There is a danger that when criticising the British Empire for all its exploitation and evils – like the violent takeover of large territories around the world; displacement of people from their ancestral lands; genocide of countless groups, tribes and ethnicities; complete extinctions of some groups, such as the Aboriginal of Tasmania – some people will use past historical events to generate nationalistic hatred again Britain and its non-ethnic minority people.
This is neither wise nor can be justified in any way according to valid rational 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 used to justifiably 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 hold the current generations responsible for the crimes of previous and past generations. This is based on a misunderstanding of responsibility, human revenge instincts and the inability to use critical thinking and moral sense to understand right from wrong because in some people these qualities 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 of 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 future working and living togetherness.
There are many things, both good and bad, with respect to present-day Britain. We have a duty 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 people that have been wronged in the past.
The injustices suffered by the Aboriginal people, Native Americans and the 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. Our duty is 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 conflicts between peoples, where some group from future generations who had no role in any of the wrongs of the past will be continually driven to cause conflict with and pain to other innocent human beings, who also have had no roles in the wrongs of the past.