Oppression   Part 2.

We, the British, or the Germans, or the French, or the Portugese, etc  imposed our way of life, religion and customs on other races, because we knew better. This is a very arrogant point of view but in the oppression gene it is very marked in all of us.   We can see that in our own lives, we are not short of people itching to tell us how to do something. They won’t actually do it for us but as soon as the baking dish or the workmate come out they save us from disaster by advice.  Sometimes very forceful, oppressive.  It’s awkward because the supposed motive is good.  But it is not exclusively that, it is mixed with baser matter. If we do it, (baking, carpentry) their way they can gloat and it is almost as if they had done the whole job themselves. They can also run down your own ability, however good it is, ……’I put him right.’  ……   ‘Disaster, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you, I saved him at least fifty pounds on wood alone.’ 

Know-alls, the ‘advice gratis’ brigade,  generally prey on friends and relatives.  Incredibly, there are people who take this ‘helpful’ philosophy further a-field seemingly oblivious to the danger, as follows:-  Call next door, friendly advice, 'Jack, when you wash your car, put a bit of vinegar in the water, it cuts the diesel.' or  'I saw your little Johnny going to school, poor little mite, if you stitch a strap at the back that satchel won't drag on him.'   Do not accept such advice or you will be waylaid with the follow up for ever, ‘Did you try the vinegar Jack?’ then you’ve got to prevaricate and none of this is your fault. It’s good and subtle oppression.  Advice is generally said to be ‘well-meaning’, this is a euphemism for un-requested, un-required, and a bloody cheek.    If you can, and even if you botch the job, reply to advisors in the same way as you would to wide trousered evangelists, i.e.  ‘pxxx off.’, and a few suggested anatomical contortions.

Remember though,  if the advisor has behind him half a dozen tall blokes with guns pointed at you, you  will be well advised to vinegar like billy-ho and swathe Johnny in satchel straps.

Oppression by force, that's the way we did it in the old days and it's a source of great shame now.  Times were different though, history is appropriate to its time, it has a sort of inevitability and chronological rightness. The swinging of a pendulum between extremes, until this pendulum, with time comes to rest at the point of sweet reason.

Colonies are ousting their old masters quicker than stone flowers close in the dusk.  Soon there will be none and all the feathered hats will be history.

Also being consigned to history is the oppression of virtually the whole population of these islands. Witness houses of two hundred rooms, peopled by staff who were subjected to an authoritarian and unforgiving regime as severe as any sugar or cotton slave across the Atlantic.  It was called the ‘proper order of things’ and was anything but.  Many a little housemaid drank laudanum in the attics of many a great house, not appreciating the benefits of 'service'  Many a man worked all year for less than the Lord would pay for one urn in his garden. 

There has been the quiet revolution now. The pendulum is swinging much less. The ‘levellers’ of the seventeenth century would be pleased to see it. The aristocracy will disappear eventually but for the present we may chose to work for them for reasonable pay and conditions. Most often we have our own homes and owe allegiance to no-one. If we are eating the korma or watching ground force and the lordliest earl there ever was came to call, we needn’t even get up, never mind them making us go to church on Sunday.

It’s a peaceful revolution, fortunately.  Plenty of French 'Aristos' would have given the urn money straight to Jaques and never mind the garden vista if they'd known that the comrades were taking poverty and servitude quite the wrong way and had no cake anyway.  The Tzar might have had one marble palace less and saved himself a nasty scene at Ekaterinburg.

Our country houses are now toured by people whose forebears lived under its shadow and were in constant fear of dispossession and the workhouse.  They are a monument to oppression I suppose, (One roll of wallpaper equals a ladies maid for a year.)  notwithstanding which, we should knock them down. Don't make anything else of them, they are unsuited to it being solely monuments of power over others, and they cost much to keep up. Better, with the money, to build a nice clutch of new three-bed houses for ex-serfs.