The Last Imperialist

A congenital conservative speaks- before being silenced by the Woke Thought Police. On the advantages of Colonisation over a corrupt "Independence" and the beneficial Eugenics of Empire.

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“Colonisation”- Unheard, unseen perspectives from The Last Imperialist.

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It’s complicated.

As I wrote in the subtitle of “The Average Indian”- “Why India has yet to gain its “Independence”.

But, as we have not been told when it comes to our shared Imperial past, “Other opinions are available”.

They don’t want you to think the unthinkable. Or think at all. That Western colonial “Imperialism” might just have been the peak of progressive, human civilisation.

Faults and hypocrisies and all, once the inverted prejudices and misconceptions of the 1960’s have been shed, like an unfashionable snakeskin, the future will reveal, “Imperialism” in fact conveyed “the widest benefit, for the widest humanity”.

For all its detractions, British Empire scaled some kind of civilisational “zenith”- from which the only way is down. To the confused nadir that is 2025.

It’s all but impossible to find opinions outside the “Antis”. “Anti-colonial”, “Anti-imperialist”, “Anti-Nation” box, dominant since the 1960’s. And that indicates to historiographers, we might be getting our history wrong.

Future historians will, I suspect, have a different tale to tell of the many British Empires, plural. Here is mine, albeit First Person, singular.

All generations think they are more sophisticated, enlightened than they are. Caught in our bubble of time. Convinced that we see impartially. Loftily standing on immutable ideas about “Imperialism” or “Race” and its morality.

Education has morphed “Slavery” and “Colonial”. Exploitation and the achievements of Empire. Superimposing one, rarefied post-colonial society of 0.1% Liberal intellectual Indians based in the leafy University bungalows of New Delhi, over another. The 99% of real India- the farmers, sharecroppers, the illiterate and bazaar traders- and lepers. The India that never gets a chance to pontificate on late-night All-India TV panels.

And since 1947, those same intellectuals, politely forgetting to ask the British themselves about the little matter of losing, or mislaying, a world system of economic and political superpower. In the rush of guilt, to understand and appease the former subjects of “His Britannic Majesty’s Realms beyond the seas”- they did not ask the British if they had anything to add to the conversation that never was. As if they- the British- and their erstwhile “subjects”, were all alike. Assuming, likewise, that all “colonials” craved the mirage of Independance. They did not.

As if “they” were all “subjugated”. Their stories and forgotten diaries tell a different version of India in 1947. Unlike the movie, not every Indian wanted to join Gandhi on his Salt March to the sea. Many more mistrusted the egos of the Congress wallahs. With good reason as the ensuing corruption and mismanagement of the decades unfolded. Many more, had too much to lose under a Communist-aligned Delhi or Bengal. US banks made unholy profits backing “Impendence” and oyster-shucking out the funny little Brits in their solar topees.

The “Land of the Free” had already bankrolled and effectively "recolonised “Independent” India by 1949. The US Fed “owned” Pakistan by the 1950’s, as a bulwark against Russian incursion in neighbouring Afghanistan. American administrations covertly armed both sides, ensuring the MAD doctrine of nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction. The White House, as much as the Indians or emboldened Africans, forced Great Britain to quit her “black possessions” overseas.

Trouble is, increasing numbers now see themselves as more subjugated by a fake “Independence”. By their own governments, multinationals and NGOs’ they did not elect, in faux democracies. (I include the US and Britain in this). From the mundane pan-national railway timetables to the Roman alphabet used so successfully in Indian computing coding and tech industry exported to Califorina’s Silicon Valley. Manchester United merchandising to New Age Tantric Sex gurus, Empire remains, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I, for one am proud, not blindly, of the pink swathes of the old maps. Of what remains of the day. And Canada under the megalomaniac Boy Trudeau.

Of the “King George V Imperial” racecourse, now dilapidated, in the “salubrious hill station” as it says in the banner as you enter town, of Nuwara Elaiya, Sri Lanka. Perhaps the more so because it is dilapidated. That I could find an anthology of P.G Wodehouse in Cargill’s department store. And the sari-ed assistant who gave me “the chit” to pay over at the teak wood Till Desk, approved my choice. A gift for the Maharajh of Baroda, a fellow Woosterite, and Queen fan, and fan of both late Queens.

“The Imperial World” is now for us, an almost unimaginable, untellable tale worth the telling. Positives and all. Better than ignoring, as we have since about “Suez” or 1960, selecting the chapters that fit our own age’s, duller, more parochial Woke morality and story.

Despite six decades of anti-British media mania, and educationalist brainwashing, inconvenient truths about Imperial and colonial achievements are slowly being revealed. That makes the teeth of the Marxist Revisionists grind, whose monovision world view monopolizes universities, media and publishing, government and research. So, you only “discover” what you choose to study or research.

