As the ww2 generation passes on, it's easy to forget the degree of utter, total mobilization that went on in the British Isles during the war. I'm always struck by how easy it is to hike into some remote part of the UK and learn that the parish school was a training ground for Italian resistance fighters or that some park in remote scotland was where they trained commandos. Perhaps its because the country is quite small, and they had to use every inch, but it always seems remarkable.
I think the notion of odd, but brilliant, boffin is deeply embedded in British culture. Or was, until at least the 2000s. The Great Egg Race on TV being a fine example.
ithkuil 2 hours ago [-]
Perhaps that's why the UK has so much more sympathy for Ukraine than the US.
Yes the US fought in WWII with a lot of human investment, the amount of direct threats to American soil was much smaller than the UK and the memories of the war are those of the fights in the jungles and not of American children fleeing bombs in major cities
dblangford 47 minutes ago [-]
I would love to see something like The Great Egg Race back on TV instead of another series of Celebrities doing things Badly. Robot Wars is the closest we've been I suppose.
arethuza 30 minutes ago [-]
Seems like a good excuse to mention the Commando Memorial near Spean Bridge:
Various infantry bunkers laying about are also a reminder, but what really gets me are the bonkers last-ditch defensive weapons you can still find in places, like preset positions for flame fougasse batteries:
They speak to the particular combination of desperation, urgency, and ingenuity found in the UK at that time.
33 minutes ago [-]
FridayoLeary 13 hours ago [-]
What i find even more remarkable is how every town, village, school and institution have memorials for those who lost their lives in the Great War. Usually there is another plaque attached in memory of WW2. It's hard to imagine the scale of deaths.
The tragedy is how little was accomplished by the sacrifices of ww1. It had none of the moral clarity of ww2 nor did most of the deaths achieve any strategic purpose.
On the other hand i knew an old scientist who had quite a few interesting and amusing stories to share about his efforts in WW2. One of them was about his attempts to perfect a formala. Several factories exploded before they succeeded.
jltsiren 11 hours ago [-]
There was moral clarity in West and South Europe. But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism. Everyone else was trying to find the least bad option, which usually meant choosing a side and switching it at least once.
rdtsc 5 hours ago [-]
> There was moral clarity in West and South Europe
> ... in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.
That is unambiguous and clear. They kept their word.
It is tragic in the end that after the war they handed Poland over to Stalin. Poland still had its independence threatened but after having supplied and helped Stalin all that time, it was awkward having to declare war against him as well.
yread 2 hours ago [-]
> they kept their word
After not upholding the 1924 pact (France) with Czechoslovakia
lostlogin 26 minutes ago [-]
That ‘defence’ of Poland mainly consisted of doing nothing, in the Phoney War.
The political situation in the 1930s was thoroughly messed up. Britain and France may have had mainly good intentions, but their policies did not prevent the disasters.
Great Britain should have made a pact with the Soviet Union against Hitler much earlier.
Poland was in an extremely difficult situation. But the decision to invade Czechoslovakia with the Germans was certainly not a good idea.
> But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism.
WWII in Eastern Europe was a war for the survival of the Slavic peoples whom the Nazis declared to be the Untermensch[0] (Belorussians, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians – all of them) and were determined to fully exterminate them all following the extermination of the Jews and the Roma people.
The scale of extermination of the Slavs went far beyond the mass murdering of them in concentration camps, and included rounding up villages and burning them along with the villagers down with the use of flamethrowers, with no remorse because the Nazis considered the Slavs sub-humans[1][2][3][4].
Neither Czechoslovakia, nor Poland, nor the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had communism of any shape or flavour.
How do Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland fit in that picture?
WW2 was a complex war. The big picture for the European part was that the two main powers divided Europe in their spheres of influence, fully intending to fight each other for overall supremacy after a while. Some countries joined their designated side voluntarily, some joined under a threat of invasion, and most of the rest were invaded. The ones I listed were the ones where the USSR was the initial aggressor.
inkyoto 3 hours ago [-]
Instead of shifting the goalposts, please do yourself a favour and read up on the Untermenschen and the convoluted hierarchy of the sub-humans in the Nazi racial ideology. As an example, since the Nazis harboured particular hatred towards the Poles, the Poles were at the very bottom of the hierarchy, and only complete obliteration of the Polish ethnicity was deemed acceptable.
