy.
@@OscarOSullivan I'm unconvinced. How much of that "awful legacy" is the result of post-imperial nationalist propaganda?
Then the Tories from 2010 to 2024 stepped forward and said "Hold my beer." And proceeded to steal billions from the UK and commit atrocities on citizens and immigrants, all in just 14 years. It's a talent.
What atrocities during the last 14 years? Genuine question
@@tantuceThe ethnic cleansing of the Chagos Islands was one of them, the UN gave a timeline for letting the expelled natives back, the UK said no and its still forcefully depopulated and it was a designated a crime against humanity.
Well... they've been in power for 70 of the last 100 years so
@@Rynewulf Thank you for taking the time to inform.
2008, wasn't it?
A book recommendation, not on the destroyed document but on some of the things they tried to hide: "The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire " by John Newsinger. Important but hard to read.
Well done. Thank you for posting this. I was unaware of this.
In Australia, often the only records of British crimes come from indigenous oral histories, which frequently face derision.
I checked up on the list of crimes from a certain time period in western Australian colonies
Plenty of crimes across the board
Very good spread of diversity also with the skin colour ..your toes would curl to see what sort of things happened amongst all humans ...back then
@@oftin_wongplease elaborate on those certain time periods and explain how they're just as bad or worse than industrial scale torture and genocide
@@sandwich2473 the colonies ..colonial Australia
Who said anything about being worse
?
@@oftin_wong colonial australia was under the direction of the crown, much like with india, etc
@@sandwich2473
Yes...so what ?
Ultimately under the scant direction of the crown ...it was a long boat journey
So we had a governor to make all the pressing decisions here on the ground.
Australia was unlike India in so many ways.
You seem to imagine I've entered a measuring contest with you ?
A wonderful and sad video, thank you for posting it. It always made me sad growing up when history in school omitted the darker truths of the Empire.
Thank you for this video. So enlightening. ❤
Sometimes the lazy bureaucrats are the real heroes it seems.
“On its colonies the sun never sets and the blood never dries.”- Ernest Jones
Excellent video as always Ms J Draper!
History is always eventually manipulated, sometimes quickly like in the incidents you descibe here, other times after many years as America has been doing more recently with slavery. Fascism is on the rise around the world because those who remember 1st hand are dying and the lessons from two world wars are being forgotten.
I was born in the 1950s in England, the shadow of WWII was ever present as I grew up.
Stay safe & stay fabulous everybody, especially you Ms J Draper
💐🦕🤔😼♥️☕🥖🧀🍅🍕🍝🇪🇺🇺🇦🌍💃⚔️👗🩰🌈🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈💐
How does this align with other lines of evidence? Are there any external sources that help to fill in some of the burned up blank spots?
"There history and our history" is the way many British people see what went on in the British Empire. I'm an American, and our first 13 states were apart of British America. Before the USA gained its independence our history was also British history and not just the good stuff but also the bad stuff too. Such as how Native Americans were treated. After the the USA gained its independence then came what was called the second British Empire. Most of the British Empire is now independent nations and the view among many British people is: that is American, history or Canadian history, or Australian history, or South African History or Indian history and so on. Most British people don't understand that when our Nations were apart of your British Empire our history was your nation history and what happen in our part of the British Empire was your own national history just as much as what went on in the Great Britain and Northern Ireland . That goes for all the good historical events as well as the bad ones too.
Their history ...
Apart or a part?... 🤔
History … before my time.
Native Americans were treated a damn sight better under British rule than by the USA, that's for sure.
Man..
History is FASCINATING. But it is NOT for the faint of heart.
To give you some idea of the sort of information that would've been concealed in British Malaya, it's said that the US utilised many of the same strategies and methods against the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, including mass aerial spraying of herbicides.
Same reasons. Allowing Soviet influence to dominate the government of newly-independent colonies of West-European nations would have been seriously problematic.
Thank you for posting this 👍
my take seeing the video name was...Which one?
Can you imagine if we had an archive of all the documents burned. British Empire would have a whole new look. BTW during the "Malay Emergency" Rory "The Tory" Stewart's dad was the Governor of Malaya
@@ShubhamBhushanCC You need the documents to prove the British were mass executioners?
Didn't know that😮
Rory Stewart's father Brian Stewart was never Governor of Malaya, though he did work for the colonial authorities there in the 1950s.
He was never Governor of Mayala, he was Secretary for Chinese Affairs in Malacca, and then Secretary for Chinese Affairs in Penang.
My grandparents island was brutalised and later, when Britain called for aid during the war and post-war, many answered the call.
