Whatever happenned to British patriotism?

[Thanas]

C'mon Stark, it is not as if he said the bad things did not exist, he just listed the good things. I am sure he is well aware that without Pearl Harbor, the US would not have gone to war, that slavery was only tackled once the north could live without nor did he decide to ignore the Manifest Destiny stuff. I am sure he knows all these.

Have you heard of a ship called the good Reuben James
Manned by hard fighting men both of honor and fame?
She flew the Stars and Stripes of the land of the free
But tonight she's in her grave at the bottom of the sea

Yes, I heard (having met Erich Topp). However, even after that there was no majority to go to war, even though Roosevolt did his best to create one.

[Thanas]

How's that different for anyone else? Empires certainly can and have opted to act contrary to necessity in the past.

Scale. There is no other empire whose history is such a brutal one and who is still responsible for a lot of the troubles in Africa and the Middle East.

There's certainly good and bad in the history of all empires, and Britain had the biggest of the lot (sure, the Spanish had a larger one geographically, but population wise there's not really any comparison) so it's bound to have more bad points. But it's also done a lot of good, the aggressiveness that Britain and the Royal Navy pursued the abolition of slavery, for instance.

Agreed on the latter.

[Lonestar]

Yes, I heard (having met Erich Topp). However, even after that there was no majority to go to war, even though Roosevolt did his best to create one.

Point is there would have been more incidents, or Hitler&Co would have gotten fed up with the material support that was being given the Commonwealth and declared war/escalated the conflict in the Atlantic. It's a pretty big leap to say "No Pearl Harbor= No American involvement".

[Thanas]

Yes, I heard (having met Erich Topp). However, even after that there was no majority to go to war, even though Roosevolt did his best to create one.

Point is there would have been more incidents, or Hitler&Co would have gotten fed up with the material support that was being given the Commonwealth and declared war/escalated the conflict in the Atlantic. It's a pretty big leap to say "No Pearl Harbor= No American involvement".

Not really. Hitler would not declare war unilaterally. They could not have escalated the conflict in the Atlantic a lot more and the American Public would not have supported a war on those grounds. Though if you have other information, feel free to share as this is very fascinating.

[Saxtonite]

one thing no one mentioned. Hasn't 'British' patriotism been supplanted by Welsh/Scottish/Cornish nationalism as well as English Nationalism?

[Big Orange]

Yes, that process is called "devolution", with Cardiff and Edinburgh becoming more and more autonomous in recent years, with more of legitimate sheen to Welsh and Scottish nationlism. English nationlism seems particularily nasty and more associated with Neo-Nazism and the like, while Cornish nationalism comes across more of a parochial joke.

This does not even measure up to the scale of British colonialism.

By the end of the 1600s there were around 4 million indigenous “Indians” left in the New World under Spanish rule according to Kenneth Pearce in Mexico, after (according to Michael Wood in Conquistadors) ‘several tens of millions of people died’ during the 1600s when the Iberians invaded the New World and introduced foreign microbes. The nasty strains of Eurasian microbes pretty much demolished the Aztecs, Incas, and so-on as civilizations, although to be fair it was partially the result of unintended consequences and plague couldn’t be stopped by anyone. Supposedly 80% of 500 European colonists died in Virginia, and during the Thirty Years War an also staggering 46% of Swedes and Finns perished from infection within six months around 1630.

In the Bengal region there were still around 40 million people left in 1801, but only three decades ago the famine instigated by Company mismanagement starved at least 10 million people to death within only half a decade in the most fertile part of India, and unlike the catastrophic pandemics spread amongst the New World “Indians” the famine in India was largely the result of conscious decisions made by British officials who were not going to be affected by the famine they oversaw and wanted to maximise profits. However the British government tried to reign in the fatal excesses of the Company, but likely for cynical reasons as well when Bengal#s tax revenues slumped at £174, 300 in 1770-71 after the famine hit when the annual military spending remained at over £600, 000. Britain weren’t good investors in welfare for centuries when the conditions of WWII exacerbated the fragile food supply in Bengal in the 1940s, the twilight of British rule. Lawrence James in Raj suggested the deaths of the Bengal famine in 1943 would’ve been reduced if ‘there had been effective machinery in place for rationing, the control of distribution and, above all, a willingness to co-operate among peasant farmers and entrepreneurs.’ and the lack of “effective machinery” in Bengal can be seen as Britain’s responsibility.

