Not Everything Is about You

When MSNBC’s Ali Velshi reduced the British monarchy to “an institution that had a long and ugly history of brutalism, violence, theft and slavery,” English historian Andrew Roberts dismissed this as nonsense, pointing out that Britain’s system of constitutional monarchy enjoys between 80 and 85 percent of the British public’s support, regardless of who is on the throne.

It is arrogant and off-putting to judge another country’s history by projecting onto it the worst aspects of your own. That’s why Roberts took issue with Velshi’s “remarks about slavery which we abolished 32 years before you did, and we didn’t have to kill 600,000 people in a civil war over it.”