Years ago it was hit by a devastating hurricane and Jon Snow asked a then diplomat why the UK should provide aid to the country.
I'm researching the history of slavery for my novel and realising more and more that the British part in slavery is only ever taught, if at all, from the abolition viewpoint. But we participated in it for a long time before that, as well as the military occupation of many, many countries. In addition, it's called being a decent human being to help others. It's just the bare minimum to help others when they're struggling
Dont forget Canada and the appalling treatment the First Nations people received from The British.
There seems to be some confusion about this. By the time of Canada's Indian Schools, the region was self-governing.
The genocide perpetrated against the First Nations of Canada with the help of the residential school system was entirely Canada's doing, not the UK. This is something we've only started to come to terms with in the past few years after the discovery of mass graves on the sites of those former schools.
@@jovic819 Australia & New Zealand have similar history, colonialism is a (inherited) state of mind, not just a political structure
@@eldrago19 I'm in New Brunswick where Lord Monckton was in charge of not just expelling the acadians but also for distributing small pox blankets to the first nations. That was long before Canada ever existed. The largest city in New Brunswick is bilingual and home of the acadians......and is called Moncton.
A bunch of these were up and running in the overseas territory that would become Alberta in 1905.
I wish current Russians had the same attitude and even a suspicion their country, the former USSR and Russian Empires were brutal colonials
Americans also need to push back on our own narrative and recognize the damage we do in the world.
@@OctopusOwl Unfortunately, influence matters, both at a personal level and at the level of relationships between nations. The less influence you have, the more you get damaged.
One of the reasons I suspect various far right leaders including Erdogan, Farage etc admire and respect Putin is they agree with his world view of might makes right and of the glory of empire.
Immediately deflecting away from our crimes to say "look! look! Someone else is also a criminal" is not a good move.
"The wildest thing is that it worked."
Yeah, because it usually works. The times it doesn't work are outliers.
Wow! Lorry loads of documents destroyed. And people moan about "destroying history" when a statue of some horrific slave trader gets trashed!
United States: coughs and quietly excuses itself from the room as quickly as possible
USA, after watching Europe's colonial era; "Hold my weak, pisswater beer..."
@@django3422 Hey now, I must take offense...we have some decent craft beer in the US.
@@meganrogers3571 The Brits invented IPA.... they get no say.
@@meganrogers3571 Oh, bless...
As a Trinidadian, I thank you for this.
You don’t even need to travel that far from Britain to see the effects of the empire. Ireland’s just a sea away, and while we didn’t get the worst of the torture and slavery, the British government is one of the main reasons the potato famine was as bad as it was, and our culture and language are practically dead
Ireland's population still has not reached pre-famine levels
The Irish played their part as colonialists too. The spud famine wasn't a uniquely Irish experience either.
What!? The British did something sketchy and morally questionable?
Well, I never...
The Dutch have very similar issues, on a somewhat smaller scale!
Well looking at the survey their opinions are quite a lot more extreme, 50% say it's something to be proud of with only 6% saying it's something to be ashamed of, compared to 32% and 19% respectively for the UK
Having gone to school in England, and having studied history until AS-level, I am shocked and horrified by how little of Britain's colonial (and even domestic, non-English!) history simply wasn't taught. I, too, only learned about the Bengal famine recently, even though we studied WW2 in great depth. None of our studies of WW1 even mentioned the Easter Rising. Even in primary school, Mary Queen of Scots "wanted the throne" and was opaquely portrayed as an evil schemer. The fact that I have to seek out this knowledge as an adult and never got taught it is probably why so few British people have interrogated their biases at all.
Thank you for covering this, J!
Another very good video. I loved your quote"all history is our history". The history of the past is everyone's history. We may not like it, but it is the way it was, whether we like it or not.
History is only useful if it tells the truth. Thanks for educating and helping us grow.
(Edited for typo)
I don't believe it! I was just thinking of you, that I hadn't heard from you for awhile.
ALL people of the United Kingdom, and I mean ALL (whether a citizen, immigrant, or part of the "commonwealth") need to see this or at least deserve to know the truth.
Just like the torpedoing of the RMS Lusitania in World War 1 - where the Brits tried to cover it all up, they did the same to historical records. The world deserves to know how our ancestors and families before us were really treated back then and how we even came to be in existence in the first place.
"All history is our history" - best quote ever!
I always found it weird that the horrible histories book that's hardest to find (in my personal experience anyway) is barmy british empire.
So I guess Governor Tarken really was a good caricature of the virtues of the British Empire. Nada.
History can only be true, when it shows the bad with the good.
