Not allowing our imperial history to be rubbished is important because if indeed our imperial history was all that they say it was, namely a litany of atrocity, then the moral authority of the West is eroded.
The Oxford Professor of Theology, Nigel Biggar, interviewed on the Conservativehome website, 16 September 2020
The Western Gulag
No people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword and later ruthlessly defended them than the English Nation’.
Adolf Hitler (1)
When Gandhi was asked in London in the 1930s what he thought of Western Civilisation, he allegedly replied: ‘I think it is a very good idea’. It is what we Orthodox Christians think too. Ask any Serb, who knows all about the effects of Western depleted uranium shells on unborn children and RAF bombs marked ‘Happy Easter’, murdering women and children on Easter Night. The Anti-Civilisation of Gulags is an inherent part of all four materialist Western ideologies: the Feudalist, the Communist, the Fascist, the Globalist.
How else can you enforce your millennial ideology of organised violence on the rest of the world? For the Western world, with its British ‘rule of law’ or its US ‘international rules-based order’, law is a medieval construct of regulated force, legalised violence, the high priest of Imperialism, the theft of land and resources from native peoples with bits of parchment and paper. Ask the medieval European serfs, herded into concentration camp ‘villages’ beneath the newly-built castles, inhabited by ‘evil men’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote, such that English peasants thought that ‘Christ and His saints slept’. Ask the Irish. Ask the Native Americans. Ask the Africans. Ask the Asians. Ask the Aborigenes. Ask the Ukrainians about the feudal Blackrock corporation.
The USSR, like China, had its own State camp system, the Communist Gulag (the abbreviation ‘lag’ taken from the German Lager – camp – camps being the new castles), inspired by the latest Western ideology of Communism. But all the Feudalist empires had their Gulags too: Spain in most of South and Central America and Mexico; Portugal in Brazil and parts of Africa; France in West and North Africa and Indo-China; the Netherlands in the ‘Dutch East Indies’; Belgium in the Congo; Germany in South-West and East Africa; Austro-Hungary in Carpatho-Russia; Italy in Libya and ‘Abyssinia’.
And Britain had them almost everywhere, most notoriously and most literally in the slave plantations of the Caribbean and Virginia, in the Indian subcontinent and only five generations ago in South Africa. Camps, camps, camps – so much admired by Hitler that he copied Britain and made his own Fascist Gulag in Eastern Europe. And after Hitler’s suicide, the British, perhaps flattered by his admiration, carried on their millions-strong Gulag in the late 1940s and 1950s, in Palestine (yes, Israel was a British invention, thank you Lloyd George and Balfour for your ‘contract with Jewry’, as you called it (2)), Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and finally Northern Ireland under the heartless Thatcher (3).
However, the USA also copied the British Gulag, at home (‘Indian reservations’ = concentration camps for Native Americans on the worst land), in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism of Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy (the latter got murdered for his), the awful British Empire survived and became the American Empire. First, there was Rhodes and then Milner, who wanted the US in. So in 1917 their followers engineered a coup to get the Russians out and a few weeks later they brought the US in. But in 1941, when Britain had gone bankrupt and could have starved, the US took over completely to keep the Germans down. The world was America’s and so they invented NATO to continue their out, in and down.
The American Empire
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without going through the process of civilisation.
Oscar Wilde
A piece of European snobbery, proclaims the American on reading the above. And probably rightly so, for surely it is not just America, but much of the Western world which did not go through the process of civilisation. For what is America, if not a European colony? After 1945 the British elite presented their Empire as a bastion of anti-Communism and so sold it to the US, knowing that that was how to pull the Americans’ strings. And so, economically, they held on to it, even when militarily they had become bankrupt pygmies.
Where did you think the CIA got its waterboarding from? It had been a small part of the long-perfected British ‘dilution technique’ of beatings and torture. And Guantanamo? Just a copy of illegal detentions in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Of course, the Americans never used the words ‘Empire’ or ‘Imperial’. Instead, they disguised the American Empire behind the words ‘Globalism’ and ‘Modernization’. And then the British copied them in turn, cottoning on to the slogan ‘Global Britain’ instead of ‘Imperial Britain’. Same thing. Just sounds better.
Yes, it is true that the hoodwinked Western peoples, at least outside the capitals and main cities, had little idea of what was being done abroad in their name by their elites. Most never went any further than a few neighbouring villages. They were told that it was all a ‘civilising mission to enlighten backward peoples’ – and they believed it, beneath the weight of the censorship and propaganda of the elite. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde approach (the novella was written at the height of Victorian Imperialism in 1886), the beast inside and underneath, was always the Western approach. Ditto for Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, the symbol of Victorian blood-sucking Imperialism.
It is also reflected in the novels of Agatha Christie (and countless other imitators, like the inventor of Cluedo), in which a nice, quiet, innocent, English village becomes the scene of dastardly murder, committed by a member of the elite. The village-murder meeting of opposites was noted by George Orwell, inspired by the British example of the wartime British ‘Ministry of Information’, in fact the Ministry of Disinformation. In his 1948/1984 world of Doublethink he commented: ‘War is Peace’. ‘Freedom is Slavery’. It had virtually been the feudal slogan of Hitler’s death camps: Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Liberates. The Americans reflected it all in their satirical film Arsenic and Old Lace. Two sweetness and light old ladies, whom we might well nickname Freedom and Democracy, have their mad brother burying their dead victims, the ‘backward’ outcasts of society, in the cellar. ‘They are so much happier now’.
