Garry Glass discusses the legacy of British imperialism.
In order for an individual who comes from a non-white supremacist state to inhabit the British Isles legally, they must undergo the citizenship test where spurious versions of our history must be regurgitated as writ. Behind these sanitised accounts of Britain’s importance for the modern world lurks tragedies – these remain unreconciled and with them, wounds are yet to heal.
We are reminded on a daily basis that those who do not share British values are our enemies, yet no clues are given as to what exactly these ‘British values’ are. It might mean being run by a syndicate of paedophiles. It might mean having more CCTV cameras per capita than anywhere else on earth. It might mean a willingness to send young men and women to their deaths based on fabricated evidence in order to maintain a monopoly on strategic energy resources.
We are a culture built upon foreign aggression that sees itself only as a force for good in the world. British exceptionalism is a kind of embarrassing remnant of imperial hubris which is trotted out by those instructed in the mythologies of Britannia. It’s fair to say that Britain’s imperial power is in a terminal state of decline. Triumphalism has given way to melancholy. How can a chauvinistic culture in the ascendency for almost two centuries countenance its collapse? The answer is, bluntly; pretty badly.
British foreign and domestic policy from the late Victorian era right up to the present is a litany of atrocities which demonstrate the depths to which empire would sink in order to maintain its reach.
The concentration camps and scorched earth policy used by the British against the Boer and Afrikaans people at the turn of last century were one of the first uses of systematic depopulation of a nation from its territory into prison camps. The technology of concentration developed by the British during the Boar insurgency was later used in Hitler’s Holocaust.
The introduction of market capitalism under the colonial enterprise at the end of the Victorian era exacerbated a series of major droughts in China, India, East Africa and Brazil. By undermining traditional coping mechanisms, famine was engineered as a method of social control and weapon of war. These “Late Victorian Holocausts” were responsible for the direct deaths of 30-60 million people.
While thousands of anti-fascist volunteers left for Spain to confront Franco’s forces, the British establishment failed to offer material support to those fighting for the Republic. Tragedies such as the bombing of Guernica which would herald the great conflagration immediately to follow the Spanish civil war might have been prevented. It is an irony that anti-fascism would be used later to justify the defense of the Empire.
Britain’s most celebrated national hero Winston Churchill was himself a militaristic, authoritarian white-supremacist. He advocated compulsory vasectomies for the Irish and anyone with a criminal record and refused to apologise for the genocides against the Native American and Aboriginal peoples. He also advocated the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. Churchill is regarded as the leader of the free world but his liberatory rhetoric was inspired by the success of his anti-colonialist adversary Gandhi.
The Irish potato famine resulted not just from potato blight but from a failure to ban food exports from Ireland during the crisis. British tables were served Irish produce whilst a million people died of starvation as a direct consequence. Again the undermining of resilience to environmental factors was key to exercising colonial power.
Cultural genocide was committed against the peoples of the Highland of Scotland to make way for the Cheviot sheep that would produce wool for the textile mills. People were forcibly evicted from their homes as entire villages burned to the ground. Many would end up working in squalid factories in Glasgow or seeking sanctuary in the new world. Present day land distribution in Scotland resembles feudalism in its level of inequality – 50% of the land is owned privately by 432 individuals. The Gaelic language has never recovered since English was imposed by the landed classes.
There is not enough space to detail all the atrocities here so apologies if this list is in any way selective. The British government recently destroyed a great deal of documentary evidence of its dirty work over the period in question. Far from allowing reconciliation the state seeks to permanently bury the more inconvenient material evidence.
The quagmires of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria are all reminders that the interventionist footing of the British state’s military must manufacture reasons to maintain its capabilities. Dossiers are heavily redacted or simply lost. Justifications only speak to hypocrisies elsewhere and mission creep facilitates the state’s covert ambitions.
What happened at Abu Ghraib was not just acts of torture which are repugnant to anything resembling human decency, but that very erosion of the idea that ‘our boys’ are inherently benevolent. Abu Ghraib represents an indictment of the whole white saviour mentality. It is not the abuses themselves that are the problem so much as the loss of sentiment that ‘we’ are the good guys. Britain is implicated in similar abuses which make for awful reading.