So, wear down the enamel a little more, Trots. You’ve had more than your say. Listen up.

“Northern European culture and economics, enlightened by progressive Christianity and technology, arguably brought the greatest benefit to the greatest number of humanity”.

India as with most ex-Dominions and colonies, simply quietly exchanged one “Imperialism” for another. Imperialist capitalism for a Corporate Imperialism, pounds and shillings for the US petrodollar rigged at Bretton-Woods. Hope, swapped for a pragmatic, corrupted reality.

Walk round back street Kinshasa or Jakarta, as I have done, and most academic and Left wing “experts” have not. See in the faces of the new generations of enslaved “Independent” populations of former colonies, if that isn’t true. The squalid inequality of 2024 is not the result primarily of “colonial” rule (too easy), but arguably its very absence over the last six decades.

It’s a good sign. I am not fashionable. In 1924, at the Wembly Empire Exhibition, I would have been garlanded with laurels and invited for Royal tea, as my grandfather was visiting from Allahabad. Now our “views” are “arrogant”, reactionary a favourite word of the rabid authoritarian Left. At best, misguided musings. (My favourite comment). What a difference a century makes.

If you are interested in hearing the other side of the coin (can one hear coins?) take a look at my books on Amazon. (The Average Indian- James Chanel- Author). Conversations with Gandhi’s grandson and Enoch Powell. My Nehru relatives and “Old Hands” from East Africa to Singapore on a vanished world that time and the BBC wants to forget. PS. Get a hard copy before I am scrubbed by the Woke Thought Police.

As a congenital Conservative I favour “limited government”, but also Colonialism like democracy as the least bad best way organising human society for most the world for most of the people most of the time. We already live in a “Eugenic” society- the Social Eugenics of the welfare state. Being an “Imperialist” doesn’t negate the presumption of the inalienable rights of the individual. To believe The Free Market is Eugenics in economics and Taxation is state theft, legalised.

The awkward truths in Eugenics won’t go away by prohibiting thought or the reality of people’s experience. No more than in Phrenology- facial indictors for criminal proclivities and “lumps” on heads- or Astrology.

But I am a nobody. Fortunately, for my opinions and ideas which I cannot forget, or pretend to. And by the time they come for me, to “re-educate” me, I will be long gone. But I will have told at least another version the truth. The truths, the whole truths and nothing but the truths.

The Average Indian - James Chanel AMAZON/KDP

In Rhodesia- constitutionally illegally rebranded “Zimbabwe” in 1980 malnutrition is now endemic, in what under European governance had been the bread-basket exporter of Southern Africa. Whose education system, even for the black populous, was the envy of the continent. And the Mother Country. All was erased in just three decades of so-called “Majority” rule by a Communist-backed “Black oligarchy”.

Similarly, in South Africa, that could have become so much, squandered advantages bequeathed by European administration. Progress undone by endemic corruption within no vaccine programme can eradicate. By multinationals and the meddling UN neo-colonial power from without.

Now black and white alike are afraid to walk after dusk (nights made ever longer due to electricity blackout after decades of ANC embezzlement). The murder rate per thousand, the highest in the world (jockeying for dubious No.1 with Nigeria, Jamaica and Pakistan). Nations where colonial potential and 150 years of advance was reversed in ten, to a feudal, tribal anarchy in which the average “free citizen” is paradoxically less “Free” than under British rule, life expectancy is below average, like most indicators, in everything except deprivation and state embezzlement.

Never a word is said in defence of the “The Average Englishman”- or more likely Scots or Irish. The generations of commitment, often selfless effort, for the wider good of these HM Dominions and protectorates beyond the seas. (By my family) and countless now forgotten, the thousands airbrushed by a short-sighted political correctness.

The Colonial administers, and Viceroys, the extraordinary ordinary, the sewing-machine salesman from Birkenhead who cleared the road in the monsoon for the bullock carts. Grandma remembered him. The “BOR”- British soldier Other Ranks who fell in love with the officer’s ayah. (My father’s ayah). But never came back from the Arakan, Burma to “take her hand”. Even if he could have.

I am holding my great grandfather’s hill-walking stick from his “India days”, feeling the curved antler horn and remembering. Like his generation, he may have used the word “Coolies” in the 1960’s, on London buses noticing how “Coloured” Oxford Street had become since his last visit “Home” from Rhodesia, as we rode to Harrod’s toy department. But I think he cared more genuinely for the villagers and farmers in his “District”.

Arguably more deeply than today’s thirty-something career UN Aid “Developmental Facilitators”. The new “colonialists”. All NGO’s, all international philanthropy, has an agenda. Usually someone else’s’. It’s just unseen. Kept “appropriately” dark.

