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Source: Real Left
In this 3rd and final article in his series dissecting the right leaning media’s takes on the role of immigrants in the recent French riots, Rusere Shoniwa takes a swipe at the fighting talk from alt media’s Christian soldiers, and examine how their typical analysis of Islamic extremism misses the glaringly obvious big picture.
There is a traceable arc from the violent end to French colonial rule in Algeria between 1954 and 1962 (the period of the Algerian War of Independence) to today’s toxic relationship between the French state and its citizens of North African descent. Low-income housing projects (or banlieues) are dominated by ethnic minorities, signifying a continuity in the ghettoization of the first wave of immigrants following the end of colonial rule in Algeria. The banlieues are now home to an economic underclass who believe that racism is a key driver of their persistent disadvantaged status.
It’s easy enough to understand this suspicion when we have videos of heavy handed policemen telling residents of banlieues to “go back to Africa”. Let’s examine a statement by a mother from Nanterre, the neighbourhood Nahel lived in, in the wake of the protests:
“Here in Nanterre, we are not educating our children. They sometimes go three to four months without teachers. And they cannot find jobs if they have an address with a Nanterre zip code. I am proud to live in Nanterre. I’m proud to be Arab, an immigrant and proud to be French. But we are always stigmatised. I’m Algerian, Arab and I wear a headscarf.”
She speaks on behalf of a stigmatised underclass, but this is what the likes of Demosthenes are salivating over to prove the alleged treachery of the immigrant. There’s the cycle of deprivation and exclusion fuelled by poor education services, and the vicious, circular logic that assumes you are unemployable because you live in an area with high unemployment. And then of course there’s the wearing of multiple identities. This woman is proud of her ethnicity – she can’t change that, so what choice does she have? She says she is Algerian but also proud to be French. Why shouldn’t we believe her? Despite the misery of violent policing and poor employment prospects, she still chooses to live in France and not Algeria.
But rather than take her statement at face value, the likes of Demosthenes would use it as ammunition for their prejudice. I’m pretty sure there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of EU migrants living in Britain with British citizenship who have a foot in another camp but whose ‘allegiance’ and assimilation aren’t in question because they are nominally Christian and have a stake in society that allows them to quietly blend in. Out of nostalgia, they also probably cheer for the football teams of the countries they were born and grew up in. They are just careful not to confess this sin to Demosthenes when they go down the pub.
Regardless of whether a person struggling in the banlieues knows or cares about what happened in 1954, these housing projects are a legacy of an earlier enmity and a reminder that though the banlieues are in France, they are not truly French. As this writer, a recent French immigrant, puts it, the reality in 2023 is that “France remains twisted in a skein of injustice, inequality, and exclusion towards immigrants and people of colour.” Then again, let’s not forget that global capitalism throughout the world needs its banlieues, its underclass, and if North African migrants hadn’t filled these ghettos, the indigenous working class would have.
Who gets to become a citizen and who gets stuck with ‘immigrant’?
The word ‘immigrant’ is itself highly charged. Its purpose is to demarcate a group that doesn’t quite belong. How should we assess whether someone belongs on a piece of real estate, and what are the degrees of belonging? What is an immigrant allowed to say or do for as long as they are an immigrant?
In this particular case, labelling the majority of the French rioters ‘immigrants’, as though they’ve just stepped off a plane, is misleading. They are citizens whose line of French descent is not as obvious as those who have French names and less melanin and who collectively call themselves ‘Christian’, even though they are anything but. Above all, they are a social and economic class set quite apart from the rest of France. They are in effect ghettoised generations of 50s and 60s immigrants amounting to nearly 10% of the total population, living in euphemistically named “urban policy priority districts” which a growing number of French citizens (the ‘real’ ones) now view as requiring “reconquest”. Reconquest is the name of a political party formed in 2021 and named to evoke the historical period known as the Reconquista, when Christian forces drove Muslim rulers from the Iberian peninsula.
When does a “French citizen of Algerian descent”, as Nahel M. was, cease to be a “French citizen of Algerian descent” and become simply a French citizen? How and when does an immigrant finally blend in to be a fully-fledged citizen? The life and ancestry of Boris Johnson might provide some clues. He was born in New York and has Turkish ancestry. Had it not been for a name change by his grandfather, Johnson would have been born Boris Kemal. Being educated at Eton and Oxford certainly didn’t harm his prospects for rising up the greasy pole to become the head of one of the most successful terrorist organisations on the planet – the UK Government. Is the French problem really a class issue that is lazily repurposed by keen dog–whistlers as an immigrant issue because a whole class of French citizens just haven’t succeeded in blending in? Would it help if they dropped their religion and changed their names? More about sameness later.
