4 ms·

History is always written by the victors. What does the western world think of colonisation, wars etc?

by amirmc 11y ago

mercurial 11y ago
But Stalin lost (historically speaking). His successors spent a lot of time erasing his legacy. And at least in Europe, our colonial past is usually not seen as something to be proud of, apart from the nationalist groups (which is par for the course, it's difficult to be a nationalist without a strong ability for cherry-picking historical facts).
- vidarh 11y ago
  Even in Western Europe, while Stalin is overall portrayed in a negative light, he's still given quite a lot of positive portrayal in the context of World War II. It's not surprising that there are still people that see him in a more positive light in a country where several generations grew up in the shadow of a massive propaganda operation setting him up as a hero. As for the European colonial past, I think that depends on where you are. In Britain at least it's not that unusual to notice signs of people that miss at least the idea of the British Empire. A lot of British culture is tied indirectly to it through an admiration for the stereotype of the British military forces that held the empire together, and a fascination with the ex-colonies. As well as the Commonwealth, of course, which is basically a re-packaged, politically correct way of holding on to some of the last vestiges of the empire.
  - mercurial 11y ago
    Interesting. I would not have thought there would be so many nostalgics of the UK's colonial empire. In France, the "nostalgic" faction are the royalists, and they are an extremely small minority that nobody takes seriously.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      I don't think many people wants it back. But many people do appear to look at the empire as a proud part of British history. With respect to the comparison with France, consider that France has been a republic far longer than Britain has been without at least the trappings of an empire, and the empire had a sort of "soft landing" with a gradual loss of territories, and with most of the colonies retaining special relationships with Britain in the form of the Commonwealth, and with many of them retaining the Queen as their head of state. It wasn't until 1981 that Britain lost its last colony (a few remaining overseas holdings remained as British Dependent Territories, now British Overseas Territories), and as recently as 1982, Britain defended one of its last vestiges of the Empire militarily (the Falklands War). But at the same time, Britain had for decades by then pursued a policy of voluntary decolonisation on relatively friendly terms (with a few notable exceptions, like Kenya and Zimbabwe) - explicitly with the aim of trying to avoid situations like what France ran into with e.g. Algeria (or anything like Britains own drawn out conflict in India). So really, a large proportion of the British adult population still at least has some vague memory of Britain still having an empire in their childhood or youth - albeit for most people their memory will be of one that had been in serious decline for a long time. Furthermore, most of them if they are aware of the decolonisation will have memories of a Britain that had abandoned any idea of holding on to its colonies with force and where decolonisation was largely orderly and reasonably "friendly" and where Britain in most cases where it did not happen peacefully could be reasonably construed as having acted properly (e.g. in Zimbabwe, it was the white minority local population, not Britain, that started the long running conflict) If most adults in France could personally remember the last monarch, I suspect they royalists would still have more support there too. Similarly I expect the British Empire will fade rapidly as fewer people personally remembers it.
  - aries1980 11y ago
    >Even in Western Europe, while Stalin is overall portrayed in a negative light, he's still given quite a lot of positive portrayal in the context of World War II. Yeah, by uneducated people who don't know, the WW II was started by 3rd Reich, CCCP and Slovakia.
- notahacker 11y ago
  And yet at the same time even many of us without nationalist inclinations in the UK are extremely proud of outspoken arch-colonialist Churchill for his role in defeating Hitler, to the point where his less fashionable opinions and military blunders are largely glossed over. Stalin fandom[1] centres on his role in Soviet military successes in the same war, and rebuilding a destroyed nation afterwards. The regime that exposed his excesses and carried out a program of "de-Stalinisation" is long gone and perhaps not entirely trusted because of its own flaws, his victims are long dead, and the last thing the Putin administration want to discourage is nostalgic admiration for leaders' strength in standing up to Europe. [1]at least Russian Soviet fandom. I'm a bit more perplexed when I see his face alongside Marx and Lenin on some of the more hard-left trade unionists' May Day placards over here...
  - mercurial 11y ago
    > And yet at the same time even many of us without nationalist inclinations in the UK are extremely proud of outspoken arch-colonialist Churchill for his role in defeating Hitler, to the point where his less fashionable opinions and military blunders are largely glossed over. That's a bit different, isn't it? I don't know how it is in the UK, but outside of it, it's not his pro-colonial views which are admired, but his charisma and obstination. The regime that exposed his excesses and carried out a program of "de-Stalinisation" is long gone and perhaps not entirely trusted because of its own flaws, his victims are long dead, and the last thing the Putin administration want to discourage is nostalgic admiration for leaders' strength in standing up to Europe. That's a fair point. I would be curious to read the parts of the current Russian curriculum dealing with him. > I'm a bit more perplexed when I see his face alongside Marx and Lenin on some of the more hard-left trade unionists' May Day placards over here... Yeah, it's not like the USSR was exactly a big promoter of trade unions on its own soil...
    - notahacker 11y ago
      > That's a bit different, isn't it? I don't know how it is in the UK, but outside of it, it's not his pro-colonial views which are admired, but his charisma and obstination. Isn't that fundamentally similar to admiring Stalin for being strong enough to defeat Hitler rather than his penchant for purges, gulags and strategically-useful famines? Or indeed crediting JFK as the media-friendly darling of the civil rights movement rather than one of the key antagonists in the escalation of a war which may have cost 10% of Vietnam's population. I'm not suggesting that Churchill or even JFK were remotely close to being a bad a human being as Stalin, but the tendency for history's lens to be very selective about what it focuses on isn't exactly something unique to Russia.

