Tag Archives: British empire

Hysteria meets facts about colonialism

The video below is of an attempted debate about British colonialism between historian & broadcaster Rafe Heydel-Mankoo and television personality Narinder Kaur.

While Rafe Heydel-Mankoo reels off basic facts about British colonialism, Narinder Kaur launches into a screaming rant. Kaur drops to the depths of imbecility with the accusation that Heydel-Mankoo ‘sounds quite mad.’

Narinder Kaur is representative of many female commentators – though most are younger than Kaur – whose views are driven solely by emotion, often wild emotion. They have an emotion about a particular issue, and that’s the end of it. Say what you want, it does not matter. Come with the most undisputed facts, it makes no difference. In Australia we have a clone of Kaur – Lidia Thrope. You could not meet a greater crackpot than Thorpe.

There are more than 5,000 comments on this ‘debate’. I have included two below that are representative.

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo has his own channel. I highly recommend it. His fluency and grasp of historical detail is impressive.

@jeremyphoenix1366

1 month agoI have a headache after listening to this woman. $500 hair , $300 nails, $1000 outfit, screaming at everyone on a public forum that she is somehow opressed by the people who gave her everything including the freedom to yell and scream at everyone. Bloody hell…..

@justinecooper9575

2 months agoA woman sitting there in beautiful clothes (well, to my eye anyway), perfectly styled hair, professionally applied makeup and in seemingly perfect health screaming that she’s not lucky. Poor thing.

British Colonialism – was it good or bad?

A long review of one’s cultural antecedents would reveal that the past has been a process of growth, adjustments, defeats, revival, consolidations until the present time. Take what I regard as Australian history. Time travel would take the majority of Australians back to the United Kingdom. From there, we would go back through the centuries, through migrations, invasions, colonization, and consolidation to the tribes of Northwestern Europe. From there one goes into the haze of pre-history or unrecorded history.

The point is that the above phases are a natural part of human history, a part of the nation into which one is born at a particular time. A country, a nation or a people is not illegitimate because it was the result of colonization and migration. Indeed, the new stable consolidation erases and supersedes whatever was prior to it.

However, one can make a moral and social judgment about a particular phase of migration and colonization. Prof. Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and canon of Christ Church Cathedral does so in his new book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning . Professor Biggar is interviewed by Peter Whittle on The New Culture Forum.