Re: Rule Britannia? was Re: upheavals in England, 1640 - 1848

[rahul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rahul Mahajan)]

Adam, you're a decent guy, your heart's in the right place even when your
brain's not (I'm not calling you stupid, just as Lou wasn't, just awfully
schematic and simplistic at times). Nobody wants to deny that segments of
the English working class have shown true internationalism, as was
evidenced both by their opposition to England's entering the American Civil
War on the South's side and by the support of Manchester textile workers
for the Indian swadeshi movement, which cut directly at their livelihood.
The fact remains that the English, as a concomitant of their empire, did
create a whole system of master race propaganda that was propagated in the
schools and at the newsstands. Gary's example from the Oxford Annual for
Scouts is just the tip of a massive iceberg.

I have little direct experience of the matter, but I think Orwell caught
the attitude of the English working class to the British Empire quite well
in his essay *England Your England*, where he mentions what he calls the
"gentleness" of English civilization, their absolute abhorrence for the
jackbooted military jingoism of the imperial stormtroopers, but also
acknowledges that in the light of this attitude they dealt with the British
Empire essentially by an act of massive hypocrisy, affecting to ignore its
existence whenever possible.

Rahul




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