SV: SV: SV: Rajaram's bull

[Stephen Hodge]

Nanda Chandran wrote:

> Do children in Germany study that their countrymen not so long ago,
> did away with six million Jews?

Yes, they do.

> Take the case of Britain - that that British brutalized the Celts
and
> the Picts is well remembered by the affected peoples.
Hhhm !    Who are these "British" you refer to ?   At the time you
seem to be alluding to, the Celts and probably the Picts WERE the
British !  It was the Romans (who you omit from your catalogue of
oppressors) who initially suppressed the Celts in the province of
Britannia.  The Picts suffered at the hands of both the Romans and the
invading Scots from Ireland.  In many of their conquered territories,
the Romans acted much as the Nazis did in Europe -- after the
Boudiccan uprising in the 1st century CE, the Romans crucified over
40,000 people.  I often suspect that the many examples of cruelty of
which later Europeans are guilty derives from the legacy of Roman
culture via the power structure of Christianity.

> But how well documented is this part of history in England?
Quit well if one bothers to look.

> How well documented is
> the savagery let loose on the aborigines of England by sucessive
bands
> of Saxons and Normans - the rapes, the pillages, the decapitations,
the
> cultural repression?
Again, quite well documented but note that the inhabitants of the
British Isles at that time were also not "aborigines" -- they (the
Celts) in their turn were invading colonists who wiped out the earlier
inhabitants who in their turn were new-comers.   I also surprised that
you do not mention our friends the Vikings.  Your suggestion of
cultural repression in the case of the Saxons may be over-stated -- it
has been well known for a long time that there was an eventual
synthesis of Celtic and Saxon culture as can be seen in the decorative
art in the Lindisfarne Gospels and elsewhere.  The Normans were
probably responsible for greater repression than the Saxons.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge