Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Empire of Good Intentions Blog

The movie Empire of Good Intentions showed me a lot that I did not know because I have never really been that interested in history. The biggest thing it showed me was that not all bad things happen at the hands of historically "bad" people. In other words, the famous tyrannical rulers I have heard about are not the only wrong doers in history. The previous sentences make me sound extremely naive, but that is not really the case. I am pretty aware of major historical events and all the players involved with them, but I suppose I never really took to the time to examine or evaluate any. After seeing the movie, I have become aware that even historically good people or empires had their shortcomings. For instance, I never knew that the Irish potato famine devastated the Irish people while the British simply looked away. I guess I always assumed that they would have tried to help given the catastrophic nature of the situation, with one third of the population dying or fleeing the country. I guess I was wrong.
One thing I was not surprised to see in the movie was a sense of extreme arrogance from the British. It said that they wanted to turn the Indians into brown Englishman and that they would use western education to transfrom India into a successful country. This type of arrogance has been prevalent throughout history when looking at world powers, and it can still be seen today. Millions of people across the world view America as having a very similar attitude. The only difference is that we are not attempting to colonize other countries, except maybe Iraq.

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