Stalin maintained that if Britain had the right to control the Suez canal regardless of what the Egyptians felt and likewise the United States had the right to control the Panama canal regardless of what the Panamanians felt, then so too did the Soviet Union have the right to control the Turkish straits regardless of what the Turks felt.
—from ‘The percentages agreement‘
French coffee shop owner Aleaume Paturle explains that in the past coffee from French colonies could be imported back to France duty-free, and the crop planted in places like Vietnam and Laos was the Robusta variety rather than the more prized Arabica.
Robusta, as the name suggests, is more hardy but the taste isn’t as rich and sometimes it’s over-roasted to give it more aroma. In general this makes for a more bitter, rougher taste, more notes of burnt wood and ashtray than chocolate or vanilla.
— Inrng, in Café Culture in France
All the same if you buy some Segafredo in Italy it tends to have this same taste, compared to the smoother varieties from Lavazza or Illy.
Many Britons have grown up believing their homeland saved and civilised the world, while atrocities, genocide and human rights abuses often go unmentioned. Successive governments have failed to narrow this knowledge gap, whether by setting up truth commissions, establishing a museum of colonialism or teaching schoolchildren about colonialism as part of the standard curriculum.
Why do archive files on Britain’s colonial past keep going missing? | Siobhan Fenton
… in the post-colonial period is that a democratic Indian government endeavored to invest more in the health and education of more citizens, however imperfectly this was implemented. The British, in contrast, supplied fewer public goods and too often the expenditures were directed toward defending British rule, extracting revenue or ensuring India as a captive market for British goods.
Legacy of British Rule Is Still Holding India Back, April 13, 2017 at 05:10 PM
Both of these are largely forgotten, if not deliberately erased.
Many Indians tend to blame post-colonial democratic governments for bringing India down.
Most British students are barely taught the reality of British colonial rule from perspective of the colonised.
Use my marker 