Great grandfather was part inspiration for Paul Scot, author of “The Jewel in The Crown”, “Raj Quartet”, for those who want to remember. To be fair, he was far from the grotesque “Colonel Meyrick” Scott amalgamated, like a photo-fit, from his wartime service in India. Though deftly drawn, it fitted the “suspect description” TV audiences in 1980’s as now, wanted. Simplified. One-sided. Every Imperial servant, every person, each motive was more dimensional than that.

It is not romanticism for “The Raj” or “KEENya”. The centuries of European obsession, almost a communicable disease, for peacock-feathered Occidentalism.

I think of the pale schoolmasters from Suffolk who washed up in Rawalpindi. Whose overgrown headstones now topple in the abandoned Ingrezi- “English cemetery” just outside what is still called “The Cantonment”. The spinster Governess Missi Peirce who loved her Indian “charges” and adopted country as her own. If not more so. Was that why they came, I wonder? To escape to another England?

The quiet missionaries who freed those who wanted the freedom, to at least choose freedom. From "the “bondage” of less “progressive” religions and family and honour. Without a death sentence or Fatwa.

We the last of the last imperialists, understand the justifications, the exploitations. But what of understanding the nuanced motives of other times. District Civil Servants and clerks caught up in imperial chess games and rivalries, they could not, perhaps did not want to understand.

The ordinary. The English who became Indigenous Caribbean, or Anglo-Indian- some 460,000 Anglo, “Eurasian” as they once were known, before the “faux-independence” of Partition. who “celebrates” their undoubted, disproportionate contribution- and stoic suffering. Not the BBC. Not interested. As I once suggested to them overlooked tales from the hills. Doesn’t fit the post-colonial victim narrative. Wokeism has blinded them to see that Imperial history is becoming ever more relevant, instructive, as years go by not less.

The Sephardic Jewish merchants in Bombay like the now very Anglicised “Lord Sassoon”, who profited from British order and “Teutonic”, obsessive administration. Admittedly now the stifling bureaucracy that blights both nations.

Low castes who flourished under impartial judicial system and police, as they had never been able, stymied under brutal Mughal or Hindu rulers. Or under the Belgian King’s personal dictatorship in Congo, or a brutal French hegemony in Algeria.

And though we love the scepticism, if we can ever measure by the purely utilitarian, Empire was an aberration, a stability and the widest benefit to the widest humanity, with a few glaring rules to the exception. Grandfather wrote “To correct the Leninists at the BBC” on a point of fact- for what else is History but facts disputed by more facts. Amritsar 1919- when he had just completed his service in Military Intelligence in “Counter-sedition”, before returning to the” Civil”- the Imperial Police. (Not that one ever leaves Intelligence).

“Though reprehensible”, he was obliged to note that this was a legally notified “Prohibited Gathering”, exploited successfully, and some say ruthlessly, by a Congress Party to entrap the inept British authority, as a “means to an end” - consolidating its own, selfish Brahim power base founded on caste not genuine Democracy for the fellow Indians dalits they despised.

From Aden to Malaya, “Colonials” prospered with every tribe and sub-tribe in turns, profiting from, hating and loyally supporting the esteemed common enemy of the “Britishers”. And when that commonality was removed?

The communal violence of an unnecessary “Partition” in all it tragic and continuing acts.

Paradoxically, as one former ICS (Indian Civil Service) District administrator pointed out on the train to Bombay (It will always be “Bombay” where father was born). Oddly, it was the British who were “indentured, to some 300 million Indians in 1947. They could not “Quit India” even if they or the Anti-Imperial League and Socialist government wanted. And in his view should not have done so before 1965, under the auspices of the UN, to preserve a “united India”, rather than two nuclear theocratic states eyeing one another over Kashmir we have today. 8000 ICS Patricians officiating 300 million. Makes you wonder. As I did, standing in front of Lutyens Viceregal statue. Rex Imperator.

Despite what columnists in The Guardian would like to have you believe, who often have never travelled farther than an LGBQ-PGTips solo walking holiday in the Pyrenees, most Imperial servants did not see themselves as “conquistadors”. But as servants. Pity our crummy politicians today choose to not remember. But in the most, genuinely cared for a sub-continent- India. That was their misguided paternalism perhaps, but the result was not social anarchy and inequality.

I ask for them, to see that there is not just another side to this particular Koh-I-Noor diamond - but as many facets as there are in the controversial diamond. Many. That History I suspect will swept of last autumn’s leaves, the Sixties anti-colonial, anti-British rhetoric and “revisionist Marxist”, the orthodox version of the past that is the only “History” now taught in schools and universities.

Remember, T.E.G. Hamilton, late of 1/11th Sikhs who “departed this life” in 1941 far from home, a parsonage in Somerset. Now just a nameless sepia photo. on someone’s mantelpiece.

Remember.

