Communities: The English and their History

[C C]

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...776&cn=139

EXCERPT: Robert Tombs massive volume is 1040 pages long; the unabridged audiobook is 43 hours. But it is possible to dip in and out of "The English and Their History" and take breaks between chapters. [...] "The English and their History" is an impressive and even though it is very long, it does not become boring. At this stage of world events, looking at history helps to see how we have survived so many changes and difficult times....

[Ben the Donkey]

One thing I've always noticed about the English, historically speaking, is that over the last couple of thousand years, they've been through and survived everything other oppressed peoples complain about.

[C C]

One thing I've always noticed about the English, historically speaking, is that over the last couple of thousand years, they've been through and survived everything other oppressed peoples complain about.

Does raise the question of what the expiration date should be on cultural and ideological grudges. The Sunni–Shia schism and animosity, for example, would probably still be going strong a thousand years hence if not for technology radically changing something about the human condition eventually (extinction, if not cyborgs and hive-minds).

Just short of making them into holidays which venerate victimhood as a status symbol, the institutionalisation of both recent and dredged-up older eras and and assorted types of oppression provides intermittent to full-time job security generations to come for those in the clubhouse beating the drums and profiting from ancestral woes. But depending upon the region, it may take more decades than most just to get a clubhouse rolling. I suspect the survivors and descendants of the communist purge in Indonesia are still a touch afraid to fully come out of the woodwork with their grievances, even after some of the faded persecutors have started expressing tentative remorse in their old age.

[Ben the Donkey]

You do have a knack for writing quite succinct summaries of what I might have tried to say if I had the energy... or ability. That's pretty much what I had in mind.

You know, when confronted with an Aboriginal going on about the Australian invasion 200 hundred years ago, and how they want their land back, I'm often tempted to agree - on the proviso they could set me up with a nice little plot in England that my ancestors probably had before those pesky Celts, Romans, Saxons, Jutes, Angles, Vikings, Normans (more or less the same mob I suppose), French, or wotnot stole it from them. I've so far managed to refrain from doing so, because I'm not a terribly good fighter.
We really need some sort of Statute of Limitations on this kind of thing.

I actually think that all of the violence and commotion is what makes English history so fascinating. They've probably been invaded, subjugated, and culturally dispossessed over the centuries as much as anyone, and yet no one seems to really take that into account.