52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School

by James Felton

In 1820, before the First Opium War, China’s economy was the largest in the world. After the end of the Second Opium War, we left them with half the GDP and millions of drug addicts. But in our defence, we got quite a lot of Earl Grey.

Darwin, famous evolutionist and naturalist, also went around chain-eating exotic species like they were goddamn flumps. He ate owls like they were chicken wings, and armadillos like they were the chocolate bar also called Armadillos. Once, after loading his ship up with them in the Galapagos, he and his crew ate endangered tortoises all on the way home. He only realised how significant they were to his theory of evolution when he got back to England and had a closer look at the shells, which they had been using as some sort of makeshift soup bowls.

If you think we learned the very obvious lesson here of ‘concentration camps are bad’ you are mistaken. In one harrowing example, the British government held over 50,000 Jewish people, most of whom were Holocaust survivors, in internment camps in Cyprus shortly after the Holocaust. After around 400 people died in those camps we learned our lesson though. I kid, we went on to use them one more time during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s, leading to well over 100,000 deaths.

The British get pretty judgy (and rightly so) of governments that still ban homosexual relationships. But of seventy-one countries around the world where it’s illegal, over half of them are former British colonies. As much as it would be nice to sit back and say, ‘what a wild coincidence, Lordy lordy really how odd, anyway must dash’ – the reason for that is we put the laws there in the first place.

In Victorian England we would very much rather get ill kids smacked up on morphine than listen to them cough, and so scientists invented cough medicine to do just that. Morphine, chloroform, codeine, more morphine, powdered opium, cannabis and heroin were all ingredients in ‘Children’s Soothing Syrup’ the 19th-century equivalent of Calpol. But you should see their 6+ version.

you can either be responsible for what our ancestors did or you can’t. You can’t just pick out the good bits and say ‘we did that bit’.

I know you want to say ‘but all these massacres are in the past’, and ‘we can’t be held responsible for what our ancestors did’, and that’s fine. But in that case you don’t get to say ‘we saved you in the war’ like it means anything unless you personally stormed the beach of Normandy as a sperm.

My biggest thanks, of course, goes to Britain for being the kind of bellend which makes filling a book of this type ridiculously easy.