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 all, a pure being in the world, unsullied by anything as crass as nationalism. Another says that the structural violence of the zionist Shadow State is so great that the Palestinians are not able to commit any violence against it, thankfully. Lessons: if you are going to commit violence, make it so big that it seems normal; if you are going to take over countries, invent a new word so your actions cannot be called nationalism. These lessons will allow you to fool anyone who wants to be fooled.

That was all before the genocide. During the genocide, the English State Broadcaster reported that rival groups of activists do their best to block or protect aid convoys reaching Gaza. To rephrase the situation, this was settler supremacists attempting to further starve Palestinians, resisted by a group of courageous people, Jewish and Palestinian. But to the respectable English person, they are all alike – activists, people made vulgar by politics, engaging in street theatre. The fact that some are engaging in genocide and some are opposed to it makes no difference. This type of ordering was evident after the recent white riots. A Financial Times correspondent worries that people will believe that the English state is in disarray after the anti-genocide demonstrations and now the fascist riots. The category here is ‘people that disgust those in power’: the fact that this category includes people who are exactly opposed to each other is immaterial. Of course the English Broadcasting Corporation has now managed to remove news of the genocide from the front page of its website. If a reader will insist on reading up on this ghastly business, they will have to hunt out the news, even before they parse the nastiness of the EBC’s phrasing, wherein any reporting on the numbers of Palestinian dead comes with an editorial smirk that this is a claim made by the Hamas-run Health Ministry. 

***

A story not in the news, she says, is that a bonfire so many metres tall (she says feet) has been constructed in Belfast. They laugh. It might end up in the Guinness Book of Records! The local council is thrilled! The presenter says that every year he means to look up the Battle of the Boyne. They do not care to know that these fires, the marching and drumming, are intended to terrorise Irish people. It is a human interest story to them, a joke on a par with Welsh people speaking Welsh, or Scottish people saying wee. Different, but almost entirely overlapping with normality, which is to say Englishness. The difference may be permitted, then again it may not.

***

A poster, in London, above the Tube tracks. A timeline of British history, presumably an ad, probably for a museum, Macdara has forgotten. No mention of the arrival of the Angles, Saxons et cetera. Any accomplishments of the peoples already on the island are presumed to be accomplishments of those who later colonised it. Stonehenge and such, all English. Recall that these are a people who celebrate Arthur, who fought against them, and Boudica, who had even less of a connection to them, who may in fact never even have heard of them. They must have a history, but it must not involve arriving, which would make them different, other than what they need to be. Because they are here now, they must always have been here; anyone who has ever been here must be them.