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madder than an expat in Spain who’s just discovered their local tapas restaurant doesn’t serve pie.
We pinched so much from around the world that walking into a museum in London is basically like walking into an evidence locker with a cafe.
In 1963, in response to a lot of ungrateful countries having the cheek of asking for their stuff back, we passed the British Museum Act, forbidding the British Museum from returning any of its holding, except in a small number of ‘special circumstances’.
We even stockpiled food from other countries that we didn’t need yet.
Like hearing an ice-cream truck go by when you’re hungry, except you’re starting to get a feeling that the truck driver might be a massive racist. Mr Whippy seems to be happy to stop for all the European kids, that’s all I’m saying.
It would be easier to dismiss this as a grave mistake by Churchill or a tactical error had he not once said, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’5 Which even if you hadn’t let millions of people starve to death is not a great look.
Henry just didn’t like how expensive it was to feed a fully grown polar bear, which is about number 12 on the Big List Of Reasons You Don’t Accept A Fucking Polar Bear As A Gift In The First Place, right below ‘it’s a fucking polar bear, why not try a rabbit first and see how you get on’.
This wasn’t even a one-off. He was part of the ‘glutton club’, a group of foodies who specifically liked to dine on ‘strange flesh’, a term Hannibal Lecter would label ‘a bit fucking creepy to be honest with you Charles.’
After spending several months trying to catch an extremely rare lesser rhea bird, he sat down and unwittingly ate one during a Christmas meal. When he realised what it was, he jumped up in the middle of the meal and desperately tried to scrape what was left off his plate for his experiments, in what might be the most scientifically important doggie bag of all time.
Armed with this philosophy and too much power over laws, over the next few years Trevelyan basically became Thanos from the Avengers films but with corn tariffs instead of a fancy glove.
You’d think that women would have to have done something pretty awful to get placed in one of these horrible contraptions, something so unspeakable that, though nobody likes corporal punishment any more, would at least make you go ‘ok yeah fair play, I personally wouldn’t go that far but I get why a severe punishment was needed.’ But no. Women would be placed in these torture masks for the crimes of being a bit rude, ‘nagging’, gossiping, or doing a wrong kind of religion in public.
It was sort of like the Great British Bake Off, but instead of a nice picnic where all the contestants return, it ends with mass murder.
At this stage I’d like to point out that the cows had not picked a side. None of these cows were even the remotest bit Hitlery. They went about their days eating grass in a politically neutral way, like a bovine version of Switzerland. If you had to ascertain what side they were on, in fact, they spent a lot of their time enthusiastically shitting on Nazi fields, so an argument could be made that we were about to declare biological warfare on the animal regiment of our own resistance.
In 1943 and 1944, we cooked up five million anthrax cakes and created customised RAF planes to drop them. We didn’t do it only because it looked like Germany was close to surrendering, and we knew that the mess would take decades to clear up.
You can’t exactly tell the father of the kid you killed ‘I think you missed a bit whilst strimming’ but you also can’t fire the father of the kid you just killed without looking like a dick.
‘it is a literal fact that each man who heard his reprieve wept bitterly, and that each man who heard of his condemnation to death went down on his knees with dry eyes, and thanked God,’9 making Norfolk Island only mildly worse than the UK’s original Norfolk.
One of the captives on the earlier fleets of ships, for instance, was a seventy-year-old woman who had been caught stealing cheese to eat. She got shipped to the furthest point on the planet from us during her old age because of a crime mainly committed by cartoon mice.
We’re basically like the toddlers of the world, waddling about the place and saying, ‘THIS IS MINE’ when we find things we want.
Priest Edmund Campion, when sentenced to death, made the point that he was being executed for being a priest of the church that until recently was followed by everyone in England, and so in a way they were condemning their own ancestors. This would have got a few retweets in modern times, but the judge ordered him to be dragged through the streets by a horse, hung but taken down whilst still alive, and then have his genitals cut off and his entrails taken out and burned in front of him. So, you know. We weren’t great to Catholics.
