Amritsar massacre - 100 years ago today

[bushfighter]

Whatever that means David (and it sounds like a professional staff officer putting-down a field soldier), you definitely are the master of the one-line post, and that of course brings rapid promotion on this Forum.

Shahbash!   Harry

[David Filsell]

Harry,

I seek no promotion this side of the ocean or the other.

i just have problems with many modern critical reactions to past events which happened under different circumstances and in a period of very different values than today. 

Regards

David

[Martin Bennitt]

Just because something seemed a good idea at the time doesn’t mean you can’t criticise it an hour or 100 years later. What Dyer did was inexcusable but not alas inexplicable. I am now reading Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, which demonstrates how we think in two ways: System 1 is fast, intuitive and emotional, System 2 is slower, more deliberative and logical, but all too often System 1 has the upper hand.
Kahneman says, “we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect out errors than we are.”
By his own admission Dyer, biased like most senior officials of the Empire against their subject peoples, and perceiving a threat that really wasn’t there, waited only seconds before ordering his men to open fire.
However, the fact that he maintained this fire for more than ten minutes, saying at one point to one of his officers, "Do you think they’ve had enough? No, we’ll give them four rounds more,” beggars belief.
Anyway, I would urge you to read Wagner’s book, which is a historical narrative, not a polemic. The facts speak for themselves.

 

Cheers Martin B

 

[David Filsell]

Not justifying it. Simply making the point that it's Impossible to walk in the shoes of those on the spot at the time. In a woke world there are many dozy b*****s who seem unable to detect the differences between the thinking and the imperatives then and the judgements we would make now and the consequent guilt they seem to think we should all still carry around now. As the man said "the past's another country the do things differently there". A different man might have made a different decision.