left, on the paper: "the positive role of colonisation"
right, "I have prepared a text on the positive role of torture"


In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Our national holiday is the hispanity day, we celebrate and recall the genocidie of thousands of indians in the hands of spanish conquerors in South and Cnetral America..

Look, if we can celebrate a genocide, I do not see why you could not point out the excelence of slavery and colonization.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Frankly, in secondary school we barely touched on colonisation. In essence we just skipped over it. From Glorious Revolution to World War One somehow we missed it.

In primary school however, we got a good dose of the greatness of Empire. Not really a deep perversion of the facts, more just a direction towards pretty artefacts and steam engines and the like.

The propaganda element came more from the old films on TV more than anything.

Fortunately for me, my father (being Indian) had firm views on the downsides of British colonisation, so I did get a balanced view, but no thanks to my education.

And this was passed last February, without much fanfare as a trailer to another law about veteran soldiers compensation. Very few people took notice.

Now that the smelly material has eventually hit the proverbial fan, Chirac & Villepin are frantically trying to extricate themselves out of the mudhole, without hurting their own troops.

Since the outbursts of urban violence last month, there's been a resurgence of racial slurs in France, notably (that's the adjective du jour) from right wing lawmakers.

Just yesterday, commenting on Sarkozy's postponed trip to the French Caribbean, Lionnel Luca, deputy (UMP) of the Alpes-Maritimes district, talked about "a tempest in a teapot" and added that "those in the Caribbean who are making parallels with slavery are not above accepting welfare checks from the former colonists!".

Yep, there are jerks everywhere, even in the French Parliament; what do you know... Welfare queens driving a Cadillac can't be far behind I expect.

Jerome is regularly highlighting the casual slurring of the Frenchs in the British press, but we can find plenty of this in our very own press these days.

Second one: When I was in public high school (2000-04), we learned about some of the more nasty aspects of U.S. imperialism.  Things such as our abominable conduct in Hawaii in the 1800's, the Spanish-American War, our wars in Latin America, and of course the Indian Wars from the English colonies until 1890.  It was far more in-depth when I entered college, but my public education did give us an basic idea that all was not as good as others would have us believe.