mostly nuggets

blessed britons

The truth is, though, that Britain has never even faced up to the dark side of its imperial history, let alone begun to apologise.

— Richard Drayton

Senior lecturer in imperial and extra-European history at Cambridge University

mad world

[At Nuremberg] the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime. The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so on—those aren’t crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it’s not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defence a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we did.’ And, therefore, they weren’t sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved.

— Noam Chomsky

On Responsibility, War Guilt and Intellectuals

fitting people for the world

Submitted by antarchi on June 3, 2007 - 14:14.

The teacher's task is ... to 'fill' the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge. And since people receive the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better 'fit' for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.