The fact that most countries chose not to be under colonial rule and many were prepared to fight for freedom, is objective evidence of the wrongs of colonialism.
Singapore flourished after the British left despite their assets and banking system being stripped by the departing British government. When Hong Kong was returned to China, apparently there was an agreement to leave similar assets in Hong Kong to avoid the repeat of history that Singapore suffered in it's early years of independance.
If there's a government in the world that has not committed atrocities, I would be amazed. This in no way excuses the British government.
Yes, there are quite many actually.
Your defensive gut reaction is wrong.
Yes, and living in Australia our country being an offshoot to the UK history decimated the indigenous peoples locally for decades after their arrival as a penal colony in 1788. Thanks for sharing this video and to remind us about heritage isnt all peaches and creame.
I don't think it is particularly unusual or shocking that people look back with fondness on a time when they were poorly informed/ unfairly informed of what an empire involved; they would like to live in the fantasy they got sold of unlimited opportunity, superiority and helping others to progress. I suspect a huge percentage of EE people would also look back with fondness on the USSR, another huge colonial enterprise that didn't describe itself fairly, because people want to live in a fantasy of universal equality and progress. Colonialism seems in the past, so always a little sepia tinted, plus there were definite benefits, either for individuals in the colonial country, or potential benefits in developing other countries that were always *not quite* realized. Post-colonial discourse also allows present day post colonial governments to blame their failings on Britain, especially around a 'betrayal' myth of British empire withdrawal (that of course has some basis in reality), and shout down any attempts by Britain/ Western forces as colonialist. You can see other potential colonial powers like China use this to their advantage.
"other potential colonial powers like China"
Potential? China _is_ an empire. But they're not white, so apparently it's okay.
The USSR had posters of the various nations which made up the USSR only the ethnic Russians are wearing modern style clothing in them.
Thank you for saying this
This is why as an American I've never had any respect for the British Royal Family, ever.. any timeline of it. The atrocities they've backed and the support they demanded for it, for centuries.. and the the cleverest trick of all was convincing the world in the early half of the 20th century that absolving themselves of any responsibility by "sitting idly and doing nothing" was their Godly duty. While still having the temerity to ask for a healthy taxpayer salary.
It's brilliant that you mention this. I'm an Indian and I think it's so important for British people to read history written by non white historians to have an idea of what has happened in the last 500 years of the empire.
The sad thing is it wasn’t just the British that committed atrocities- all of Europe treated their ‘colonies’ supremely badly.
0:11 actually I did know that. It’s one of many reasons why I’m an Anarchist
It always surprises me how little Portuguese people learn about history in their colonies in school. Like, as a Brazilian it honestly offends me how people don't even learn that a lot of the riches that allowed their country to have things like beautiful architecture, public buildings like big libraries, schools and universities, hospitals, churches, palaces, government offices, etc, came from the atrocities they committed here, and they don't have any idea of just *how much* their country *literally stole* from us. Like, without the things they stole from Brazil and all the slave labor they extracted from us, Portugal would be a much poorer country today and Brazil would be much richer. If the kind of colonization that happens here wasn't the kind of colonization they did (they didn't want to "colonize" the area, they had no intention of creating permanent settlements, they just wanted to take everything they could and leave once they got everything, it just happened that Brazil had a lot they could take, so they were here for 3 centuries and still had stuff they wanted to take left), if the kind of colonization that happened here was more akin to what happened in the US (aka, people actually moving in with the intention of creating permanent settlements), Brazil would be in a much better position in the world.
Brazil today is what it is *despite* Portuguese colonization, not because of it. And it pisses me off that people in Portugal aren't even taught that.
To be clear, I don't blame current Portuguese people for anything, neither am angry with them or anyone (including the descendants of the Portugal that actually ended up staying here a group of people that I'm probably part of too), I put the blame on all pf those things *solely* on the people in the past that did all of those things, I just think that this is a big part of *their* history that is being willfully ignored because it makes their country look bad.
Are the james felton books a genuine source of information on this subject?
Sincerely, thank you so much for using your platform to help make people aware of this.
There's lots to enjoy and celebrate in our history and heritage. But we can't do that in good faith unless we also reckon with the bad.
No, we dont have to be ashamed or guilty. But we need to be aware, we need to be honest about it, in order to make sure we aren't turning a blind eye to the continued impact the empire had on the world as a whole.
If you want to learn more about some of this stuff, I really recommend the work of Robert Evans. He doesn't focus on the UK but has done some interesting episodes looking at the empire's actions and its legacy.