Having (or not having) a stake in society and the role of impotent rage in riots
That the bitterness and exclusion evident in the French riots seem insurmountable does not make them so. We know that reconciliation can emerge from implacable hatred. Northern Ireland and South Africa are cases in point. The histories underpinning those conflicts are no doubt different, but they manifest in the same dynamic – one or both sides convinced that the other is irredeemably different and beyond understanding. The catalyst for lasting peace is political will, of which there seems to be very little in France. Political will requires concrete solutions to be implemented, and it seems that no one can even muster the imagination to conceive them.
As for riots in general, there are at least two universal factors that make them difficult, if not impossible, to attribute to innate savagery. First, I think people tend not to set fire to communities and infrastructure that they feel they have a stake in. If rioters feel they don’t have a stake in huge swathes of society, we should probably delve into the actual or perceived source of their exclusion, both materially and psychologically. Second, riots have a tendency to be a last resort response to unaddressed grievances. David A. Bell, writing in UnHerd, describes it as “impotent rage” – how the powerless in society express themselves when power ignores them for too long.
The more power you have, the more calmly you are able to respond to real or perceived injustices. We saw it happen here in the UK in 2011 when nationwide riots were sparked following the killing of Mark Duggan by police. Duggan was no saint but there was a long history of grievances about police violence in the community in which he lived. The riots may not have even started had it not been for police attacking a 16-year-old girl with shields and batons because she angrily threw a leaflet or stone at them during a vigil outside the police station. Someone set fire to a police van in the minutes following, and the rest is history. Someone is going to have to explain to me how fully grown men trained to deal with violence judge it appropriate to respond to an angry 16-year-old girl with such force, because I’ll never get it. If there is a causal element of savagery in riots, it’s the police that seem to have an unchallenged monopoly on it.
The plank in the eye of the Christian soldier
Moving away from France but remaining on the subject of anti-Muslim sentiment, I’m now going to poke fun at a boilerplate Right-leaning dog-whistler to illustrate how ‘Christians’ who put Islam in the cross-hairs – that’s not very Christian for starters – can so easily end up shooting themselves in both feet.
On July 14, a 37-year-old man in North Dakota opened fire on first responders at a traffic accident killing one officer and critically injuring at least three other people. The killer was a Syrian man granted asylum in 2012 and then US citizenship in 2019. Writing in TCW, the central question exercising Bernard Carpenter’s mind was: “did a jihadi terror attack occur recently in the city of Fargo, North Dakota?”. The fact that 10 days after the shooting, in Carpenter’s own words, “why he opened fire remains a mystery” was no barrier to Carpenter setting out to prove his hypothesis. Instead, he opted for Michael Howard’s “are-you-thinking-what-I’m-thinking” method of inquiry:
“Is it so unreasonable to ask if religion played a role in this atrocity?… No decent person would indict an entire religion based on the behaviour of a fanatical and homicidal few, but only a fool… would fail to consider a possible and plausible connection between Islam…and terrorism.”
That statement is quite a work of twisted art, like a melting Dali surrealist clock. It’s not easy to contradict yourself in one short sentence but Carpenter achieves it with aplomb. He starts out by saying decent people would never ‘indict an entire religion’ based on the acts of a few depraved individuals, but then goes on to do and say the very thing he condemned by stating that it would in fact be foolish to ignore the connection between jihadi terrorism and Islam, thus indicting billions of adherents to Islam. And so, by achieving at the end of his sentence the very thing he said we should avoid at the beginning of his sentence, Carpenter blows off his right foot.
He then proceeds to provide what he thinks is evidence of the link between Islam and terror. Carpenter’s Exhibit A – “it was followers of Muhammad, not of Martin Luther, who murdered thousands on September 11, 2001”. That is the sound of bullet number two entering Carpenter’s left foot. That Carpenter either doesn’t know or can’t acknowledge that 9/11 was a CIA false flag event and that the ‘blood of thousands’ is therefore on the hands of the CIA and not ‘followers of Muhammad’ is obviously problematic in the context of seeking to deploy 9/11 as a prop in an Islamophobic dog-whistle article. So here is a link to some preliminary homework for Mr Carpenter – it’s James Corbett’s epic journalistic feat that blows the lid on the whole 9/11 false flag. (For the full transcript with source references click here.) The strength of Corbett’s work lies in its use of primary source evidence – the statements and documentation of the establishment criminal class who committed the crime and not speculation by people pejoratively labelled ‘9/11 truthers’.
