The English Kingdom
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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…
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Let us listen in, learn something of Imperialism, since the language allows it. The cleverest people in London discuss the world amongst themselves. Of course I don’t like nationalism, she says, in reference to Scotland; the concept of Britain, England’s drag name, allows her to live as if she is happily of no nation at…
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I A new dawn in the last of Europe’s Habsburg-like messy conglomerates, the kind of thing that used to be called an Empire but is now reduced to a mere Kingdom. A cold new dawn it is, as Macdara will report. A few things have happened. The Conservative collapse was not at all as dramatic…
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III Of a paranoid disposition—which, Macdara might add, has served him well—the present writer has been considering the likely near-future of Ireland’s nearest neighbour (so near in fact that they are still Occupying part of the House). It is important for people to understand the scale of the collapse of the Kingdom over recent years.…
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I To expand a bit on a recent letter: the Irish Government that collapsed in early 2011, the Government of the 30th Dáil, was notable for a number of reasons. In the first place, its willingness to lie about things that took no more effort to disprove than a look at the day’s news: as…