My mum loved Wetherspoons and we thought it fitting that the Chapel of Rest where she spent a few days was next door.
Exactly! Plus the ridiculous text on the government website suggesting generous housing and support after arrival. Itâs meat and drink to people traffickers!
We need to say clearly UK is full you will be returned before more deaths happen
I thought they might be coming in their droves to visit Pepper Pig world.
I feel this thread is fast turning into a little Englander topic bringing out the obvious prejudice that is alive and well in the UK. As @Geof_Cox has said on another thread many of the refugees come from countries formerly controlled by the British Empire that created the mess these countries are now in. Refugees are human beings and are no different to you or I, they only want to feel safe and have an opportunity to live without fear, not too much to ask surely?
@Geof_Cox wrote:
There are also enormous ethical differences between countries. With regard to most of the current refugees, from the middle-east and east Africa, itâs actually the UK that should be taking the lionâs share of responsibility, because much if the conflict and instability stem pretty directly from the mess left by the British Empire.
If only Brits knew the truth of that history! - how the attitudes of every right-thinking person there would change.
Quick - drape a flag over that too terribly truth, blame the victims, lock the doors.
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That was a while back, the horrible turmoil and unrest is now and caused by the governments of these countries. NATO should intervene to stop these dictators.
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History does tend to be a while back.
But once you interfere in a counjtryâs affairs, the damage and after effects tend to last a very long time. Look at Ireland.
Funny that dynasties with slave trading links, which are also a while back, are now being demonised and held to account for what they did back in the day, but when it comes to the UK itself - oh that was a while back, draw a veil.
Itâs NATO at the UNâs behest sticking its nose into other countries business thatâs got us into this mess.
Ireland for obvious reasons is probably better understood than most British colonial history - but even so the true horror of its 400 years of exploitation, injustice and killing are unknown to most Brits.
The fact is that what the UK media portrays as âtensionâ between religious âcommunitiesâ in Northern Ireland is typical of many post-colonial societies - Northern Ireland, like many other âcountriesâ with no reality on the ground (Israel and Iraq and Afghanistan also spring to mind) before they were created by fiat in London - artificial borders and ânationsâ building the injustice of empire into countries forever - many now at a far earlier point in their history than Ireland - not at all âa while backâ for any real understanding of history - and therefore perhaps looking forward to similar centuries of conflict.
As the great Irish novelist James Joyce wrote: âHistory is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.â
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A lot of the present conflicts arose from the so-called Great Powersâ carving up of the Middle East after the end of what was once known as the Great War, and while Geoff rightly draws attention to the legacy of colonialism, the other side of the coin is tribalism.
I moved to S Africa , shortly after the end of Apartheid , my role was to modernise a culturally isolated department and to help implement âTransformationâ in a âhistorically whiteâ university. It was a steep learning curve , but one of the many lessons learned was that creating a sense of nationhood is difficult when most of the population retain a primarily tribal identity and loyalty. Unfortunately we see this situation in too many countries where seemingly âmodernâ political parties are defined not even by religion but by tribe.
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Youâll know well of course Mark Alan Patonâs lovely book Cry the Beloved Country - which engages with the adjustment from tribe to nation. I re-read it quite recently (lockdown return to classics).
But you seem to be erring towards seeing the tribe as more of a problem than the nation. Is it? The tribe, surely is the deeply rooted historical and more human-scale reality - the nation a temporary imposed and generally destructive artefact of capitalism?
We have to move forward. Demanding wrongs far back in history be righted is as bad as vendettas between families going back generations.
I was reading a description of what soldiers found in the concentration camps at the end of the war the other day. I didnât seek it out it was just part of a biography of a nonmilitary publication editor whose photographer was there. If I dwelled on that it would still, even today, make me hate Germans and not to work with them or be kind to them.
We have to do our best to right wrongs in the recentish past as much as we can, because weâre all responsible for how the world runs. But this political trendy claptrap of having to right wrongs in long ago historyâŚit would never end just like the vendettas. At some point we have to say letâs just go forward and participate in multicountry cooperations such as the EU and the UN, to organise a strategy and share in costs and benefits of immigration, emigration, world and regional health issues and other things.
