The Romans Had An Empire

Historian blows up on MSNBC's Velshi for bringing up British colonialism

"Andrew, Andrew, this is not a propaganda show. Andrew, I need you to stop. I need you to stop for a second. "https://t.co/zDOoaNrbVr

— Raw Story (@RawStory) September 10, 2022

MSNBC host flips the script on royal coverage to document British colonial brutality

"if you're having mixed feelings about the mourning of the queen and the institution that she represented for so many decades, that's valid, and you're not alone." https://t.co/8W6hQGxxa4

— Raw Story (@RawStory) September 10, 2022

And most people think that was pretty much a good thing, punctuated by a famous crucifixion and maybe the sacking of Jerusalem a few years later (the historian Josephus claimed the blood in the streets reached the horses’ knees, but that’s unlikely). They did slaughter pretty much everyone in the city. We forget that crucifixion was a Roman invention used to punish political prisoners and maintain the Pax Romana.

Yeah, they built aqueducts and paved roads and established incredibly well planned cities (at a certain size a new city was started down the road). They were tolerant of other religions, just not of alternate political ideas. And all roads and all things really did lead to Rome. Empires only exist to support the Imperium, and that leads to massive exploitation. That massive exploitation was sustained by brutality. Those aqueducts and paved roads came at a very high price for anyone not at the top of Rome’s socioeconomic pyramid.

London’s public benches in Victorian England were made of teak because it is so durable; and because England had access to so much of it, and harvested it with effectively slave labor. Exploitation makes everything cheaper.

George Orwell wrote two excellent essays about the price of being a colonial power. He saw the racism and exploitation which requires racism of the Empire from the ground up. You don’t run an empire on cricket and tea time and impeccable manners. Britons may never, never be slaves, but they enslaved much of the planet, and brutalized it in the name of “civilization.” It was just an excuse for being powerful enough to take what they wanted.

They weren’t unique; the French, the Belgians, the Germans all did it.  Great Britain was just more successful at it.

Should we bring this up now, at the death of the Queen of England? We cannot mourn her personally: we didn’t know her. We knew her persona, her public image, her position as Head of State of Great Britain; as monarch.

When else do we publicly and internationally discuss this, then? When it safely doesn’t matter? When no one really cares?