Remembering Oscar Wilde

He symbolises the moral decline of this once great country.

When was this country great?

He symbolises the moral decline of this once great country.

Wrong. He symbolises the best of the genre of satire and one of Ireland's greatest writers. Unfortunately, he was unjustly imprisoned by a backwards society who could not handle a man that challenged their so-called Christian society. Btw, Britain was not great when it conquered half the world. It was a tyrannical undemocratic state which is why decolonisation had to happen. Whoever taught you that white-washed version of history is a idiot.

White washed? Give me a break, the British Empire is fundamentally misunderstood, it is portrayed as a deliberately expansionist movement when in reality it was something that gradually proliferated for so many, extremely nuanced reasons, there are literally dozens of complex ways in which countries ended up in the British Empire. The "white washing" comes from those that shut down discussion and demand that their interpretation is the only truth. And i'm talking about the reactionary left, and I italicize it to emphasize that I do not mean the entire left but rather the liberal bigots that ignore fact and reason in order to push their agenda. I am as 'left' as they come, but I actually believe that people should be allowed to argue a point if it can indeed be backed up whether or not it is "politically correct".

To admonish the British Empire as "undemocratic" is just about the dumbest comment I can imagine, Britain and France were the cradle of modern democracy, without the British and French Empires democracy absolutely certainly without any glimmer of hesitation would not be accepted world wide as the political ideal. Its like when people use slavery to attack the British Empire when in reality the environment that Britain fostered, particularly in the UK, allowed for open discussion on such matters that ultimately led to a wider acceptance of the once niche (or altogether non-existent) belief that slavery was fundamentally wrong. Without the British Empire these sort of ideals would never have been spread across the globe.

So just try shutting me down, and we'll see who's the one doing the white-washing. Try and imagine a world in which the British Empire had never happened it would be a world of absolute monarchs, the few presiding over the many, it would not be a world of democracy!

How exactly was it democratic when Britain marched into Delhi and basically massacred everyone there in 1857? William Dalrymple has written a whole book on it. It wasn't exactly very democratic either when Winston Churchill decided to let three million Indians starve to death in the Bengal Famines.

Agreeing that slavery was wrong did not suddenly make the British Empire or France a racial utopia. Blacks were still believed to be inferior to whites. Frantz Fanon, who lived in Martinique, colonised by France, has written a book explaining the racism that blacks faced in these empires.

Here is an important question. If the British Empire was such a wonderful haven for the world, why was there civil unrest in a lot of its colonised countries?

This is not to say the British Empire did not do some good things. It did introduce the railway to India. However, I am very sceptical of this idea that the British Empire was this wonderful time where everything was hunky-dory. These views often come from an overly-emotional feeling of patriotism rather than being grounded in historical facts.

You are applying a political meaning to white-washing rather than understanding it in historical context. It is only recently that history is now being explored from the colonised perspective. Yet, a lot of history is still being taught from the perspective of the west. African history is still only taught from the moment that the west interacted with it.

There really aren't 'complex' ways that countries ended up in Britain's control. Ultimately, it was conquest. Britain was always in control of India through indirect rule by severely limiting the shah's power. They finally officially claimed India as a British subject when they took Delhi. To pretend the Scramble for Africa was not a conquest is just being ridiculous.

I don't care enough to try and 'shut you down.' Don't worry. I'm not an agent of the Jewish illuminati trying to spread my communist propaganda across the world.

A quite incredible twisting of what I was saying, my points were not that Britain was a "racial utopia" not even remotely, you have imagined that. My point is not whether the British Empire was 'good' or 'bad' but that many ideals that we hold to be absolute today exist across the globe, in a very real sense, because of the British Empire. And who was pretending that the scramble for Africa was not conquest? The rise of the British Empire was protracted over centuries, to pretend that the scramble for Africa shares literally the same background and reasons as the settlement of Australia or the Americas, or Britain coming into ownership of Sri Lanka, or the vassalisation of Egypt is ridiculous. My point at its core is that for someone to say "the Empire was bad!" is no more reductive than someone saying "the Empire was good!".