Green and pleasant land, Part 1

As occasional visitors to the blog may have noticed, the words haven’t been flowing of late. I have been on a bit of a downer. As someone who doesn’t really suffer from depression or mood swings, it has been a bit of a surprise. I think, when all is said and done, that I have just had enough. I have come to the end of my tether. I am effing sick of it. And this has induced a sort of temporary paralysis. When it came to fight or flight, I froze.

While three full months in lockdown isn’t helping, I’m talking about life in general here. Or rather that thing that passes for life in various countries of the world (primarily in this rant, in the USA and the UK). Actually, the US I wrote off a while ago. They will either sort themselves out in time for the next election or they will implode into several republics. It is the sort of crucible the country really should have gone through in the 19th century, but staved it off through its expansionism and a slavish devotion to a list of reasonably-good-at-the-time late 18th Century ideas. Now that people are actually rising up and making their voices heard, things might happen more quickly. Besides, while they are turned inwards, they are not sabre rattling in Central America, the Middle East, South America, Africa, South East Asia or the Caribbean. Or on the Canadian border, which was threatened with a positioning of troops in March of this year. No, the US can look after itself, as far as I am concerned. It has permanently damaged its credibility and influence in the world, exposed its “land of the free” image for the sham mythology it always was, and will struggle for a generation to attract the brains it needs to thrive as a leader in R&D and S&T, not to mention IT, DARE, and FAPE. (Still, as long as they have ADHD, S&M and KFC, some will remain happy.) No, the crippling factor for me has been my erstwhile country of nationality, and its adoption of the Trump play book for governing.

I honestly cannot overstate how sickened I have been by what is going on in England at the present time. And for all the bullshit that is put out on a daily basis by UKOP (i.e. the United Kingdom Official Propagandists, the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, BBC, The S*n, The Times, etc., in other words, all of the media outlets either owned by Murdoch’s Fox empire or the government), the fact remains that England has been in a complete mess since before Victoria was on the throne, and that successive governments have only ever managed to paper over the cracks and reinforce the papier-mâché plinths on which the country’s entire system of governance has been built. Britain isn’t great. Britain has never been great. It is a cruel country, propped up by a tyrannical system of self-interest, which has exported its cruelty and nastiness around the world and, in a rather brilliant and jaw-droppingly brazen way, has managed to convince a number of those it has oppressed, massacred, dominated, bullied, intimidated, threatened, cowed and enslaved that it has done it in the name of civilisation or progress. It has, of course, copied this strategy from the Romans, who did it all 2000-2500 years ago, and managed to establish pax romana across vast swathes of the planet. The English even aped that particular term, reveling in the pax britannica that Victoria so loved.

The problem for Britain though is that it has been found out. In fact, it was found out well before the First World War, and (although I am no historian and am basing this part on leaps of thought rather than carefully researched evidence) I think part of the reason it engaged so wholeheartedly in that conflict was to settle the stirrings that were happening from within. Bloody Sunday happened in Liverpool before it happened in Dublin. There is nothing the English ruling class fear doing to other races, because they quite willingly do it to their own people. Churchill sent a gunboat into the Mersey to cow a trade union movement, and he was also more than happy to send troops into Tonypandy to quell a miners’ strike. So you can look at the participation and imperialism of WWI as being a way of sending all those naughty would-be trade unionists or revolutionaries away to either slaughter, be slaughtered or both, hopeful in the knowledge that the only thing they would want when they came back would be a bit of peace and quiet and certainly no major upheavals in their own country. On the whole, the Great War is synonymous with the slaughter of the working class. And those who sent them there knew exactly what they were doing. They’d been doing the same thing throughout Europe for centuries.

And all the time, Britain was glowing in the majestic light of having an Empire on which the sun never set. An Empire devoted to civilising the world, shining light into the darkness of anthropophagic Africa; headhunting South East Asia; duplicitous China; fetid India; bog-dwelling Ireland; savage Scotland; stone age Australia; bead-worshiping America… not to mention others around the world who were fortunate enough to share the glory of English Dominion. How lucky they all were to be part of the Empire, the glorious Empire, ruled from beside the Mighty Thames by an august body of fair-minded men, worshiping a Divine Queen-cum-Empress, benefiting from English savoir-faire and technology.

The delusion was total, in England at least.

England, the master of illusions, the prestidigitateur par excellence, the King of the Sleight of Hand. For while selling the illusion, England was undertaking a slaughter of those it had newly colonised – or at least those who did not welcome subjugation under the colonial heel. England was enslaving the Africans; seizing and raping the land; stealing minerals and gold; destroying libraries and palaces; imposing its monarch-worshiping version of Christianity on societies with complex theistic or animistic panoplies of belief; oral traditions stretching back millennia; snatching children from their parents to “re-educate” them and prevent the learning of indigenous languages; smashing cultures and ideas and systems of justice and learning, all to impose its own.

And England did this with a benevolent smile on its face. From Scotland to Canada to the Transvaal to Ireland to Australia to China to India to New Zealand to America to Gibraltar to Egypt to the Falkands to Nepal to Malaysia to Kenya and Tanganyika to the Ends of the Earth, England looked down upon those it had subjugated through superior technology and surprise, and told them how lucky they were to have England to look after them, how lucky they were to be getting their civilisation for free, how lucky to be upgraded from a country of barbaric savages to a subjugated, indentured, vassal state. We are, said the English, happy to accept your gratitude and gifts, your land and your men. Please don’t mention it.

It's not for nothing the French know the English as la perfide Albion.

I'm bushed. I will carry on with this tomorrow. Bear with me...