• 🇬🇧󠁿 🇸🇪 🇿🇦 🇮🇪 🇬🇭 🇩🇪 🇪🇺
    European & African
    Drug Discussion

    Welcome Guest!
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
  • EADD Moderators: Shambles

Romany & gypsy are we tolerant in Europe ?

Obviously the people who committed the 200 odd years of injustices have a lot of work to do in gaining anyone's respect
Click to expand...
Who are those people? I know I didn't commit 200 years of injustice; I was born in 1988. Don't oppress minorities, so far as I'm aware. If I had slaves, I'd free them, but I never have. I wouldn't hand out plague blankets, I think it's off. Feeling guilt for the transgressions of one's progenitors is such a Teutonic trait, not really befitting an Englishman.
 
^ I'm not an Englishman, and I edited that sentence before I saw yr post.

Do we collectively have a responsibility - culturally, historically, ethically - for the sins if our forefathers?
If we are serious about healing and fostering some kind of unity, I would say, to some extent - yes.
Collective guilt is still guilt, even if individuals personally played no part in it.

Denying the past and ignoring history has a way of furthering mistrust and disharmony IMHO
 
I'm really not into collective guilt. I accept absolutely no responsibility for things that people did before I was born. Leave that to the Hun. I am neither my brother's keeper nor my great-grandfather's.
 
Yes you misunderstood, I assumed we were talking about living brothers and great-grandfathers, as dead ones don't (usually) need kept.
 
spacejunk said:
Do we collectively have a responsibility - culturally, historically, ethically - for the sins if our forefathers?
If we are serious about healing and fostering some kind of unity, I would say, to some extent - yes.
Collective guilt is still guilt, even if individuals personally played no part in it.
Click to expand...
Look at it this way .....

We tend to go a little easier on someone who is too young to know the difference between right and wrong, and is unable to grasp the consequences of their actions, than we would on someone who was fully aware of exactly what damage they were doing for the sake of their own gratification but went ahead and did it anyway. When harm results from ignorance, and to a lesser extent carelessness, as opposed to a deliberate act, then we tend to prefer to treat it as a lesson for the perpetrator, and give them another chance to better themself. Consider the difference between how society views a kid playing with matches through being fascinated with fire, and a serial arsonist; or between games of "Doctors and Nurses" motivated by simple curiosity about the similarities and differences between people's bodies, and full-on child abuse.

Well, in the past, we thought differently than we do today, because we did not know any better. If you genuinely believe that illness is caused by demons entering the body, then it is quite reasonable to cut holes in skulls to allow the demons to escape as a cure. Can you blame people for not having made scientific discoveries? Advances in medicine are probably the greatest factor in our belief that human lives are not expendable. When plenty of people were dying for no reason at all, then what could have seemed so wrong with a few extra dying for a good reason? Easy access to long-distance transport has demonstrated first-hand to many people that those who live in other countries are just the same as us. When people lived in isolated groups, it was very easy to consider all outsiders as lesser beings.

Our ancestors deserve to be cut a little slack, because they did not know any better.
spacejunk said:
Denying the past and ignoring history has a way of furthering mistrust and disharmony IMHO
Click to expand...
Quoted for Truth.
 
It does not have to be collective guilt. But if we are prepared to live off the benefits of our ancestors then we should at least acknowledge how those benefits were obtained and act accordingly. The alternative is people like MentalKenny stating western European white man worked hard and so reaped the benefits when the reality is, for example, cities such as Bristol and Liverpool being built on the slave trade and our transport infrastructure, from canals to roads and rail being built by navvies, largely from Ireland. And they didn't get rich on it.
 
Navigator - The Pogues

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh0F41AvO_Q

I think this says it all.

The canals and the bridges, the embankments and cuts,
They blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts
They never drank water but whiskey by pints
And the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights.

Navigator, navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done.
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
Yes to shift a few tons of this earthly delight.

They died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where
Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur.
By landslide and rockblast they got buried so deep
That in death if not life they'll have peace while they sleep.