One joins an alliance of convenience, sometimes in very unfavourable circumstances, to avoid the worst – the demise of one's own people and to guarantee their survival. Making a deal with the devil is a well-known adage that aptly describes such an unfortunate event.
Nazis considered the Finns (and the Estonians by extension) to be racially pure, with Latvians and Lithuanians being somewhere in between either redeemable or tolerable (frankly, I can't recall the exact details).
> WW2 was a complex war.
WWII was no more complex than the WWI, and it had a single, overarching objective – the repartitioning of the world. The main difference between the two was that the WWII was infused with a vile racial ideology, used to justify the pursuit of Lebensraum and the total annihilation of peoples whom the Nazi Party targeted with hatred, based on their crackpot so-called racial studies.
markvdb 31 minutes ago [-]
A clear view of WW II in all its complexity is important. The current tense geopolitical context makes that even more so. Have you noticed how the current head war criminal in Moscow is glorifying his WW II predecessor?
oddmiral 4 hours ago [-]
Moreover, Germans decided that Slavs are untermensch because of Holodomor henocide of Ukrainians ([Little] Russians) by Russians (Great Russians). The confusion between [Little] Russians (now Ukrainians) and Great Russians (now Russians) caused Germans to think that Russians performed genocide of their own nation, killed millions of their own mothers and children, which is biggest sin in Germany (and many other nations).
The differentiation between Ukraine and Russia is interesting.
Ukrainian nationalists had also joined the Nazis.
lostlogin 17 minutes ago [-]
> Ukrainian nationalists had also joined the Nazis.
This occurred in all occupied territories didn’t it? France, Holland, Belgium etc.
It also occurred in some that weren’t occupied. Spain for example, and don’t look too hard at the British Royal Family (for this reason and various others).
As with Ukraine a few Nazi's didn't represent the country nor even come close to a majority.
FridayoLeary 9 hours ago [-]
I don't know if the eastern european countries besides maybe ussr count. Many many polish, ukrainian and lithuanians enthusiastically helped the germans in carrying out the holocaust.
oddmiral 4 hours ago [-]
Many jews were communists. Communists killed millions in those countries.
rrr_oh_man 1 hours ago [-]
I think you got your causalities wrong there
sorcerer-mar 12 hours ago [-]
It's worth pointing out explicitly that WW2 didn't have the moral clarity that it does today either. The vast majority of the western world was perfectly content to let Hitler run Europe and Japan to run Asia.
MattPalmer1086 12 hours ago [-]
What do you define as the vast majority of the western world? Just the US?
sorcerer-mar 10 hours ago [-]
Literally not one country initiated combat against Nazi Germany before being attacked itself.
Churchill stands virtually alone as one with moral clarity on the Nazis.
USSR allied with them. France was fine seeing everyone else get rolled. Poland signed a nonaggression pact. The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way.
How about instead, you tell me who you think went out of their way to combat Nazism?
yread 2 hours ago [-]
British government even signed a british german naval friendship on the eve of Munich agreement. Moral clarity haha
lostlogin 13 minutes ago [-]
How else were they going to get peace in our time?
abraae 5 hours ago [-]
> Literally not one country initiated combat against Nazi Germany before being attacked itself.
Apart from many of the Commonwealth countries?
lipowitz 2 hours ago [-]
The UK could have declared war on Mars and the Commonwealth would follow, so you are only talking about Churchill.
FridayoLeary 10 hours ago [-]
To an extent you are right. ww1 made much more sense at the time then it does today. And it wasn't as clear during ww2 that it was in fact the greatest conflict of good vs evil ever.
The extent of the German and Japanese atrocities only became clear after the war and they were so great that even the Soviet Union were on the side of the angels.
