Friday 13 December 2019

There is no escaping the national question at the end of empire

"Scottish Independence and Brexit have gerrymandered the vote"
When England lost an empire it joined the Common Market, screwing over its remaining colonies, as imperial preference gave way to the European market. England had been in parlous financial states and there wasn't the stomach to butcher every colonial independence fighter, or concentrate whole nations into camps, altho they did a bit of that. What they had instead was to be America's European outpost, endlessly diluting European unity with economic liberalism and weakening European consolidation, while peddling arms and latterly mercenaries, affording an outsized geopolitical influence, despite the loss of empire.

What has taken place in England is that that influence has now been destroyed and the actual reckoning of the loss of empire in the post war period is now playing out ideologically. This also happened before, when England stopped including parts of France, there was a big old war to sort it all out and the end up was the Tudors and their piracy and unsuccessful foreign wars that ultimately started to come good for imperial coffers once everyone wanted manufactured goods, and this helped to finance a new wave of genocides and protection rackets, which ultimately led to a hegemonic bloodthirsty empire, which was to see the 20th century be 'The British Century'.

 My takehome from all this historical blethers is that the fascists understand the deep modal forces that underpin this wave of reaction. They've harnessed latent English imperial discourses that the obfuscation of post windrush inclusive "Britishness" made no attempt to reckon with. The national question in England is alive and well simply because for a huge cohort of people, the British empire never ended and restoring the project of whitey global governance in the English language is of absolute paramount importance, trumps all other policy concerns and baked into that set of ideas is also the British imperial system of racism (which differs markedly from American racism, which for some reason the English left is more interested in). This is why we are seeing reports of racist maniacs shouting at black people, but we have a far right British Gujarati MP as Home Secretary leading the charge on official racist attacks.

I described what was going on in England in 2016 as a Nationalist paroxysm. The last one on this scale in England lasted for a generation. We are sat here as bystanders in England's end of empire psychodrama.
 
[not so much about 'racism' as a hierarchy of 'races']