Doris Lessing Quotes
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
Lessing, Doris. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. HarperCollins, 1994.
Chile with help from San Martin had ejected the Spanish. O’Higgins, the Chilean leader had joined up with San Martin and served under his command. The sectional rivalry bothered men like Carrera. Instead of seeing all the South Americans fighting the Spanish as allies as O’Higgins did, Carrera and his brothers refused to join a government of unity and they and their troops were just as dictatorial and cruel as the Spanish had been. O’Higgins gave Indians and Blacks equal rights with whites which distressed the aristocratic Carrera’s. Finally the Carrera’s tried to set up their own government, and the new Chilean government disarmed their militia and executed two of the three Carrera brothers who were leading the militia troops who were little more than thieves and brigands.
British colonial economics imported raw materials to England which then exported them back to the colonies as manufactured goods. Gandhi correctly calculated that by minimizing purchase of English cloth, colonial control of India would not be as profitable. Gandhi not only called for the boycott, but called on Indians to spin their own cloth, set an example be spinning himself, and his Congress party adopted the spinning wheel as its logo and symbol which continues today. Narcotics, was at the time not only legal, but British economic interests controlled much of the world narcotics trade. Gandhi’s call for a boycott of narcotics was as much an economic tactic as it was a health measure.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising. He was criticizing his fellow Irish. During the English conquest, Gaelic was often prohibited and almost totally disappeared. Since independence there have been various movements to revitalize the old Gaelic language but this have not gotten very far.
Shortly after the failed uprising the Mufti went to Berlin where he was made a Nazi SS Major General and set up Arab SS Units to exterminate the Jews in the Middle East. See {586894}.
Earlier, his father had also castigated the ministers over their inept hard-line handling of the American Revolution. See {641505} .
The IRA had just murdered Lord Mountbatten with a bomb on his small boat. Mountbattten, then a 79 year old, elderly man in retirement was a member of the Royal Family. His grandson was also murdered. Mountbatten had not had anything to do with Ireland but to the IRA he was a symbol of British imperialism since he had been the British Viceroy of India. Actually, it was he who had organized and presided over Indian Independence.
Doris May Lessing CH OMG (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British-Zimbabwean (Rhodesian) novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
