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The US is worse by the numbers and yet the US is the UK's fault
Like, what the US is is the UK's colonists sent to do their dirty work they couldn't stomach directly - genocide and slavery - while they still profited from it
And in a sense that's more contemptible https://twitter.com/innesmck/status/1340591238001664000
Like, what the US is is the UK's colonists sent to do their dirty work they couldn't stomach directly - genocide and slavery - while they still profited from it
And in a sense that's more contemptible https://twitter.com/innesmck/status/1340591238001664000
The American Revolution, in the end, was hardly an admirable cause - it ended up being the US's elites going "If we're gonna be doing all this slavery and genocide we're keeping the goddamn money" - and yet seen in this light how can you not feel great contempt for the UK
Generations of wealthy Brits sitting in their green little island sipping their tea and making wry jokes about their charmingly antiquated folkways while the greatest human suffering ever imagined in history occurs over three centuries across five continents to pay for their shit
Orwell diagnosed this, writing in the 40s, as a Brit who was very defensive of English culture in his way and yet tried to be realistically self deprecating about it, especially in comparison to America
That as someone who'd been abroad as an agent of Empire in India he thought he recognized the ugliness in American culture, the crassness and viciousness that permeated US society and media from his POV, the casual, arrogant cruelty
America was born in blood, raised in it, soaked in it, and Americans were never very far from the places that blood had been spilled and never went long without seeing the blood on their hands
While Britain went to all this effort to hide the blood, flee from it, wall it away
While Britain went to all this effort to hide the blood, flee from it, wall it away
And for that Americans held an ancient hatred and contempt for their parent country, and you couldn't even blame them
Like Orwell quitting his job as a cop in India full of self-loathing and self-pity and then came to despise the people back home even more
Like Orwell quitting his job as a cop in India full of self-loathing and self-pity and then came to despise the people back home even more
"Anyone else can judge me but not you
I did it FOR YOU, you stupid old man"
I did it FOR YOU, you stupid old man"
Like fuck I'm so sick of Brits going off about how they have the NHS because they're a smarter, more rational and compassionate society than the US
Americans are a subspecies of people who are just too stupid and greedy to see that it's the right thing to do
Seriously fuck you
Americans are a subspecies of people who are just too stupid and greedy to see that it's the right thing to do
Seriously fuck you
No, you know what the difference is?
The UK passed socialized medicine because they felt they could pay for it from the profits of colonial exploitation abroad for a population of mostly white people in Britain
The NHS was bought with the spoils of Empire
The UK passed socialized medicine because they felt they could pay for it from the profits of colonial exploitation abroad for a population of mostly white people in Britain
The NHS was bought with the spoils of Empire
The US has very substantial ethnic minority populations consisting of the descendants of people who were enslaved and trafficked here and people from whom the land was seized
Socialized medicine would be redistribution of wealth from colonizers to colonized
So they said no
Socialized medicine would be redistribution of wealth from colonizers to colonized
So they said no
The thing they did instead of socialized or single-payer medicine, employer-provided group health insurance, they did specifically because that's LIKE socialized health care but something you can limit to a subset of the population
Everyone who, say, worked at Ford could be treated *as though* they lived in a social democracy with a welfare safety net, they could gatekeep Black people from working there and pretend they didn't exist, and in the prosperity of the 50s they thought that could last forever
It's race
It's always race, which is to say it's always the legacy of colonization, genocide and slavery, which is something that Brits get to pretend doesn't affect them because they did it and turned around and walked away
It's always race, which is to say it's always the legacy of colonization, genocide and slavery, which is something that Brits get to pretend doesn't affect them because they did it and turned around and walked away
NHS would've been a much harder sell to the British voting populace if it applied to the whole population of India too, wouldn't it? Or the former possessions in the Caribbean?
Or if the AmRev hadn't happened and you had to pay for healthcare for Black people in Alabama
Or if the AmRev hadn't happened and you had to pay for healthcare for Black people in Alabama
But no, they divested from Empire when it got too troublesome and expensive, kept the money, went into retirement and tried to pretend they've always been one of the nice countries
Cracking their shitty jokes "Indigenous studies? Well here English history IS indigenous", har har
Cracking their shitty jokes "Indigenous studies? Well here English history IS indigenous", har har