Winning hearts and minds was a counterinsurgency tactic used by the same people who would drop bombs or leverage by economic sanctions which hit the most vulnerable hardest. The state is adept at promoting its benevolent image and burying those which would bring the whole idea crumbling down.
Defeating the Nazi scourge is central to the narrative of British Nationalism. It is quite inconvenient then to consider how much support Moseley’s British Fascist Blackshirts had in the 1930s. The Royal household also seems to have dodged the worst fallout from the Nazi salute footage published by The Sun. The Daily Mail at the time ran a headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”. How much has really changed?
We pride ourselves that our state does not sanction torture and yet we allow extraordinary rendition from our territory to US black ops locations where it is known torture is carried out. Similarly we allow Israeli jets to rearm for bombing campaigns that are in clear breach of international law.
Britain is happy to support democratic uprisings in some states such as Libya but then trains riot cops in other states such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen.
Indeed Tony Blair mislead parliament and took the country to war on false premises but his obsequiousness will prevent his impeachment, which should bring the whole edifice of international criminal law into question.
Britain is arming itself with a new nuclear deterrent system which it blatantly cannot afford just so it can keep a seat on the UN security council. Nonetheless the special relationship with the US is becoming tenuous as military budgets decline.
Britain is a bully too long insulated from the vulgarity of its own history. Our vitriol would be tempered were we actually taught about the misery inflicted in service to Empire. Britain is not the pristine force for good in the world it believes. It is only because we are convinced we are, that British foreign policy is so empowered militarily.
At no point has this country undergone a thorough self examination in order to purge these chauvinistic proclivities, if anything they have been retained and mutated into the entitled bankster culture that many envisage as the class enemy today.
Britain is the quintessential bastion of Imperialism. Few nations have accumulated so much material wealth off the back of the political and economic control of other nations. At the height of its ambitions because of its global geographical reach it was described as “the empire on which the sun never sets”.
British Empire at its territorial peak in 1921. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire
Britain (and the London metropole in particular) is a major epicentre for the ongoing neo-colonial project. Much land grabbing and natural resource appropriation are to this day organised and managed out of the City of London. Nowadays it’s the institutions of finance capital, rather than the state, acting as primary protagonists of neo-colonialism.
A major part of this work is to challenge the ‘othering’ which occurs through representations of non-white cultures. Our public areas still have bronze statues celebrating racist military figures. Our national health service employs qualified doctors from abroad as nurses – a brain drain with huge impacts on public health in the Global South. Islamophobia is promoted in order to divide working class communities. Whilst ships with hundreds of refugees sink in the mediterranean, Britons enjoy holidays to tropical destinations. Billboards and bus-stops advertise fabrics with exotic prints and paradise islands whilst people from those places are held indefinitely in detention centres for the crime of not having the appropriate documentation. Our economy is propped up by workers from abroad yet they are treated as an underclass. We will take everything from Africa except the people.
Britain celebrates the fact that it eventually gave up slavery. Little is made of the fact that this was after centuries of brutality, that in many ways goes on less formally. Slave owners were well compensated for financial loss whilst reparations to affected peoples and nations were never really entertained. Abolition was based on the fact that slavery was technically illegal under English and Scots law on the British Isles and that by extension it should not be allowed in all of Britain’s dominium. If only we were able to extend the social gains we enjoy today to the corners of the world which still support the influx of wealth to these isles. The ultimate problem is that our entire way of life is built upon the perpetuation of wage slavery and land appropriation. Indeed the export of alienation prevents the kind of class antagonism we would otherwise see. Anyone in this country can apply for enough benefits to buy tropical fruits from some desperately miserable plantation in the tropics.
It is imperative that people on this island deconstruct the social norms and attitudes that are remnants of colonial thought if they are to prevent the perpetuation of this abhorrent system. It might be uncomfortable to accept that our privilege is ongoing. It’s less about being responsible for the acts of those in the past and more about a refusal to perpetuate the systems of privilege which colonialism set up and which many still benefit from today. Thankfully being slave masters is not something so inherent to our national identity that it cannot be recovered. However with xenophobia on the increase stoked by the ambitions of the ruling class there remains a great deal of work to be done in challenging these reactionary tendencies.
