The shadows of the whites and associated sycophants strut still about the countries we in the West subsumed through our God-given right to extol profit from wherever it could be unearthed, or more truthfully, from wherever it could be stolen. The methods used did not matter, only the rewards as well illustrated by the philosophy of The East Indian Trading Company and slavers.
To quell Western voices from protesting superior attitudes were assumed. It was white supremacy versus the heathen savage, even the church got involved. It appeared in pamphlets, the press, in government circles and of course in businesses. It was simply everywhere, even in the gin houses and opium dens of the shadier parts of towns and cities in Victorian times. Although the philosophy extends way back into the shadows of history. The Romans versus the Druids… It is little known that the Roman’s originally invaded Britain in 43BC purely to wipe out the Druids who had fled from Gaul and whose way of life was opposed to Roman ideals of commerce and conquest.
Now here's the nub, I suspect such attitudes are the cause of so many of our present ills and discontents. Interestingly an email from The Guardian to their supporters on the 28th March 2023 suggested exactly that about the newspaper's own shadowy history. I have not included the text of it here as I await permission...
Our benign acceptance still of those atrocities and outrageous attitudes to support conquests and slavery is I suspect one of the causes of racial and cultural prejudices today. It is not conscious in many but it lurks like a decomposing body left to lay in our subconscious.
I defy most of us not to think of the word ‘undeveloped’ when we consider Africa, parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Vietnam, The Amazon forests, The Philippines and their mountain regions and forests. Even parts of Japan and China where Indigenous peoples still live - Tibet, and oh how the list could go on.
The fumous rotting body in our subconscious declares that our culture is superior. Some even fume, “Such people are savages.” Others, “What do they know about anything? They are not as educated as we are. And look at how they dress and dance. And as for their horrid music…”
Other are visited by shades of the film Zulu, “Lord help us they’re upon us!”
We in the West emanate prejudices, it is there in almost everything we do. We may not mean it, but we still allow it to affect our decisions and attitudes…
On top of that, there is also our personal natural prejudices - those which all humans have, some might even say, all humans endure. They arise from our fight and flight instincts and are referred to here as our tribal instinct.
Instinct creates responses which generally we do not question. We merely react - but that is better explained in another essay.
All I’ll say for now is, we chose who we mix with closely and it is based on our instinctive preferences. Like attracts like, but not always consciously. In children, a ‘tutu-wearing princess’ attracts other ‘tutu-wearing princesses’, or those who aspire to be one - regardless of gender. Parents who encourage that behaviour in their child gravitate to other parents with similar ideas. Then they aspire to outdo the others to become the leader. We are tribal in behaviour whether we like it or not.
I once worked for a company where just two directors took on the new employees. From a employees physical attributes we could tell easily which director had employed them. But that is enough said, for it was sexist.
Rather than acting as our peripheral advisers our prejudices become deeply wrong when they set out to deliberately exclude and be harmful - but they are also natural and are exercised by all humans and across all walks. Classism is prejudice. Even refusing to shop in a discount store because ‘those other types do’ is prejudice. We are driven daily by them. The Psychopathy Of Business preys on those prejudices to their benefit, usually by way of advertising to include their use of social media. In the time of Empire they used pamphleteers.
The job for us all is to recognise when our prejudices are arising not from tribal instinct, but from the fumes of that rotting carcass smothering our common sense and decency. And I would suggest it also smothers what should be our gratitude for those we exploit. They have indirectly, and probably against their wishes, supplied us in the West with our affluent societies. If a school or university was built by the proceeds of slavery, then all those children passing through those doors owe their education to the enslaved. They owe a big thank you and not prejudice. Yet… The fields of Eton encourage prejudices to grow.
No one person or organisation can help us rid ourselves of this. Change must come from our own awareness of what lies within us and what formed those thoughts and created our present-day society.
But before we even start our self-investigation we must accept that the origins of our rotting prejudices emanate from those savage and awful days of Empire and those that led up to it… which played on our tribal instincts. We al;so need to recognise that some of our fellows would gladly return to such times. I venture, many of those will be found lurking in The Collective.
At present, our prejudices, however they evolved, allow the west to turn its eyes away from atrocities happening in other parts of the world, especially when it comes to environmental issues. To truly solve those issues we must learn to subvert our prejudices and to stop thinking, its miles away, and has nothing to do with us, when in fact it has everything to do with us. When we fawn before the new emperors and take their trinkets we encourage their ways.