Charming politeness and law-abidingness on the surface, pitiless and ruthless bloodshed underneath, in the cellar of the Western world, that part of the house the polite never speak about, but hypocrisy will not make it go away. The whole of Western double standards is satirised. ‘Sorry we murdered you. But it was for your own good’. Such precisely is the history of Western Imperialism and its aerial bombing ‘back to the Stone Age’ (aerial bombing – another British invention from the 1920s, faithfully copied by the Americans). If you do not believe me, look at today’s murder of the Ukraine. ‘It is all for their own good’, claim the neocons. ‘Why, once all those who resist are dead, they will be civilised – like us’. If anyone is left. After all, they do want to fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’.
The Narcissist Club
The Capital of that beacon of light, the USA, is named after a slave-owner. How many slaves did he own and exploit – 200, or was it 300? It is as if Berlin was called Hitlerstadt. They would complain about that name, but not about the Washington name. Isn’t it time to give Washington a native name? The same hypocrisy goes for the British arch-imperialist Churchill. He complained about Hitler murdering 5.4 million Jews, but what about the 5.4 million Bengalis that he allowed to die in the Bengal famine of 1943? It did not matter. They were brown. The Jews were not. And, besides, the Jews had plenty of money. Isn’t it time to take down Churchill’s statue in London? We have had enough of the apologists for Western crimes. They are after all no more than apologists for Hitler.
I love Old Europe, but not New Europe. Like Dostoyevsky I approach New Europe as the cemetery of a dear friend. In the first millennium Europe gave us those who, surrounded by death, preached the Divine message of Resurrection from death and so offered Eternal Life. These are the saints of Europe, the apostles and martyrs in Rome and such as St Irenaeus in Lyon, St Maurice in Switzerland, St Ursula in Cologne, St Eulalia in Barcelona, St Ambrose in Milan, St Martin in Gaul, St John Cassian in Marseilles, St Patrick in Ireland, St Genevieve in Paris, St Benedict in Umbria, St David in Wales, St Martin in Braga, St Columba in Scotland, St Gregory in Rome, St Willibrord in the Netherlands, St Boniface in Germany, St Eulogius in Cordoba, St Anskar in Denmark, St Edmund in England, St Olaf in Norway, St Stephen in Hungary, St Sigfrid in Sweden.
In the second millennium Europe gave us those who, surrounded by death, preached the humanitarian message of Resistance to evil and so offered cultural life. Despite all the surrounding evils, they gave us such as Boccaccio and Dante, Giotto and Chaucer, Van Eyck and de Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Moliere and Mozart, Blake and Keats, Beethoven and Goethe, Chopin and Heine, Dickens and Strauss, Dvorak and Grieg, Rodin and Renoir, Monet and Mucha, Verne and Wells, Orwell and Mann. Then Europe began to dry up, as in 1914 it started on its long, slow and bloody process of suicide or rather genocide of the peoples of Europe by the elites. And that suicide/genocide is ongoing. This time in Zelenskyland, in a conflict which implicates the whole spineless European elite. Europe lost its way, and so its culture, when it lost its foundations, and so its principles.
Here I am in France, yes, the independent France that existed until the CIA mounted its colour revolution against De Gaulle in 1968 and is now ruled by the effeminate banker ‘Micron’, as many call him. Here I was struck last week by the wording on the clothing of a little girl. I suppose she must have been about seven years old. She was wearing a T-shirt with words which surely she did not understand. They said, naturally in English: centre for self-love. And I thought how those words actually sum up the present-day Western world, with its Facebook and likes, me-time and iphone, Twitter and Instagram (‘I buy buy branded clothes, so I can take pictures of me wearing them and then post them on my Instagram account’). It is a selfie world, an ‘I-world’, an ‘I love me’ world, a world of narcissism. As such, it is therefore a doomed world. Creation only ever comes from sacrifice and suffering, whether from childbirth and concertos, never from egoism and self-satisfaction, from Tik Tok and Instagram. The century-long suicide of Europe continues, long ago exported to the rest of the West.
On account of its suicide/genocide, today we can no longer speak of Europe being able to stand alone, not even of Eurasia, but of Afro-Eurasia. It is Russia, Asia and Africa that can together still save the Half-Continent at the Western end of Darkest Europe from itself. (European Russia and Belarus already managed to save themselves from all four materialist Western ideologies of Feudalism, Communism, Fascism and Globalism – all variations on the same exploitative theme. We look to BRICS to save the North American Brave New World and to BRICS to save the Australian and New Zealand Brave New World. As for Europe, its only meaning now is, like Zelensky, to surrender and bear responsibility for the crimes of its millennial elites whom most Europeans obeyed. But first Europe must reject its aberrant Imperial history of pride and return to its roots of humility.
Notes:
- Mein Kampf
- Lloyd George, Memoirs 2: 721
- See, for example, Caroline Elkins’ excellent cataloguing of twentieth-century British Imperial genocidal crimes in her Legacy of Violence (London 2022). It confirmed everything we had long suspected and forms a suitable reply to the whitewashing of the British Empire by Lawrence James in his Rise and Fall of the British Empire, (was that part-funded by MI5?), or the absurd nonsense of Ferguson’s ‘the West and the Rest’ with his Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (paid for 2003 propaganda?) and Nigel Biggar’s pure Establishment Ethics and Empire project in 2017, in which like an extraterrestrial from Oxford academia he still appears to be clueless about the millennial reality. The West’s moral authority ‘eroded’? It never had any.