"Shashi Tharoor Makes An Eloquent Case For Reparations For Britain's Colonial Legacy"

"Career diplomat and former external affairs minister Shashi Tharoor took part in a debate at the Oxford Union recently, arguing for the motion that put to the house whether Britain should pay reparations for its colonial excesses. The Thiruvananthapuram MP tore through the myths of any "benevolence" by British colonisers, and eloquently demolished the arguments routinely made to whitewash the excesses of the island nation's colonial past...

At the debate, which Tharoor's side won by 185 to 56 votes, the 59-year-old former UN official unearthed a series of statistics to point India's financial decline due to Britain's ill-gotten gains.

"Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India," he said, referring to India's slide in its share of the world economy from 23 to 4 percent due to British colonisation. "It's a bit rich to oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. We were denied democracy, so we had to snatch it, seize it from you.""

http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/07/20/watch-shashi-tharoor-brit_n_7807456.html


This was phenomenal. Really, really stop what you are doing and watch this man speak. I feel inspired and a little changed.

Related: The Case for Reparations; “Genome-wide ancestry of 17th-century enslaved Africans from the Caribbean” <-- a project that I am interpreting as a form of reparations from the Dutch government