I wouldn't say they were perfectly content. It was more that they were cowardly and apathetic.
kjellsbells 6 hours ago [-]
WWI makes no sense (or perhaps, we understand it better) because over a hundred years have passed, and the highly emotive propaganda of the time no longer persuades us. If you were listening to your pastor thundering in the village church about (say) nurses in Belgium in 1914 you might not have had the emotional distance, or education in cold politics, to recognise that what was really going on was the death throes of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the fight for hegemony in the empires that remained. (Not to diminish the crimes in Belgium, btw, but they were part of a bigger picture that would have been hard to read in 1914.)
mhh__ 11 hours ago [-]
> As the ww2 generation passes on,
I was at a picnic recently that happened to be on VE day, it really struck me that now London is only about 35% or so English as the ww2 generation would've known it, almost no one has a particularly good reason to bother paying attention. I'm sure I was the only person there who knows who Barnes Wallis was.
And yes I miss the boffins. They do still sort of exist but that type of mind has been strangled by the last few decades drive towards left-brained processes where everything basically has to be nailed down before the work actually starts.
That latter point is one reason why we're struggling so much - we owe a great debt to the generations who built all the infrastructure and housing. We didn't pay it off, we now can't really do anything at scale other than extract rent. The victorians were building a HS2 every few years.
jameshart 10 hours ago [-]
Not sure the WW2 generation would be all too comfortable with you looking around and making a snap judgement based solely on appearances that some of the people around you have a lesser right to call themselves ‘English’ than you because you assume none of them know who Barnes Wallace is.
mhh__ 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not assuming, I asked; they wouldn't call themselves english anyway. Almost no one does anymore anyway, I don't.
nocoiner 13 hours ago [-]
You would probably enjoy the book “Backroom Boys” by Francis Spufford.
j00pY 19 minutes ago [-]
Near to where I live, there are the remnants of test concrete walls that were used to assess the best way to blow them up. Apparently people snuck over, took some samples of the concrete to recreate how it was made, and then constructed lots of sections of this wall—which they would then use to test their explosives against.
There's an episode of the 1970s BBC documentary series "The Secret War" about the miscellaneous technology projects that sound obviously crazy now, or may have been cancelled to soon:
The whole series is worth a watch, including episodes on radio location finding, radar and radar jamming, Jet engines, the V1/V2 rockets, and Ultra/Enigma etc. Many of the participants (both British and German) are interviewed - including Albert Speer.
the__alchemist 14 hours ago [-]
Panjandrum: Fraa Orolo’s pejorative term for a high-ranking official of the Sæcular Power.
lelandfe 13 hours ago [-]
Stephenson enjoys the word. He also used it in Cryptonomicon. I keep a running list of new words I encounter and share them online occasionally. Someone once recognized I was reading Cryptonomicon just from a string of those new words, lol.
KineticLensman 13 hours ago [-]
If you enjoy encountering new words and phrases such as 'theurgic vermin' then you might like China Miéville’s Kraken. I had to read it with a copy of the OED and Wikipedia to get the most from it.
Rebelgecko 13 hours ago [-]
I had a pretty good list for Polostan
ben_ja_min 13 hours ago [-]
Thank you for this. I was going nuts trying to figure out where I had read this before. Peace and love! For the uninitiated, the Neil Stephenson novel, "Anathem", is brilliant and extremely entertaining.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 12 hours ago [-]
And if you enjoyed that you'd possibly enjoy The Glass Bead Game
Also by the way the Normandy beaches were NOT fortified with bunkers very much at all (unlike what you might have seen in Saving Private Ryan), just trenches and sandbags. A large portion of Omaha beach casualties were inflicted by a single machine gun nest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh
dwroberts 2 hours ago [-]
> Severloh's claim is not viewed as credible by either US or German historians
I don't agree with the 'ideology' but I don't find it totally unreasonable or objectionable.
And surely even 'everyone who doesn't worship X and abstain from Y and live according to text Z is living in sin' is... That's just an ideology, that's fine, it's not terrorist until you do some sort of destructive act in its name or try to enforce it somehow?
Some context lost in the linked article I think, not having read into it.
typewithrhythm 10 hours ago [-]
The context is that the UK government has extremely wide reaching powers to fine or imprison based on online speech, with much of the wording of these laws being contrived as anti terror. So by classifying a position as terrorist ideology, they can apply these laws and chill opposition.
mhh__ 10 hours ago [-]
I'm exaggerating obviously, you're not automatically considered a terrorist now, but I want to draw attention to the fact that this is the avowed view of the british state.
That particular organisation is particularly batshit in that they have e.g. published guidance that watching (say) TV shows about politics or railway journeys could mean you're harbouring dangerous right wing views!
