Posted on 04/06/2011 1:04:40 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
David Cameron: Britain caused many of the world's problems
Britain is responsible for many of the world’s historic problems, including the conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, David Cameron has said.
By James Kirkup, in Islamabad and Christopher Hope
The Prime Minister appeared to distance himself from the imperial past when he suggested that Britain was to blame for decades of tension and several wars over the disputed territory, as well as other global conflicts.
His remarks came on a visit to Pakistan, when he was asked how Britain could help to end the row over Kashmir.
He insisted that it was not his place to intervene in the dispute, saying: “I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”
His remarks about Kashmir were greeted warmly by the audience of Pakistani students and academics, but drew accusations from historians that the Prime Minister was wrongly apologising for Britain’s past.
Daisy Cooper, the director of the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit, said: “This is typical of the UK’s schizophrenic relationship with former colonies where it is both proud and embarrassed about its past. The Coalition has said that it has big ambitions for a modern Commonwealth and the UK should stop being embarrassed about its colonial past and they should work with other countries to help improve their human rights.”
Tristram Hunt, the Labour MP, historian and former television presenter, said: “To say that Britain is a cause of many of the world’s ills is naïve. To look back 50-odd years for the problems
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
it’s not white guilt. Cameron is wrong to paint it one-sided, the British rule in various parts of the world had good as well as bad effects. Which outweighs the other depends on your own personal position, but no one can deny that there is an ambiguity in their position. This is quite unlike the French who ruined their colonies and quite unlike the Portuguese whose colonies still in many ways consider themselves part of the mother country.
He's explicitly said we don't want to get involved
when he was asked how Britain could help to end the row over Kashmir. --> Quite frankly Britain gave Pakistan independence 64 years ago, and Britain has no intention or ability to play peacemaker here, it wants to do trade with both countries, so Cameron was veryyy wise to say "No way jose" in a very diplomatic way, preening the Pakis egos at the same time!
We’re those areas peaceful BEFORE Britain got involved?
Actually the Brits still have the same problem, they think they rule the world and their body guard will pull their balls out of the fire every time they get in over their heads.
He is talking out of his backside....just like that barking mad Bob Brown(Australia Greens Party) who thinks that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.....He wants to tax the very air we breath!
You’re absolutely right. The French and the British have a lot to answer for. And yet they have amnesia when it comes to their past actions - continually blaming the USA for problems they created years ago.
That being said, Cameron should not be on an apology tour. He and his countrymen should look inward and stop dumping on Americans (that means you, Guardianistas!)
Must be related to Obama..
Hey, David, such self-loathing for your self and your culture is unbecoming. Maybe you should send Churchhill’s bust somewhere where it will be appreciated, you whining putz.
Savages?!
Would you call Zionists “savages”? How about the Roma?
The underpinning issue here isn’t even one of religion. The same issues you see between Muslims and other Muslims, can be seen between Hindus and non-Hindus, between Jews and non-Jews, Roma and non-Roma, and so on.
The nomadic lifestyle predates Christianity and Islam and the concept of the nation state and wherever people live according to a nomadic lifestyle, our understanding of property rights and artificial nation state borders just doesn’t work properly.
For thousands of years, nomadic tribes in the tropics have been rooted in one village but travel hundreds if not thousands of miles for at least six months of the year, to follow the climate. The Old Testament confirms that the Jewish tribes were just as mobile as the Tuareg still are.
So when, in the 20th century, a lot of Western loonies with big maps of whole regions, just drew lines and said “that’s one country, that’s another”, all they really managed to achieve was, exacerbate entrenched tribal disputes between nomadic tribes of all faiths.
In Iraq/Iran/Kuwait there are tribes with centuries worth of historical and cultural claims to villages on different sides of the bordersm suddenly separated by an artificial barrier. Same happened with Kashmir, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Result: perpetual political and cultural disputes both between nations and between tribes within nations, right across the region.
If you took away all the power structures in those countries, abolished the borders, and left them to their own devices, there’d be a lot of transient hotspots where multiple tribes claim ownership of the same turf. But you’d also find a lot of stability - “that town’s Shammar, that town’s Dulaim, that town’s Jabouri, that town’s Pashtun” and so on.
At that point you wouldn’t get the scale of war we have now, because the system would regulate itself and disputes would be between small local population groups.
