If Nigel Farage took to the podium to extol the virtues of the British empire and exhort African and Asian nations to willingly re-submit to the imperialist yoke, the left-media elite would erupt in a frenzy of denunciation.
Indeed, when academic Bruce Gilley published a double-blind peer-reviewed paper, arguing that a return to “some forms of imperial governance” might benefit some developing nations, something unheard-of happened. The paper was withdrawn, not because it was logically or academically flawed, but because “the journal editor has subsequently received serious and credible threats of personal violence”.
Yet the same left who outdid the Inquisition are cheering rapturously for an open call to establish the empire of the Fourth Reich.
‘The world of tomorrow is a world of empires, in which we Europeans and you British can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together in a European framework and a European Union’, declared Guy Verhoftstadt, the EU Parliament’s Brexit spokesman, to rapturous applause at the Liberal Democrats’ conference.
The Lib-Dems are, with Corbynite Labour, the mainstream left in Britain. And here they are, cheering on a new European empire, with its own army, under the boot heel of the nation whose imperial ambitions two generations of Britons fought to defeat.
Of course, it is usually Brexiteers who are denounced as empire nostalgics […]The New York Times described Brexit as ‘England’s last gasp of Empire’ […]‘Imperial fantasies have given us Brexit’, wrote the Guardian’s Gary Younge. In the same paper, historian David Olusaga equated proposals for post-Brexit trade deals with the Commonwealth as Empire 2.0.
What these leftist useful idiots are determined to subject Britain to is, in fact, Reich 4.0.
The European empire is already here. Wolfgang Streeck characterises the EU as a ‘liberal empire’. The EU’s fiendishly complex construction disguises its true nature, but there are some aspects we can certainly identify as imperious. Streeck argues that it has a centre (Germany and France) and a periphery (southern and eastern Europe). The centre rewards compliance with fiscal transfers and military protection. National sovereignty is strictly curtailed, particularly on economic matters, and disobedience among peripheral countries like Greece and Italy is punished with austerity measures and the overthrow of elected governments, who are replaced with imperial governors. Meanwhile, core countries are generally free to break the rules.
The EU is also expansionary, growing from six founder members in 1957 to 28 today.
But the Fourth Reich’s ambitions don’t stop at the Mediterranean. Just as the “jolly pioneers of progress…[with] their jolly lager beer” staked their flag in the 19th century “scramble for Africa”, and Mussolini’s Italy briefly seized Abyssinia, the EU is setting its imperial sights on Africa once again.
The left in Britain are busily tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and demanding reparations for colonialism – at the same time that they are clamouring to Remain in the new Reich.
For Guy Verhofstadt, the already existing empire does not go far enough. Earlier this year he called for the creation of a single ‘Euro-African economic area’ – re-colonisation by other means.
For Britain’s liberal Remainers, the EU provides the certainty of empire while freeing them from the baggage and guilt of the old version and its horrors.
In fact, it is the Brexiteers who are carrying the flag of traditional anti-imperialism.
Brexiteers […] are also labelled as ‘Little Englanders’. Today, a Little Englander is generally used to mean a xenophobe or nationalist. But when the word was first used in the late 18th and 19th centuries, it was applied to opponents of Britain’s imperial expansion […]Then, as now, the Little Englanders are hated for their opposition to the empire of the day.
spiked-online.com/2019/09/16/its-remoaners-who-are-nostalgic-for-empire/
In The Simpsons, Homer carries a warning card to “Always do opposite of what Bart says”. In the case of the left, the guiding principle is that they always do the opposite of what they say. “Anti-fascists” ape the tactics of the actual Fascists, to much the same ends. “Liberals” advocate authoritarian rejection of liberal principles.
“Anti-imperialists” want so very, very badly to be part of the new European empire.