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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Orwell wasn't exactly pro-british-empire either [1]. But he British empire's vision was of economic exploitation (at the parallel of a gun) not of racial replacement.

[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

When economic exploitation didn't work (the americas) they killed off the populace and replaced it with workers they could exploit (africans). What is that other than racial replacement?

The difference is ideological. They brought slaves from Africa because they believed it was the best way to make money, not because they had any kind of belief about what race should be where.

Both of the ideologies and outcomes are heinous, but if you want to understand history and stop it from repeating you have to look deeper than lumping all evil together.

>The difference is ideological

And yet the result is the same.

The British Empire was more than "the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder". During the nineteenth century, the British army was absurdly small compared, for example, to the armies of continental powers. See e.g https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14218909

I don't think that's a useful comparison, since Britain's military instrument was (and continues to be) its navy, with a small but largely proportionate land force. By contrast, you never hear anything about, say, the Austrian navy because there isn't one that matters.

The main difference is that the British Empire was to exploit resources, trade and people. Hitler's expansion main goal is to completely replace the local population with Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum.

Interestingly the wiki article mentions why it is a good idea: During the First World War, the Allied naval blockade of the Central Powers caused food shortages in Germany and resources from Germany colonies in Africa were unable to slip past the blockade; this caused support to rise during the war for a Lebensraum that would expand Germany eastward into Russia to gain control of their resources to prevent such a situation from occurring in the future

AFAIK: the British Empire caused much suffering, but your comment is a blatant fabrication of it operated. For example, the British East India Company succeeded in gaining control in India not through war, but by striking deals with (or strong arming) local rulers and land owning elite, whom they rarely interfered with directly but instead used them for collecting taxes and enforcing law and order. The size of the British military in India was apparently very small.

It isn't. They operated whichever way worked, whether that was hooking a country on opium (China), or wiping out the population and rounding up the rest into camps on undesirable land(Americas). There's also the Boer war.

I find this statement deeply ignorant of history. I am no defender of imperialism in general, however, Hitler started his conquest with the idea of a systematic genocide of anyone not of the master race. He started with Jews and polish and had plans to mass murder Slavs, and eventually all the mixed races of the world.

Britain’s empires (there were more then one) were usually accidental and commercial in nature. They were not founded with the goal of deliberate mass genocide and replacement by a pure race. They tended to be extraordinarily under staffed for their purpose.

So you're saying that the genocides that Britain enacted were just accidents? I think you're the one who is ignorant here. You realize that the British expressly didn't want to help the Jews in the concentration camps (of which they were fully aware) because they were afraid that they would go to Palestine after the war (British Territory), and cause an issue. So they purposefully let them die.

While the U.K. and its allies may have been aware of the Holocaust prior to the end of the war, there wasn’t exactly a lot they could do; they were already at war with the Nazis.

Provocative and bold statements like yours require robust and trustworthy sources. Please provide.

Your replies and original comment so far have read like you have an anti-British agenda.

It's not anti-british, it's just the truth, there are tons of trustworthy sources if you care to find them. You'll be more likely to believe them if you find them yourself. I doubt you really care though. Your replies and comments on other articles seem very pro-British.

That's not entirely true. The systematic killing of the Jews was formalized in 1942. Before that, there were other plans, such as evicting them to Madagascar, and even Palestine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution

It the plan to wipe out the Slavs predates that - and pretty much was there for anyone to read in Mein Kampf

What else is it but a description of almost any empire? Of course German expansionist ambitions were largely driven by envy of other European power' empires overseas.

One essential difference though was in Hitler's attitude to race and racial purity. He didn't want just an empire ruled by Germans, he wanted an empire consisting only of Germans, and that's the distinction Orwell is pointing out.

I’m not a fan of this description because it’s reductionist to the point of stupidity. It can be applied to any empire, from the Romans to the USA.

Empires do tend to have a lot of features in common and run into the same difficulties. I recommend The Fate of Empires by John Bagot Glubb for a concise statement of the problem.

Thanks! I’ll check it out

Empires in general. I wonder if it wouldn’t equally describe the Mongolian or even the Roman. But it’s also hard to discount the amount of technological progress that comes from such empires, so “brainless empire in which nothing ever happens” felt like a stretch.

Exceptional point. I hadn’t noticed this bit when I read just now.

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