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Dining across the divide: ‘He has a very rosy view of empire and colonialism’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I thought this was interesting, seeing the views of a young adult who supports Reform. The article is about him having a date with a Green-voting young woman.

What are your thoughts about the growth of Reform, especially among young adults?

Having said that though, it looks like Reform's voting base still skews older. If you look at YouGov's most recent data here (as of the time of me writing this) you can see the following:

15% of 18-24 year-olds support Reform
20% of 25-49 year-olds support Reform
26% of 50-64 year-olds support Reform
29% of 65+ year-olds support Reform

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Definitely depends on who teaches history, my history teacher was far from the best, but they didn’t gloss over the darker parts of our history, and certainly never justified the empire as anything more than a power grab by a nation that took because it could.

It’s certainly dangerous to have too rosy a view of our past, but I don’t think our history is exactly a secret.

That said, we do have a skewed view of the good and bad actions in our history, but I’m less convinced that’s a serious problem, it might even be beneficial, if framed correctly (ie we can’t hide when we’re sampling a rare good moment amongst a sea of horror).

To use an example from another nations history to avoid bias, statistically speaking it wouldn’t be justified for Germany to teach about Schindler, he was one unusual individual and not representative at all. But it seems critical that they do teach about him, because he represents the hope of a better nation buried within the darkness, they need stories like that to show that the making things better is always possible.

Maybe it’s important to teach both the overall horror of our past (to discourage fools thinking the empire was a good thing), and also focus on the rare moments when good came through nonetheless, because those are the moments we need to continue creating, and burying them under cynicism (even accurate cynicism) helps nobody?

Or maybe I’m overthinking it.