Like the Niggers of yore…

W G Sebald, in his ‘The Rings of Saturn’, where he recounts his ramble through Suffolk, goes off at a tangent, as he will, and recounts the crass and large scale murderous cruelties of the Belgians in subjugating the peoples of their African colony, the Congo. He then recounts the similar treatment of the native populations in South America, in the jungles of Peru, of Columbia, and of Brazil, by the Amazon Company, whose headquarters were in the City of London. And it strikes me that the imperialist attitude still persists in this country today, in the form of its attitude to, and its treatment of, the ‘lower orders’, that is, of a large section of its own people, whom it treats like the niggers of yore, in fact, as the despised enemy…Those in power and in possession of the goodies of the country, who enjoy the privileges of their position, blame the poor for their poverty, instead of taking responsibility for the grossly uneven distribution of wealth, and legislating for a fairer sharing of those goodies. To me the fact that our prisons are fuller than those of all the other European countries, ties in with that imperialist attitude, which runs counter to an understanding of the rebellion generated by the utterly unfair distribution of those goodies, and which metes out the vicious and vindictive punishment of the transgressors, whose crimes arise largely out of the social conditions for which those in power hold sole responsibility.…

Of course the imperialist attitude is also the basis of the country’s foreign policy, resulting in its military interference all over the world, costing vast sums of money, which could well be better channelled to the needs of its own people.