Almost everyday I find myself deleting an FB response because it will not endear me to the originator of the post. Sometimes these are quite long and thoughtful, and perhaps worth jotting down here.
In response to a post about a survey that discovered "shockingly" that 44% of people were "proud of the British Empire", which is clearly not something you are allowed to say in polite society, because you really need to be lacerating your breast and howling with shame, I posted this:
"I am neither proud nor ashamed, it was what it was, none of us were there to bring our 21stC liberal values into the frame. A few people black and white began to speak about the iniquities of it and gradually it faded away - that's history. So many people judge the past by contemporary values. And we tend to keep to the more recent past - I don't hear people getting all uptight about the feudal system in Europe, yet for centuries, millions of European peasants had to put in backbreaking toil for their feudal overlords in exchange for having a small patch of land on which to subsist...right up to the 19thC in some parts of Europe."
In response to a post about a survey that discovered "shockingly" that 44% of people were "proud of the British Empire", which is clearly not something you are allowed to say in polite society, because you really need to be lacerating your breast and howling with shame, I posted this:
"I am neither proud nor ashamed, it was what it was, none of us were there to bring our 21stC liberal values into the frame. A few people black and white began to speak about the iniquities of it and gradually it faded away - that's history. So many people judge the past by contemporary values. And we tend to keep to the more recent past - I don't hear people getting all uptight about the feudal system in Europe, yet for centuries, millions of European peasants had to put in backbreaking toil for their feudal overlords in exchange for having a small patch of land on which to subsist...right up to the 19thC in some parts of Europe." 
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