This idea might be a bit abstract but, our children in the UK are not taught true British History in all its ingloriousness. They do not learn about the abusive issues of Empire because I guess it is uncomfortable for The Collective. Yet, the same people can encourage and even expect those reminders of slavery to stay in public view. Food for thought…
Why should we in the West care to save those individuals in other parts of the world, those we consider to be racially inferior to ourselves or care about the lifestyles of those we look down upon - ‘Uncivilised they are’, some say. Now ask again where did that attitude originated from?
That is not just a British attitude either. I have heard such things said in South America when referring to the Indigenous Rainforest peoples - Bolsonaro for example justifying the rape of the forest and its people and the killing of them - but we in the isolated UK do seem to hold onto our prejudices for the longest.
I guess that encourages us not to care about our overseas plundering and can be found expressed in everyday comments such as. ‘Their problems aren’t our doing. It’s for their countries to sort out, not ours’.
It’s interesting how quickly such voices change when they are unable to buy the food or the stuff they want due to environmental and political issues that our forebears started in motion - which we today continue to feed…
Yet more attitudes which the environmentalists have to overcome.
Consider, whenever we hear about an indigenous child being whipped, raped and starved or enslaved on our behalf it does not raise a single hackle in most of us in the West. How can it not be wondered, is it because they are not white Westerners and they are too far away so we can disconnect. If such things happened in Luton or Paris or Washington or even around the corner to a non-coloured person I’m sure there would be uproar.
Let me support that thought.
The UN peacekeeping troops - mainly from Europe - operating in what we in West call undeveloped countries take advantage of the local women, or they simply rape them, while the UN's hierarchy turns its backs on what is happening. They also, when questioned about the rapes hide the details of the troopers involved. See this link Sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers in DRC
There was none.
Why? Because Indigenous peoples are not seen as worthy of our respect even today, just as they were not in the 19th century and before when they were slaughtered or taken into slavery. Most nations in the western world were responsible for that which includes China who are currently brutally exploiting the peoples of Africa.
Let's plant a seed and let's see if it takes. To encourage our troops in the 1st and 2nd World Wars they were fed lies, one being, the Huns eat babies...
Arguments aside regarding the rights or wrongs of war, such comments were whispered by The Collective to encourage millions to go forward and embrace their deaths to save a system that up until then had not cared for them. So, I wonder, what other Collective whispers and attitudes have we, the populace, endured or quietly subsumed over the centuries concerning ‘our right’ to exploit and belittle Indigenous peoples?
Such manipulative peoples do not appear in our history yet they played a vital part in the making of it! That is prejudice at its most highest.
And crikey…, that dismissive attitude of The Collective was evident in the recent discussions in the UK regarding the Gurkha Soldiers.
They have and do devote their lives to the British Establishment, but that very establishment tried hard to deny them the right to be considered British - despite dedicating their lives to the service of this country.
‘Die for us, by all means… but you ain’t British, are ya!’
What bloody arrogance! And that has been ingrained into so many of us British. The number of online comments I read arguing that the Gurkhas should not receive recognition was astronomical when considering the service they have voluntarily given us.
This is what I took away from my readings.
Take what you want from the inferior and damn them if they want anything back from ya!
Sorry, but that attitude is a fact and underlines much of our thinking in the West.
Don’t governments say subtly about immigrants, “They will fill those jobs that ‘we’ (unspoken: whites) won’t.” Think about the exploitive colonial attitude behind that.
Furthermore, consider this little idea. The Collectives have little concern for the social upheaval which mass immigration will cause the people - after all if the people had taken the jobs as we demanded them to, then the immigrants would not be needed. It’s a thought!
I cannot recall a single outcry when it's claimed the immigrants will fill certain jobs because inherently we accept the proposal. It is how we are encouraged to think. We are often encouraged to believe that they are here to sponge off us, and or they have no worth other than to be exploited.
As a nation, we did that to many who arrived in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, as we still do so today. In the main, our attitudes are still colonial. Or classist. A prejudice which we the populace sporadically try to fight against - yet we do not care to notice when we use similar attitudes towards immigrants.I will be the first to admit that in the past I have expressed questions about how many people this country can realistically support and I may well again. But that is not prejudice. That is a concern of density and has nothing to do with where the people come from. Unless such points attack the individuals because of their ethnic origins. Fortunately, mine do not do so, and never will they. Especially when our nation has taken so much from theirs.