Remember his brother the “late lamented” Cecil who worse a silk turban in the evensong, translated Sanskrit poems he loved as his own “native” Shakespeare, as tutored the Mohammadan boys, sons of the local Munshif- His Majesty’s Magistrate- and recited Housman’s “Blue remembered hills” and Verses XII, off by heart. It was by heart.

Remember the Techies and language schoolteachers in Bangalore and Malaysians who speak better “English” and know their grammar, better than most inhabitants of Luton, a place they’ve likely never heard of, less likely to ever see. The lingua franca, the mother tongue, gives voice to protest understood if not heard the world round.

Remember the light on the empty pews. The evensong prayer of the ghosts, for those who never returned “Home”, to an England in which they were not born and did not die. It is not for us to judge how much Good or Bad they measured out, or if they aided and abetted, perpetuated what we have been hammered into believing was only a “reprehensible” system. Race like life is anything but “black and white”, and History even less so.

Younger generations I detect are looking beyond the filtered “set texts”, and as the internet is narrowed are beginning to think for themselves- and see “Nationalism” as a positive as much as a negative. They will just rebrand it “Identity” and will “celebrate” it.

When I lived in the crown Colony of Hong Kong, Imperial Britain’s last toehold in the Far East, you could walk into any Police station, Royal Hong Kong Police crest and cipher over the door, and report a missing wallet- handbag or wife. “Missing” in those days usually meant just that- because thefts and muggings were mercifully rare.

The Duty Desk Sergeant in Wanchai would note the particulars, in English and Cantonese, and give you your Lost Property receipt HMSO From 12/2B Published by “Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, seven thousand miles way. The British had “power”, because people agreed to believe it had power, long after the navy and army and treasury were all but impotent. You felt “Justice” British law, even in 1995. Felt that if it could, something would be done.

I’m not so naive to think there was never any “graft”. That some “gifts” never changed hands to expedite justice. Or see it was never done. Political cover-ups from Bengal famine in 42, to corruption for the “greater good” somewhere, sometime.

But that was the are exception to the rule. Now, under the PRC, The Party it is the rule to the exception. The finger is may not always be tipping the scales of justice. But it is no longer “blind”.

Soon I will be one the Few. The last of the last who lived in the final outpost of British Imperial rule in Southeast Asia. Under the Crown.

The world is shrinking. Contrary to media propaganda, the world and human experience with it, is shrinking. Diminished by tech and the lowest common denominator that is “A-social media.

We are “Less global” than in 1966 when Oxford contemporises could do-up an old Land Rover, fill up Jerry cans and drive to Katmandu via Iran. Now they would not get as far as Belgium without being robbed at knifepoint and stumped by an expired EU Visa in Italy.

A great civilisation lost to the west, as Sufism is undefended by Deobandi, Wahabist structures funded by the Saudi and Emirati gas you pump into your tank every Monday or whenever…

Imperialism thus never ended. It was transformed. It became, subtle. Neo-Colonial corporate, hidden in supply chains, globalised chains.

Slavery (still continues, rebranded in other forms as indentured labour be it to Apple or Bangladeshi sweat shops. Suti, outlawed by the Britishers, replaced by “honour” killing where fathers murder and uncles pour hot oil on “disgraced” beloved daughters,

Caste systems stifling rational, progressive societal development. The Enlightenment did not come from the western brahmin intellectual.

Erased since the 1950’s by “progressive pseudo-education. We think our history, our past is fixed. But there is one thing more uncertain than the future- and the that is The Past.

The future will tell a different story to the high and mighty liberal left version of the orthodox History. That “imperial Capitalism” despite the resources and inevitable exploitation of people and resources, was arguably transferred the most benefits to the greatest number. The English language eloan conferred and built Indians Silicon Valley and enabled its technologists.

Ask the villagers, the farmers “choosing” between buying Monsanto seed and swigging weedkiller because they can’t afford the loans. Ask if they are any “freer”? Independent in an Independents India, Pakistan or Nigerian.

They- the new Corporate Imperialists, Left-wing academics and the UN deliberately, consciously made “Imperialism” into something you only whispered.

But nobody does ask the people who matter. The people who know the answer to that question every single morning at five, when they go into the landlord’s fields to harvest indigo for your $150 “designer” grunge jeans which they hen sandblast and hot wash and rip to make them look worn. An insanity not unnoticed by the average sweat-shop worker.

The media ask the LSE-educated Brahmin ex-diplomat living just outside Delhi. Or the Nigerian exiled to- Knightsbridge.

The evidence of “Eugenics” is all around you. You noticed it first at infant school when some could run faster, smarter, kept going than others. Others just kicked their feet under the table and said rude words. (Those were the future’s CEOs). Now you are and to pretend it does not matter. That race means only race.

What are The Wokies and BBC Execs so frightened of? Themselves.

From Voices- Unheard, unseen perspectives of “Empire”.

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