Cambodia under Pol Pot. The Soviet Union under Stalin. Nazi Germany under Hitler.

According to actress Jameela Jamil, none of them compares with the evil that is ... Britain.

'They are Thanos. Britain is Thanos. They owe 43 trillion to India. We colonized the world.'

A statement this stupid could only come from an entitled celebrity on a podcast. Check, and check.

'Good' riddance

Jamil recently appeared on something called "Yestergays" (nope, no idea either — sounds thrilling) to humblebrag about her career when she decided to engage in some good old-fashioned Brit-bashing. Discussing her role on the NBC sitcom "The Good Place" — in which she played a shallow British-Pakistani socialite — the London-born actress said that she had to make her character intentionally unlikable because of her home country's historical record.

Proving that a person can be so dense that light bends around them, Jamil said: “But I just had to make her more of a bitch ... because Americans think British people are so sweet, which is crazy because British people are truly the most evil people in history.”

Great — just what I needed, a history lesson from the star of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”

Normally I wouldn’t waste the skin on my fingers typing a response. Ill-informed, attention-seeking actors are a dime a dozen. But as a freeborn Englishman — proud to share a heritage with Thomas Paine and John Milton — I was stunned. I had to take time out from my busy schedule of torturing animals and punching children in the face just to gather my thoughts.

Raj-podge

It takes a special kind of dumb to dismantle centuries of British history from the brutal, oppressive trenches of a Los Angeles podcast studio. One can only admire the sacrifices Ms. Jamil makes daily — enduring the tyranny of hot yoga and air-conditioned trailers, bravely fighting the British Raj one iced chai latte at a time.

Because, as we are all meant to believe these days, before the British showed up, the world was a peaceful utopia. The Ottomans specialized in consent-based border expansions, the Kingdom of Dahomey was merely hosting neighborhood barbecues, and India's Thuggee cult was running a roadside assistance program. History was a serene, harmonious folk festival until a white man in London decided to chart the high seas and ruin it for everyone.

Any serious historian knows that to truly understand the past, you must contend with economics, politics, religion, personalities, geography, and pure chance. Or you can try Jamil's considerably simpler method of reducing a sprawling, centuries-long empire to an intergalactic purple despot in a Marvel movie:

“They are Thanos. Britain is Thanos. They owe 43 trillion to India. We colonized the world.”

Shrillionaire

$43 trillion? Believe it or not, Jamil didn’t do that back-of-the-envelope calculation herself.

No, she’s parroting a theory revived by Marxist economist Utsa Patnaik. The idea that British rule created a “drain of wealth” from India is more than a century old; Indian nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji were making versions of the argument during the Victorian era.

Patnaik’s contribution was to exhume the disputed theory and attach a suitably comic-book-size number to it: $45 trillion.

That figure is not an accounting of money or treasure Britain can be shown to have carried away. Patnaik arrives at it by treating India’s colonial export surpluses as uncompensated transfers and compounding their estimated value at 5% over generations. In other words, the $45 trillion is less an amount found in a ledger than the hypothetical present-day value of money her theory assumes was stolen in the first place.

Economic historians have criticized the drain theory for decades. The argument also assumes that wealth remaining in India would automatically have been invested productively there — something impossible to prove and contradicted by much of the historical record.

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Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Jamil’s world

In Jamil’s world, centuries of complex history are reduced to an image of Dick Dastardly twirling his mustache and making off with bags marked with dollar signs. No, we did not ransack India. Long before the high tide of empire, England was already a wealthy, highly productive nation. According to historians Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, as early as the 16th century — long before the East India Company ever set foot in Bengal — England’s GDP per capita was so high that India would not match it until the late 1990s.

And when we were there, we laid thousands of miles of railway track and roadways, constructed deep-water ports in Bombay and Madras, established irrigation systems, and introduced representative governance.

We also helped outlaw barbaric practices like sati (widow burning) and introduced municipal sanitation as the bedrock of a hygienic civilization — not to mention the billions in development capital and financial assistance Britain has pumped into the country since.

We left nearly 80 years ago, and India is now a space-faring global economic superpower — so if people are still defecating in the street, that’s on you, literally. It’s like everything else we left behind: We built the framework, but it’s up to you what you actually do with it.

Passage from India

And while Ms. Jamil treats history as a one-way moral ledger in which Britain holds a monopoly on human suffering, she turns a blind eye to the present. According to the Global Slavery Index, over 11 million people in India today live in modern slavery — trapped in forced labor, debt bondage, and forced child marriage.

Britain is evil? If that’s true, somebody needs to tell the nearly 1 million Indian nationals who migrated to the U.K. between June 2020 and June 2025. Not to mention the roughly 880,000 Indian-born residents already living in Britain before the post-pandemic migration surge.

Of course, it would be wrong to single out poor Jamil. She’s hardly the first celebrity descendant of immigrants to slam the country that allowed her family to flourish. Jamil is simply singing from the hymn sheet of the church of identity politics, doing the bidding of what Deirdre McCloskey terms “the clerisy,” our modern opinion-forming priestly class — worshipping the holy trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Hate the sin, not the sinner. Jamil is merely reciting the liturgy of modern secular religion. Strip away the histrionics, makeup, and logic-free platitudes, and you’re left with a recycled godless version of Calvinist predestination — where systemic racism is original sin and inherited guilt becomes a lifelong sentence with no possibility of atonement.