The same is the case in Libya. Libya can never be “one nation” without an oppressively strong regime to force cooperation between the tribes. But it cannot be two nations either, because the entire population has deep nomadic roots and it’ll simply be a matter of time before they come into conflict. The best solution really is, to have several nation states within a federal union where they have to cooperate and no one tribe is given power to dominate the others. But that might not be practical right now.
There are thousands of Westernised Jews migrating from America to Israel - even if ten generations of their ancestors have never even visited Israel, they still feel as though Jerusalem is their spiritual home. And the sheer fact they have that nomadic drive to go “home” to Israel, *proves* that the same mindset cannot be totally bred out even after living according to Western norms for a hundred years or more. However, the Palestinians share the same mindset.
A Palestinian might have no legitimate claim to land in Israel but when he says, “But at least my family have been here for three generations, that guy just got off the boat from America and the last time an ancestor of his was here we still thought the world was flat!” he’s making the exact same mistake that we in the West make - assuming that there’s no nomadic tendency involved when there patently is.
I haven’t yet met a Christian from America who’s got a huge romantic vision of moving back to Dorset because they have a stronger pull to Weymouth than they do to America! This is because Northwestern Europe never has depended on that nomadic lifestyle. Frankly, we’ll never understand that pull in the same way an Arab or a Zionist will.
His remarks was a Teleprompter mix up, can’t wait for O to use other one
Savages I said and savages I meant. The reason all those countries are having trouble, and african countries as well, is because, by and large, the people are uneducated and ignorant and were not ready to govern themselves. almost 100 years later, in some cases, they are still killing each other off. They have a mind set that goes back about 1100 years ago and they can’t get over it. BTW, next time keep your return comments to a frickin’ minimum. I got tired of reading your BS after the second paragraph.
Actually, no.
Take Iraq just by way of example - the British Mandate of Mesopotamia was about setting up a way for them to manage themselves.
We screwed that one up by ignoring the tribal element, and the nomadic culture.
About the only thing we actually did get right in many respects was the British Mandate for Palestine, which allowed the Jewish population to expand WITH the support of Palestinian Arabs.
When it went wrong, we can’t take all the blame. Consider the Peel Commission which proposed a two-state solution for Arabs and Jews in the mid-30s, at a time when we could see Anti-Semitism kicking off all over Europe and this would’ve provided a safe refuge for European Jews.
The Zionist Congress and the Arabs both rejected the plans, but after WW2, Ben-Gurion admitted, “Had partition been carried out, the history of our people would have been different and six million Jews in Europe would not have been killed-—most of them would be in Israel”.
In that context, maybe it’d have been better if we HAD ruled the world, because I’m pretty sure if the Zionists had had the benefit of hindsight, they might not have been so hostile to the idea of the two-state solution when that was put on the table...
The Liberal’s motto: Blame somebody else. It’s on their flag, I think.
Britain did more to civilize this world than anybody since the Romans and before the Americans.
Ah, yes. The “it’s too much information, I can’t handle it so I won’t read it” excuse.
If you ever get tired of reading the Old Testament (which really is quite a lot longer than my posts) I think you can get the Ten Commandments on flash cards. Just a tip.
This is a rather stupid thing to say. Britain is only "responsible" in the sense that they didn't eliminate the Muslim Menace wherever they encountered it. Instead they tried to isolate it as they did in Pakistan and Trans-Jordan. This obviously didn't work, but the Muslims were killing Hindus and Jews who didn't submit to their ways in these places before the British even knew they were there. See e.g. The Moslem Conquest (of India) . (an excerpt from Will Durant's Our Oriental Heritage)
ML/NJ
I didn’t know that Britain was responsible for Islam, but if they were, then Britain is responsible for most of the World’s problems.
Given that the British did what they could to keep them that way for as long as possible (for understandable reasons) what was the mistake? Face it, empires are ruled by force and lies. I'm an admirer of the British Empire and don't hold it against them.
True enough, but if they had educated and tried to make the people equals to the Brits, things would have gone differently, at least to a certain point. However, be that as it may, they are on their own now and have been for a long time. Time for them to clean up their own mess.
Well, I suppose Attlee and Mountbatten could have told Jinnah, “No, we’re not carving off pieces for you lot, now go bugger off and help Nehru and Gandhi make it work, there’s a good lad,” and that would have eliminated the Kashmir border problem…and created others. Somebody was going to be unhappy no matter how that got set up.
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