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My government is worse than your government

 
  

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Regrettable Juvenilia
09:37 / 01.02.02
quote:Originally posted by The resistable rise of Reidcourchie:
oddly as Fly was agreeing with me, I'm going to have to disagree with him, being a Scot and all.


Ah, but I limited myself to 'English' so I could also bring in the way we fucked the Irish... "Civil rights march? Have the paratroopers shoot them", and so on.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
09:37 / 01.02.02
Yeah - and centuries of political, military and cultural oppression of the Welsh.
 
 
BioDynamo
11:56 / 01.02.02
Ah well, my beloved fatherland Finland is really too small and new (independence in 1917) to really compete, but I'll give it a shot.

Some of the first (argument about whether they actually were the first) concentration/deathcamps in the world: civil war in 1918 ended with the Reds (socialists, communists, anarchists) first being slaughtered en masse and then put in internment camps to starve. Mass deaths ensue. A good concept that has been in use globally since then.

Teaming up with Hitler in the Continuation War (1942-44) against Russia, causing mass deaths through leadership-megalomania: they wanted to create (according to themselves re-create) a Great Finland, stretching approximately to the Ural mountains, so they had the Finnish army attack the Soviet Union.

Deportation of jews to Nazi Germany during above mentioned period.

Drafting of long-time conscientious objector Arndt Pekurinen (8 years of prison for refusal to perform military service) into front-line service during above mentioned period. Shooting Pekurinen as a deserter when he refused to put on a uniform on the front.

Making incredibly crap music for the Eurovision Song Contest: not a single victory ever (since 1956) and being the country most often receiving zero points (IIRC).
 
 
BioDynamo
11:57 / 01.02.02
Double post, sorry.

[ 01-02-2002: Message edited by: BioDynamo ]
 
 
grant
17:28 / 01.02.02
I'm afraid I'll have to give concentration camps to the British; they may not have been death camps, but I'm sure plenty of my Boer ancestors died in 'em (or escaping from them) all the same.
 
 
Haus Of Pain
21:32 / 01.02.02
This thread inspires a strange kind of masochistic voyeurism.

quote: ...nobody knows how many indigenous people were killed in the tests because they were classified as fauna at the time.

I've met many an educated Australian that doubled as a rascist but this is beyond belief.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
11:31 / 02.02.02
ooh. me wan' play. lesseee...

The Empire's been mentioned already but lets look at a particular example: Partition of India, 1947.

Our glorious government, having finally decided that it's going to cost too much to hang onto the Indian subcontinent now the darkies are getting all uppity, takes everything it can carry and gets the fuck out. Desecrates temples, digs up corpses (buried in the Hindu tradition with gold), dredges the Ganges and chips marble off walls for fuck's sake. This after years of police state antics, 'disappearances', slavery etc.

But not before dividing the subc. up in such a fashion as to guarantee bloody war in the region for , oh pretty much for ever. Forcibly moving hundreds and thousands of people over arbitrary borders, killing anyone who tries to resist.

Paints a picture of 'granting independance' when in fact holding on until absolutely sure that it's fucked over an entire region. A region that's incredibly rich in all the resources you can think of and couuld/should be a major power is still utterly ravaged and torn apart. And probably always will be.

Divide and rule. Even when you've fucked off
home. The oldies really are the goodies.

Will be back to attempt a similar job on India... bit more challenging, maybe...

But, just for starters, rape/torture of Kashmiri activists, 'disappearances' in Kashmir, Tamil Nadu. The Haryan issue...
 
 
grant
16:47 / 04.02.02
Subcontinental Colonial Government's yours, then, Plums?

Hmm. What've they done *lately*?
 
 
The resistable rise of Reidcourchie
06:38 / 08.02.02
Who won?
 
 
Jackie Susann
08:37 / 08.02.02
We all lost.

Although I would like to note that in just the last week, the Pope has expressed concern about Australia's refugee policy, the PM has refused to say whether he'll let the UN Human Rights Commission inspect the detention centres, and given hundreds of thousands of dollars of arms to Indonesia while affirming Indonesian sovereignty over Aceh and Papua.
 
