The Second Stain: Some Recent Colonial Developments

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Title: The Second Stain: Some Recent Colonial Developments
Author: gardnerhill                        
Word Count: 60                     
Rating: G
Warning:
Summary: The letter.

***

To the Queen of England and her ministers:

How can your hearts let you sleep at night – with the blood of children, old people and women dripping from our bales of tea and cotton? Would that I could show you the British soldiers standing over pits full of tiny bodies, make you hear their mothers' cries!

Arjun, Rajah of Nizamabad

Comments

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

A cry that went unheard.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

What a very bloodless euphemism that phrase is - once you learn some actual history of the Raj.

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

True nonetheless. Add to which the opium wars. You can't run an empire without ensuring the cooperation of the peoples by whatever means necessary.

A bit like stealing a letter which could have great consequences to protect yourself and not caring who suffers in the process.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Yes, the part that wasn't a mystery. Ugh.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

I'd love for some rogue animatronics people to redo the Disneyland Jungle Cruise to show the REAL horrors of those exotic lands - little Congo kids toiling in tea fields with missing hands, British soldiers shooting Indian strikers, South African diamond mines...

[debriswoman]

Yes...so much more to be said, and be horrified by...

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

When you think of the adventure stories written about the Empire's holdings during that time - and you've learned some real history about what happened - you just shake your head and think, "And we called THEM savages."