What amuses me about the Right-leaning independent media’s refusal to grapple with 9/11 is that their act of willing self-censorship makes them mainstream in the worst sense of the term. Admitting that the Deep State sacrificed some 3,000 American lives at the altar of the neo-con Project for a New American Century is a step too far for some in the Right-leaning independent media. They have erected a barrier for themselves, beyond which they fear they will be totally cast out by the Establishment. Which is precisely what the Establishment craves – a deference to authority that keeps real rebellion in check. We know that the battle for freedom will never be won by the mainstream Left because their minds are a complete mush of identity spaghetti. But nor will it be won by the deferential Right-leaning freedom-loving authoritarians who only want freedom if it comes with Establishment-imposed limits to thought. In other words, they will never be truly free and nor do they want to be.
Now, if TCW and Mr Carpenter do know that 9/11 was a false flag but, for whatever reason, can’t bring themselves to go public about it, then it’s disingenuous of them to use it to gird their Islamophobic arguments. But then I suppose hatred of the other has to be founded on some central lie about the other – their religion, their culture, their choice of food, insert whatever condiment goes best with the Islamic crime de jour. Pretty much like how hatred of the unvaccinated had to be founded on the lie that we were irresponsible baby killers. It’s sad to see freedom fighters using the methods of their enemy. TCW may be living proof of the spiritual gurus’ warning – you become what you fight. Which is why it is far more important to be clear about what you are fighting for than what you are fighting against. That way, you end up moving towards the light and not the darkness.
Now, returning to Bernard Carpenter’s contradictory sentence – it’s the gift that keeps on giving. As illustrated by Robert Malone, and now Carpenter, dog whistlers seem to detest beginning at the beginning because, well, it just doggone spoils things for them. In discussing terrorism, I feel it would be somewhat remiss to omit the War on Terror, which James Corbett more accurately terms The War of Terror. In fairness to Carpenter, he does allude to the start of the whole War of Terror by referencing 9/11, albeit in a foot-shooting type of way. Remember the War of Terror? Twenty years of hell for the Middle East starting in 2001 with the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan and a war there that ended in 2022 with the Taliban returning to power as if nothing had ever happened. That progressed to the murder of a million Iraqis based on a little fib about WMD and a 45-minute scare. Then Libya, Syria, Yemen all torn to shreds by the US empire and its allies.
The architects of the Iraq WMD lie were Bush and Blair, two Western leaders who were unabashed Bible bashers and conveniently saw axes of evil wherever they turned. With that War of Terror scene-setting, let’s make some minor adjustments to Carpenter’s gift of a sentence to see what it would look like if we begin the terror story of the 21st Century at the beginning:
“Is it so unreasonable to ask if religion played a role in this atrocity of the War of Terror?… No decent person would indict an entire religion [Christianity] based on the behaviour of a fanatical and homicidal few [Western leaders, CIA, NATO], but only a fool… would fail to consider a possible and plausible connection between Christianity…and terrorism.” [bold text representing edits to the original sentence]
And when we do that, it becomes patently obvious that Christian terrorism has racked up a far more impressive body count than Islamic terrorism could ever have hoped to. And, having run out of feet to blow off, that is the sound of Mr Carpenter, pulling the trigger with the barrel aimed at his chest.
In another Bible-bashing piece, TCW sternly wagged its holy finger at Muslims, instructing them to “learn to love they neighbour”. Indeed! No doubt the Muslims of the world are grateful for the never-ending stream of Sunday school instruction from the Christian soldiers of the West. Perhaps they are eagerly awaiting TCW’s instalment on Matthew 7:4-5 – “take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” They should not hold their breath on that one.
And in the sermonising, finger-wagging spirit pioneered by TCW, here are some words of wisdom the Christian soldiers might ponder as they go about setting the record straight on the “connection between Islam and terrorism”. They come courtesy of W H Auden:
“I and the public know
What all school children learn
That those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
UK intelligence services said more or less the same thing when they warned at the outset in 2003 that Bush and Blair’s decision to set fire to the Middle East would come back to bite them in the form of terror attacks on home soil. The psychopaths, including Bush and Blair, who craved war knew that would happen. It was baked into the plan. They understood that the endless cycle of violence begetting violence would provide the cover they needed to drag the whole sordid affair out for 20 years – more than enough time to fully embed the surveillance state, thus laying the ground for the next phase of biosecurity enslavement heralded by the pseudo pandemic of covid.
