Fascinating, if overlong, exposé of the ongoing UK White obsession with Empire - as both a concept and a practice: A dream and a nightmare. Current British politics and culture are profoundly shaped by the imperial experience in the twenty-first century - especially the extreme violence and brutality that maintain it. The latter produces more enemies than friends; rendering the institution moribund - as it is today, despite present-day (2010) attempts to revive it in Arab lands.
The legacy of Empire lurks everywhere in the UK, in museums and galleries stuffed with looted treasures, statues of White supremacist militarists, genealogical studies revealing family histories benefiting from imperialism and tv programs about the glories of the Raj. Outside the UK, ex-colonial states possess national borders drawn by Whites and Western political and religious philosophies grafted onto indigenous norms.
This book tells this story from one man's point-of-view to emphasize the characterological distortions inherent in any imperial system - particularly that of the twentieth-century British Empire - in presenting mediocrities with the chance to shine abroad by pretending to be gods among men. Effectively, the borders of the British Isles were extended for such people to increase and improve their employment opportunities.
This is the diary of an uneducated nobody, who is not a member of the colonial elite, yet is not a stupid man. He is simply caught up in what it is to be White and British in the Chinese Raj; resulting in disturbed thoughts and physical violence against the native Chinese. The experience here is contradictory (& thus psychologically damaging) because colonial policemen were treated as servants, while being issued with them for their private use. Treated as inferior, yet told they were superior Whites. Like the UK lower-classes today, they are treated as chavs, yet told they are superior to immigrants. This reveals the recurrent mental confusions that lie at the heart of White, Western culture as nothing else can.
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