Saturday, January 07, 2006

Gott almighty

Now I always knew that Richard Gott was an Soviet Spy, (or I suppose more properly 'an agent of influence') and thus was hardly worth taking seriously, but this really astounded me. It shouldn't I suppose, after all he did want my world to be destroyed and conquered by the architects of the Gulag. (Why does the Guardian keep on paying him?) However in this book review, of Maya Janasoff's fascinating Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting on the Eastern Frontiers of the British Empire, 1750-1850, he seems to come to the conclusion that we should have been finished off at leats 150 years earlier, indeed by the French revolution.
"Britain was largely engaged - in Ireland, South Africa and the West Indies as well as in India - in what was essentially a "counter-revolutionary" war against Jacobinism. In fighting against France, the country that had launched the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the British were laying the groundwork for a permanently counter-revolutionary empire that would keep those rights low on the agenda."
Has the man never heard of the massive increases in human rights occasioned by, to pick one, the abolition of the slave trade, or did he not notice that, having announced that all the slaves we free the French quickly rounded up Toussaint L'Ouverture's rebellion and consigned many of them to death. The man really is a shower.

2 comments:

Automatic_Wing said...

Yes, that Napoleon was a real progressive, he was.

The Aunt said...

Yes, no pin-up for women's legal rights he.

I'm glad I don't live under a modern Code Napoleon. Check out French West Africa. You can't leave a country without your father or husband's permission.

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