>And then there is Botswana - if it wasn't for AIDs...
That seems to be a place where they got it right and the locals built on the good parts after independence.
Compared to Zaire, the Congoa, Chad, Sierra Leone, Rwanda ...
Rhodesia may have been the epitome of third generation colonialism - but it certainly wasn't Zimbabwe and whatever his faults Ian Smith wasn't Mugabe.
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>>But is wasn't the partitioning that was the problem, it was that you had people on the wrong side of the line at the end ( and the issue of disputed territory - Kashmir and some of Punjab - that was never really settled.) Think Yugoslavia or Iraq, I guess.
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>>Besides - this was not the problem of Empire but of the dissolution of Empire. True of a great deal of the post_colonial era. The Congo was certainly a hell-hole under the Belgians but it didn't exactly evolve to paradise on earth.
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>>South Africa was a bad place to be black under apartheid and Rhodesia was another example of minority tribe rule being problematic. But black minority tribe rule has had the same - and in most cases much more bloody - results.
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>>Rwanda would have benefitted nicely from a stern colonial administration in the 90s - even if it were French.
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>>The parts of India and Pakistan ( and the US ) that are most hopeful are often the legacy of the Brits.
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>>They bungled a lot, muddled through a lot, but did a better job of it than any other civilization ever has and left an imprint more positive than negative. They also managed to rule a quarter of the population of the earth and they did more through guile than guns. ( oddly, the boneheaded bungling that lost them the American Colonies was probably one of the low points )
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>>>>I think historic credentials are quite sufficient that England never be put in the column marked "cheese eating surrender monkeys" <g>
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>>>>I do think we have a great deal to learn from our cousins about running an empire without making too much of a mess.
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>>>
>>>Ahem. Read anything about the partitioning of India? (I'm sure you have).
>>>
>>>Whenever I am tempted by the appeal of splitting Iraq up along religious lines, I think of that example.
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
