Robert Clive was a vicious asset-stripper. His statue has no place on Whitehall | William Dalrymple
Having read this, I dont understand why the statue was ever erected and why it is still in situ
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Because there isn't a country on earth with such a troubled relationship with its past as us.
"In Britain, study of the empire is still largely absent from the history curriculum. This still tends to go from the Tudors to the Nazis, Henry to Hitler, with a brief visit to William Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale along the way. We are thus given the impression that the British were always on the side of the angels. We remain almost entirely ignorant about the long history of atrocities and exploitation that accompanied the building of our colonial system. Now, more than ever, we badly need to understand what is common knowledge elsewhere: that for much of history we were an aggressively
racist and expansionist force responsible for violence, injustice and war crimes on every continent.
We also need to know how far the British, every bit as much as the Germans, helped codify a system of scientific
racism, creating a hierarchy of race that put white Caucasians at the top and blacks, “wandering Jews” and Indian Muslims at the bottom. Yet while the Germans have faced up to the darkest periods of their past, and are taught about it unvarnished in their schools, we have not even made a start to this process. Instead, while we understand that the Belgian and German empires were deeply sinister, the Raj, we like to believe, was like some enormous rose-tinted Merchant Ivory film writ large over the plains of Hindustan, all parasols and Simla tea parties, friendly elephants and handsome, croquet-playing maharajahs.
This has become a real problem. Our vast ignorance of everything that is most uncomfortable about our imperial past is damaging, every day, our relations with the rest of the world. In particular our misplaced
nostalgia for our imperial past is encouraging us to overplay our
Brexit hand. Contrary to fantasies of Brexiters, our former colonies are not about to warmly embrace us. Nor can we kickstart the empire, as if it were some sort of old motorbike that has been left in a garage for 70 years. The strategy of trying to strike trade deals with Commonwealth countries - dubbed Empire 2.0 by some in the Civil Service – has been a total failure."
