The English Kingdom
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Macdara is keen to emphasise his agreement with Abbott’s basic point: the racism (or prejudice) suffered by minorities now classified as white, is different in various ways to that experienced by non-white people. This closes nothing down, but is a reasonable starting off point for exploring all the various ways that different groups experience different…
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In any case what interests the present writer is not the article itself, but Abbott’s letter, and strictly speaking it isn’t quite the letter that interests him, but rather the response to it. First, here is the letter itself: Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” (“Racism in Britain…
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Time for another round of Macdara’s favourite game: ancient grudge. In this case it is not so ancient, but highlights an age-old phenomenon: English racism. Let us explore further. Your correspondent’s representative in the theatrically undemocratic electoral system that obtains in the UK is Diane Abbott. He has no idea if Abbott is an effective…
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It is pointless to ask, as Macdara did recently, whether the squabble between Zelenskyy and the inhabitants of the grotesque underworld that is the Oval Office, were staging their recent confrontation. Such a question is the mark, your correspondent admits, of an old-fashioned mind. It is not that Trump necessitated that Zelenskyy engage in reality…
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The representatives of the Liberal Right expect to be judged on their exquisite feelings, not their murderous acts; they expect to be commended exactly for this gap between what they would like to do (nice things), and what they believe they must do (nasty things). It is mark not only of a lack of imagination,…
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What better evidence of the base nature of the Imperialists than the following response to the Foreign Minister, which begins with a rote expression of support for genocide and then wanders into a bizarrely non-commital humanitarianism. This is from a Labour Party politician—like the man she is responding to, she is Black, but is thoroughly…
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The English government belatedly banned less than one in ten weapon shipments to the zionist forces currently engaged in an active and very public genocide, not to mention a campaign of equally public terrorism against a host of other countries in the region. This seems to the present writer to be an emblematic act of…
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I This writer has long been an admirer of Schreker. Reading about this composer, Macdara came across the following extraordinary sentence: It has taken quite some time for Schreker’s star to rise above the horizon below which it set on his death in 1934 (a fateful year which also saw the death of Holst, Elgar…
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IV The differences between Irish and Scottish attitudes to the Union are evident in many ways, but it is a source of constant disappointment to the present writer that Scottish politics has rejected any and every means available to an anticolonial movement to succeed in its aims. Why not take the Irish case as a…
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I One of the greatest idiocies of the Late Capitalist democratic-imperialist state is that there can be such a thing as an illegal referendum, when it comes to nations within the state wanting to leave it. It seems to the present correspondent that even in an authoritarian state, it would be foolish for such a…