Lilitu Wrote:Oh look it's Britain's colonialist history, what wonders lie in store:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batang_Kali_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_treaty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boer_war
Australia did not fully disentangle itself as a legal entity from Britain until 1986. I am well aware that the list of atrocities I linked to is a list of British atrocities. One list among many.
The point I was making is that all those people of British origin who talk about incomers assimilating ignore that very history. The British Empire was not created by going to foreign parts and assimilating. The term "going native" is a derogatory one because assimilating was considered treacherous and unhelpful to the aims of empire, a point that has been missed here in the UK for more than sixty years. For that I can blame sheer British arrogance and can only express disappointment that in shaking off the colonial yoke our antipodean cousins seem so anxious to cling to this unsavoury relic of empire.
To stress the irony point, yes I consider it ironic too that we in the UK were making just the same assimilation arguments about immigrants of West Indian origin who came here. We conveniently ignored the fact that we had kept their forbears as slaves for 400 years and built prosperous British cities on the backs of trading and sweating them. How ungrateful of them to fail to assimilate after we gave them the gift of slavery.
The West Indians at least took the pressure off the Jews, another lot who were accused of not assimilating; the UK has a distinguished history of antisemitism. And the West Indians, they're now considered as British as British can be, not because they've started wearing monocles and top hats (their culture is more distinct and vibrant now than it was in the days of "no dogs, no coloureds") but because attention has turned to the Muslims. It turns out the Muslims have been here as long as the West Indians but somehow we failed to notice their filthy foreign ways for more than fifty years. See a pattern emerging?
This same pattern can be seen to a limited extent in the treatment of gay people. Although homosexual acts were decriminalised in 1967, popular culture treated gay people as shit until almost the nineties. Now we have out national treasures, gay cabinet ministers and a prime minister pressing gay marriage legislation through parliament.
We owe all this not to an outburst of clear thinking or liberal sentiment on the part of the popular media, we owe it to the pedos, who have filled that slot in the nastier reaches of the national imagination that gay men used to occupy. The tabloids enjoy nothing more than a good pedo story.
It's almost as if there's a kind of tribal thing going on, a little bit of the human psyche reserved specifically to be suspicious of the outsider and that as a society we just shunt one identifiable group after another into that slot. Who would have guessed?
I haven't read your links, I can guess what they are and I am fully aware of Britain's despicable colonial history. If you want to start a pissing contest about British atrocities then have at it. I will not be joining in, there's no way you can lose.
That you should think this in some way constitutes an argument simply confirms that the southern hemisphere really doesn't have a word for irony, something I suggested initially only as a rhetorical flourish. That the first response to my initial post, rather than engage with the point, invited me to go fuck myself suggests this may not be the only problem you have to contend with. Trust me, if I could find a way to fuck myself I wouldn't be wasting time on here.
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