 
The Monkey
22:35 / 10.02.02
lick my plums, i'm afraid you're throwing a bit much at the foot of the Empire on that last post. yes, they sucked. and they sucked on a grand global scale.

the last big cock-up of the British Empire in the subcontinent was the massacre at Jallinwallah Bagh, which was bad enough, and related directly to the independence movement in India, then nascent.

but the mess of the Partition wasn't: the decisions leading to Partition were made by Indian politicians, after the aparatus of British rule were well on their way to being disassembled.

the partition was a problem between the congress party and the muslim league, respectively led by vallabhai patel and muhammed ali jinnah. mountbatten, the last viceroy, was asked to mediate. the muslim league demanded that a part of the subc be set apart for muslims only. of course, the big mess was that the muslims weren't in easily-isolatable regions--they were dispersed. thus muslims who wished to move to this hypothetical new state were thus required to move.

Mohandas Gandhi tried to hold India together, but Jinnah in particular was dead set on a Muslim homeland.

and nobody was "forcibly transported" by the British. the entire migration of muslims up into newly-formed pakistan and hindus from the former had nowt to do with the british.
the massacres were horrible...whole trainloads...but they were committed by muslim, hindu, and sikh private citizens, not
British governmental forces.
The same goes with the trashing of temples/mosques. and unless i miss my guess, the vandalism of art you're talking about was the product of the activities of the last Moghul emperor, Auranjzeb.

and Hindus are cremated, not buried, fairly unilaterally, and not with gold, either.
No doubt tomb raiding went on, as it did in Egypt, but it isn't what you claim...probably more of the stripping of archaeological sites than grave-robbing.

[ 11-02-2002: Message edited by: [infinite spectral monkeys] ]
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
23:55 / 10.02.02
I'm now considering myself under the heading of the Vatican, (which is a country) as I was brought up Catholic. I think the church can pull ahead or everyone.

1. Our leader is a man in a dress

2. Drunken french road trip (crusades). Eventually ended up with Catholics slaughtering other Catholics in mass numbers.

3. The brilliant idea to send children to fight the Muslims, under the assumption they wouldn't dare kill children. We were wrong. Thousands of children either died on the way there, were killed, or sold into slavery.

4. The Inquisition, during which we killed or tortured as many non-catholics as we could get our hands on, and was an ideal time for backstabbing other catholics. It started out weeding Muslims out of Spain and ended up "let's kill everyone not like us".

5. We hindered science for hundreds of years. "The sun revolves around the earth, dammit, and anyone who says otherwise is in deep shit."

6. The order of St. Mark, a band of Jesuits whose sole purpose was killing any protestants they came across. The church has stated in public that they were disbanded centuries ago, but on the Vatican budget sheet they still get 5 million dollars a year.

7. Years and years of crackhead popes who actually bought the title and used church funds to populate the Vatican with young boys to frolick about naked.

8. The great idea that you could buy a pardon for a sin you haven't commited yet. Planning on adultery? Go ahead and get forgiveness ahead of time.

9. The billion different ways that you can still get forgiveness ahead of time, two billion if it's a jubilee year. A priest friend of mine has thirty eight years of pre-forgiveness lined up.

C'mon, it's the center for the Catholic Church. Half the atrocities already mentioned were the result of the Church anyway. It's an antiquidated relgion that hasn't done anyone any good for a long time now. It's huge, rich, and employs a mercenary army. It has it's own warship (which is about to be refitted) called the Divine Wrath.

Heck, these are just the things everyone knows about, catholic or not. I got more sittin' right here...
 
 
BioDynamo
16:03 / 11.02.02
quote:Originally posted by Johnny the Zen bastard:


Also, we came up with McCarthy. Vietnam! 56,000 people died, the average age being 19! "The war is almost over! The body count of the North Vietnemese is too high for them to go on!"...and the war goes on for another four or five years.


Um.. that's 56,000 AMERICAN people.
South Vietnam Military: 185,000-225,000
North Vietnamese Military + Viet Cong: 500,000-1,000,000
South Vietnam civilians: 287,000-2,000,000
North Vietname civilians: 65,000
USA: 56,000
South Korea: 5,000
Philippines: 1,000
Thailand: 300-1,000
Australia: 500

Total estimate: 1,637,000-3,100,000

This is for the whole of the second indochina war, 1960-75, not just the US involvement.

Fun, huh?
 
  

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