By M Ahmedullah

(From a Facebook post on 7 June 2016)

There is a danger that when criticising the British Empire for all its crimes – exploitation of people around the world in unprecedented ways; the violent takeover of large tracts of lands around the world; displacement of people from their ancestral lands; genocides of countless peoples and complete extinctions of some groups, such as the Tasmanian people – it can be used and become the basis for nationalistic hatred of Britain and its non-ethnic minority people.

This is not wise and cannot be justified by any valid rationalistic and moral reasoning. For one thing, just like children cannot be held responsible for the sins or crimes of their fathers, what the British imperialists did in the past centuries cannot be justifiably used to hold current generations of non – ethnic minority British citizens or British institutions responsible.

However, many people, in reality, do hold children responsible for the sins, imagined or real, of their fathers or the current generations responsible for the crimes of previous or past generations. This is based on misunderstanding, revenge instincts and the inability to use critical thinking and moral sense because in them these senses are undeveloped. Sometimes certain people use revenge instincts as a strategy to influence and instigate others, who are less developed in their critical and moral thinking, to hate others based on misguided historical interpretations of rights and wrongs in the past and how wrongs of the past can be made right now or in the future.

Those who hold current generations responsible for previous generations, inevitably, want to right the imagined or real wrongs of the past by hurting current and future generations who had no role in the wrongs of the past. Nationalistic type hatred is not a solution to the sins of the past but a danger to world peace and the future working together of humanity.

There are many things good and bad concerning present-day Britain. We have to continue to study, understand and criticise the horrible crimes of the British overseas expansion and its Empire for all the pains and sufferings of the past and their legacy, many of which continue to affect us negatively, within Britain and around the world. We should be looking at how we can learn good lessons from the past and utilise the British state and its institutions to right the wrongs of the past, not by undermining the state but by working to promote more equality and justice for the descendants of the people that have been wronged in the past who continue to suffer as a result.

The injustices suffered by the Aboriginal people, Native Americans and Palestinians, for example, at the hands of the British Empire/overseas expansion need addressing today as there are current victims who are suffering and marginalised due to British imperialism. We have to learn lessons from the past, through objective studies, and do whatever we can to bring justice to the surviving descendants of British imperial crimes. At the same time, we should always look out for and oppose the development of any nationalistic hatred through the study of history.

Nationalistic hatred and revenge instincts are not only not a remedy for past wrongs but a recipe for the continuation and enlargement of conflict between peoples and cause pain to innocent human beings who had no roles in the wrongs of the past.