Here's how Fela Kuti, the great Nigerian musician, defines colonialism:
"At first it's quite nice having new faces around. But then you start noticing things going missin'. Ashtrays. Towels ... Petroleum. Diamonds. People! And what do they leave in return? Gonorrhea and Jesus."
It reminds me of a Ghanaian friend who told me that Geography lesson 1 was a map of Ghana's tarmac road network on independence day.
It led from the emptied diamond mine down the port. Yoink!
This is the most naked order from Imperial HQ we've seen in public for a while, which must mean they're worried, but it's far from unique.
We sometimes need to step back from the political rhetoric to look at the global political situation. When we do, it's clear that NATO is the equivalent of the Roman Empire's foederati: natives hired by the imperial power to tame them and to extend the empire's reach at low cost.
The US is, of course, much like Rome in that the entire economy depends on military spending: this is Marxism in its purest form. Whatever the Tea Party and their Republican friends say, they don't really want small government. They want heavily armed, globe-spanning government, just without any of the social stuff like Welfare, education and civil rights.
Reduce the massive armed services (the US spends ten times more on arms than the next ten countries combined), cut away the 'pork' of army bases, arms factories and so on, and the economy collapses. Entire towns will be devastated. Poor people wouldn't have an escape route via enlistment. Let's be clear: the US needs a permanent state of war to remain afloat.
Turning to the UK, it's time to honestly admit that it's a puppet. OK, British politicians might occasionally make a trade treaty decision or a fisheries agreement without Washington's approval, but on the serious stuff, nothing happens without Americans giving the word. Remember Blair's orders to his new Ambassador to Washington: "get up the arse of the White House and stay there' - keeping close to the Americans was and is far more important than the lives of Iraqis and British soldiers, more important than international law.
The more British politicians protest, the more pathetic it is. I have to laugh every time one of them says 'independent nuclear deterrent': Britain's nuclear weapons are made by, rented from and loaded by the US, and can't be launched without US permission. They don't even have 'Royal Navy' painted on them. Lockheed Martin make them, Halliburton put them on the subs. No US permission to fire = no firing. No spare parts, no computer upgrades, no movement from harbour without finding a US force waiting.
The UK is a shield and an aircraft carrier for the US, like the other 140 or so countries with US military bases on their land: if that's not a global imperial hegemony, I don't know what is.
So why is Hillary so upset? Perhaps she genuinely thinks that Britain's contribution to the anti-imperial bush wars which flare up here and there is important. But I doubt it. The US could swat like a fly any country in the world, without raising a sweat. No, Hillary's upset because our potential failure to invest in new weapons of mass destruction might indicate a failure of nerve, a little pinprick of self-interest. The US might look like a bully of it can't point to the nominal contributions of micro-states like Britain, Denmark and Italy - it needs cover to make itself look like a leader rather than a dictator.
Hillary, in short, finds our lack of faith in her - disturbing. Only at times of stress do we see the iron fist under the hegemonic velvet glove.
But don't worry. The Tories will always, always choose guns over butter, or child benefit. The Navy's been promised its two aircraft carriers, despite the lack of any actual aircraft to go on them (though the US is selling some…).
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.
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.
