Huzzah.

Mr. Bilston (cough). As one who is, possibly, over-cautious about expressing opinions on affairs current and foreign, yet none the less moved by such affairs - and one who also enjoys the play of words, I applaud this tiny, but perfect ode. Chapeau, sir, chapeau.

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Bravo, sir! 👏👏👏👏

(I suspect Churchill would have volunteered all four volumes of 'A History of the English-Speaking Peoples' for the task…)

That was absolutely hilarious.

Thanks for the share!

We’ve had gerbils. They do this too. One would run and run and run, the other was a clumsy git that would briefly run then stop and spin around and often be ejected, sometimes upwards.

That spinny wheel is definitely better than the expensive cheap bit of tat we had though.

I see the squirrel centrifuge program is on track.

Wow 😂

the flip side of ‘great man’ theory is much easier to process than Susan Sontag’s

“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”

yes, but killing Columbus would be still different story, than killing Hernando Cortéz and other conquistadors.

Not all colonialism was equal: there were many different strategies, some of it was mostly trade and left the originals cultures almost intact, and perhaps the benefit was mutual (at least some of the trade, eg. spice trading with Southeast Asia, could be considered as such case).

The spread of Christianity was sometimes much worse then trade and sometimes relatively innocent. And not all trade was slave trade. And not all colonialism was white Christian colonialism... I believe Arab expansion is more or less comparable in scale to European expansion. There was no basic difference from Europeans, when Turks conquered Balkans or Moguls conquered India. China was expanding very slowly, but still: the Han ethnic dominance on China mainland was simply result of slow conquest. Not only colonialism, but also assimilation.

The exploration urge is natural, the big question was "what next"? Trade and cultural exchange seems fair, slavery and conquest definitely not.

in no particular order:
- when and where exactly would you travel back to to stop colonialism?

- national socialism in Germany was an outcome of the Versailles Treaty. Killing baby Adolf would be unlikely to change the course of the history.

- if you want to explore the "what if" time travel genre then popadantsy books are really popular in Russia.

I think that's due to colonialism being a complex system that benefited a whole lot of people and to stop it, means to to change the course of history in a scale comparable to nuking Rome in 476* or something.

Yeah, and killing hitler wouldn't prevent nazi crap for same reasons

edit: i forgot that roman empire fell in 476, not 486.

Hitler is a person but colonialism isn't. I think an equivalent might be would you kill Christopher Columbus (which wouldn't be sufficient to stop colonialism, but would have saved many Taino lives). It's just so easy to kill a baby. Like no one talks about going back to stop antisemitism because that's a much broader thing.

So I think the real issue is that stopping evil never actually looks like killing a baby. It's always a lot more involved. Hitler didn't even start the Nazi party.

Everyone kills Hitler on their first trip

reactormag.com/wikihistory//

And no one, absolutely no one, ever thinks about going back in time and giving Hitler's father a condom, or just kidnapping baby Hitler and raising him up as your own child to become a decent person.

Maybe the solution to people who kill isn't killing them instead.