Posted on 03/06/2007 1:50:55 AM PST by Lorianne
Britain is apparently to blame for just about all of the planet's problems. In its days of might and glory, our Sceptred Isle was in fact an Evil Empire that enslaved the world, and is today responsible for everything from African genocides to the Iraq War and the conflict between Palestine and Israel.
We are also to blame for global warming - because Britain launched the Industrial Revolution which produced the smoke that polluted the sky that heated the world. And as if that was not bad enough, we also burned Joan of Arc at the stake, made cocaine 'look cool' and pandered to Hitler, before dragging the whole world into global conflict.
These are just some of the accusations against Britain in an outrageous new 'history' book, The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined The World, that looks set to blow a giant raspberry at the much-vaunted 'special relationship' between Britain and America.
It has been written by Steven Grasse, a selfstyled 'amateur historian' from Philadelphia, who believes that Britain has never been held to account for its role in some of the darkest chapters in global history.
After a successful career running a marketing agency, Grasse is now pouring his resources into launching his alternative view of Britain's national story - complete with websites, publicity stunts, video films and documentaries - because he wants to persuade the world that Britain is to blame for most global ills.
His aim is to grab the attention of a generation which no longer reads books and which is ignorant of history, but which, nonetheless, believes that America is the true Evil Empire.
'I'm not claiming that America is innocent of everything,' writes Grasse, 'but England is supposed to be our ally and our friend, and all we hear these days is how awful Americans are and what awful things America is doing. It is time people heard the other side of the story.'
So, in Grasse's eyes, Britain is to blame for world poverty and starvation, for The Great Plague, for the ravages of Nazis and Communists, and for Islamic terrorism today. Apparently, we are even to blame for the Vietnam War which humiliated America 35 years ago.
'There would have been no Vietnam War if there had been no French colony in Vietnam, and there would have been no French colony if England had not started with its colonies, which meant that everyone else had to have colonies too,' explains Grasse.
This is the sort of twisted logic that has inspired him to start the International Coalition for British Reparations, a new campaign launched with a full-page newspaper advertisement in America, which is demanding that Britain pay £31 trillion in damages to be distributed to every man, woman and child in the world as recompense for the damage the UK has inflicted around the globe.
'Look at World War I - you started that!' says Grasse. It was an unnecessary war, started by Britain because Germany wanted an Empire, which Britain, France and Russia had.
'You then dragged America into it. The whole bloody history of the 20th century, including the Nazi genocide, starts from that point. The average person does not know any of this.'
And here is Grasse on the Anglo-Chinese Opium War of 1840, when Britain sent a task force to protect its trading outposts. In a chapter headed 'They Hooked the Chinese on Opium', he writes: 'What could be worse than looking out your window and seeing a drug dealer, peddling his narcotics to every passer-by?
'How about a drug dealer who sets up camp on your doorstep and pummels your walls with musket fire and cannon balls until you allow him to sell drugs from inside your very home?
'Grisly stuff, I know, but it's exactly what Britain did to China during the 19th-century opium wars.' (Never mind that opium was not, in fact, illegal at the time - or that this anti-protectionist measure gave rise to the global free market from which America has prospered so greatly).
But it is when Grasse turns his eye to more recent problems that his accusations become as hysterical as they are inaccurate.
For he believes that many of the global problems we think of as being recent developments can be traced back to Britain's doorstep. He blames the spread of global warming on Britain's dependence on coal during the industrial revolution - a 'fact' made worse by our apparent indifference to global warming.
As for the debacle in Iraq, Grasse believes Britain is to blame for the bogus scaremongering over weapons of mass destruction which led to the ill-conceived assault on Saddam.
Even more of a liability in war than Blair himself, though, were 'the touchy British people, who seemed to want our mission to fail the day it began'.
Yes, we Limeys are untrustworthy allies, whose manifold failings include our antiegalitarian attachment to the Monarchy.
'It's more than tradition,' writes Grasse. 'It's worship. The British people desperately need a strict hierarchy to function. It needs to put a crown on an old lady simply for the sake of having someone to bow down before.'
Such assertions are so wrongheaded that serious historians don't know whether to laugh or rage. Among the first to comment was Jonathan Steinberg at the University of Pennsylvania.
He points out that in the 'plus' side of British history lay, just for a start, the Magna Carta, the creation of the first free Press and the first free markets, not to mention the abolition of slavery.
But it is only the bad things that interest Grasse. 'I want to start a debate; to throw a rock in the pond and watch the ripples,' he says.
One reason for his campaign is that he believes that after the debacle of President Bush's war on terror, young Americans have fallen into an era of national selfloathing, equal to that which paralysed the U.S. in the wake of the Vietnam War.
He hopes to restore American pride by pointing out that Britain has a far more shameful past than the U.S., but has never been forced to own up to its injustices.
'The English have never been forced to confront their past,' he says. 'Germany has. Japan has. America has - America does; we are always wringing our hands over what we did to the Indians, what we are doing to the Iraqis.
'Well, there wouldn't BE an Iraq if it wasn't for the Evil Empire (Britain) which created it, which created Saddam.'
