Trump cannot save the British
Donald Trump is causing such a stir in Britain. Demonstrations against him occur on a near daily basis here, and a petition to refuse him a state visit hosted by the queen has surpassed one million signatures. Simultaneously, right-wingers, enflamed by Brexit, hail him as a semi-divine saviour who will stride across the Atlantic waters to deliver them from Europe.
Like most British political debate, all this impassioned argument is utterly irrelevant. Elected president of the USA, Trump is now god-emperor of the British, who will supplicate and receive him as they have all previous god-emperors the American voters imposed on them. Whatever relationship Trump has with Britain, it will be one entirely driven by the interests of himself and the US: the British don't even figure in the equation.
Yet, like ghosts who don't know they're dead, the Brits crazily rattle their chains from beyond the grave as if they affect the world. For all the sound and fury on their side of the veil, it registers in this dimension as no more than a poltergeist's pointless flicking of a light-switch.
Theresa May was always going to be the first foreign leader to rush to meet the freshly inaugurated Trump. As prime minister, her job is to do what Tony Blair did for George W Bush: lend support and international credibility to a controversial American president – a role that will take absolute priority over any concerns for her own people.
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| Anti-Trump protest in London. |
In the run up to the Iraq War, Blair even assured Bush that “I will be with you, whatever”. Can you imagine an Indian leader, or an American one, pledging such unconditional personal allegiance to a foreign power? He or she would have to flee for their lives, unlike Blair, who lives in ease and luxury in Britain, knowing that his countrymen understand and accept their coolie-status in the Anglosphere.
While the Canadian and Australian leaders have already openly disagreed with Trump on immigration and other policies, Britain is the one Anglophone nation that will never disobey the US. Having, along with David Cameron, criticised Trump's proposed visa-ban for Muslims while he was campaigning – only because they were certain he would lose and wanted to please an incoming Clinton II administration – Theresa May now has no comment on the subject.
Suffering from both a residual imperial hubris and the cowed servile character that afflicts those shaped by a feudal monarchical society, the British are clueless in their dealings with big powers.
When their foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, demanded people demonstrate outside Russia's embassy in protest at its military intervention in the Crimea, no one here remarked on how wretchedly pathetic it is that his only proposal to deter Russian expansionism is to ask an indifferent public to wave placards. Simultaneously, London would continue to be a convenient venue for every Russian oligarch and gangster who wants to buy his mistress a bijou apartment or a weekend shopping trip. Hilariously, many British commentators applauded Johnson for being so bravely outspoken.
Johnson declared that he would turn Putin into a “pariah” at the same time as the Russian president was attending the BRICS summit in Goa, a convention that represents over a third of the human population and the future of the global economy. Some pariah.
This hopelessly deluded mindset also contaminates British relations with India.
As Theresa May prepared to visit India last November, the British Right were in a reverie of grandiose fantasy, genuinely expecting her to achieve a comprehensive trade-agreement to fill the vacuum that will be created by leaving the EU. The rightist magazine The Spectator ran an editorial applauding India's surging economy and potential, and how May “must” return with a deal.
At no point did it occur to these idiots that Indians might have an agenda other than walking Britain down the aisle to a post-European utopia. It was clear that they'd taken no interest in India's perspective whatsoever, simply presuming her co-operation without insight into the UK's place in India's geopolitical calculations. May, of course, came home with nothing.
Feeling spurned, The Spectator has resumed its traditional snide attitude towards India, taking sideways swipes at its social problems. But then the magazine is merely a sour pamphlet that panders to the senile gin-sodden white Pakis of the English provinces, who, confronted by their hastening extinction, console themselves with animal-cruelty and a Jinnah-like dream of a Brexit-enabled Land Of The Pure.
Last week, it published a snarky article by the right-wing British historian, Andrew Roberts, who'd been a speaker at Jaipur Literature Festival. He thinks Indians should “grow up” and regard Winston Churchill as a great man, attributing their dislike of him to a lack of self-confidence. He, of course, didn't have the balls to say this to their faces at the time.
Having volunteered in the fight against fascism in far greater numbers than the British – Indians in World War Two constituted the largest volunteer army in history – only to be lead straight into Japanese POW camps by his gutless brain-dead British officers, Indians rightly have a problem with Churchill, a rabid and incompetent alcoholic who routinely racially abused them and, in living memory, wilfully starved an estimated four million Bengalis to death.
None of this seems to have crossed Roberts' mind. This fatal inability to think outside of their constipated mono-dimensional psychology has, more than anything, condemned the British to their erasure from history.
Three-thousand Indians showed up to hear Roberts speak about Brexit and other western subjects – a mark of India's insatiable curiosity about the wider world. Such expansive intellectual hunger is nowhere to be found in Britain, and that is why India thrives while Britain fades.
Like the Mongols, the British are a marginal people who briefly exploded into prominence with a vast empire, leaving their mark on the world before rapidly returning to obscurity. But they will not endure even in the limited Mongolian manner, as they are made to melt into a globalised Euro-American Instagram-culture and economy. Having a great past no more guarantees them a future than it did the Mughals or the Aztecs.
Many peoples have existed on these islands, only to evaporate completely. Celts, Jutes, Saxons and others have all come and gone. The present-day British are merely the latest transient human formulation to inhabit them – and they, too, shall soon pass.
Indians, however, have always been around. And always will be. But then, unlike the British, they are deeply fascinated by the world and want to persist in it.