No, Not America this time, although we did ride the coat-tails of this idea, but rather Britain:

Michael Palin: Britons should stop apologising for their colonial past and be proud of our Empire’s achievements

By Neil Sears
Last updated at 8:38 AM on 02nd October 2009

Britain should stop apologising for its colonial past, Michael Palin has declared.

The travel show presenter and former Monty Python star said we should instead remember the good that arose from Britain’s days at the helm of a global empire.

No, not one of THE Palins who’ve been in American news so much of late, but yet another Palin who seems to have his head screwed on straight, that is, in direct opposition to the “official” view.

Palin’s feelings are in contrast to the tendency of modern politicians to bend over backwards to apologise for Britain’s imperial past.

In 1997 Tony Blair apologised for the 19th century Irish potato famine and three years ago he expressed ‘deep sorrow and regret’ for Britain’s involvement in the slave trade.

Palin, however, told Geographical magazine that we should stop fixating on what are now perceived to be crimes in the distant past.

The TV star said: ‘If we say that all of our past involvement with the world was bad and wicked and wrong, I think we’re doing ourselves a great disservice.

Okay, maybe Ireland wasn’t a hotbed of intertribal conflict with its people barely out of the Stone Age, but much of what Britain took upon itself was…

Some, like the Indian sub-continent, was a motley collection of nation-states in constant warfare. Others, like the African colonies, was in reality, just on the edge of exiting the Stone Age. Kipling said it in a poem:

Take up the White man’s burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Yes, Britain did indeed profit from her colonies. But life is a two-way street, and she paid. Thousands of graves across the globe are resting places for “the best ye breed”, died of disease and warfare.

In the wake of the British flag were left ideals of fairness and civility and rule of law. In lands where the existence of the wheel was almost black magic, there came infrastructure.

Take up the White Man’s burden —
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper —
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

If you want to see how it works, then give regard to a patch of Africa that in my youth was known as “Rhodesia”, also “Africa’s Breadbasket. Named after Cecil Rhodes, British businessman and politician (for whom the “Rhodes Scholarship” is named), it formed with a British treaty with the native occupant chief. The British brought the trappings of civilization with them, courts, civil projects, farming, mining, roads, schools, universities, all things that had never been conceived in other than the most rudimentary fashion before the Union Jack was planted.

For the next several decades, those horrible colonial interlopers halted intertribal warfare, introduced modern schools, medicine, law, and commerce. Gone was the African tribal chieftain system of government, where the chief was entitled to every sort of riches he could force his people to wrest from the earth for his benefit, even if that meant selling a few of those people into slavery for the odd bag of gold. That was the result of “The White Man’s Burden”:

Take up the White man’s burden —
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard —
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: —
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”

And that was exactly the case in Rhodesia: Two generations past wearing the skins of cattle and rattling animal bones to cure disease, a generation of black politicians aspired to show the world how THEY could run the land of their ancestors. And after years of bloody and violent conflict, and under outside pressure from the outside world, the “White Men” rolled over and gave them the chance.

And we found out that a century of British civilization wasn’t enough as Robert Mugabe showed the world that the definition of the African “paramount chief” had NOT died, it was only now wearing a fine suit and had acquired a taste for the best things money could buy in Europe: cars, food, palaces, luxuries. And those white farmers and their silly ideas about work and technology and pulling crops out of the ground? They could be supplanted by “war veterans” who were loyal to the new paramount chief. And the farms died. And so did a huge part of the Zimbabwean (You KNEW they couldn’t have a country named after a white guy!) population. And another huge part of the population fled the country. But it was those evil British who were ruining the country.

If indeed Britain is guilty of anything, it is guilty of NOT completing the job. Apparently the whole idea of Western Civilization as embodied in the British pattern (Thank G-d we inherited the British pattern, and not the French) is not something you can transfer to the natives in one or two generations. India and Pakistan and Bangladesh were under the ministrations of British administration for a couple of hundred years. Despite sectarian differences and with the exception of the tribal areas of Pakistan, the forms of government with emphasis on fairness and rule of law seem to have taken hold, resulting in ECONOMIES that support their people and make them of some significance on the world stage as something other than holes into which other governments pour largesse.

But I agree with Michael Palin. We should stop apologizing for the West and its impact on the world. As much as the whack-jobs want to parade on the upcoming Columbus Day about how Europeans ruined the Americas, it is well to remember that prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Aztecs didn’t know of the wheel, their whole society was a pyramid of one level enslaved to the next and their religion consisted of placating the gods by sacrificing prisoners and slaves on the tops of those majestic pyramids. The picture isn’t any prettier with the “noble red man” who populated the North American continent.

But then it’s insensitive to point out those inconvenient little facts. Sure the “aztlan” movement wants to affect the trappings of the long-dead Aztecs, but that’s only because they figure they’ll be the ones on TOP of the pyramid holding the knife.

The same thing goes for the “Afro-centric” bunch in our own country. Africa was possibly and idyllic place if you were one of the chiefs, served by the labors of his tribe, treated like a demi-god, every appetite satisfied by the labors of the tribe. It’s pretty neat if you’re the chief. Not so much if you’re the tribe. Ask William Jefferson or Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. They’re naught but caricatures of anything that every occupied a “throne” in a picturesque thatched village in Africa, or they all wish they could be Robert Mugabe. But that statement is, I know, horribly insensitive.

Western civilization raised mankind out of the “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” existence in Europe, then in America and in the dozens of places that the British Empire touched. We in America benefited from this foundation, and the bastions of freedom and education around the world are, like us, places where once the British flag flew.

And that’s nothing Britain should be apologizing for. Nor us.