Though much of his book is risible, Grasse is no fool. What he wants is for the rest of the world, led by Britain, to stop accusing America of being the root of all evil. He has a point.
Despite it being the world's only truly democratic superpower, pouring scorn on America has become something of an obsession among Britain's bien pensants.
'Why did some people even blame George Bush for the effects of Hurricane Katrina?' Grasse asks. 'He didn't start the hurricane, and the levees which burst were built before he was born.'
The danger is, of course, that by making equally absurd accusations against Britain, Grasse risks provoking the anti-American sentiment that he so objects to.
In its far-fetched assault on British history, his book is less of a rock causing ripples in the pond of public discourse than a giant pair of hobnailed boots, marked Uncle Sam, delivering a wholesale kicking to America's staunchest ally.
And as the saying goes: with friends like these, who needs enemies?
The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined The World by Steven Grasse. Published by Quirk Books/ Chronicle Books plc and distributed in the UK by Grantham Book Services. £9.99.
Anyone can yack all day about the "evil" British Empire. But the fact of the matter is that there isn't a country on earth that exists today outside of colonialization and conquest.
Some were just better at it than others. And some, like the Brits, pretty much universally ahd their colonies turn into the most prosperous nations on earth.
Sorry, I admire the British Empire for what it was and is. Historical revisionism and modern global guilt are pretty much useless in my eyes.
Grasse is laughing all the way to the bank. Idiotic journalists are falling for it and giving him more publicity than he could have dreamt of.
Whether or not other empires were crueler.
The biggest thing the British gave to all their colonies was the infrastructure for taking up English.
The British gave the ability to use English, and the Americans gave the impetus to use English.
BUMP
I concur.
This character is rightly concerned about all the hand-wringing negativism and self-loathing that afflicts many Americans today, and about the way in which everyone else seems to be "getting" at the US. The only problem is that his solution seems to be to deflect the criticism by throwing all the blame onto someone else, so that THEY can crumble under hand-wringing negativism and self-loathing!
If something is wrong, it's wrong. Period. Even if England were as horrible as he seems to think, no modern day Englishman is to blame for the mistakes of the past.
The empire was an historical fact, a construction of Man, with all that that implies. It did a lot of good things, and a lot of bad things too. Personally I think the good outweighed the bad, but that is obviously a matter of the perspective and priorities of the individual.
This guy is an idiot, plain and simple.
L
The British did give their colonies, protectorates, etc. advanced technology, medicine, infrastructure, political structure, as so on. However, those same things could have been obtained without having the British subjugate and rule over them.
Europe gained gunpowder, the compass, paper, the printing press, and they even could have gotten credit banking from China. And yet China did not have to turn Europe into colonies for Europeans to take advantage of those technologies. Similarly, Japanese had European experts in various fields come over to Japan, and they were paid to show Japanese their skills. Again, Europeans didn't have to take over Japan for Japanese to take advantage of those technologies.
Altogether, in comparison, I'd give the British an A+ on colonization.
Keeping them is another matter, but that speaks to the empowerment that the people assumed due to their implied freedoms at the time under colonization.
Compare that to say, what the French did in Angola where they are still shooting at each other. You should here what my pal at work from Angola says about the French - Yikes!
As opposed to my chief complaint about the British - "Is that all that comes in a pint? Pfff! *chug*"
Grasse is crass.
His main thesis is flawed--that every nation has been forced to account for historical wrongs except Britain--anyone who has attended school in England knows exactly how hard the leftist National Union of Teachers* tries to push Anglo-Saxon Guilt down everyone's throat.
*Yes, the British teachers union is called NUT!
The reason that Charles Laurence at the Daily Mail would review this book is that the Mail readership is made up of the populist right-wing Britons that would be the cultural equivalent of Freepers and Lou Dobbs viewers. These people actually believe in "The Special Relationship" with the United States and see Americans as cousins. They would find this book shocking.
Incidentally, Tony Blair's Labour Party hired leftist activist Zack Exley (Ruckus Society & MoveOn.org) to come to the UK to design a campaign against the Daily Mail during the last election--as the Mail had been hitting Blair hard on his immigration record.
Actually, thats incorrect.
Singapore and HK are dynamic economies because the British Colonial Government created an atmosphere conducive to prosperity (British rule of law, efficient civil service, and British capitalism). This allowed the Chinese in Hong Kong and Singapore to thrive in a way that Asians who were living under other regimes (French, Dutch, or Imperial China) were not able to do so.
In fact, as far as Asian capitalism is concerned, this has little to do with American English. The British Empire has laid down a global foundation for civil society and prosperous trading partners.
There's something the United States can take from that with NATO, ANZUS, the OAS, and defense agreements with Japan, South Korea, and even Taiwan. (even though personally support helping some of the countries in those groups if they are attacked--simply not an obligation and requirement to do so).
The wording for Taiwan is decent: it highly suggests that the United States will go to war if Taiwan is attacked by force by the PRC, but the United States does not necessarily wage war against the Communist Chinese.
Look into the Belgian Congo Genocide sometime....
L
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