And I nearly forgot about the 19th century Potato Famine in Ireland.

The exhausted, overstretched Mughal Empire would’ve likely still been mostly subsumed by the superior economic and military might of European nations before the end of the 18th century anyway, but the real question is would India been better off if it was partitioned by several European empires instead of just the British Empire?

No, but what does this have to do with the topic? If you try to say the German empire was as bad, you are misinformed. Just look at the numbers - miniscule compared to the deaths in one famine and even more miniscule compared to the British conduct as a whole. This of course neglects the investments taking place - and all in all, the Germans were quite easily among the most benign of the colonial empires.

But 60, 000 out of a community/tribe of 80, 000 people killed intentionally within a single campaign?! Although in wider terms in relation to the centuries of British conduct that’s a car smash and Germany did invest a lot in its African colonies, with schools and hospitals, and if the locals didn’t get on the wrong side of their German masters like the Herero did, they were loyal enough to enrol as soldiers in the German military. I agree that Britain around that time couldn’t really boast about being “better” invaders and exploiters when the British oversaw the deaths of 24, 000 women and children in internment camps during the Second Boer War alone, but Africa seems to be a shared responsibility amongst Europeans when France in recent post-colonial times supposedly oversaw the mass dismemberment of almost a million people within a hundred days, to stop America nosing around its old central African stomping grounds.

There’s not much pride in European colonialism, full stop, but the problems in Africa today seem to partially stem from the European powers leaving the continent too soon, without any mature political systems and natural national boundries left in place to prevent batshit dictators and brutal wars.

[Thanas]

I honestly can't tell what your point is in that rambling post, so could you try once more?

[Big Orange]

Yes, we're going round in circles on whether Britain was intrinsically worse than its contemporaries as an colonial invader, but what about the Royal Proclamation of 1763? That's one example of the British Empire being relatively fair, but unfortunately that was used as one of the pretexts for its American colonists to rebel and ultimately making things much worse for the rest of the tribal nations on the continent.

While I'm kinda relieved that Britain is not as aggressively patriotic as the rather more scary, straightfaced patriotism you more often get in the USA or Japan and I've got no time for violent, paranoid cranks like the EDL (who have supplanted the BNP), at the same time I dislike the practically treasonous anti-patriotism that is a byproduct of Neo-Liberal Globalisation that involves multinational companies taking over national assets, usually not for the greater good, like the privatisation of the UK Coast Guard.

[Bernkastel]

While I'm kinda relieved that Britain is not as aggressively patriotic as the rather more scary, straightfaced patriotism you more often get in the USA or Japan and I've got no time for violent, paranoid cranks like the EDL (who have supplanted the BNP), at the same time I dislike the practically treasonous anti-patriotism that is a byproduct of Neo-Liberal Globalisation that involves multinational companies taking over national assets, usually not for the greater good, like the privatisation of the UK Coast Guard.

I can agree with that. I personally find the worst part of that is when supporters of such measures use the excuse that they are necessary for us to remain competitive. I'd rather keep such assets. As for cases like the mentioned privatisation of the coast guard, such services do not seem like the kind of things you want being run privately, with profit in mind. It's meant to be a branch of the public service!

[Corpsman]

. . . Sarah Palin and her bunch of Republican rejects?

Hold on a minute, I am an extremely patriotic American Military Member. I fly the National Ensign every day at sunrise, and retire it every day at sunset. The song America, the Beautiful brings a tear to my eye without fail every time I hear it. I get more excited about the Fourth of July than any other holiday. While I do consider myself more conservative, I still think Palin and a lot if not most republicans (and most democrats, for that matter) are morons who do not deserve their title or office. National service should always be a burden, not attractive and well paid.

[Thanas]

Yes, we're going round in circles on whether Britain was intrinsically worse than its contemporaries as an colonial

It was, due to the scale and the influence on the developing nations even today, plus the racism which was nowhere as violent as in British Imperialism/Anglo-Saxon values.

invader, but what about the Royal Proclamation of 1763? That's one example of the British Empire being relatively fair, but unfortunately that was used as one of the pretexts for its American colonists to rebel and ultimately making things much worse for the rest of the tribal nations on the continent.

The Royal Proclamation is a thing in Britain's favor, but I doubt it was done out of any high moral principle rather than vested British interests.