Looks like not a lot has changed!

oct 27th, 2006

the only difference is that the whites are in india now, not in the uk.

btw, the only globally competitive UK business these days is financial services, right: so they've gone from being a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of moneylenders. and the money they are lending is money they stole from us!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ga

A hundred years of rule over India

Friday October 2, 1936
The Guardian

[Extracts from a letter written by the Nobel prize-winning philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore to an English friend]

You know that of all the Western peoples who have direct dealings with alien races I respect most the British people. Many things have recently happened in our country to wound us to the quicks.

In spite of it all, I still say that there are other great nations in Europe who exercise dominion over foreign peoples. And we cannot but heave a sigh of relief whenever we recall that it is not they who are our rulers.

We admire the United States from a distance, because we have no relations with her. But, apart from her inhuman treatment of the Negroes, the instances of rank injustice, perpetrated by her highest courts of law are such as do not fortunately belong to our normal experience in India.

I have seen many great Englishmen. They stand up against wrong, whether done by others or their countrymen. These may not be statesmen, for statesmen are not usually reckoned as the true representatives of the nation.

If the persons wielding political power in England had been able to ignore the silent judgment of the great minds in their country, they might have succeeded in levelling to the dust all the best canons of humanity - as has been done in Germany.

I admit my admiration of British character does is not much more than a comparative statement. It is inhuman enough for us, as you must have found from political prisoners, in the prime of their youth, coming out to die after a few years of gaol, miserably broken in health and spirit. And it is but meagre consolation to us to think that it could even have been worse.

The chronic want of food and water, the lack of sanitation and medical help, the neglect of means of communication, the poverty of educational provision, the all-pervading spirit of depression that prevail in our villages after over a hundred years of British rule make me despair of its beneficence. I state my conclusion that what is responsible for our condition in the so-called British Empire is the yawning gulf between its dominant and subjugated sections.

On the other hand, it has to be recognised that there is an inevitableness in the fate that has overtaken Hindu India. We have divided and subdivided ourselves into mince-meat, not fit to live but only to be swallowed. Never up to now has our disjointed society been able to ward off any threatening evil.

Rabindranath Tagore

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1885545,00.html