Letters | Moral of the story for the UK? Colonialism doesn’t pay
- Readers discuss how the United Kingdom got to the anti-migrant riots, Hong Kong’s one failure in 2019, the UK’s double standard, and the transit needs of wheelchair users in Hong Kong
Until about 70 years ago, Western countries like the United Kingdom went all over the world and took things from others. The only reason they stopped is that they started fighting among themselves in two world wars.
You would think Western nations would be chastened by the destructiveness of the wars, repent of their sins, and return all the stuff they had taken from other people.
But, no, that was not the case. The bizarre logic of some Western nations seemed to suggest that there was no such thing as your country or my country, your stuff or my stuff. There could be no theft without ownership.
Perhaps to make their logic believable, Western nations started to let people from other parts of the world move in, and take their stuff.
For a while, their logic seemed to hold: Western nations had so many things on account of all they had taken from other people for centuries, and because the number of people who initially moved to these nations was small, there was more than enough to go round.
