I call it nationalist denial. Or deliberate ignorance.
This type of nonsense is embedded in English accounts of the British Empire. Variants of the “white man’s burden” and the sacred principles of the market can be spun in all sorts of interesting ways.
The most galling example of this that I’m familiar with is the Irish famine. Millions died of starvation in the midst of a record bumper crop for export. The British justification for deliberate inaction was and for many still is a mixture of denial, high minded debate about the role of government, and a deep concern for keeping Irish wretches out of a cycle of dependency.
It bothers me that almost every nation in the world has a "big shame" but probably the only people that faces, admits and owns their "big shame" are the Germans.
Belgium still keeps statues of King Leopold, Spain keeps statues of Cortez and Pisarro, Portugal of Vasco da Gama, the US is only now arguing about the statues for Confederate soldiers; Italy, Poland and France never did a real "mea culpa" on how they actually helped and collaborated with the Nazis, Brazil and most of Latin America keep ignoring the ongoing extermination of their natives, most Japanese try to avoid knowing what their country did in Manchuria during WWII, Turkey keeps denying the Armenian genocide,...
Yes, every nation in the world has a "big shame", but none of them really face it. They might play "good cop, bad cop" by dividing into several "nations", each with a different policy. Remember, "the Germans" comprise many "nations", i.e. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Germany was even 2 nations for half the 20th century, and Switzerland was virtually all German-speaking until 1815. Have the Switz Germans really faced up to financing the Nazis?
Or a nation might face up to a big shame as cover so they can nurture many "little shames", like modern Germany's treatment of its Turk residents.
Us dutchies are decent on admitting our faults.
I think we are pretty clear about our mistakes in Indonesia, the biggest issue is probably the triangle trade in slaves.
This is not something we stand behind as far as I know, though we still harken back to the times of the VOC as good because it was a 'golden age'.
> Us dutchies are decent on admitting our faults. I think we are pretty clear about our mistakes in Indonesia
I respectfully disagree. I've always thought of Dutchies as open-minded but I remember reading a plaque at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) that left my jaw on the floor by being overly euphemistic. It was an exhibit of about 2-dozen weapons symbolically surrendered by Indonesian leaders; the text was worded as if it was a voluntary gift of their own volution. I thought a little self-honesty would go a long way.
That doesn't seem like an accurate re-telling of the Irish famine.
The British government engaged in many kinds of relief effort. They bought food from America to import it, albeit screwed it up because Ireland didn't have sufficiently advanced mills to process the imported grain. They repealed import tariffs (the Corn Laws). Large public works programmes were created to employ the devastated farmers. This was all made more complicated by an Irish attitude that to ask for charity from the English was weakness and should never be done:
William Smith O'Brien—speaking on the subject of charity in a speech to the Repeal Association in February 1845—applauded the fact that the universal sentiment on the subject of charity was that they would accept no English charity.
Mitchel wrote in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), on the same subject, that no one from Ireland ever asked for charity during this period, and that it was England who sought charity on Ireland's behalf, and, having received it, was also responsible for administering it.
Despite this large sums were donated by the English through private charities anyway.
What you're referring to is a later stage of the famine whereby a new Whig government came into power, and it did indeed feel that the market should be left to sort things out. So it stopped intervening against food exports, believing that would make things worse instead of better (i.e. people who were successfully growing food despite the blight would have to sell it below cost and would go bankrupt). Even so, it still organised a public jobs programme so huge it became impossible to administer (over 500,000 people employed).
That state lasted all of six months before the government of the day realised it had failed and changed tack again, switching to a mix of direct relief through soup kitchens and the like.
So your claim that there was "deliberate inaction" is hardly true. There was lots of action at all times and the debate focuses on to what extent the action was incompetent or not.
Food exports from poor countries are a tricky subject even today. African countries export food to Europe and would export far more if it weren't for the CAP, even though Africa has famines, hunger and disease. Should they be prevented from doing so, or will trade enrich them and ultimately end their poverty?
Another example is the opium poppy used as a symbol of Remembrance Day. It's a silly coincidence and was chosen because of the poem "in Flanders Fields".
Never mind that a third of the population in some areas of India was literally starved to death to grow that exact, or what it did to China, or how it was the foundation of the British empire.
"Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: Sleep because the opium extracted from them is a sedative, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead. Poppies used as emblems on tombstones symbolize eternal sleep. This symbolism was evoked in the children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which a magical poppy field threatened to make the protagonists sleep forever. A second interpretation of poppies in Classical mythology is that the bright scarlet color signifies a promise of resurrection after death."
"The remembrance poppy was inspired by the World War I poem "In Flanders Fields". Its opening lines refer to the many poppies that were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up earth of soldiers' graves in Flanders, a region of Belgium."
This type of nonsense is embedded in English accounts of the British Empire. Variants of the “white man’s burden” and the sacred principles of the market can be spun in all sorts of interesting ways.
The most galling example of this that I’m familiar with is the Irish famine. Millions died of starvation in the midst of a record bumper crop for export. The British justification for deliberate inaction was and for many still is a mixture of denial, high minded debate about the role of government, and a deep concern for keeping Irish wretches out of a cycle of dependency.