Very important subject and yet, i guarantee, those who need to hear about it the most - will willfully ignore it
Don't know if you planned this, but this video came on the National Day of truth and reconciliation in Canada, where we commemorate the victims of genocide and child abuse. Some residential schools were in operation before all of Canada was confederated, although obviously the bulk of the atrocity was committed by Canadians, and, unsurprisingly, a lot of records were destroyed
I feel like there should be a lot more taught to Brits about what the British empire was to the people it colonized. They should know what was done at least as well as the people living in those places now.
"It's all our history" 💯
Thank You J. I Always learn Interesting Things here.
Cheers From California 😎
Are we the baddies?
Our caps have skulls on them....
We ALL are the baddies. These are stories of human nature which whether we act on it or not is nonetheless present in all of us.
The ICA exhibited some national archive material about Palestine and the middle east this summer. Reading them I couldn't help thinking how dull and bureaucratic much of it was. Banality of evil comes to mind
Excellent Mitchell & Webb reference - but yes - colonialising everyone & thus creating the usa? Yeah - we're the baddies.
*Well not "We" cos Im multi·mixed* - only ⅛th of me is the "baddies".
GD we gotta get the hierarchies out of play & recognise soc reciprocity is always far more effective & sustainable.
@@throttlegalsmagazineaustra7361 Actually they've got crowns on because we like money and other people's jewels.
Is this the girl who made a video on chainmail armour?
Sir Melon has yet to recover! 😜
She should do more of that and less of this divisive rubbish.
@@otterofdespair3387 What is wrong with shedding light on the past?
@@otterofdespair3387 Such is history. Our past is a nasty, glorious, joyful and a depressing thing. We have been the bad guys, the good guys even the ones that have done the right thing by accident and the wrong thing with totaly good intentions. All of it should be talked about, the good bits celebrated as good examples, the bad bits recognised as the object lessons they are (and a warning to future generations).
Wasn’t Princess Kates family knee deep in „cotton trade“ and are still super millionaires to this day?
I read her parents were the first generation millionaires in their family. They started their business when young
Kate Middleton's Lupton ancestors owned a *woollen* mill. Cotton was not a major element in the family history.
@@tantuce that is incorrect they inherited several million upon the death of her dads grandmother
I can imagine the British government was worried they'd be buried in legal cases from every ex-colony for war crimes and whatever else. And imagine the amount of compensation if they won, it could have bankrupted a country still recovering from WWII. So they turned a blind eye. Now it's been long enough legal cases are an unlikely prospect so I guess it doesn't matter so much now.
Thanks for sharing this truly important piece of the puzzle ❤
The problem was that the British Empire had a 'holier than thou' mentality to it's policies and actions throughout.
As a person from Northern Ireland, I'm well familiar with the British government and their penchant for both atrocities, and covering them up :P
I was actually wondering whether this would be about the events of Bloody Sunday and the way you still can't name the perpetrators in certain nations.
Can I genuinely ask why Northern Irish people think it's normal to be talking about 13 civilians killed in a war 50 years ago when that many people have been killed in places like Palestine or Ukraine in the past hour.
@@HerewardWake If you're saying this, you're very well aware of the logical fallacies your statement contains.
People can care about the trauma in their own history and also care about current atrocities.
That's like saying "why do you care that your dad died 30 years ago, when people are starving to death in Africa now??" C'mon man. No need to be divisive like this.
@@HerewardWakeMaybe because the Irish have been a steadfast ally of Palestine since the Nakba?
Maybe because the pain of murdered family members doesn't just go away?
Maybe because, 50 years from now, we'll still remember what is happening today, while your own spawn chastise us for remembering those atrocities?
@@NeoNovastar Thing is it wasn't your dad dying 50 years ago and it's not trauma it's a self-indulgent grudge.
I've long been dissuaded from the idea that you should either be proud or ashamed of your country's history. Unless I had a personal hand in something, actions undertaken by other people who just happen to have been born in the same country as me (or rathe, had the same citizenship) is just a series of facts. We can choose to assess their relative merits as their positives and negatives, but the pride/shame issue seems arbitrary and irrational.
Thanks for covering the migrated archives. Some of those documents from Malaya that were destroyed or shipped overseas would have related to the Malaysn Emergency.
Am actually listening to “Inglorious Empire” by Shashi Tharoor (and read by the author) about the atrocities in India, and would recommend it in this context. Free via your local library on Libby.
Caroline Elkin's Imperial Reckoning is a forensic level book worth reading.
My people used the southern americas as a proving ground on how to make free people eun from their hones. Who says we can't export democracy? Fools they be. thanks tour guide lady
What still makes me shake my head is that when France was forced out of Viet Nam and the other Asian colonies, they exhumed all the bodies in the cemeteries and took them back to France.
