[Oliver_W]

Originally Posted by Tom4784

Tribes profiteering from slavery doesn't really make our role in it better or worse. It's whataboutism to bury your head in the sand, to protect the image of what you want this country to be, and not the bones and suffering of other cultures that built it.

True, I did say it doesn't absolve anything. But only one side wanted to end it.

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by Oliver_W

True, I did say it doesn't absolve anything. But only one side wanted to end it.

Again, doesn't really change a thing. It was a problem we helped create in the first place. There's no way to cut that story that makes us the heroes unless you disregard huge parts of history.

[Oliver_W]

Originally Posted by Tom4784

Again, doesn't really change a thing. It was a problem we helped create in the first place. There's no way to cut that story that makes us the heroes unless you disregard huge parts of history.

"We" didn't. No-one living can personally claim heroism for helping to abolish the slave trade, just like no-one living should be made to feel guilty for it. If one part of that piece of history should be taught in schools, so should the other.

Are your future grandkids responsible for your posts on here?

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by Oliver_W

"We" didn't. No-one living can personally claim heroism for helping to abolish the slave trade, just like no-one living should be made to feel guilty for it. If one part of that piece of history should be taught in schools, so should the other.

Are your future grandkids responsible for your posts on here?

I think you're choosing to purposefully misunderstand the intent of 'we' to push a point that doesn't really work.

'We' in this context is not referring to us as individuals but as the UK as an entity throughout the centuries.

Again, to go back to the WW2 example. One day, Nazi Germany's atrocities will be as distant in the past as the slave trade is to us, but do you think that Germany's stance on teaching the horrors of WW2 and what Germany did to their kids will change? I doubt they ever will, because it's important to learn from history. The good and the bad.

The problem with so many people in this country is that they refuse to engage in reality when it comes to the past. We're heroes of the world, the empire was the greatest thing that ever existed and we never did anything wrong ever. None of that is true, and we committed atrocity after atrocity. Just because we, as individuals, weren't born during those times doesn't mean that we, as a nation, should pretend that history that paints us in a bad light is fiction or that it no longer matters.

It matters to those who still live with the impact of the empire generations later.