Empire, and resistance to it, is the central issue of our time

From Iraq and Lebanon to Afghanistan, the Anglo-American attempt to remake the world by force is failing

Andrew Murray
Saturday August 26, 2006

Guardian

'How goes the empire?" Perhaps Tony Blair will be tempted to repeat King George V's dying words as he prepares to shuffle off his own political coil. It is a measure of the extent to which the prime minister's foreign policy has restored imperialism to the political vocabulary of the country that, when his legacy is debated, the state of empire will be the main issue...

...But the opponents of imperialism are by far the more numerous. Nearly two-thirds of the public believe British foreign policy is too subservient to the US and that the foreign occupations are a failure. The strength of the anti-war movement over the past five years, drawing fresh support during the Lebanon war, testifies that this sentiment goes much further than opinion polls.

Against this renewed left, there has coagulated a coalition of the brazen conservatives in Washington and their transatlantic admirers, including the two parliamentary frontbenches and a pseudo-social-democratic "new right" addicted to the spread of its values at the point of the imperial bayonet. They have set aside the left's traditional support for international law and the UN in favour of backing Bush's endless war.

We can now see where making "anti-anti-imperialism" your touchstone leads. The pro-war bloggers and lecturers who produced the Euston manifesto earlier this year have recently been reduced to providing a platform for Blairite ministers to promote privatisation, just as their stateside superhero Christopher Hitchens backed George Bush's re-election in 2004. They have resuscitated the gloomy traditions of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, whose doyenne Rita Hinden patronised Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, when he came to London to rally support for his country's freedom, with the thought that "British socialists are not so concerned with ideals like independence and self-government".

But it is the tradition of the socialist pioneer William Morris which has come to dominate the left. Morris's support for the Mahdi's rebellion in the Sudan, on the grounds that he at least restored his country to its own people, is detailed in John Newsinger's new history of Britain's empire, The Blood Never Dried...http://tinyurl.com/rg4sx
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Empires Suck. I'm Spartacus.
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