Er, what's going on with the Dutch in that poll? 🧐
By the 1950s they didn't have the resources to commit many atrocities in their colonies.
Come out ye black and tans
Come out and fight me like a man
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders
You are doing such important work, thank you
She's pursuing virtue points by trotting out the same boring anti-British rubbish that many people of her age and demography do these days to signal how wonderfully on trend and progressive they are.
@@otterofdespair3387"her demography"?
Why are people even surprised anymore
You know what the best part is? This is most likely still very much in use by modern day governments
3:11 on the 26th of August 2024 - I got a call from a university friend who works for the Trinidad and Tobago government (Minister of the Attorney General And Legal Affairs) - part of their job is to make sure all government documents/information is available under the publications (legal deposit) act 1985.
Some of the documents dumped into the sea they are trying to find/replace because no one has a copy of the laws/ordinances from a number of years ago:
The main issues they have missing ordinances from Trinidad from the 1700s and 1800s
To make it more interesting Trinidad and Tobago was at that time being ruled over by the French, British and Dutch.
Recent calculations put the looting of India at US$40 TRILLION in current dollars.
In the 1930s Winston Churchill
, foreign minister, used mustard gas on the civilian Kurdish population in British Iraq, being the first government to used chemical weapons on the Kurds. This the sort of thing the UK bombed Iraq for many years later.
As an American, I got a sweet education of British Empire thievery simply by visiting the British Museum when I stayed in London. The Crown was all about ripping off the treasures of conquered lands.
That's why America America'ed!
And isn't a good thing that America never messed with other countries in such a way...
Just leave it to Britain to embarrass Britain.
I wonder how we look at it here in the Netherlands. We did some awful stuff at the end of our rule of Indonesia with our "police actions" for which we had a draft and used the army, no policing about it. Recently a movie came out that also showed the ugly side that was broadly hidden and there were people who participated, even just as young drafted men, who felt personally attacked, instead of critically reflecting on it (also many of those young men were either implicitely or explicitely made to commit attrocities) which saddened me. We also keep ignoring our role in the slave trade locally. Several port cities that were heavily involved and had slaves pass through them on their way to the Americas try to pretend nothing happened and try to prevent monuments from being erected in their cities. But at least the king has publically expressed his apologies during the memorial last year, not just for what the country did, but also specifically the parts that his family was involved in and he is letting an inquiry take place to discover any other ugly parts there. But seriously, we abolished slavery in our western territories in the Caribbean and Suriname but forced the slaves to be in a kind of indentured servitude for another 10 years for those same masters, just so that those slavers weren't impacted too heavily. Priorities were not there where they should've been. Every good thing had to be undermined with a bad thing.
I wonder if the UK tried to form an Empire today with the proliferation of social media and the speed information can be disseminated would the people of Britain still be proud of the Empire? Would we accept the military actions to suppress other people and their culture? Soldiers being used to put down opposition to the new rulers? People being moved off their ancestral lands so capitalism could make 'better use' of the natural resources? Were the Empire builders so different from the Nazis?
You might be new to history but appropriation of land and suppression of culture and opposition has been a reality since about 3000BC.
Contemporary examples of persecution and imperialism indicate that, if there's any substantial difference, consent and pride could be manufactured even faster than in the past
I've heard young, educated, western people use the term "russophobia" when talking about Ukraine.
So yeah, it still work today
@@arshputz Russia's interesting because it's the ultimate example of the difference between imperial expansion by sea and imperial expansion by land. Expansion by land (as in Russia, the USA and China) creates an empire *masquerading as a nation.* Expansion by sea always creates "an empire" even if that empire is much smaller than a neighbouring land-expansion empire.
There's always a pool of smoke over Deli.
It's not like they didn't know that what they were doing was wrong but they justified it by claiming to be "protecting" them... to the point where a lot of people believed it to be true. The British Empire was far from alone... The French, Spanish, US expansion, Russia. Even people within the conquered areas were turning on their own people.
There was a whole lot of wrong going around and it was all in a bid for power... Maps are how you showed superiority during that time. All of the kings were classically educated and wanted their own Roman Empire. The epic pissing contest.
And it ultimately led to WWI. Millions dead, just to satisfy egos.
Tell me about it.
During the revolts in North Africa my grandfather fled to Israel;
These revolts are the reason for why France's official name is
"The Fifth French Republic".
France is still embarassed about it.
The British government/military/intelligence were still committing atrocities in Northern Ireland right upto the 90's. As revealed in a recent BBC documentary series.