[fit2rule]

This is so typical of the British attitude - its on TV, so it must be true, or have weight, or .. something.

I cannot fathom how an entire nation of people can allow themselves to be duped so well, by so few. The entire 'keeping people safe' position is a button that gets pushed and pushed - do the English really fear for their lives so much that they are willing to give up so much freedom, and to allow a powerful elite to rule them? The answer, centuries old: YES.

It is my belief that the English zeitgeist is so riddled with guilt over what IT did to its colonies and foreign possessions, that it is currently in the death throws of a society crippled by its own crimes against humanity. This notion of the elite nature of the British Empire serves no purpose other than to polarize the people of that tiny nation against all others .. and this is terribly shocking.

The British people will never be truly safe for as long as they continue to deny their own empires criminal behaviour. What England did to Ireland; what it did to its colonies; what it continues to do in foreign lands, daily - this is the true source of danger for the English people. No amount of pontificating/Mind Control being force-fed on the British public will ever address the dire straits in which England has forcefully left millions of people, not subjects of their empire but nevertheless victims, all over the world.

[lewispollard]

> I cannot fathom how an entire nation of people can allow themselves to be duped so well, by so few.

The same reason as in every western democracy, including the US: massive marketing budgets & the media.

> It is my belief that the English zeitgeist is so riddled with guilt over what IT did to its colonies and foreign possessions, that it is currently in the death throws of a society crippled by its own crimes against humanity.

What absolute nonsense. So many countries have committed atrocities on a similar level, and many more recently than the British empire. Should the Norwegians be crippled by guilt for the actions of the vikings? Should the Americans be crippled by guilt for crimes against the native people? Should the Japanese and Germans be crippled by guilt for atrocities committed in WW2? People don't live in the past.

[fit2rule]

Nobody should be crippled by guilt - but todays generations ought to damned well be held responsible for the wealth they enjoy as a result of the slaves their parents owned. It wasn't that long ago, and we still have people in modern society who are responsible for atrocities, yet are nevertheless getting away with it - because, as you say, 'people dont live in the past' ..

[lewispollard]

> but todays generations ought to damned well be held responsible for the wealth they enjoy as a result of the slaves their parents owned.

No. People should by all means recognise the privilege they have and make ethical decisions based on that privilege - but they shouldn't be 'held responsible' for it as if they're criminals themselves.

[cafard]

The slaves their parents owned? My parents were born considerably after the Emancipation Proclamation. As for my more distant ancestors, I have no idea whether any of them owned slaves. I do know that a bunch were serfs. Let me know where to send the bill.

[coldtea]

>What absolute nonsense. So many countries have committed atrocities on a similar level, and many more recently than the British empire. Should the Norwegians be crippled by guilt for the actions of the vikings? Should the Americans be crippled by guilt for crimes against the native people? Should the Japanese and Germans be crippled by guilt for atrocities committed in WW2? People don't live in the past.

Yes, they should be crippled by guilt. Guilt is good -- it prevents you doing the same bad things again and gives you a perspective of what you did.

People might not live in the past, but countries carry their past with them.

The fact that the actual people that started the Vietnam war have died, doesn't mean that the country and the organisations that they worked in died with them. Those should carry the guilt forward. (Of course, instead they usually carry forward the same long term strategic planning that led to their previous attrocities).

What I mean is, countries are not discreet: they are continuous. A country has a history like a person has. Its history doesn't die and start from zero with each generation.

That's even an accepted norm of international relation even when the change inside a country is from a state to another (e.g the US after independence) etc. It's called "succession of state")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_of_states

Now, of course the truth is that they are not crippled by guilt at all -- they never stopped doing crimes on humanity and on their own citizens ever. Look what they are doing to the native americans in Dakota still. Look at Zimmerman.

[lewispollard]

> Yes, they should be crippled by guilt. Guilt is good -- it prevents you doing the same bad things again and gives you a perspective of what you did. > People might not live in the past, but countries carry their past with them.

I would argue that it's the leaders and governments who should be crippled by guilt. It's useless for me to carry the guilt of the British empire when my ancestors were working class and had no influence over those decisions (and, in fact, were Irish when you go back more than a few generations - should I be angry at Britain in that case?)

[nly]

It's not fear, it's ignorance. Most people here have no interest in this topic. Snowden? Who's that? A lot of Brits still rely on newspapers and the evening news for their primary source of news, if they follow it at all. This stuff typically doesn't reach paper outside of the Guardian unless the Daily Mail are in a shit-stirring mood. Most of the coverage of Snowden for instance has focused on the politics and drama, relationships between Germany, us and the US etc, not what he has unveiled.

Once you start stepping on our rights we stand up like the best of them though. See recent stories about a guy who got told by his bank that he couldn't withdraw his money unless he told them what he wanted it for. That made dinner table conversation amongst my family. Net neutrality, data protection and privacy in the digital age is all too abstract though.

That said, it's pathetic that there are regular arrests here for people being mean to one another on Twitter (death threats aside). There's a large celebrity base calling for more of this, and it relies on the polices ability to access ISP records quickly for very little.

[gazrogers]

1) British!=English.

2) David Cameron is in no way representative of the British or the English.

Please stop painting us all with the same brush.

[fit2rule]

>David Cameron is in no way representative of the British or the English.

Right, because you don't have a representative government. At all.

[jamessb]

David Cameron is leader of the Conservative party, which received 36.1% percent of the popular vote at the last general election. In order to form a government, he had to enter a coalition with the third party, the Liberal Democrats, who received 23% of the popular vote. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_electio...).

Based on these numbers, it seems difficult to claim that the leader of any political party represents the views of Britain as a whole.

[cs02rm0]

I'm not buying whatever you're selling.

Most English people today don't know anything about what's supposedly been done to Ireland in their name. Neither are they duped by the rhetoric, but democracy is sufficiently weak that they don't have a voice.

I don't think most people around the world have an issue with colonial Britain either.

[fit2rule]

>I don't think most people around the world have an issue with colonial Britain either.

Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but many outside the western world consider the UK to be one of the chief evil influences in the world.

[DanBC]

You spun all of that out of a misquote?