I have chosen such a controversial title because the Establishment view usually suggests that nationalism is the cause of many of the world’s troubles. Of course I do not think that all troubles could be solved by nationalism but may be many more than people usually think.
I am interested in history, both the sweep of it in terms of human development and in all the civilisations of the world, but mostly in Western civilisation and especially anything to do with England.
As part of my general reading I have recently read a very interesting book, it is called:-
Churchill's First War: Young Winston and the Fight Against the Taliban
by Con Coughlin
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Churchills-First-War-Winston-Against/dp/0230758517I would recommend this book to anyone interested not only in Winston Churchill and in military history, but also in current affairs in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
For the purposes of the title of this article however, the interesting thing that appears in the book is that a significant part of the reason why there has been more or less continuous disorder, wars and bloodshed in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan (and before that North West Frontier of British India), is because of an, all too typical, decision by a British bureaucrat. While a recurring feature of the British administrative mind-set seems to have been, and to continue to be, an almost total disregard of people’s ideas of their own communities. You have only got to think of how a variety of hopelessly unstable African States have been left with parts of tribes in various different States. Of course as part of the imperial plan of “Divide and Rule” it may have been quite useful to have various parts of antagonistic tribunal groups cancelling each other out. It seems to me that it may well be part of this mind-set that has engineered the current divisions of “communities” in England under the doctrine now called multiculturalism.
In this book however what emerges is that a British bureaucrat by the name of Durand arbitrarily decided the boundary between British India and Afghanistan without any real effort to consult anybody who might be affected by his decision. On the contrary he drew a line on maps following only geography, rather than considering the social/societal implications of his decisions. The upshot of this is that Pashtuns, who were a long way towards becoming a Nation with an idea of themselves as a national identity, suddenly found themselves divided in such an arbitrary way that villagers might even have been divided from their own fields between British India, as it then was, and Afghanistan. In many ways all the fighting and bloodshed ever since can be understood as a liberation struggle of a Nation seeking to assert its nationhood against a variety of foreign interferences.
I wonder if instead of dividing the Pashtuns, the British imperial colonial administration had decided to unite them in an independent territory, whether there would have been any of the imperialist adventures described in this book, by Churchill or ever since?
I suggest that if our foreign policy focussed more on supporting the creation of States wherever possible with a clear sense of self as a Community and Nation rather than the administrative mind-set of supporting often deeply unpopular and undemocratic statist structures, whether the world would not already have been a much happier and better place in which people genuinely respected the “diversity” of the world’s Nations.
One of the world’s Nations whose Integrity and Unity needs to be Respected is of course that of the English Nation. We do not need to be broken up under some British imperialist legacy of Divide and Rule!
Here is the Daily Mail take on this book >>>
http://search.aol.co.uk/aol/imageDetails?s_it=imageDetails&q=Winston+Churchill+first+war+image&img=http%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2Fi%2Fpix%2F2009%2F06%2F20%2Farticle-1194352-056199F3000005DC-173_468x572.jpg&v_t=sb_uk&host=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-1194352%2FHunting-Taliban-footsteps-Winston-Churchill.html&width=126&height=154&thumbUrl=http%3A%2F%2Ft1.gstatic.com%2Fimages%3Fq%3Dtbn%3AANd9GcQjxbOUCY3nNRgkMT79WszTQacK5ywNMHmJ8a8vHZmfm_DZpYpZiC6aqOHE%3Ai.dailymail.co.uk%2Fi%2Fpix%2F2009%2F06%2F20%2Farticle-1194352-056199F3000005DC-173_468x572.jpg&b=image%3Fv_t%3DimageResultsBack%26page%3D3%26q%3DWinston%2BChurchill%2Bfirst%2Bwar%2Bimage%26oreq%3D9c54c50cdfd549de9106677cf99ac394%26oreq%3D05aca111a7fc4056bbf89866cd5196d5&imgHeight=572&imgWidth=468&imgTitle=Hunting+the+Taliban+in+the+footsteps+of+Winston+Churchill+%7C+Mail&imgSize=70255&hostName=www.dailymail.co.uk
You need only look at nature to see why there is always conflict and diversity it’s normal, it’s to set things against each other to create change with different qualities character strengths and weaknesses, to sort the strong from the weak. However just like animals humans have learned to group together to survive and make it less easy for the strong to overcome the weak, multiculturism is the middle ground but as we are seeing leading eventually to Muslim “MASS” domination which will wipe out all creativity and life on earth, because diversity and change and creation will cease to be present, it’s just like the Bible says from DOT to BLOT.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to see the situation in Belgium, which became a nation when the southern provinces of the then Netherlands broke away in 1830. The new state was dominated by the French speaking Walloons and the Flemings have been hostile to them for many generations. Indeed in Flanders today as a tourist it is better to either attempt Flemish or to speak English than to speak to the Flemings in your schoolboy French. Now we have the situation where the mainly socialist Walloons are controlling the Belgian parliament and dominating the more right wing Flemings. For Walloons sustitute Scots and for Flemings substitute English.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to the days of the Empire, I have often mused on the fact that the British Establishment was still imperial at the end of the War when the colonies began to break away and achieve independence. In the days of the Empire, if the natives would not do as they were told or were too lazy then the solutions was to import indentured labour, mostly from the Indian sub-continent. Thus Indians were taken to Trinidad because the black slaves there either could not or would not work hard enough and ended up running the show, the same for Fiji and the same for Kenya and Uganda until they were thrown out.
So in 1948 there was a problem with London's buses and the workers were too demanding. Bring in the indentured labour from the West Indies. Then there was a problem with the textile mills in the north of England. Bring in indentured labour from Pakistan. Then there was a problem with manpower in Southall. Bring in Indians. It was all so simple, just like in the good old days of the Empire.
And as elsewhere, in Africa, the West Indies, Fiji etc, the indentured labour was just left there to cause resentment on the part of the natives, hence the attempted coup on Fiji. The imperial establishment never seemed to worry about that and they still don't. They just put the natives down, as they did in Fiji and here in Britain. In fact, the British establishment still seems to be playing empires. The difference is that the colony is England and the natives are the indigenous English.