When Chickens speak English

When the last rays of day set upon the westernmost extremity of the British archipelago tomorrow – Brits will begin the anxious wait for their Electoral Commission to enumerate votes cast in a plebiscite that has generated strained and impassioned expostulation for the past several months, anti-climaxing in the murder of an MP, Jo Cox.

Just across the Atlantic, their American neighbors are embroiled in a Presidential contest that has coincided with, if not engendered, the greatest incidence of gun-orchestrated domestic bloodshed in the nation’s history.

Who knows, perhaps this was only a tiny glimpse of worse to come?

One can only hope against the possibility.

While there are many issues of concern that have dominated global airwaves in both elections – one position that stands out in the rightists’ rhetoric in both cases is the almost paranoid desire to restrict immigration.

For the Brexit referendum, failing to make any meaningful headway in convincing voters against the economic feasibility of a sustained EU-membership, the ‘leave’ campaign decided to capitalize on its strongest card – Xenophobia.

By making the claim (falsely, as many commentators have argued), that a continued EU-membership would open up Britain to an influx of political, but mostly economic immigrants, the leave campaigners have sought to prey upon the atavistic fears that all humans harbor, of aliens and outsiders.

As if the blanket label of ‘foreigners’ weren’t enough – its spokesmen have gone ahead to nuance those fears by specifically narrowing-down the identity of people who’d most likely immigrate into Britain, to Muslims – ‘‘70 million Turks will flood Britain when the EU grants Turkey membership.’’

What is less spoken of, but often implied, is the steady stream of ‘‘darker’’ refugees streaming into Europe through Iberia from North, Central and West Africa.

Even with an EU membership, Britain came under intense heat for being the European country that took the least quota of refugees from Syria, a former colonial mandate of hers.

Only a few hours sail south, across the English Channel, the Brexit campaigners have found natural allies, with heads nodding in agreement as France’s own right-wing actors begin to contemplate a similar move in the not so distant future.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all this is that Germany, the one European country stripped of colonies and excluded from sharing in the loot of imperialism – at least in the long term – has proven herself most welcoming to the refugee community.

This cannot be taken minus a pinch of nutmeg, of course, for one online source ranks Germany – ‘‘ in third place among the world's biggest weapons suppliers, behind only the big guns of Russia and the United States and in front of France and Great Britain. Its arms are coveted around the world: tanks from Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall; submarines from ThyssenKrupp; fighter jets, helicopters and drones from EADS; missiles and munitions from Diehl; rifles from Heckler & Koch; torpedoes from Atlas Elektronik; and telescopic sights from Carl Zeiss.’’

Germany, in classic European fashion, is donating with one hand (sheltering weather-beaten refugees), while simultaneously snatching with the other (profiteering obscenely from supplying the armaments which create the refugee-crisis in the first place).

A second vested interest for Germany – would be, that most of those fleeing Syria are actually the cream of that country’s young and literate denizens, since only they possess both the money and the physical endurance to make the trip across/to Europe.

A far cry from Germany’s own ageing and rapidly declining population, this new blood (albeit foreign and Muslim), is seen by Germany’s political class as the new-blood the German economy (not to be confused with German SOCIETY), needs to retain its competetitve edge.

Angela Merkel herself has said so much, in attempting to diffuse the nascent Xenophobic sentiments from the country’s right-wing voices.

Is the Xenophobia we see in Britain and France however, in part a fear, that the world’s once-colonized peoples may indeed have a chip over their shoulder? 

Are these erstwhile Metropoles implicitly being haunted by imperialism’s specters?

One member of the British House of Commons was allegedly overheard complaining – ‘‘When I talk to Brits my age and older, they express acute worries about how times have changed. When we were younger, one would stroll down the streets and be greeted by fair, jovial and ‘British’ faces. Today, the faces have grown darker, sterner and far from British, but rather noticeably brutish …’’

Younger voters, suspected of softening-up under the aegis of social-media, pen-pals and globalization; have been ‘invited’ to picture Britain 50 years from today, bursting at the seams with Muslims and Duskies. 
‘‘Where will your children go to school?’’ – they’ve been solemnly cautioned.

In America, it is the cannonball Trump who’s come under most fire for his Islamophobic and anti-Hispanic comments.

While, as I’ve argued elsewhere, Trump’s ‘madness’ may not be as misguided as it appears, and may well be a very sane strategy to harness the simmering prejudices millions of right-wing Americans hold – the presumptive republican nominee has come under increasing pressure for ‘‘speaking out of hand’’.

Seemingly, things came to such a head that he was compelled to terminate the services of his Chief Campaign Strategist – famed for masterminding the ‘let Trump be Trump’ gamble, which had worked so far, but was faulted by centrists for becoming increasingly alienating.

Trump’s position on and attitude towards Mexican and Muslim immigration is all too unambiguous, and need not detain us here.

Our concern ought to be the striking consistency, but also the unmissable irony in both campaigns.

With their legacies of unapologetic imperialism, it is strange indeed that both countries should nurse even the slimmest thought of sequestering themselves from the rest of the world.

No two states in modern history have been more enthusiastic about interfering in the affairs of their neighbors close and distant – with the effect that they boast the most numerous and problematic settler communities across the world; Zimbabwe, South Africa, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand etc.

Envisage the Roman Empire, barring conquered ‘barbarians’ (including the Anglo-Saxons), from travelling to Rome?

Come to think of it – modern America too, is actually a British settler territory.

With their kith and kin spread so generously across the earth’s land area – Britain, it may be submitted, has actively pursued policies of disenfranchisement and subjugation toward conquered peoples.

The wretched states of their (former?) colonies across Africa, Asia and the Middle-East are an unsilenceable testimony, to the attempt by a particularly small society of men to turn the entire globe into their dominion.

No one is born with the desire to leave behind the warmth and familiarity of home, to embark on perilous journeys upon the high-seas and intrude upon other folks’  hospitality.

The destitute masses rushing to Europe and America do so, only because their own nations have been ravaged and ravished by a confluence of greedy interests – many of whom are actively patronized by the West.

Go back far enough, and we're all some kind of immigrant.

Our antecedents all moved from somewhere, conquered someone, married someone's daughter to forge an alliance, displaced a native population etc etc.

The categories of native and settler – made to look fairly rigid and inflexible by (European?) historians, are all fluid concepts that meld into each other and blur as they lose discreteness.

One can’t help recall that (in)-famous statement of braggadocio from a colonial official in British India – ‘‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’’.

In keeping with so elevated a precedent, it’s high time her Majesty opened her royal doors to the haggard, weather-beaten and moth-eaten subjects her ancestors supposedly conquered and civilized, all those years ago.

Yes, Your Queenly Britishness – the chickens have come to Buckingham palace to roost, and this time, they speak English.

PS: For an in-depth understanding of the folly and stupidity of Xenophobia and related indigeneity sentiments, I'd recommend one reads the Indian-Ugandan scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, whose Citizen and Subject, supplemented by a host of essays and transcribed lectures, undertakes a very enlightening study of the subject.