Word: britishers
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Over half a century ago, in 1955, the British governor of Kenya, speaking during the infamous Mau Mau uprising, pleaded with all concerned to appreciate the enlightened project that was his Empire’s burden: “The task we have set ourselves is to civilize a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state.” About a decade earlier, his predecessor Philip Mitchell had outlined this duty in starker terms still: “The African has the choice of remaining a savage or of adopting our civilization...
...Against the colonial myths that the Mau Mau epitomized intrinsically “African” savagery, history makes clear systematic British inhumanity. Even though the rebels were responsible for the deaths of almost 2,000 locals enlisted in the colonial cause, more than 10,000 Kenyans were killed by the British, with some estimates running much, much higher (in contrast, only 90 Europeans were murdered by the rebels). The British ran infamous concentration camps, assisted actively by their (civilian) settlers, one of whom described his role in the interrogation process as follows: “Things got a little...
...Much like the British in colonial Kenya, this country’s present-day administration has presided over a similarly stupefying self-righteousness in Iraq. Despite the intervening half-century, in which the great powers were supposed to have outgrown colonial pretence, the barbarity of the ‘civilizing mission’ makes itself apparent in Iraq today. And no episodes in the four and a half years of occupation better demonstrate this than the brutality of the two sieges of the city of Fallujah...
Another reason why some Australians want to keep the monarchy is unease about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure" Anglo-Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine a half-century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British descent and could feel themselves to be, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies would later put it, "British to the bootheels." But today the picture of exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia, has almost faded away. The White Australia Policy, that disgraceful provision whereby no one of Asian...
Maybe, but it doesn't ultimately matter. Immigration has done its work. It has changed Australia irrevocably. Nobody old enough to remember the dullness of its old monocultural cuisine can regret that. The British Empire has gone. The British Commonwealth is no longer, to put it mildly, a decisive linkage between nations. The Australia Act of 1986 formally defined Britain as a foreign country. Australia's economic links to Britain, though not insignificant, are small and dwindling in comparison with its trading ties to the Near North, once known as the Far East. Britain is in the European Union...