Posted on 06/22/2018 11:03:24 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Briefing by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova, Moscow, April 19, 2018
On April 13, UK Ambassador to Russia Laurie Bristow said that the Russian state has a record in state-sponsored assassinations including in the UK. It is not the first Russophobic statement made by a UK official...but its not the main point... Maybe the UK Ambassador does not know his own countrys history, role and involvement in processes that took place in other countries over the past centuries...
Lets start with modern history...Britain was one of the most ruthless metropolises in terms of the repressive actions it took in its colonies and dependent territories...Today we will be speaking about details. The establishment of concentration camps in the Boer War that later inspired the Nazis death camps, the cultural annihilation of kingdoms and palaces from Ashanti to Beijing, British army massacres in Ireland and the devastation of Bengal, the industrial-scale exploitation of natural resources and the slave trade...
"The Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin has a famous picture, The Devils Wind. This is not a symbolic comparison. The canvas shows a type of execution invented by the British to crush the 19th-century Sepoy Mutiny in India..."
"In the 1870s, on the orders of the British authorities, a genocide of Zulus was perpetrated in the Cape Colony and in 1954-1961 of the Kikuyu people in Kenya...The British authorities massacred 300,000 Kikuyus and sent 1.5 million to work camps. An account of these events is given in the book by Caroline Elkins titled The Untold Story of Britains Gulag in Kenya."
"In his book Inglorious Empire released in 2017, Dr Tharoor cited the atrocities of the British Empire, stating that Winston Churchill, should be regarded as one of the cruellest dictators of the 20th century..."
(Excerpt) Read more at mid.ru ...
Sorry, no. The communist chinese (mao) and communist russians (stalin/lenin) are still the top murderers by government action of their own people —— distantly followed by hitler.
Considering the source, they want to whitewash their own countries responsibilities
Yup. Her statements are fully in line with the manifestos of communists, Islamic terrorists, and PC police everywhere.
Nevermind that Brits like preacher William Wilberforce and John Wesley led the movement to abolish slavery and end the slave trade. Nevermind that freedom-fighters such as Ghandi were educated in Britain and used Britain's own Judeo-Christian political principles as the basis for India's independence and peaceful transition to democracy.
Nevermind that the US Constitution was founded on the groundwork laid already by British Common Law. Nevermind that the countries of the British Commonwealth in Africa, the Carribbean, and elsewhere are among the most Christian countries in the world today -- even as the Western world has lost much of their faith.
F.D.R referred to Stalin as "Uncle Joe" and plenty of libs in our government were and are Soviet sympathizers - or Soviet copycats, like the current Deep State is now despite claiming to be anti-Russia.
Putin, Zakharova, and Russia succeed today in hiding behind the "WWII Victory" banner, instead of being forced to acknowledge that Stalin turned out to be worse than Hitler. This is largely because of the U.S. govt's own legacy of whitewashing Soviet crimes as we allied with them militarily for a time.
See film: Mission to Moscow. At F.D.R.'s request: Stalin's purges and terrors were essentially justified in the name of defeating the Nazis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_Moscow
Never mind that Brits like preacher William Wilberforce and John Wesley led the movement to abolish slavery and end the slave trade.
Than being the case, it was the Brits than brought slaves to the US and it was the US that fought a war to free them.
freedom-fighters such as Ghandi: He's a piece of work in himself siding with Hitler, that other freedom-fighter.
Britain's own Judeo-Christian political principles as the basis for India's independence and peaceful transition to democracy.
Britain giving back independence to India from whom they took it in the first place and then arbitrarily drew a line and said: Hindu's here and Muslims up there.
Curry is a national dish in the U.K. There are British-Indians, British-Pakistanis, and British-Africans aplenty who have found their place and integrated successfully into British society throughout the decades. And if they don't live there, then happily exchange, study, trade, and do business with England and/or retain their "Commonwealth" status.
Oh and there's a half-black Princess now too. But Russian state TV did not air the Royal Wedding because it's "propaganda."
Meanwhile, what does Russia have to show for its Soviet legacy and satellite states. Let's see: NORTH KOREA for one. Kim Il Sung was handpicked by Stalin. - Cuba, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Syria, to name a FEW...
It's one thing if an Indian/African historian were recounting Britain's former sins, but it'a a whole other when it is a 1) spokesman for former KGB officer Putin, 2) in a country nostalgic for USSR's glory, 3) where Stalin is considered by many to be a hero-victor, and 4) Lenin's body still lies in open display in Red Square.
So they didn't totally abandon slavery.
Well it was the initial major step, while independence movements in India, South Africa, et al. followed later. Also, while Gandhi followed Christian political principles, he himself was Hindu - and I am not certain it’s fair to cast Britain with the full weight of historical Hindu vs. Muslim hostilities.
Of course I am not trying to dispute British guilt, but rather the hypocritical grounds on which Ms. Zakharova is speaking from. I think the British are doing a better job of wrestling and reconciling with their past. Some of the most moving World War I/II memorial services as of late have been organized by the Church of England and parties even from former enemy countries like Turkey (Ottoman Empire) are invited to attend. They can be viewed on youtube.
In person though, I have been to Russia’s “Victory” parades. They tend to be more self-serving and propagandistic. Glorifying of war in the same spirit that led to such wars in the 1st place.
How does that compare to how many Stalin killed.....let's see; 20,000,000 divide by 300,000 is what......
Indeed the hypocrisy of Ms. Zakharova is astounding. And unlike Russia, Britain acknowledges their past. If not overly so, to the point of political correctness.
“...Their side of the Great Patriotic War and its prior history leading up to and the end in Berlin...”
“Setting the Record Straight: How Stalin Used Hitler to Start World War II”
Interesting but not convincing; to me anyway.
Well the pro-Stalin narrative is doing humanity no favors. Easy to tow that line though. You weren’t on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Or in the middle - where you had to deal with BOTH Nazi and Soviet invasion/rape/occupation.
But my heart in history has to do with the spiritual and moral fabrics of events. I do not doubt that vibrant economic mobilization carried the day, but I believe we - imperfect though we are - held the moral high ground. And the USSR most certainly did not.
Lots of history books out there about both sides.
Honestly, even ignoring for one minute the fact that the Russians are being very hypocritical with decrying Britain of “genocidal actions” during World War I when the Russians under Lenin and Stalin managed to rack up an even bigger body count (and unlike the British or even the Germans who at least went to great pains to not only acknowledge them, but even go to extensive, almost suicidal extremes to make up for the crimes, they haven’t even properly acknowledged their crimes or paid for them at all, nor have they made any effort beyond tearing down a few statues to actually undo Communism’s legacy, even having Lenin’s mausoleum still up and running when they should have torched it when the USSR collapsed), Britain isn’t even the FIRST country to do genocide, either. Let’s not forget that before them, there was the Vendee Massacre during the French Revolution, which CAN be listed as a genocide since it involved a deliberate attempt at exterminating a particular group of people, the Vendee Region, and they did it specifically because of the latter’s religion. And don’t get me started on Islamic countries before even that time.
Shall we talk about Katyn?
There's actually another claim from the same era of being the first concentration camps: Spain in Cuba.
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