Their mark on this land is still seen and still laid
The way for a commerce where vast fortunes were made
The supply of an empire where the sun never set
Which is now deep in darkness, but the railway's there yet.

zshane-macgowan_zps6eec2529.png
[/URL][/IMG]
 
Last edited:
Yes, what SHM and the Pogues, channelled by MDB, said (my broadband's been disconnected so I'm tethered to a phone and I can't see Julie's video, vodafone seem to have blocked Flash, which is probably wise as I'm eating up my allowance at a rate of knots). People saying "Sorry!" for murder, enslavement, and brutal exploitation committed by their ancestors or those of someone of the same skin colour is sort of not really satisfactory and seems more self-serving than anything else. But to wilfully ignore historical fact and pretend we're all on a "level playing field" now that some time has passed is even worse.

I used to think history was boring but the more I learn about the world, the more I realise that the only way to understand it is by learning about history and seeing how it shapes our present conditions, which are not some fixed reality but the product of processes which have developed over thousands of years, and which continue during and after our lifetimes.
 
History is so open to interpretatiuon though. Even with the facts right infront of them the various historians draw completely different conclusions from them. I agree that History is more interesting the more you know about it, and the more you look into it. I was very lucky to have a brilliant History teacher for my O level and A level in the subject. If he could get the laziest of bastards like me to get a C grade before the whole education system went to shit then he must have been good.
 
Yes it's all about sources and I too had brilliant O level and A level teachers. Particularly my O level teacher who was a Tory (he was a local councillor) but gave me the freedom to express pro-IRA, let alone pro-republican sympathies at 16.

Similar at A level, different college, different teacher. Knew I was a Marxist (he certainly wasn't) so gave me a tutorial to do on "Marx and the cash nexus". I liked Marx but had never heard of the cash nexus. Did my research and did my pro-Marx tutorial. He then said (and he was near retirement) "that is the best tutorial I have ever heard from the mouth of a 17 year old".

Yeah, blowing my own trumpet but these things stick in your mind and I'm feeling shit today so...
 
Why not. There's no need for false modesty. I can well believe what he said was true aswell. At uni most of my work was shit as i just want interested, funnily enough i got well over first class honours marks for my essays on Drugs and Society though :)

That seemed to amuse everyone very much. A sudden increase from doing the bare minimum to scrape a pass to scoring 96% or something. I really want to be a drugs worker or counsellor when i get myself more sorted out. I feel like its my destiny, if that doesnt sound too much like Goran Ivanovitch when he won Wimbledon.
 
Last edited:
This is why I think it is outrageous when anarcho-capitalists -- I refuse to taint the positive word "libertarian" by allowing it to be associated with sociopaths like that, even at the distance afforded by a capital L and "fright marks" -- want to allow infrastructure to go to rack and ruin, rather than admit the necessity of taxation. The sewers, the roads, the water pipelines, the canals, the railways, the electrical grid -- people paid for all these things with their lives. And just because life then seems cheap by the standards we know today, does not mean that families and communities were any less devastated by their losses.

Allowing the infrastructure that was built at such high human cost to fall into disrepair would be the ultimate insult to the memories of those who built it. Every time you switch on the light, travel by train, flush the toilet, drive a mass-produced car on a paved road or accept treatment under the National Health Service, you are benefitting from the actions and the sacrifices of those who came before. All these things are enormously positive in their own right, and we should not feel guilty for a moment about taking advantage of them. The best way we can demonstrate our gratitude to the workers of the past is by fully appreciating their legacy; making full use of, maintaining and expanding upon the systems they built, in order for no-one ever to have to go through the ordeal of building it all over again. They certainly did not build the railways to close down and make short-term profits for shareholders.

** EDIT **
A posthumous pardon for Alan Turing is an empty gesture in a world where anybody still thinks he was even a criminal in the first place.
 
Last edited:
Yes, sources come with biases, and it pays to seek out non-mainstream sources. It seems to me, though, that we live within history so we can see for ourselves how history works and apply that knowledge to the interpretation of events which took place before our time.

For example (an example I'm stealing from someone else) in this article reacting to Russell Brand's call to spurn voting, Robin Lustig suggests that the election of the ANC was the pivotal event in the ending of Apartheid in South Africa, whereas anyone who was aware of current events in the years leading up to that election, any rational person, would conclude that what ended Apartheid was not a vote but decades of struggle against the racist ruling class and their government. If no-one had voted in that election would the Apartheid regime have brushed itself down and carried on like it had been given the green light to resume? I think not.

By extension one can conclude that the creation of the NHS was the cumulative effect of many years of worker's militancy whereas mainstream history makes out that it was the result of installing a Labour government.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top