Prejudice, racialism if you prefer, is what prevents us from clambering as we ought to help those countries severely affected by climate change - an event which in the main is caused or exasperated by our lifestyles in the West. The environmental calamities will in time fuel future immigration. It has to - those peoples affected will flee their uninhabitable regions. To those who would deny them assistance I would ask, have you been that hardened against other races that you would rather see them drown than offer a hand to help? When we buy trainers or products produced in those countries we contribute to their demise. When we conspire to maximise production using their raw assets and slave-like labour, we kill them or their country.
Our problem is, we do not accept that we are to blame for the immigrants displacements because we are not taught at a young age to understand how such things work. And neither do we care to help them - again encouraged by lack of education and our subconscious prejudices.
Once again, I am mortified by the sheer voracity and number of comments I read in newspapers left by people who are rabidly against providing funds to help with overseas climate issues. Which are also our climate issues and have mainly been caused by the West.
If they could they might understand and accept that Western businesses in search of markets and The Collective’s needs for dominions in the past have caused most of the problems today. If they did so, their attacks might be better aimed. And more useful. But they are not taught such in schools… Are they…
To cap this section off, here is a link to a recent story about a young Ugandan climate activist, Vanessa Nakate who was cut out of a photo where she was standing with four white activists, one being Greta Thunberg. 'It was like I wasn't there'- climate activist Vanessa Nakate.
It was used around the western world! That is not an isolated case of prejudice either. It is a good indicator though of the press and how businesses treat indigenous people. The press is a business with investors after all and they decided to cut her out.
It cannot help but be assumed that someone considered her presence offensive to readers, or investors, or simply that her voice did not matter. The voice by the way of an individual living with and suffering from the effects of climate change. The climate change The Psychopathy Of Business is fuelling. Think about that…
What begs to be said, is that her exclusion had nothing whatsoever to do with cropping the image to fit, as the linked article clearly explains. It is yet another sad example of the attitudes the environmentalists contend with - those shadowy realms of our subconscious which prevent us from helping.
In many household publications I get a feeling of scepticism or from some, an outright denial of climate issues.
Particularly vitriolic on climate issues is the online publication, townhall.com (American). Their voice is rabidly against climate issues and the need for change. The arguments I’ve read of theirs are biased and spurious at the best. Personally, I find their denials both ignorant and frightening because people want to believe their claims.
Then in the UK there is, Tim McNulty of the Express.co.uk. His approach towards such issues is use mockery, or certainly so in a recent article about Greta Thunberg.
Ben Fordham of the dailymail.co.uk. Again it was mockery of Greta splattered with undisguised bias.
I call such publications out for their blindness and blatant stupidity.
To their joint ridiculing of Greta Thunberg I would defend her by suggesting that at least she is trying to do something useful. And occasionally the information she relies on will be wrong, and so what. Be mature gentleman, take time to understand the messages. But you won’t, because you are ignorant. When you attack a young lady in the way you do, understand it is tantamount to mental rape. Take care to think first and I suspect in your journalistic lives you have been very wrong at times too. But then again your reporting psychopathy will simply shrug it off…
As for deniers wandering through the corridors of press, I’m sure there are many.
Those publications and such others could do much good but would rather waste their time ridiculing the messengers who are trying to do the right thing. I guess they believe that if they act that way for long enough it will all go away, and leave them free to get on with business as usual. I would conclude by suggesting that is Trumpism at its worst.
It would not be surprised to learn that such people have strong colonial leanings and trumpet loudly, it’s the rule of the fittest and dog eat dog and so on…
Such is The Psychopathy of Business that the deniers will never accept the climate arguments put forward by those with sense and understanding, not even while they shelter from the storms that beset the planet. Or run from raging fires. Or even when their skins burn in the unseasonal heat. Or they can’t eat fish because rising water temperatures are killing them off. And they will most certainly not respond kindly when nations cry out for help - unless there’s a buck to be made. Or that we, the people finally learn how to hurt them in the wallet, enough to finally put their attitudes right.
Continued in Part Four Perceptions Of Affluence
Comments as usual to author@theannstories followed by .co.uk