All in all it's a (deep) state (I mean deep in the sense that we can't see it rather than in a conspiratorial sense) that basically accidentally enacted a huge cultural revolution in the 90s, got away with it for a while, now has nothing to show for it, knows everyone now knows this, and is hedging.
We do not have free speech anymore because of this e.g. see this case of a man having his home raided while police officers rummage through his books - "very Brexity things". Brexit got a majority in a referendum! (which fwiw I was at the time and sort of still am against but they won)
The english middle classes despise their worse offs, but are quite fond of similar people from afar.
Oikophobia, basically.
Unless we get out of this (and we probably won't) there will basically be a "gradually, then suddenly" transition to a very, very, different society as the boomers die off, and then probably a civil war over the scraps.
> 90 percent of the American people stated that they would rather loose [sic] the war than give full equality to the American Negroes
from Greenberg's Troubling the Waters about Black-Jewish relations.
FridayoLeary 9 hours ago [-]
it's unfair to hold people from the past to our moral standards. I'm sure that in 50 years they will be appalled at some of the things we do. Society progresses. Hopefully.
And most of those were voluntary, not armed rebellions.
xg15 6 hours ago [-]
And how did they become part of the British Empire in the first place?
pvg 8 hours ago [-]
but I would challenge you to name a nation
This sort of thing is way offtopic, come on. It's puerile flameframing.
closewith 12 hours ago [-]
Than the United Kingdom? The obvious answer in line with my comment is Ireland.
cperciva 12 hours ago [-]
I won't argue with the statement that Ireland did less evil than the UK.
I'm unclear how you can justify claiming that Ireland did more good than the UK.
drewcoo 10 hours ago [-]
More good does not mean less evil. Or vice versa.
bee_rider 12 hours ago [-]
I mean, you might be able to make some kind of argument about the good outdoing the evil (I think it would be hard, but hey, I won’t call a line of argument impossible until I see it happen). But, the idea that it would be challenging to name a country that did less evil than GB is pretty ridiculous, right?
Most countries didn’t have colonial empires, so GB is pretty high up there (arguably not at the top) in the evil rankings.
cperciva 12 hours ago [-]
Sure. The UK has done a lot, both Good and Evil. There are lots of countries which have done less Evil than the UK. There are some countries which have done more Good than the UK. I can't think of any country which is on both lists.
bee_rider 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t think it is really quantifiable. Like if I say France, how would anyone adjudicate that? In terms of “good,” both contributed in WW2, both made some contributions to the concept of liberal democracy…
arandomusername 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bee_rider 10 hours ago [-]
Having a colonial empire involves countless horrible acts of evil.
GB was a little bit ahead of the curve on ending the slave trade (at least compared to particularly shitty countries on this issue, like the US). But is it also a problem that they themselves contributed massively toward, so kind of a mixed bag there.
arandomusername 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
FridayoLeary 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks for that. For example the British ended sati in India. Colonialism wasn't all brutal exploitation even if that did happen.
Britain did mess up a lot and did many shameful things but there are also lots of things to celebrate.
krapp 9 hours ago [-]
Those empires didn't build that infrastructure out of the kindness of their hearts, they did so to more efficiently enslave the locals and extract their resources and to make life more comfortable for the colonizers occupying the territories.
Absolutely not one bit of it was done to improve the quality of life of colonized people. That it did regardless is a statement about the neutral moral dimension of technology, not the relative good of imperialism.
8 hours ago [-]
MangoToupe 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hollerith 11 hours ago [-]
The Europeans invented modern science and technology, with England contributing the most (particularly during the 19th Century).
Maybe most nations of the world would've followed a course of colonization and empire if they had been as dominant in wealth, technology and organizational ability as England was.
cperciva 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
arandomusername 11 hours ago [-]
By siding with the USSR, and letting them take control over eastern Europe? The USSR was just as bad as Nazi Germany.
cperciva 11 hours ago [-]
Fair enough, but I'd say that half of Europe being free is better than none of Europe being free. I don't think there's much the UK could have done to help Eastern Europe.
graeme 10 hours ago [-]
The USSR was terrible. Remarkably, the Nazis still managed to be substantially worse.
