The problem, as I understand, is that a lot of British people don't know all the bad things the Empire did, or don't learn about it the way German people learn about the Holocaust and the Nazi's. Same thing might apply to Belgium - I was appalled to visit Brussels and see a park called "Leopold Park" [1] in the center of the city.
Edit: Turns out this park is named after King Leopold I, the first king of Belgium, and before the Congo atrocities. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15314232 for the person who educated me :)
On a more personal level, as an Indian person who grew up in the US, I always thought Churchill was a badass dude and a good wartime leader. It wasn't until Middle School that I learned about the WW2 famines and all the stuff he said about Indian people. He hated Indians and was extremely racist. His decisions directly lead to the death of millions of people in India. He's no better than Hitler or any of those dictators in my view, and it's mind boggling that people idolize him as the Lion.
Tangent aside, a lot of people did bad things (globally), but saying the Ottomans are bad or the Belgians are bad doesn't absolve the British Empire of its crimes. I don't think we need reparations or blame anybody today, since we all understand bad things happened, but more people should be educated about what happened and how to make sure it never happens again.
It gets even more ironic than that. During the 1940s Bengal famine, things were so bad that the Axis powers offered to step in and send humanitarian aid. Churchill not only refused, but he tried to prevent the newspapers from printing news of the offer, so that people wouldn't know how truly unnecessary their starvation was.
Lest I be mistaken, this is not to say that the Axis powers were somehow anything other than evil themselves. But it does highlight the level of hypocrisy of the British to claim the moral high ground when their own leader was intentionally starving millions to death out of spite. (And yes, it was spite - read what Churchill himself said on the topic).
"Offering aid to your enemy, to highlight their weakness" is a standard propaganda technique, not to be taken at face value.
> hypocrisy of the British to claim the moral high ground when their own leader was intentionally starving millions to death
no disagreement here.
There are still quiet a lot of statues of him. Which indeed sounds weird in relation to Hitler statues. It might be an idea to give them the same treatment as the Nazi party grounds in Nuremberg. Proper context next to them.
That is true. I'm Belgian; I can't remember having heard about this e.g. in history classes; it's something I came across later on.
That I find kind of odd. His treatment of the locals in the Belgian Congo is sort of the gold standard for imperial oppression.
What treatment? Wikipedia says that it became a memorial, but doesn't say what it became a memorial to.
It is in a rather unmaintained state (minimal reinforcement), with relevant information displayed next to and on it and is freely accessible to all.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. A lot of Akbar's praises can be attributed to 'creative' history writing after the 1950s.
Scroll down to Akbar and you'll find some interesting things. Also of interest is Allauddin Khilji.
It is important to note that while the foundations of the Mughal Empire were forged with plunder and loot, the Empire itself became native to the Indian subcontinent not soon after and also subsequently for a couple of centuries brought about great cultural boom in the general area. The Mughals eventually came to see themselves as "Indians"(sic) and built their homes here.
This is a far cry from an Empire which was founded on loot and extortion & also evolved into siphoning off the wealth (both cultural and scientific) to a motherland completely disinterested in the welfare of its subjects.
That is the key difference. The British were never interested in anything but looting India. The Mughals were more like the Normans in British history -- they started off as conquerors but eventually completely assimilated into the local population.
For those who read Hindi/Urdu, this ghazal, which eventually became his ephitaph, by the last mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar is quite touching (https://rekhta.org/ghazals/lagtaa-nahiin-hai-dil-miraa-ujde-...). The whole ghazal is well worth reading, but it ends with:
कितना है बद-नसीब 'ज़फ़र' दफ़्न के लिए
kitna hai badnaseeb 'zafar' dafn ke liye
दो गज़ ज़मीन भी न मिली कू-ए-यार में
do gaz zameen bhi na milee koo-e-yaar mein
(The British exiled Bahadur Shah Zafar to Rangoon and he was eventually buried there.)
The interesting thing is that the Norman mark probably never wore off: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8424...
So much for "assimilation" of the conquerors! I feel like it really works the same everywhere, every time. They won't really let you in even after centuries. Don't get deceived.
I'm curious if this is because the arminian genocide killed 90% of the ethnic groups population, being one of the most horrific and close to complete acts of ethnic cleansing ever to happen.
1. The British Raj is still in living memory. All 3 of my surviving grandparents were born before independence and were adults and married by 1947 (when India gained independence). They remember British rule. Comparing the criticism that an evil empire from living memory receives with empires that came before it is pretty disingenuous.
2. As an Indian, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth when tyrants like Winston Churchill are celebrated in modern Britain. His thoughts on the Bengal famine of 1943 and his inaction during that time which caused the death of an estimated 2 million people due to starvation is a matter of public record.
The reason has more to do with the fact that victors write history, and the Empire co-opted and exploited local institutions. So while Britain’s Empire was lost, its language and cultural impact reigns supreme in many ways to this day.
Not knowing about Mughal is ignorance, while not learning about the bad sides of our own history is (often: culturally imposed) revisionism.
Also, the scale of the British empire was much vaster than the ottomans or the Belgians, and we’re still dealing with the repercussions of it the empire and it’s collapse all over the world.
Fewer still know about the "Turkish Genocide" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_genocide) but that's more to do with cherry-picking "historians" such as yourself.
Of course that Wikipedia page redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Ottoman_Muslims which kinda proves the point that for some reason we can't use the term "Turkish Genocide" and must use quotes and softer language like "Persecution".
I've never claimed to be a historian, and it's impossible to not leave lots of things out in a Hacker News comment, especially if the scope is as broad as "all historical atrocities". I didn't write these Wikipedia pages, I'm just linking to them out of convenience since I can't link to copyrighted history books.