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>but after Burma's/Myanmar's coups, ethnic violence, atrocities...perhaps even British colonial rule was not quite so bad after all. Please never ever spout th

>but after Burma's/Myanmar's coups, ethnic violence, atrocities...perhaps even British colonial rule was not quite so bad after all. Please never ever spout this nonsense again, we are all done with that part of History; Here is a relevant excerpt from G. K. Chesterton's article on Indian Independence movement; When all is said, there is a national distinction between a people asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for things that have been wholly invented by somebody else. There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of the conqueror. Suppose an Indian said: "I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than die of toil and vexation in order to avoid the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it." Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him.

rsj_hn 5y ago
Chesterton's quote is a nice one, but that doesn't mean that the GP is "spouting nonsense". They may be focused more on outcomes rather than Chesterton's focus on maintaining national traditions and sovereignty. Both are valid views and both can be debated with nuance.
- rramadass 5y ago
  >Both are valid views and both can be debated with nuance No. When it comes to Colonialism (and ideas of Superior/Inferior races) there is no two ways about it; it is untenable and unacceptable.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    One can believe that some people are better at ruling a country than other people without believing that this is due to genetic differences between these people.
    - rramadass 5y ago
      >One can believe that some people are better at ruling a country than other people That is a "belief" without any basis in facts and therefore untenable.
      - adrianN 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure that I'm a worse at ruling countries than Angela Merkel and a better than the heroin addict that lives at my local underground station.
        rramadass 5y ago
        And yet all three have one vote each under a Democratic system i.e. you are equivalent in that context. The point is that when it comes to sovereignty, there can only be self-determination based on whatever accepted criteria by the people themselves. Relevant: The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie - https://mises.org/library/politics-obedience-discourse-voluntary-servitude https://mises.org/library/politics-obedience-discourse-volun...
    - pjc50 5y ago
      .. so you let that be decided by election, right?
  - meany 5y ago
    I can appreciate your passion and ideas, but continued rule under a modern western democracy would not be equivalent to the race based colonialism of the past. I think there is nuance to this, and I don't think any of us can speak for all residents of all former colonies. It doesn't seem unreasonable that a situation could get so bad that an individual would prefer continued colony status (which is nothing like it would have been in 1936) under a liberal western democracy over some of the alternatives. For instance, my understanding is that there are some people in Hong Kong, who would prefer British rule to Chinese. From a WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-hong-kongers-want-to-be-british-again-11567770402 https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-hong-kongers-want-to-be-br...): "On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered outside the British consulate in Hong Kong for a rally urging London to take immediate action to protect British nationals in the city and grant them full citizenship. “We’re too British to be Chinese,” said Eric Cheung, a 25-year-old Hong Kong resident at the rally who is a British National (Overseas), or BNO. “We share the same ideology with the U.K. We support democracy, we support freedom, we support the rule of law and of course we support the U.K. government,” he said. “ Boris Johnson, fight for us,” he added, appealing to the British prime minister.
mrjangles 5y ago
I don't understand this quote. This is a conversation with an imaginary person who never existed. The Indian Nationalist Movement was founded and pushed forward by Western trained and educated elite Indians who wanted self government and Western institutions. They most certainly did not want a return to the caste system or to the system of Islamic slavery that the British abolished. They most certainly preferred "dying in hospital" to dying in pointless battles between warlords.
- rramadass 5y ago
  That quote and the passage it is from (https://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2009/01/gandhi-reference.html https://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2009/01/gandh...) was directed at very "concrete" Indian Nationalists who were arguing to basically transplant British Empire values into Indian Independence Movement and by extension into a newly formed Indian State. They had gone so far as to accept Herbert Spencer's "Social Darwinism" (among others) with its inherent justification of Colonialism and "rights" of the Colonizer over the Colonized in all Social/Cultural dimensions and Chesterton was having none of that. Chesterton is arguing for Indians (and by extension all other colonized people) for changing themselves using their own social norms/culture/paradigms and needs. While they maybe influenced by other cultures, it is their decision to make in the context of their history and culture. He is deriding the attempts of the so called "intellectuals" in the then Indian Nationalist movement to transplant wholesale the ideas of the British Culture.

rsj_hn 5y ago

Chesterton's quote is a nice one, but that doesn't mean that the GP is "spouting nonsense". They may be focused more on outcomes rather than Chesterton's focus on maintaining national traditions and sovereignty. Both are valid views and both can be debated with nuance.

rramadass 5y ago
>Both are valid views and both can be debated with nuance No. When it comes to Colonialism (and ideas of Superior/Inferior races) there is no two ways about it; it is untenable and unacceptable.
- adrianN 5y ago
  One can believe that some people are better at ruling a country than other people without believing that this is due to genetic differences between these people.
  - rramadass 5y ago
    >One can believe that some people are better at ruling a country than other people That is a "belief" without any basis in facts and therefore untenable.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure that I'm a worse at ruling countries than Angela Merkel and a better than the heroin addict that lives at my local underground station.
      - rramadass 5y ago
        And yet all three have one vote each under a Democratic system i.e. you are equivalent in that context. The point is that when it comes to sovereignty, there can only be self-determination based on whatever accepted criteria by the people themselves. Relevant: The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie - https://mises.org/library/politics-obedience-discourse-voluntary-servitude https://mises.org/library/politics-obedience-discourse-volun...
  - pjc50 5y ago
    .. so you let that be decided by election, right?
- meany 5y ago
  I can appreciate your passion and ideas, but continued rule under a modern western democracy would not be equivalent to the race based colonialism of the past. I think there is nuance to this, and I don't think any of us can speak for all residents of all former colonies. It doesn't seem unreasonable that a situation could get so bad that an individual would prefer continued colony status (which is nothing like it would have been in 1936) under a liberal western democracy over some of the alternatives. For instance, my understanding is that there are some people in Hong Kong, who would prefer British rule to Chinese. From a WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-hong-kongers-want-to-be-british-again-11567770402 https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-hong-kongers-want-to-be-br...): "On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered outside the British consulate in Hong Kong for a rally urging London to take immediate action to protect British nationals in the city and grant them full citizenship. “We’re too British to be Chinese,” said Eric Cheung, a 25-year-old Hong Kong resident at the rally who is a British National (Overseas), or BNO. “We share the same ideology with the U.K. We support democracy, we support freedom, we support the rule of law and of course we support the U.K. government,” he said. “ Boris Johnson, fight for us,” he added, appealing to the British prime minister.

mrjangles 5y ago

I don't understand this quote. This is a conversation with an imaginary person who never existed. The Indian Nationalist Movement was founded and pushed forward by Western trained and educated elite Indians who wanted self government and Western institutions. They most certainly did not want a return to the caste system or to the system of Islamic slavery that the British abolished. They most certainly preferred "dying in hospital" to dying in pointless battles between warlords.

rramadass 5y ago
That quote and the passage it is from (https://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2009/01/gandhi-reference.html https://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2009/01/gandh...) was directed at very "concrete" Indian Nationalists who were arguing to basically transplant British Empire values into Indian Independence Movement and by extension into a newly formed Indian State. They had gone so far as to accept Herbert Spencer's "Social Darwinism" (among others) with its inherent justification of Colonialism and "rights" of the Colonizer over the Colonized in all Social/Cultural dimensions and Chesterton was having none of that. Chesterton is arguing for Indians (and by extension all other colonized people) for changing themselves using their own social norms/culture/paradigms and needs. While they maybe influenced by other cultures, it is their decision to make in the context of their history and culture. He is deriding the attempts of the so called "intellectuals" in the then Indian Nationalist movement to transplant wholesale the ideas of the British Culture.