As one example there's the Hunger Plan. Hitler's defeat stopped him from executing it, though they had started. He planned to kill 35-41 million people in eastern europe via starvation and take the land for Germany.
The USSR equivalent, Holomodor, killed 3-5 million, and was fully executed. Horrendous. Not as bad as the hunger plan.
And that was not the only Nazi mass death plan....
That's a fair point. USSR soldiers did mass rape women in conquered territories (and even their own). And the Brits did have that famine in India that killed a lot as well.
Maybe the Nazis were worse, but wasn't really a good vs evil war.
codeduck 13 hours ago [-]
Good Lord, how can you function with that massive chip on your shoulder?
I think the notion of odd, but brilliant, boffin is deeply embedded in British culture. Or was, until at least the 2000s. The Great Egg Race on TV being a fine example.
Yes the US fought in WWII with a lot of human investment, the amount of direct threats to American soil was much smaller than the UK and the memories of the war are those of the fights in the jungles and not of American children fleeing bombs in major cities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commando_Memorial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_fougasse
They speak to the particular combination of desperation, urgency, and ingenuity found in the UK at that time.
On the other hand i knew an old scientist who had quite a few interesting and amusing stories to share about his efforts in WW2. One of them was about his attempts to perfect a formala. Several factories exploded before they succeeded.
Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_declaration_of_war_on_.... Both Britain and France declared war on Germany because they made guarantees to Poland about it.
> ... in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.
That is unambiguous and clear. They kept their word.
It is tragic in the end that after the war they handed Poland over to Stalin. Poland still had its independence threatened but after having supplied and helped Stalin all that time, it was awkward having to declare war against him as well.
After not upholding the 1924 pact (France) with Czechoslovakia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War
Great Britain should have made a pact with the Soviet Union against Hitler much earlier.
Poland was in an extremely difficult situation. But the decision to invade Czechoslovakia with the Germans was certainly not a good idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal
WWII in Eastern Europe was a war for the survival of the Slavic peoples whom the Nazis declared to be the Untermensch[0] (Belorussians, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians – all of them) and were determined to fully exterminate them all following the extermination of the Jews and the Roma people.
The scale of extermination of the Slavs went far beyond the mass murdering of them in concentration camps, and included rounding up villages and burning them along with the villagers down with the use of flamethrowers, with no remorse because the Nazis considered the Slavs sub-humans[1][2][3][4].
Neither Czechoslovakia, nor Poland, nor the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had communism of any shape or flavour.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michni%C3%B3w_massacre
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Centre_Lipa_Remembers...
WW2 was a complex war. The big picture for the European part was that the two main powers divided Europe in their spheres of influence, fully intending to fight each other for overall supremacy after a while. Some countries joined their designated side voluntarily, some joined under a threat of invasion, and most of the rest were invaded. The ones I listed were the ones where the USSR was the initial aggressor.
One joins an alliance of convenience, sometimes in very unfavourable circumstances, to avoid the worst – the demise of one's own people and to guarantee their survival. Making a deal with the devil is a well-known adage that aptly describes such an unfortunate event.
Nazis considered the Finns (and the Estonians by extension) to be racially pure, with Latvians and Lithuanians being somewhere in between either redeemable or tolerable (frankly, I can't recall the exact details).
> WW2 was a complex war.
WWII was no more complex than the WWI, and it had a single, overarching objective – the repartitioning of the world. The main difference between the two was that the WWII was infused with a vile racial ideology, used to justify the pursuit of Lebensraum and the total annihilation of peoples whom the Nazi Party targeted with hatred, based on their crackpot so-called racial studies.
That was the actual Nazi plan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
The differentiation between Ukraine and Russia is interesting.
Ukrainian nationalists had also joined the Nazis.
This occurred in all occupied territories didn’t it? France, Holland, Belgium etc.
It also occurred in some that weren’t occupied. Spain for example, and don’t look too hard at the British Royal Family (for this reason and various others).
As with Ukraine a few Nazi's didn't represent the country nor even come close to a majority.
Churchill stands virtually alone as one with moral clarity on the Nazis.
USSR allied with them. France was fine seeing everyone else get rolled. Poland signed a nonaggression pact. The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way.