Let’s be clear. The War of Terror was a Trojan horse for, among other things, embedding the surveillance state. Now that the surveillance state is a fact of life, the War of Terror has been turned inwards on us. It’s the War on Domestic Terror, the war on all dissent against the government official line on all the key pillars of Agenda 2030 – the War on Disinformation, which is a War on Democracy. When I see the dog-whistle politics of immigration using this or that terror attack to denounce Muslims, I see Deep State stooges, witting or not, refusing to see the big picture because they have an agenda. All I ask of TCW is to just see the big picture, be honest about it and stop Muslim-bashing in the name of freedom and Christianity. From either perspective – freedom or Christianity – it’s not a good look, and it really misses the point. By a wide margin.
Freedom values aren’t Right or Left
Why am I criticising fellow freedom fighters so harshly?, I hear some of you ask. After all, divide and conquer is axiomatic to rule by the parasitic plutocracy. Why play into their hands? Well, I don’t believe I am. Robert Malone doesn’t want freedom for those he strongly disagrees with, like France’s “immigrant children”. That’s not freedom. In any case, has he forgotten who he is fighting? France’s underclass are not the enemy. They aren’t in league with the WEF, the WHO or the UN, and they clearly aren’t in league with their corrupt WEF-ruled government. The Robert Malones of the freedom movement want freedom for themselves, after they’ve defined ‘themselves’ and excluded ‘others’ from those definitions. And those definitions will change. In essence, they want freedom deploying the same concept as the biosecurity state – freedom for the ‘good’ people and not the ‘bad’. That’s not freedom, and they’re certainly not fighting for my freedom.
When I see articles by so-called fellow freedom fighters about deporting “immigrant children” or the “connection between Islam…and terrorism” all I see is a doubling down on the pseudo-intellectual thuggery that entrenches conflicts as opposed to the imagination and courage it takes to understand what each party is prepared to give up in order to have peace. Those articles are written by people who put the differences between groups under the microscope and magnify them. Then, apparently oblivious to the fact that magnification increases the perception of the size of something and not its real size, they solemnly conclude that the magnified differences are insurmountable. The problem with seeing difference and then wanting to obliterate it is that this process never ends because it is driven by the insatiable and irrational desire for sameness. The extreme desire for sameness, homogeneity, is a kernel of the totalitarian ethos. Sameness cannot be achieved even if you succeed in wiping out ethnic and religious difference. People fighting over pronouns and men identifying as women is ample proof of that!
I stopped caring about immigration and the race debate when global capital instigated its coup d’état in March 2020. Far bigger fish to fry, I told myself. But I haven’t forgotten what those debates mean to me insofar as they continue to test my own values. I’m still the same person I was, even if I now despise the mainstream Left who I previously thought were harmless enough and well-intentioned. To the extent that immigration is being used by the parasitic class to sow division within the freedom movement, then hats off to Bastards Inc. From my personal standpoint, it’s worked.
Many of us in the awake-not-woke tribe have given up the divisive Left / Right construct, but it’s clear that many cannot. As long as people cling to those identities and the Left / Right ding-dong remains a political reality within the freedom movement, then there has to be cooperation between the sane element of the Left and the sane element of the Right. That’s going to be much harder if there’s a suspicion on either side that fundamental values which speak to what real freedom looks like aren’t shared. Do we all want real freedom or do some of us just want more benevolent top-down control?
Seeing what passes for commentary about immigration in the Right-leaning independent media has reminded me of a comment made by Silkie Carlo (Big Brother Watch) at a Real Left event last year. She discouraged cooperation with the Right on the grounds that they did not share the values of the Real Left. She was of the view that the mainstream Left was still Real Left’s natural ally. That made no sense to me. First, I cannot imagine any meaningful cooperation with the zombie death-cult of the mainstream left as long as it clings to its slavish adherence to the roll-out of the biosecurity state enabled by its vaccine and climate crisis religions. They are beyond hope. Second, I was immediately very suspicious of what I saw as a deliberate attempt to sow division between the pro-freedom Real Left movement and the pro-freedom Right. I am now starting to question whether she was right about the Right.