Otherwise Iâd still hate Germans and keep wanting them to pay.
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It is always good a) to recognise that historic events still shape our lives today and b) that generally the people living today had no control over those events.
If you know why thing are done, rather than simply that the ARE done then it allows reshaping of personal behaviour and attitudes, and may make us campaign to change things if sufficiently motivated.
As for hating Germans (or other nationalities) most nations have atrocities tucked away in their history though maybe not on quite the scale of that particular holocaust, and one could easily feel that way about most of the western nations and indeed most of those from the rest of the world too. History is almost always written by the winners, and that colours our viewpoint heavily too.
People are just people: some kind, some cruel, most just muddling along as best they can, and seldom does a single nationality behave uniformly to earn a universal hatred or love.
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Geof, maybe youâre idealising the concept of a tribe a little more than I might - it sounds too cosy for me!
I donât believe in some Hegelian notion of progess, but nevertheless think of the tribe (in the original sense of the word) as an earlier, pre-modern form of community and that successful nationhood demands the transcendence of old tribal boundaries and allegiances. The Mandela years were a time of understandable optimism that created a false impression of a new unified Rainbow Nation. Sadly the truth was very different as inter-tribal warfare was a continuous feature of my years in SA.
Nearly every morning one would hear on the radio that dozens of people in rural areas had been mysteriously murdered the previous night. Usually government press officers made allusion to a mysterious (ie implied white) âThird Forceâ; no one dared admit it was actually the post-Apartheid continuation of an unofficial war between the then Xhosa dominated ANC and the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party that had begun in the 1980s, If there has been any transcendence of tribal loyalties, it was through the creation of a new tribe known as the Wabenzi (corrupt government officials who drove Mercs given to them by the French government in return for buying a French submarine). This situation suddenly has put me in mind of the history of Scotland and its passage from tribe to nationhood
Youâve made me think about the transition from Highland clans who fought each other, but united in the Jacobite Rebellion and when that failed and the English and Lowland Scots army took control of the Highlands the clansmen were driven from their ancestral lands by their own tribal chiefs. âWhere there was insurrection, there is now wildernessâ (Dr Johnson )So much of present day Scottish (and Irish) sense of identity was created by their tribal leaders (the Mac and OâBenzi?) driving their own people from their original tribal lands. Ironically, the hardship and migration that ensued helped shape a new national sense of identity that transcends clan, religion(?) class (and tartan). But itâs taken nearly three hundred years and theyâre not yet an independent nation.
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I think one thought that we can take from pre-war Germmany is that the electorate were sold a future that turned into a nightmare.
Brexit is turning into the UKâs nightmare.
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I think youâll find it is a rising rather than a rebellion (cf American civil war, war between the states, war of northern agression)
Sorry, '45 Rebellion,/ Jacobite Rising
Yeâll no mek yerselâ popular!
Hardly in the same league surelyâŚ.? A few empty supermarket shelves and and small increase inflation does not equate to 300% inflation and people starving in the streets.
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I think the difficulty youâre having here Karen is that youâve created a very extreme characterisation of a view you donât like. I donât think anybody is suggestion that itâs possible to right all the wrongs of the past, nor that we shouldnât move on from the past, and try to create a better world. What is being suggested, is that both countries and individuals need to acknowledge truths about the past, try to understand how it continues to shape what happens in our own time, and accept responsibility where necessary, for example by extending a bit more understanding to people we have wronged in the past, who now need our help.
There is though another way of looking at âjust going forwardâ without understanding that the past is ever-present: when people have tried this, it has generally ended very badly indeed. This, surely, is the real problem with revolutionary change - when we try to start afresh, Year Zero, we often fall into Terror - the attempt to really wipe the slate clean, and recalcitrant humans with it. Dangerous stuff. Better, I think, to take on board that this life is always a negotiation with the past, and we move on not by ignoring it, but by dealing sensitively with it.
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Your Ego speaking. You are just embarrassing yourself with baseless facts. 10 years live in France and you get residency status. While itâs 20 years in UK. Getting legal residency is much harder than anywhere in Europe. In Europe if you are paying tax then thereâs hope. You have not met or seen people troubles and I can understand that you didnât knew. This matter is huge and require understanding.
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