How about instead, you tell me who you think went out of their way to combat Nazism?
Apart from many of the Commonwealth countries?
The extent of the German and Japanese atrocities only became clear after the war and they were so great that even the Soviet Union were on the side of the angels.
I wouldn't say they were perfectly content. It was more that they were cowardly and apathetic.
I was at a picnic recently that happened to be on VE day, it really struck me that now London is only about 35% or so English as the ww2 generation would've known it, almost no one has a particularly good reason to bother paying attention. I'm sure I was the only person there who knows who Barnes Wallis was.
And yes I miss the boffins. They do still sort of exist but that type of mind has been strangled by the last few decades drive towards left-brained processes where everything basically has to be nailed down before the work actually starts.
That latter point is one reason why we're struggling so much - we owe a great debt to the generations who built all the infrastructure and housing. We didn't pay it off, we now can't really do anything at scale other than extract rent. The victorians were building a HS2 every few years.
https://surreyhills.org/places-to-see/atlantic-wall/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8&t=8883s
The whole series is worth a watch, including episodes on radio location finding, radar and radar jamming, Jet engines, the V1/V2 rockets, and Ultra/Enigma etc. Many of the participants (both British and German) are interviewed - including Albert Speer.
A Town Like Alice is probably the most popular in Australia, where he resided after the war. Also made into a good movie.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_and_Round_Went_the_Great...
Also by the way the Normandy beaches were NOT fortified with bunkers very much at all (unlike what you might have seen in Saving Private Ryan), just trenches and sandbags. A large portion of Omaha beach casualties were inflicted by a single machine gun nest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh
I don't agree with the 'ideology' but I don't find it totally unreasonable or objectionable.
And surely even 'everyone who doesn't worship X and abstain from Y and live according to text Z is living in sin' is... That's just an ideology, that's fine, it's not terrorist until you do some sort of destructive act in its name or try to enforce it somehow?
Some context lost in the linked article I think, not having read into it.
That particular organisation is particularly batshit in that they have e.g. published guidance that watching (say) TV shows about politics or railway journeys could mean you're harbouring dangerous right wing views!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11764775/Yes-Minist...
All in all it's a (deep) state (I mean deep in the sense that we can't see it rather than in a conspiratorial sense) that basically accidentally enacted a huge cultural revolution in the 90s, got away with it for a while, now has nothing to show for it, knows everyone now knows this, and is hedging.
We do not have free speech anymore because of this e.g. see this case of a man having his home raided while police officers rummage through his books - "very Brexity things". Brexit got a majority in a referendum! (which fwiw I was at the time and sort of still am against but they won)
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2053511/pensioner-arrested...
The english middle classes despise their worse offs, but are quite fond of similar people from afar.
Oikophobia, basically.
Unless we get out of this (and we probably won't) there will basically be a "gradually, then suddenly" transition to a very, very, different society as the boomers die off, and then probably a civil war over the scraps.
from Greenberg's Troubling the Waters about Black-Jewish relations.
In your head, in your head, they're still fighting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
This sort of thing is way offtopic, come on. It's puerile flameframing.
I'm unclear how you can justify claiming that Ireland did more good than the UK.
Most countries didn’t have colonial empires, so GB is pretty high up there (arguably not at the top) in the evil rankings.
GB was a little bit ahead of the curve on ending the slave trade (at least compared to particularly shitty countries on this issue, like the US). But is it also a problem that they themselves contributed massively toward, so kind of a mixed bag there.
Britain did mess up a lot and did many shameful things but there are also lots of things to celebrate.
Absolutely not one bit of it was done to improve the quality of life of colonized people. That it did regardless is a statement about the neutral moral dimension of technology, not the relative good of imperialism.
Maybe most nations of the world would've followed a course of colonization and empire if they had been as dominant in wealth, technology and organizational ability as England was.
As one example there's the Hunger Plan. Hitler's defeat stopped him from executing it, though they had started. He planned to kill 35-41 million people in eastern europe via starvation and take the land for Germany.
The USSR equivalent, Holomodor, killed 3-5 million, and was fully executed. Horrendous. Not as bad as the hunger plan.
And that was not the only Nazi mass death plan....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
Maybe the Nazis were worse, but wasn't really a good vs evil war.