I want to stress that I don’t believe the Bible bashing, anti-Islam dog whistlers in the Right-leaning alt media are fundamentally racist. But they’re coming at the immigration and national identity debate from a position of fear, not courage. We are living in dark times so it’s understandable – choosing courage when under threat is easier said than done. I know that from personal experience. We all do. In part I of this essay, I tried to define controlled and uncontrolled immigration and why the latter is obviously threatening. I don’t think my views on the rights and wrongs of each are that different from those of conservatives who worry about the impact of uncontrolled immigration on national identity. So, I’m more interested in conservative freedom fighters’ stance on second and third generation ‘immigrants’ who, by their standards, aren’t integrated enough. Is there a chance that conservatives might discard their dog whistles and actually try to appeal to seemingly unassimilable ‘immigrants’ instead of repel them?
Ethnic minorities (who constitute a significant proportion of the most recent waves of immigration) were far more street-smart than the overly trusting white indigenous population when it came to rejecting the ‘vaccine’ experiment. They’re also more culturally conservative and don’t have much time for heeding the pronoun police or upholders of militant transgender ideology. As Tucker Carlson pointed out in his interview with Ice Cube, the only selling point the ‘vaccine’ religionists on the mainstream Left have to offer ethnic minority voters, both here and in the US, is: “the other side hates you, we don’t”. That’s pathetic and insulting. So, here’s a radical Christian idea for the Bible bashers in the conservative freedom movement – why not prove them wrong? Everybody wins except the death-cult authoritarians on the Left and Right.
Addendum: Response to a Reader’s Comment on Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Immigrant? -Part I
A Real Left’s reader’s critique of Part I of my three-part essay has prompted me to respond in a little more detail. It became apparent to me that something which I had thought was obvious might not be that obvious to others. It then occurred to me that my argument, a central plank in the whole piece, might suffer from a deficiency stemming from my own complacency about it.
I made the point in Part I that uncontrolled immigration from Britain and Europe had a played a major role in traumatic demographic, social, cultural and economic changes for indigenous people in the Global South. As a result, to the extent that uncontrolled immigration today in parts of the West is a concern for the indigenous population in these countries, I expressed empathy with that fear based on my acknowledgment of the role immigration had played in past demographic changes.
The reader criticised my equating of colonial immigration with uncontrolled immigration today. The basis of my comparison was that both would have undesirable effects on the populations who bear the burden of that migration. The reader felt that the examples of past colonial immigration that I cited represented “conquest” and cannot not be compared to today’s immigration into the West by people “trying to get a job or escape war”. She therefore felt that there was just no comparison to be made between uncontrolled immigration that is complained of today in some Western nations and the migration that took place from Europe to its colonies in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
Here is her comment.
“Well it certainly is not ahistorical to point out that what you call “uncontrolled immigration,” given your examples, is not immigration at all but conquest. It’s qualitatively different to come to a place armed to the teeth for the purpose of grabbing land or resources or enslaving the population, than to come to a place with little in your pocket trying to get a job or escape (as you rightly say) war in your own country. So, calling conquest immigration further obscures the issue. which, is, as you say, already complicated.”
The reader is correct in pointing out qualitative differences, but any qualitative differences are irrelevant to the argument I was trying to make, which is in fact a simple one:
- Large-scale migration from Europe to various colonies, for whatever reason, took place. (And the reasons and circumstances of that migration in each example I gave do in fact vary from case to case.)
- The indigenous populations who bore the consequences of that migration may have wanted to control it but could not. In all instances cited, there was a power vacuum or imbalance that was violently exploited, with mass migration used as a tool. A conceptual absence of ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘border control’ were likely contributory factors in this power imbalance.
- Ergo, there was uncontrolled immigration into those territories that became colonies.
So, labelling historic immigration as “conquest” immigration is neither here nor there when we examine its effect – traumatic demographic and social changes and the potential for similar effects to be experienced today in the West, or at least the fear that they might be.
I also think that the reader’s own characterisation of colonial immigration as “conquest”, with the migrants arriving “armed to the teeth”, is somewhat caricatured. If we examine the nature of colonialism more closely and the way it unfolded, we might conclude that both the colonial immigration of yesterday and Western immigration today share similar root cause in that they are both economic, not military, with force subsequently applied to defend economic interests in the case of the historical examples.
European Jews emigrating to Palestine between 1896 and 1939 were not “armed to the teeth”. They were certainly encouraged to believe in the Zionist project, and Palestinians, who had inhabited those lands for centuries, were given no say in the matter. Uncontrolled immigration? I think so.