Robert Catesby, the gunpowder plotters decided to blow up the House of Lords and the King with it. As cool as it sounds, it wasn’t the best put together plot imaginable. At one point, Rob’s servant accidentally learned of the plot and had to be brought into the conspiracy in case he blabbed. It’s like if one of Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle was there only because he found the plans whilst having a bit of a tidy.
If there’s one sure fire way of identifying a psychopath, you can’t go far wrong with ‘he’s murdered so many women he’s got his own murderer nom-de-plume’, but nobody seems to have told people in the 1600s that. This led to a situation where Matthew, a man who called himself ‘The Witch-finder General’, was allowed to go around killing women like they were characters in Game of Thrones.
If you booked a holiday, you’d sure as hell hope you picked somewhere you’d like to live permanently, because buddy, we were not letting you back in.
Almost 1,000 pets were caught and put to death using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles on the island, which, and I know it’s not the main thing, isn’t even very eco-friendly.
*No goody has ever been told to sanitise anything. If your job is to sanitise something and it’s not some kind of toilet, congratulations: you are on the side of the baddies.
Oliver Cromwell had fought a long and brutal civil war which split the country. During the first part of the war his band of Roundheads had done horrible things. During the second, they did some more. For example, they held a siege of the town of Colchester that lasted so long civilians had to eat dog as well as their candles. This is only marginally made better by the fact that candles were made of mutton wax. It’s still dog with a side of candle, though, which is by no means laying on a feast.
In Ipswich another riot broke out, in which a protestor got killed on Christmas Day. It later transpired that his name was also Christmas. And so it was that we the British killed Christmas on Christmas for trying to celebrate Christmas. Even the Grinch drew the line at homicide.
As a lot of other countries were already helping themselves to Asia, the British East India Company were quite late to the game, but what they lacked in timing they more than made up for in ruthlessness and/or not really giving a shit about exploiting everybody (including slaves) to make money. They called themselves at times the ‘Honourable’ East India Company, which is a massive red flag. It’s like how North Korea calls themselves the Democratic Republic of North Korea, or if some guy late at night at a bus shelter introduces himself as ‘Not Even Remotely Stabby Ben’.
I know you’re thinking ‘it was different times and torture was seen as acceptable, so you can’t judge them to be bellends using today’s standards’. Well congratulations, you just defended opening up someone’s belly with a knife and then letting a rat loose on their intestines, and making people into human soup. Feel proud of yourself?
As well as the more horrible methods of torture, which it’s too grim to focus on for too long, we also showed a callous disregard for the welfare of our prisoners.
That incident was soon forgotten after he showed up to a dinner party riding a bear. At some point he decided the bear wasn’t going fast enough (if you’re looking for speed, maybe ride a horse) and kicked it. It objected to this and tore a chunk out of his calf. To be fair to John, ‘please call a doctor, this fucking bear I rode here has eaten a part of my leg’ is a hell of an entrance to a dinner party. There would be no awkward pauses in polite conversation that couldn’t be filled with ‘so I rode a bear here and the bastard ate me before I could park’.
As well as riflemen, Reg had brought machine guns mounted on vehicles, but left them outside, not because it is undeniably evil to mow down the public with machine guns, but because the entrances were too small for the vehicles to pass through. Turns out the only thing that can stop the British from reaching their true capacity for evil is basic physics.
The problem with shooting down a crowdful of peaceful protestors for showing support for anti-Empire leaders is you do sort of prove the leaders have a bit of a point about the Empire.
Old habits, just like everyone who gets in the way of the British and petrol, die hard I guess.
I’m not saying that we definitely destroyed damning evidence of crimes so heinous we could never be forgiven, but when you feel the need to drown your spreadsheets in the middle of the ocean, you’ve probably done something that would at least warrant a ‘quick chat’ with HR. It’s not a great sign when you’ve done something so bad or racist it should only be read by fish.
It was a horrible incident, but one that could be solved through talking. So both sides brought in the military.
