I am currently reading a fresh study of the massacre, an excellent work by Kim A. Wagner. The Empire will always be a certain litmus test for us anglophiles. Being not conservative, nor radical, but a liberal I view that day as a crossroads, a defining moment. The moment when all illusions left were shattered and the skull beneath the skin was revealed, the racist grin. And not only that day and the awful days and weeks after, but the way this vast, vile crime was treated in London. Yes, a half hearted, typically British, gesture was made towards justice, mocked by its own nature and the deep respectable torydom in the Home Counties and beyond.
Yes, killing innocents is the way of the world, the routine way of history. No excuse though, the opposite of an excuse.
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