Facebook. Friends on Facebook. Some of my cousins are friends on Facebook. I see people there being very close to each other. Being silly with each other. Being sentimental. I also see people who I can only assume are actually frightened, in this generation, by Muslims.
I opened a post today which was a link through to video showing a demonstration purportedly by a Muslim group somewhere in London driving the police back whilst various things are shouted including some recognisable phrases in Arabic. The text below it tells us rhetorically about the fact that there are areas of London that a no go to the police. This is followed by hashtags connected, particularly noticeably, to patriots and to Donald Trump.
What a populist he is.
And it’s my cousins who are listening to it and daring to put it out publicly. I don’t say anything otherwise I’d never hear it. Except increasingly out there in the press.
It is if they relish in some sort of coming battle imagining I don’t know what. Do they think the others want the same? To start the battle when their side is so weak. No on both sides people want to start the battle. We the Liberals say that education will matter. That people develop as they want to at a speed they are comfortable with in this system. If you force them into corners they will feel obliged to fight to rebel and fight.
But of course that’s what was done to you my cousins. To the working class. To parts of the working class. They were given increasing amounts of education and responsibility and power. They were given these in order to put them off from actually fighting. They maintained an increasingly disciplined attitude to themselves. This wasn’t done to you because somebody was afraid to crush your rights but because, pragmatically, if you were to start fighting then no sort of advance could be made. Peace is needed to move on. War doesn’t achieve that.
And then are the great empires, the Chinese Empire, the Roman Empire. The British Empire. Change moved forward through these because of the control. Because of the forced peace that comes with Empire, within the bounds of the Empire.
So we are real imperialists those of us who wish war not to take place. We are global imperialists.