Letter To The ICBR: Re: sharing reparations
04/26/2007
From: jamil Brownson
Organization: Emirates.net
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:42:57 +0400
To:
Subject: sharing reparations
ok, agreeabout reparations
Agreed about reparations ... but ... do not excise the usa from its
intimate, albeit at times contentious, interweaving with the british
imperial agenda ... willingly inherited and pursued by the usa as an
inseparable unit in the anglosphere ...
But while the british empire dominated the second round of European
imperial-colonial enterprise, it cannot be held solely accountable for the
entire European agenda and action. Thus a broad across the board
accounting of European imperial-colonial enterprises needs be made …
including reparations, but in the form of debt relief and excising all
interest accumulated or proposed to accumulate on any such loans or funds
contributed to development of former colonial territories.
Specifically toward the uk and british / English imperial drive, its
origins are against the Celtic Fringe – as Michael Hechter has well proven
in his study of internal colonialism documenting the experiments of the
English in brutally developing a colonial-imperial model, including the
settler-colonial process displacing locals through ethnic cleansing and
replacement by English or in the case of Ireland, Scottish settlers.
But what about this british empire, and its English core ethos of
expansionist imperial conquest, colonial settlement, rule and dominion? As
Kevin Phillips so well documents, its roots are in the Anglo-Saxon ethos
and ethnos, and especially prevalent and emergent within the fanatical
protestant movement culminating internally in the excesses of Cromwellian
rule, and its succession in the brutal continued subjugation of Ireland
under William of Orange — King Billy’s fanatics, known today as Ulstermen
or Orangemen … so troublesome to a reunification of Ireland under a
majority rule.
Yes, we must condemn excesses by the British empire, through its English,
and ultimately protestant anglo-saxon ethno-ideological core. But where
does the blame situate? With the house of Windsor, war of the roses or
even Norman Barons of Magna Charta rules?
Where in this history do we divide England from France, with a hundred
years war to settle claims by both ruling houses for territory inherited
within the other’s domain? And the Dutch — caught between a Protestant
alliance of Germanic states, including England, and the House of Hapsburg,
as leader of an imperial force coalesced around the Roman Catholic
counter-reformation embedded in the Spanish and Austro-Hungarian
territories.
Of minor mention to all except their victims, are the Belgian and Italian
colonial enterprises, so brutal in their occupations and domination of
local populations. Italian conquest, occupation, colonization and
settlement of Libya, matched or exceeded norms of European
settler-colonial brutality, while their subjugation of Ethiopia and
Somalia were unholy enterprises of deploying aerial bombardment,
artillery, and machine guns against spear and sword.
Of Belgium and the Congo we not only have Joseph Conrad’s novelistic
accounts of European savagery amidst the heart of darkness, but a
continuing saga through Katanga, and current genocide and ethnic cleansing
in the Eastern regions spilling over among other artificially divided
former colonies, reconfigured into dysfunctional post-colonial states of
Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and other neighbours.
While taking the grand overview would not only condemn European
enterprises, but include Russian imperial expansion into Western
Turkistan, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia, and also Chinese
expansion and imperial colonial rule over Tibet, Mongolia, and Eastern
Turkistan.
Irregardless of direct European imperial expansion, can we ignore the
equally genocidal rise of its offshoots — the USA, Australia, or Israel?
Where to draw the line?
Is it sufficient to indict the UK as inheritor of the British Empire,
blaming it as a surrogate for all the others who profited through global
genocidal rape of territories, peoples, resources?
To answer this question requires a collective discourse, indeed a
reconvening of a global peoples court to investigate and try those guilty
for their crimes, yet leaving both verdict and punishment or recompence to
the decision of such trials and juries representing the victims.
Yet, how can we indict the working classes and former peasants of European
imperial powers? Can we not also indict feudalism of the ancien regime,
or mercantilism and its even bloodier successor capitalism, and its
present ruthless turbocharged capitalism under the tragically hypocritical
banner of neo-liberalism?
These issues are too complex to either shunt aside or lay all the
accountability to the feet of the UK. A valid indictment must explore the
evidence and context of the crimes as much as the intent and motivation of
those accused as criminals.
Without similar resources to the anti-UK reparations movement — if indeed
it is a movement and not merely a public relations ploy to sell a book and
promote an author — a more just and necessarily extensive global tribunal
(via internet) hardly seems possible unless the sponsors of the British
Reparations websites would actively open the discourse to public debate
over these issues.
Michael Hechter's (1976) history, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe
in British National Development, 1536-1966,
Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of
Anglo America
