Dumb Ideologies wrote:South Reinkalistan wrote:Since when were you the arbiter of what rhetoric is constituent of "doing liberal ideology"? I am merely stating what I see to be the case: your take is grounded in sentiment and irrationality. You consider your history to be more important to that of your contemporaries. Britain has committed atrocities -- our modern society leaves much to be desired. To recognise this objective fact at the expense of an abstract notion of heritage is no curse. This is not an inherently liberal outlook.
Funny story is that those who disagree with you will believe your take to be sentimental and irrational, based on guilt and so on. You criticise that I am making myself some final arbiter but then you are continually pretending to speak from some universal position of rationality, a characteristically liberal move.
Your belief is that I am trying to silence black history, whereas I believe that minorities and their tame liberals are trying far more than to allow their ideas to be heard but instead to marginalise and not permit stories told from the point of view of whites. You are stating opinion very thinly masked with constant rhetorical claims that any other position is abstract, sentimental or irrational. Ironically this shares a lot of ground with which the black history lot criticised the formerly mainstream versions of history back when the liberal was supporting those ideas. The liberal tries to speak from the position of the universal because it allows him to permit other people to have their say but he then denigrates all other opinions for not meeting his enlightened "objective" standards, which of course would entail agreeing with what he has already decided since he has created the "objective" in his own image.
At the risk of perpetuating a back-and-forth:
Our history is predominately portrayed from the white British perspective. While taking into account the political realities of the British Empire, we must acknowledge that our perspectives are skewed by this bias. Through education, through media, through every level in which British history can be portrayed, it will invariably change how we think and view our history. It is undoubtedly necessary that we must review this and take a more wary stance when it comes to how we portray and perceive history. Could this be used to skew it the other way? Maybe. But is it better than doing nothing? Yes. I'll view it with scepticism, as I do most things, but it's clear that your view is predicated on heritage, something that is, yes, abstract. As shown by your language, you believe some rather nasty things about minorities -- the idea that they have "tame liberals", as if they're puppeteering liberalism to enforce a supposedly uniform minority agenda. You're fighting what you perceive to be an affront to your culture and history with affronts to minority culture and history. This is not, and is never, the way to get your views across.