The date in history that Australia celebrates as its national day is the date that Britain established a prison colony in Sydney – 26th January 1788. Australia was originally planned as a penal colony – an agricultural work camp for British convicts. That of course is also the beginning of the dispossession of Australia’s Aboriginal people as the colonisers spread across the continent. From the perspective of the indigenous population, it’s hard to argue that isn’t uncontrolled immigration.
With a few quotes from some scholarly work, I will try to nuance colonialism to show that:
- it was not as much about “conquest” as it was about business backed up by force to defend trade and profit when necessary;
- the migrants from Europe were, for the most part, not “armed to the teeth”, although we know full well that Britain did use military force to protect its overseas trade interests and that the settlers or colonisers themselves were more than heavy-handed with the ‘natives’;
- like today’s migration, much of the movement of people from Europe to the colonies was driven by a combination of adventurism and economic migration or, as the reader who commented on my piece said of today’s migrants, “com[ing] to a place with little in your pocket trying to get a job”.
Here are some observations made by Bernard Porter from his work: The Lion’s Share – A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004 [1].
The economic roots of British imperialism and colonialism
“The roots of British imperialism were material, not cultural. Specifically, it grew out of the nature of the British capitalism of the time[2]… This ‘informal empire’ was the product of Britain’s expanding economy…Every year the industrial system devoured more raw materials and turned them into saleable commodities, and demanded yet more materials and markets; that its appetite would spread ever wider beyond Britain’s national boundaries was therefore natural… The result was a constant expansion of Britain’s world market to match the expansion of her industrial production at home [3].”
Not every ‘colony’ was colonised. Settlement and migration was not always a prerequisite
“In a way Argentina was as much a British ‘colony’ as Canada[4]… the mere fact that Britain had an economic interest in a country did not make that country her colony or dependency… If another country voluntarily accepted and fulfilled these requirements, as for example Argentina did by treaty in 1825, then to the way of thinking of the 19th century free trader, the bargain between her and Britain… was a fair and equal one [5]… Argentina was Britain’s perfect satellite economy: a willing servant who did not need to be enslaved [6].”
The imperial justification for force – profit and trade
Quoting Palmerston in 1860:
“It may be true in one sense that trade ought not to be enforced by cannonballs, but on the other hand, trade cannot flourish without security, and that security may often be unattainable without the exhibition of physical force [7].”
The role of adventurism and empire as a way of providing jobs for the higher-ups…
“British India had come into being through an earlier manifestation of ‘creeping imperialism’, and the cavalier empire-building of a few freelance adventurers like Clive in the 18th century[8].”
“Colonies were persisted in, said Cobden, only to enable the English upper classes to find jobs for their younger sons as governors and generals. In logic – the logic of the market, at any rate – there was a lot to be said for this view [9].”
And jobs for the plebs
Retaining colonies like Australia, New Zealand and Canada was a way of promoting kith-and-kin links to profitable trading outposts as well as absorbing surplus labour at home:
“There was also their value as settlements for emigrants, soaking up the labour surpluses that British capitalism – puzzlingly to free market zealots – continued to throw up [10].”
It should go without saying that recognising the nature of British imperialism does not make me an apologist for it – understanding is not condoning. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that living under Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia for the first twelve years of my life screwed me up in more ways than I am aware of. But I also know it enriched me in more ways than I am aware of. So I’m not bitter. My father certainly had a right to be bitter about it but I never heard him complaining once about it. He made the most of a bad situation by leveraging British colonialism to secure a scholarship to study law at Exeter University and then Oxford.
And nor are the above quotes offered up as a representation of the whole truth – they can’t possibly be. More than enough has been said about the brutality that was used to reinforce the economic imperatives of empire, so I haven’t thought it necessary to ‘go off on one’ here, so to speak. These quotes are an invitation to a nuanced view of imperialism and colonialism.
Crucially, I hope some of them also help to show that the comparison I made, insofar as it references the unplanned and undesired effects of large-scale migration, is not as barmy as the Real Left reader makes it out to be!
[1] At the time of publication of the 4th edition, Bernard Porter was Emeritus Professor of History, University of Newcastle.
[2] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Preface, page [x]
[3] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 15.
[4] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 14.
[5] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 19.
[6] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 20.
[7] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 21.
[8] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 23.
[9] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 26.
[10] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 28,29.
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