History is always written by the victors. What does the western world think of colonisation, wars etc?

by amirmc 11y ago

History is always written by the victors. What does the western world think of colonisation, wars etc?

But Stalin lost (historically speaking). His successors spent a lot of time erasing his legacy. And at least in Europe, our colonial past is usually not seen as something to be proud of, apart from the nationalist groups (which is par for the course, it's difficult to be a nationalist without a strong ability for cherry-picking historical facts).

vidarh 11y ago
Even in Western Europe, while Stalin is overall portrayed in a negative light, he's still given quite a lot of positive portrayal in the context of World War II. It's not surprising that there are still people that see him in a more positive light in a country where several generations grew up in the shadow of a massive propaganda operation setting him up as a hero. As for the European colonial past, I think that depends on where you are. In Britain at least it's not that unusual to notice signs of people that miss at least the idea of the British Empire. A lot of British culture is tied indirectly to it through an admiration for the stereotype of the British military forces that held the empire together, and a fascination with the ex-colonies. As well as the Commonwealth, of course, which is basically a re-packaged, politically correct way of holding on to some of the last vestiges of the empire.
- mercurial 11y ago
  Interesting. I would not have thought there would be so many nostalgics of the UK's colonial empire. In France, the "nostalgic" faction are the royalists, and they are an extremely small minority that nobody takes seriously.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    I don't think many people wants it back. But many people do appear to look at the empire as a proud part of British history. With respect to the comparison with France, consider that France has been a republic far longer than Britain has been without at least the trappings of an empire, and the empire had a sort of "soft landing" with a gradual loss of territories, and with most of the colonies retaining special relationships with Britain in the form of the Commonwealth, and with many of them retaining the Queen as their head of state. It wasn't until 1981 that Britain lost its last colony (a few remaining overseas holdings remained as British Dependent Territories, now British Overseas Territories), and as recently as 1982, Britain defended one of its last vestiges of the Empire militarily (the Falklands War). But at the same time, Britain had for decades by then pursued a policy of voluntary decolonisation on relatively friendly terms (with a few notable exceptions, like Kenya and Zimbabwe) - explicitly with the aim of trying to avoid situations like what France ran into with e.g. Algeria (or anything like Britains own drawn out conflict in India). So really, a large proportion of the British adult population still at least has some vague memory of Britain still having an empire in their childhood or youth - albeit for most people their memory will be of one that had been in serious decline for a long time. Furthermore, most of them if they are aware of the decolonisation will have memories of a Britain that had abandoned any idea of holding on to its colonies with force and where decolonisation was largely orderly and reasonably "friendly" and where Britain in most cases where it did not happen peacefully could be reasonably construed as having acted properly (e.g. in Zimbabwe, it was the white minority local population, not Britain, that started the long running conflict) If most adults in France could personally remember the last monarch, I suspect they royalists would still have more support there too. Similarly I expect the British Empire will fade rapidly as fewer people personally remembers it.
- aries1980 11y ago
  >Even in Western Europe, while Stalin is overall portrayed in a negative light, he's still given quite a lot of positive portrayal in the context of World War II. Yeah, by uneducated people who don't know, the WW II was started by 3rd Reich, CCCP and Slovakia.
notahacker 11y ago
And yet at the same time even many of us without nationalist inclinations in the UK are extremely proud of outspoken arch-colonialist Churchill for his role in defeating Hitler, to the point where his less fashionable opinions and military blunders are largely glossed over. Stalin fandom[1] centres on his role in Soviet military successes in the same war, and rebuilding a destroyed nation afterwards. The regime that exposed his excesses and carried out a program of "de-Stalinisation" is long gone and perhaps not entirely trusted because of its own flaws, his victims are long dead, and the last thing the Putin administration want to discourage is nostalgic admiration for leaders' strength in standing up to Europe. [1]at least Russian Soviet fandom. I'm a bit more perplexed when I see his face alongside Marx and Lenin on some of the more hard-left trade unionists' May Day placards over here...
- mercurial 11y ago
  > And yet at the same time even many of us without nationalist inclinations in the UK are extremely proud of outspoken arch-colonialist Churchill for his role in defeating Hitler, to the point where his less fashionable opinions and military blunders are largely glossed over. That's a bit different, isn't it? I don't know how it is in the UK, but outside of it, it's not his pro-colonial views which are admired, but his charisma and obstination. The regime that exposed his excesses and carried out a program of "de-Stalinisation" is long gone and perhaps not entirely trusted because of its own flaws, his victims are long dead, and the last thing the Putin administration want to discourage is nostalgic admiration for leaders' strength in standing up to Europe. That's a fair point. I would be curious to read the parts of the current Russian curriculum dealing with him. > I'm a bit more perplexed when I see his face alongside Marx and Lenin on some of the more hard-left trade unionists' May Day placards over here... Yeah, it's not like the USSR was exactly a big promoter of trade unions on its own soil...
  - notahacker 11y ago
    > That's a bit different, isn't it? I don't know how it is in the UK, but outside of it, it's not his pro-colonial views which are admired, but his charisma and obstination. Isn't that fundamentally similar to admiring Stalin for being strong enough to defeat Hitler rather than his penchant for purges, gulags and strategically-useful famines? Or indeed crediting JFK as the media-friendly darling of the civil rights movement rather than one of the key antagonists in the escalation of a war which may have cost 10% of Vietnam's population. I'm not suggesting that Churchill or even JFK were remotely close to being a bad a human being as Stalin, but the tendency for history's lens to be very selective about what it focuses on isn't exactly something unique to Russia.