Dana Fried
In the 1940s the big debate in the West was whose weird, shitty colonial scheme all of the displaced Jews were going to be pawns in. The answer turned out to be "their own".
(It's funny that the British thought they could use Jews as pawns to keep a permanent base on the Suez, but failed to realize the Zionists would have other ideas. The US plan of using them as human shields against the Soviets was also funny, and would have been equally disastrous.)
Dana Fried
If you want to know the root cause of any inter-ethnic strife or genocide in the modern world, "the British" is usually a pretty safe bet.
Charlie Stross
@tess The British Empire carved up its territories using the 70/25/5 rule: a 70% majority, taxed and worked for profit, plus a 25% minority from another ethnic group, armed with whips/clubs/rifles and enlisted as a middle class and tax collectors, ruled over by a 5% elite of British colonial administrators and soldiers with Gatling guns and artillery (in case of a 25% uprising). The empire then left behind new nations with built-in ethnic strife: a poor 2/3 majority vs. a less-poor 1/3 minority.
Brad Rubenstein “:verified:”
So today I learned that having an empire over which the sun never sets creates a lot of problems after the sun sets.
Adrian Tombu 🦀
@tess France is usually not very far behind too 😞
Oblomov
@to @tess doesn't Belgium have a pretty decent (for appropriate definitions thereof) track record for its size?
Oblomov
@patterfloof I mean, arguably the USA and Canada are themselves good examples of Brit-caused strife
@tess
patter
@tess sometimes America, or is Britain counted as the root cause of The US
anilmc
Thanks. This sectarian generational carnagefarming algorithm is what has given each powerful postcolonial state its own scapegoat population, keeping the compradore tail wagging the dog of war.
Charlie Stross
@anilmc @tess Worth noting that the British Empire had another mode of operation in areas with population density too low to support tax farming (North America, Australia): kill off or expel the locals and import white settlers. Planter slavery fell out of favour from 1770 onwards, but penal servitude (convict labour in Aus) and push-migration of the urban poor (through the 1950s in pursuit of the White Commonwealth policies of Aus, Canada) filled the labour gap.
Robert Petersen :startrek:
@tess @cstross number 1 cause of Independence Days throughout the world.
Charlie Stross
@Sonikku @tess I seem to recall somebody published a book a couple of years ago listing all the countries the British invaded at one time or another.
It ran to book length because it covered basically the entire planet, with just four exceptions (out of roughly 200 countries).
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