Ron B

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o understood it with absolute clarity. You do not need chains if you have classrooms. You do not need to physically prevent a people from imagining their own freedom if you have already shaped the language in which they think. If the colonized child learns to read in the colonizer’s language. If the colonized child learns that the "great books" were written in the colonizer’s language. If the colonized child learns that the history worth knowing begins with the colonizer’s arrival. If the colonised child learns that success, sophistication, education itself, is measured by proximity to the coloniser’s standards: That child does not need to be imprisoned. That child will imprison themselves. Will measure themselves against a standard designed to find them lacking. Will work their entire life to approximate an ideal that was never constructed to include them. Will call this effort "self-improvement." The classroom was the most elegant instrument the colonial project ever designed. More durable than any fort. More effective than any army. Because armies are visible. Forts can be stormed. But a belief installed in childhood, in the voice of a teacher, in the language of learning itself, that is nearly invisible. And what you cannot see, you cannot dismantle.

The Nile is not a border. This is the simplest version of the argument and also the one that should require the least explanation. The Nile flows from the interior of Africa northward to the Mediterranean. The civilizations along its length were in constant contact, trading, fighting, exchanging people and ideas and religious concepts and agricultural techniques across what was not a separation but a connection. The civilization of ancient Egypt did not emerge in isolation. It emerged in relationship with the Nubian civilizations to its south, some of whose cultures predated the unification of Egypt, which contributed to and drew from Egyptian culture across millennia. The kings of Kush would eventually rule Egypt as its 25th Dynasty. And across the centuries that followed, Kushite civilization would leave behind something that still surprises people today. More pyramids. In what is now Sudan. Built by the civilization that the Western imagination has most completely erased. There are more ancient pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt. Most people reading that sentence right now are encountering it for the first time. That is not because the information is obscure. It is because the information does not fit a story that someone needed to be true. And the information that does not fit the story does not make it into the classroom.

If the UK media wasn't entirely captured by the billionaire class – serving as its PR division – then we might know more about the role of the United States in meddling in UK politics. The recent claims of a supposed “terrorist plot” outside RAF Fairford – really a US airforce base pretending to be a British base and one from which the US has waged an illegal war of aggression against Iran – should have reminded us that the Pentagon is largely in charge of UK foreign policy. The US has some 15 major military bases on British soil, plus half a dozen smaller intelligence sites. As the rightwing US podcaster Tucker Carlson recently observed, the fact that Britain has foreign troops crawling all over it makes us little more than an occupied “vassal state”. The US recently announced a $4 billion upgrade of its UK bases, including establishing storage sites for its nuclear arsenal. The plan caused barely a ripple of interest among British politicians or the media . Although our political and media class pretend the UK is an equal partner in a western defence alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the reality is very different. Nato takes its orders from the US, doing Washington’s bidding. That’s why Nato has been pivoting towards America’s biggest economic rival, China, which is, of course, nowhere near the North Atlantic. When the US snaps its fingers, Britain stands to attention and hikes its spending on the war industries. Along with European governments, the UK is willing to drain its national coffers and scythe through public spending with yet more austerity cuts to support Washington’s military agenda for “full-spectrum global dominance”. Much of the US influence on British politics is carefully concealed from view, operating behind closed doors. In the early 2010s, the US was desperately seeking a pretext to extradite Julian Assange from the UK and lock him up in a super-max jail, hiding him out of sight after his organisation Wikileaks revealed US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was during this period that Starmer, as the director of public prosecutions, repeatedly jetted off to Washington for secret meetings with US officials. We will never know what was discussed. Freedom of information requests discovered that his own officials destroyed all records of those meetings. Once he became a politician, Starmer was recruited to the shadowy Trilateral Commission, originally founded in the 1970s by officials in Jimmy Carter’s administration to deal with the supposed problem of “an excess of democracy” in the US. The commission’s view was that voters were becoming dangerously less passive, at that time over the Vietnam war, and ways needed to be found to return them to docility. A similar British-American Project cements ties between rising stars in British politics, business and journalism and Washington elites. The power imbalance between the two sides ensures up-and-coming British leaders are readily groomed into an Atlanticist worldview in which the UK is very much the junior partner. There are a plethora of other “respected’ think-tanks and organisations whose chief role is to embed US policy ideas, especially those relating to foreign policy, in the thinking of British elites. They include the Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, The British-American Parliamentary Group, and BritishAmerican Business. The US uses its financial muscle through these organisations and many others to manufacture consent for its extreme neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. The latest example are massive grants to organisations willing to export Trump’s MAGA ideology to the UK, masquerading as a “public education” initiative. There is plenty of evidence to show that it was pressure from the Trump administration that led to the unprecedented decision by Starmer’s government to proscribe a civil disobedience group, Palestine Action, for the first time in Britain’s history as a terrorist organisation. Palestine Action had incensed Israel by targeting its weapons factories on UK soil, highlighting another aspect of British collusion in the Gaza genocide, and had infuriated Trump personally by spraying one of his golf courses in Scotland with the words “Gaza is not 4 sale”. In truth, the ways that the US meddles directly in British politics are so numerous it is virtually impossible to quantify them. Britain is little more than a colony of the US, receiving diktats on important foreign policy issues – especially regarding US and Israeli interests – that the UK is invariably too frightened to oppose. Burnham is already rolling over to reverse the UK’s decision to honour a ruling from the International Court of Justice and other international tribunals that Britain has no claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and must return them to Mauritius. The UK has faced a temper tantrum from Trump on the matter because the US operates an illegal military base on one of the islands. Disobedience by the UK is the exception, not the rule. Which makes Burnham’s exclusive focus on Russian influence almost laughably beside the point. This furious finger-pointing at the Kremlin is designed with one purpose in mind only: to distract the British public from where the real external meddling in our politics is coming from. This is an extract from my latest article Worried about Russian meddling in UK politics? Wait till you see what Israel is up to. Find a link to the full article in the reply post ⬇️