The UK itself is not an "ethical empire", it is the English empire. England's satellite states are second-class. All of them harbor grudges about it, and all of them have robust political factions which advocate leaving the UK.

Yes all of Scotland harbors a grudge against the English, that's why they voted to remain a part of the UK when given their "once in a generation" chance to do so.

And yes they're totally second class. That's why they have their own parliaments whereas England doesn't.

Should I have said "every one of them"? I didn't mean to imply that every citizen personally harbors a grudge. That would be silly! But they did have a referendum, and "remain" barely won.

Yes, the fact they have their own parliaments, while "England does not", does indeed demonstrate that they are second class. Because the reason England "doesn't have a parliament" is that when Scotland "joined", the English parliament was simply renamed into "The Parliament of Great Britain", without changing anything else. They even kept the same MPs - didn't even hold an election! It was all for show, a minimal mask of fairness for dissolving the Scottish parliament. It resulted in riots and martial law.

This, by the way, was the closest England ever came to "consensually" adding a member. Wales at this point in time was a straight-up English territory. It didn't even get a parliament until 1999, at the same time Scotland was allowed to reform theirs. And would you like to talk about Northern Ireland?

You're referring to the way things were in the past, whilst making claims about the present day. Empires don't generally give parts of themselves fair and free referendums on whether to stay and then win, do they?

Tell me then, why do you think England is unique among the constituent countries of the United Kingdom in not having "its own" parliament? Is it because it's the least important member, subservient to the others?

History, and the way devolution was set up by Blair. He wanted Scotland to have more power locally because it's a relatively left wing place that voted Labour at the time, and didn't want England to have more local power because that would have hurt Labour electorally.

And funnily enough the British empire was by far the best one to be in, only extracting around 6% of GDP from countries, it was much worse to be in the French, ottoman, or soviet or any other empire.

Why did so many countries want to join the commonwealth?

Unfortunately the woke oppression crusaders really need to admit Britain and the US might be slightly oppressive but it’s nothing compared to almost any other country or empire on earth.

A catalog of some of the "slightly oppressive" things done in India:

https://historiesofcolour.com/THE-BRITISH-RAJ

History is bad. Lots of people did bad things. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a relative hierarchy of evil.

I’m from the Soviet empire. Trust me. From my family’s stories they’d much rather have been in the British empire than where they were. I’m pretty sure a lot of Rwandans and Haitians would agree too. The British were relatively good to their empire.

Yeah, but we are talking about India under british empire. Not Rwanda and Haiti. Since you're so oblivious of what the british empire did, here's a 8 minute mini speech of things British empire did in India. India wasn't some poor country, it was actually one of the richest countries in the world before brits came along and stole everything.

This was my entire point in the initial post, it's both hilarious and a bit sad how people are so unaware what the british empire did in India.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4

Stealing is a bit different to killing 30m Eastern Europeans, starving them to the point of cannibalism etc, and also killing 30m of your own people.

That’s my point. And that’s my family’s experience.

They did cause famine starving tens of millions of people. Deliberately. Among a great many other violent atrocities. Please read/watch the resources you have been given.

Even were we to accept that, the whatabout-ism is a shockingly poor taste response to someone with a personal connection to real oppression, and I don't even have words for someone labeling people "woke oppression crusaders" for pointing out that the UK committed crimes against humanity on a vast scale resulting in tens of millions of deaths.

See my comment above about my family’s experience. As an Eastern European frankly I’m fed up of this British and American bashing. These places were heaven compared to the raids of mongols, Turks, soviets, and everything else in Central Europe.

There are grades of evil.

I really don't understand your point. Mongol raids happened, so it's fine to brush the atrocities of the Raj under rug? Bit of a non-sequitor.

Let's turn it around. "I'm fed up of all the Soviet bashing. It was heaven compared to the Congo under King Leopold." See? Not a nice reply is it?

You're aware that the places the Empire conquered were all empires themselves, right? (with the exception I think of Australia/New Zealand, which weren't developed enough to have anything resembling an empire)

As a rule I find that people who take the common, simplistic, tweet-length view of British rule (i.e. that it became rich by stealing from India, that it was the deliberate invoker of India's famines, that it was racist even by its times standards, etc), assume that anyone who disagrees isn't aware of basic history.

I've also noticed that there's always an (annoying) triumphal 'gotcha' when they link to some short-form essay mentioning basic facts, denied by nobody, of the famines and loss of relative share of GDP suffered by India etc.

Again, _everyone knows this_. It comes across as naive and arrogant to assume otherwise.

The effect British rule had in India (and everywhere) was extremely nuanced, and there is a huge amount of interesting history to be debated. After all, we're talking about a subcontinent over a 350 year time period.

The British, for instance, banned the practices of Sati (burning widows alive) and of infanticide, and explicitly allowed Indians to compete on equal terms with the British in examinations to enter the Indian Civil Service.

There's very little consensus amongst historians whether or not they were responsible for the famines India suffered at the time, or if they even made any net money from India whatsoever, given their constant fear of raising taxes.

I'm not necessarily trying to take a position either way, by the way, just begging people who are nodding along to some of these bumper-sticker anti-colonialism comments to read more deeply into what is an unimaginably huge subject.

To add to your point, there’s very little consensus among people on the subcontinent about it. My mom and aunts are borderline monarchists. My dad is a republican, and growing up I heard him complain about the British dividing and conquering by creating tensions between Muslims and Hindus. But even he readily credits the British for developing the region’s laws and institutions.

As to the famines: cyclical famines were common in India: https://www.orissapost.com/this-is-why-indian-kings-used-to-.... The British didn’t cause famine in India, though it’s fair to say they mismanaged the response.

Please stop using HN for ideological battle. You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we ban accounts that do this regardless of what they're for or against.

Also, please don't use multiple accounts to do this and especially not in the same threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Firstly I'd like to apologize for replying to this comment instead of flagging it and moving on. It can be difficult to judge sometimes when to engage.

There's something I'd like to clarify. I came back to this thread to find that my own comment was flagged, and I'd also collected a surprising number of downvotes in a short span of time (unless flagging resets vote count - I'm not sure). Is the flag from you, as a slap on the wrist for fueling the fire? I didn't think flags were used that way, but once again I'm not sure. If it's not from you, then I suspect some brigading may have occurred. (It's possible someone else felt my comment warranted admin attention, but 1) the timing is odd and 2) you've clearly already seen this thread).

Sorry as well for the meta - I'd have made this a PM, but, well...

(It's better to email [email protected] than to post about this in the threads. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

Yes, I flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34596819 and downvoted the comment but there were flags and downvotes from other users as well.

I'm not arguing against your view on the topic (nor the GP's, for that matter) but you definitely fed the flames in this thread, and not just in one place. I flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34596819 because it seemed the most egregious.

EDIT: probably got that wrong, I'll see when you answer :)

> A more ethical empire wouldn't be an empire at all. It'd be something more akin to the USA

Are you suggesting that the US behaves ethically? Snowden, Assange, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, BLM, Guantanamo, ...

Or the way the native population was treated. (theft and oppression)