During the heyday of George W.Bush’s “War on Terror”, his erstwhile ally Great Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair scolded the late President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivian President, Evo Morales in the aftermath of a European Union-Latin American summit.
Blair requested both Presidents behave sensibly and responsibly with their respective country’s natural resources. Obviously, Bush’s right hand man did not qualify how such ‘sensibility’ and ‘responsibility’ should manifest itself. But if we gaze across the world and look at how the Arab despots of the Persian Gulf spend their wealth we certainly can decipher what the war criminal meant by ‘sensibly’ and ‘responsibility’.
Abundantly clear to the naked eye, is that what Blair demanded from the Latin Americans, is that their wealth should be jubilantly showered on the British economy.
There hardly isn’t any aspect of the British economy which hasn’t been supported (or “invested in” as the British media likes to delusionally boast) by the Gulf statelets. These statelets have shown themselves to be, in effect, nothing but British demarcated oil wells designed to give the British economy priority over the regions hinterland populations.
Great Britain’s leading arms exporter, British Aerospace is totally dependent on the weapons sold to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates (UAE), etc. There very likely would not be a globally renowned, successful British arms industry if it wasn’t for these statelets. I’ve written specifically about this here and discussed other parts of the British economy propped up by the Gulf dictators here.
The latest act of most outrageous ‘sensibly’ and ‘responsibly’ in spending the oil wealth, is that leader of the UAE is building a personal six-story car park in London for his collection of over 110 lucrative private cars to the tune £20 million. While millions around the world are starving to death, what better way for a British lackey to spend the wealth of the region than to build a car park in his master’s capital?
More so, the British economy has been propped up in recent years by these artificial states in the Persian Gulf created by British imperialism, while the mainland of the Arab World sinks deeper into sectarian war funded and tele-visually fanned by these same states. There has always been an outrageous and blood soaked international dimension and backbone to British prosperity. Back in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries it was the transatlantic trade in millions of captured Africans as labour for North American/Caribbean (sugar, tobacco and cotton) plantations and British imperialist rule over India which allowed Great Britain to be the most powerful imperial power on earth.
William Gladstone, the much vaunted great Liberal politician of the nineteenth century, began his career in the British parliament, knee and neck deep in the blood of his father’s slave plantations in Jamaica. Yet we hear next to nothing of this when Great Britain’s famous historians marvel and recount on how great and sublime the British Empire was. Such moral obliviousness never escaped George Orwell. Writing on British prosperity in the late 1930’s he had this to say:
“What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so. One gets some idea of the real relationship of England and India when one reflects that the per capita annual income in England is something over £80, and in India about £7…This is the system which we all live on…”
Returning to the contemporary world, British political commentators would never mention how Great Britain’s continued prosperity is more or less dependent (or “the system which we live on”) on the bogus statelets created by British imperialism in the Persian Gulf. The barbaric sectarianism running rampant in the Arab World today is the flip-side, of say, the tallest building in Western Europe and London’s latest iconic landmark, the Qatari financed ‘The Shard’ or a Gulf Sheikh’s car park in London.
With one hand the Arab despots of the Persian Gulf fan sectarianism in the Arab mainland and beyond, and with the other they are left free to “invest” in the British economy. The Shard can be seen as symbolising the twisted and essential link between jihadist sectarianism of the Arab World and the British economy.
Colonial Karma 