Next stop, the Faroes

LAst week I had the pleasure of listening to an esteemed white, upper-middle class professor of education at the Hegemon telling us - with postmodernist references - that it was time to encourage our students to move on from thinking of themselves as black/poor/gay whatever because that was victim thinking, old-fashioned, boring. It's time to move on, live in the now!

It looks like she's in tune with the new Conservative government. This bunch of all-white, privately-educated Oxbridge types has decided that harping on about the global shame of imperialism, exploitation and genocide is so yesterday. Get with it, kids! Empire's back, according to the Minister for Education, and should be 'celebrated'!

"empire is more necessary in the 21st century than ever before"

Because nothing says 'we're all in this together' than a tiny elite of rich people celebrating a system that benefited, er, a tiny elite of rich people while killing and starving the poor at home and abroad, and stealing their land.

According to Tory historian Andrew Roberts:

The British empire was an "exemplary force for good", Roberts has claimed, and imperialism "an idea whose time has come again".

Really? The Israel-Palestine conflict is a legacy of the British Mandate there. Every border dispute in Africa - British. The continuing oppression of Arabic peoples in Egypt, Kuwait, the UAE, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kurdistan: British oil greed and British border demarcations. India/Pakistan? Britain's fault. Entire countries reduced to producing raw materials and exporting their educated classes? Ex-British Empire, the lot of them. South African apartheid? Britain was the imperial power. Northern Ireland? Huge numbers of countries run by dictators with no concern for their populations like Malaysia (thousands of innocent people killed when Britain's parting gift to the new administration was a list of 'subversives' to be murdered), Singapore and numerous African countries? The Kenyan genocide? Britain. The condition of the Australian Aborigines? Britain. Jamaica's parlous state? Britain's fault.

Perhaps this is a little crude and harsh, but I find it difficult to believe that important people are really claiming that imperialism is beneficial and compatible with democracy. What imperialism unsubtly proclaims is that there are two classes of humans: efficient, powerful, wise white rulers and 'savage' brown people who'll do better under the benevolent (or not) guidance of the first lot. It's a pure, racist argument (and let's not forget that the current record for savage murder of millions of people in one go is still held by Europeans - depending on the maths, Stalin or Hitler).

 At least the Americans are slightly ashamed, and tend not to use the E word to describe what they've done. Presumably Gove's new kings'n'dates education will skate over the pesky details of what having an empire actually means.

Here's Seumas Milne's summary of the pink bits of the globe:

The British empire was, after all, an avowedly racist despotism built on ethnic cleansing, enslavement, continual wars and savage repression, land theft and merciless exploitation. Far from bringing good governance, democracy or economic progress, the empire undeveloped vast areas, executed and jailed hundreds of thousands for fighting for self-rule, ran concentration camps, carried out medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions of people.

In late 19th-century and early 20th-century India, whose economy barely grew in two centuries of British rule, 30 million died of hunger as colonial officials enforced the export of food in the name of free market economics – as they had earlier done in Ireland.

And far from decolonising peacefully, as empire apologists like to claim, Britain left its colonial possessions in a trail of blood, from Kenya to Malaya, India to Palestine, Aden to Iraq. To this day, Kenyan victims of the 1950s campaign of torture, killing and mass internment are still trying, and failing, to win British compensation during a "counter-insurgency" war that, by some estimates, left 100,000 dead.

So where's Britain going to invade next? Which countries do you really fancy having a slice of? Somewhere with fjords, for me. Not that the UK is in much of a condition to grab another slice of Empire. Africa's out: China's bought it. Still, Britain's back in Afghanistan, which it never managed to fully conquer back in the 'good old days'. Better luck this time, chaps!

Sorry, it's going to be a trying few years. I'll post some soothing unpolitical music later.