Times change

Sick Rose's post on Fingering disintegrating empires reminded me vividly of this. It was one of those rare brilliant posts on boychat, such as only four or five people regularly produce, that keep me reading here. It taught me a lot that I feel ashamed not to have known, and led me to a much more charitable view of Zionism than I had been able to muster before. Proof that discourse here really can sometimes change some people's opinions, even strongly-held ones. But the point is that all ideas can only reasonably be judged in the context of the times that gave birth to them. In the light of the discourse that dominated intellectual thought in the 18th and 19th centuries, British (or French or Ottoman) imperialism wasn't so terrible, however much some of the suffering it gave birth to has become evident to us with hindsight. We are bound fairly to judge by entirely different standards the rank hypocrisy of a new power that sprung itself on the world in 1918 self-righteously condemning the old European order and proclaiming itself a champion of the self-determination of all peoples whilst showing ever since the utmost contempt for that self-determination whenever it conflicted with its own selfish interests and in violation of the international law it pretended to have been instrumental in creating. (And never mind that it had already irrevocably destroyed for ever its moral credentials to preach in such a manner by its mass-murderous suppression of Filipino independence in 1898-1900) But possibly one cannot come closer to putting one's inadvertent finger on this disgusting hypocrisy than by championing as having "anti-imperialist" credentials those racist colonial bigots who despoiled and murdered the natives of the land they stole whilst holding in slavery another people long after times and values had turned against this in more decent cultures. I don't for a moment think there's anything "ethno" about your nationalism, but nationalism of the most double-standard sort it surely is that manages to take offense at Diogenes. www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112