Britain’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has defended the record of the British empire, stating that the nation’s history must not be edited. When it comes to sanitising imperial history however, none has a better track record than the version of Britain’s imperialist war history we are taught by the English ruling Tory commentariat.

Brexiteer nationalism is a recycled and updated version of imperial nostalgia, turned inwards. Lying about the predatory and criminal nature of its imperial project not only distorts history, but provides a xenophobic vision to rebuild British society along racist lines.

Successive British Prime Ministers, up to and including Boris Johnson, have made numerous statements supporting the British empire as a humanitarian and noble institution. Regarding the British empire in a positive light is not just an exercise in historical amnesia; imperial nostalgia plays a toxic role in promoting myths of British ‘exceptionalism’ which sustains white racism and an anti-immigrant political culture.

While the British political class remains mired in a delusional fantasy version of imperial history, expressed today in Tory Brexiteer nationalism, Britain will never be able to solve any of its economic and racial disparities. Daniel Trilling, writing in the Guardian, maintains that until Britain squarely faces up to its imperial atrocities, today’s culture wars will continue to burn.

Modern empire loyalists, such as Niall Ferguson, encourage a sickly misty-eyed romanticism about the empire and its traditions. Anxieties about black, Asian and ethnic minority immigrants are sustained and recycled by an imperial nostalgia regarding a mythically racially homogeneous ‘white Britain’ that only ever existed in the imagination.

Priyamvada Gopal, tutor in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University, writes that:

In Brexit Britain, sustaining itself on dreams of a global renaissance in the embrace of its former colonies, a significant number of people likely believe the empire was a winning proposition. Between the saccharine justifications and convenient omissions of popular histories – largely written by privately educated white men – and the institutional failure to provide a reasonable schooling in the bare facts of imperial history, many Britons know little about the empire.

Britain has never been oppressed by villainous migrants or duplicitous refugees, but has exported its white nationalism around the world. While the British empire colonised people of black, Asian, African and Caribbean origin, Brexiteer nationalists – today’s empire loyalists – reject immigrants from those backgrounds. British citizenship was extended to the white migrants – Australia, Canada – societies that are themselves products of overreaching white nationalism.

How many of us know about the crimes of the British in Kenya, Yemen, or Iraq? In Kenya, a former English colony, Britain instituted a policy of mass detention and widespread torture to suppress the Kikuyu tribe, out of which the Mau Mau rebellion grew. Sir Evelyn Baring, the colonial governor, herded masses of Kenyan villagers into concentration camps – that term is no exaggeration – after German leaders had been convicted of deploying such measures in World War 2.

The details of this brutal war had been airbrushed from official histories of the British empire, until the work of brave historians compiled evidence from the archives – and the latter had been censored, with documents destroyed on the orders of British authorities.

While the Kenyan war has largely been marginalised, the Falklands war has received official attention, and commemorations of that conflict are routinely maintained. That is because that war fits into an imperial-nostalgia narrative – upholding the purported ‘rights’ of a Britannic empire ruling the waves. The loss of British military personnel is tragic – no-one is minimising the human suffering of that conflict. It is the hypocritical and selective sympathy cultivated by the empire loyalists that must be exposed.

What has this history got to do with current political problems? Imperial nostalgia and its associated racism contaminates our vision, and is no basis on which to build a future. The ideological heirs of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell uphold the British empire not out of any commitment to historical veracity. The rehabilitation of empire is bound up with the advocacy of an anti-immigration politics today.

Brexiteer nationalism is the last gasp of Tory Powellism. Mosley, a wartime Nazi who reinvented himself politically, found common ground with empire loyalists such as Powell. In what way? By advocating for a whites-only, anti-immigrant Britain. The nation’s imperial role, having declined in the post-war period, had to be sanitised as a civilising, humanitarian project. White nationalism had turned inward, and became a platform to remould British society.

The revamped nationalism of Tory Brexiteers relies on misinformation and distortions not only about empire, but also about the role and place of immigrants in Britain. Economic inequalities, driven by neoliberal austerity, could be blamed on African and Caribbean migrants. The latter, doing the jobs that Anglo British citizens do not want, form a marginalised group that is easy to scapegoat.

As the UK economy slumps into its deepest recession on record, in the wake of the pandemic, it is time to ask how empire loyalism can solve any of the economic and political problems that bedevil Britain today. How is increasing xenophobia, and hankering for the ‘good old days’ of empire, going to create a single job or prop up the overworked national health service?

It is not refugees, or migrants, or ‘shame’ about Britain’s imperial past that is at the root of the current problems in that nation. It is the economic model of capitalist austerity that is causing the socioeconomic crisis – and is incapable of solving it.

The governments of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel have signed an agreement paving the way for full normalisation of relations. This agreement brings into the open the growing and numerous clandestine linkages between the two nations. The formal accords between the two countries is the logical and open culmination of a decades-long bilateral relationship, previously undertaken in a secretive manner.

Dubbed the ‘Abraham accords’, in reference to the founder of the three monotheistic faiths, the cultivation of relations between the Emiratis (and the other Gulf nations) and Israel have been disguised as the promotion of Muslim-Jewish interfaith cooperation. This cynical ploy cannot disguise the naked and brazen economic and geopolitical interests motivating both parties.

For instance, back in October 2018, then Israeli Minister for Culture and Sport, Miri Regev, visited the UAE to oversee Israeli participation in a sporting tournament. This visit, touted as a bridge between Jews and Muslims, was great public relations. However, Regev, a former Brigadier-General in the Israeli army, has previously described African migrants to Israel as a ‘cancer‘, and called for violent repression of the Palestinians.

US President Donald Trump took credit for the deal, gloating that he had facilitated a ‘historic breakthrough’. For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a vague and non-binding promise to halt the annexation of the West Bank, though he was quick to point out that his postponement of annexing Palestinian territories was temporary.

The US and Israeli governments are portraying this accord as an enormous breakthrough and a diplomatic triumph, shoring up the electoral prospects of both incumbents. The Palestinians have denounced this deal as a betrayal, and condemned the Emiratis for their willingness to acquiesce in Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian land. During mid-August, Israeli warplanes struck several targets in the Gaza Strip, indicating that the Emirati–Israeli accord will not bring peace to the Palestinians.

Numerous Palestinian activist groups, human rights advocates and American Jewish organisations have condemned the Emirati-Israeli accord, stating that it is a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle and is nothing to celebrate. US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, herself of Palestinian origin, tweeted that no-one should be fooled by the declarations of peace in this accord. Creeping annexation and apartheid are part of the daily life of Palestinians until today.

The Gulf nations, including the Emiratis, have a long track record of conducting secret diplomacy with the Israeli state. Rationalising their latest manoeuvre, the UAE claims that they will advocate for Palestinian rights, and an independent Palestinian state, with their Israeli counterparts. However, even a cursory examination of the UAE’s policies in the region expose the falsity of this ‘constructive diplomacy’ claim.

Senior political analyst at Al Jazeera, Marwan Bishara, writes that the Emiratis – like their Saudi big-brother partner – are the most pro-war country in the Gulf. It is no secret that the Emirates have actively participated in the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen. Sending thousands of troops, the UAE pursued its own goals in that war, and only the prospect of a full-scale military defeat led the Emiratis to withdraw the bulk of their soldiers.

The Emiratis have pursued an aggressive expansionism in Libya, taking advantage of the ongoing chaos in that Arab nation to prop up its own proxies. The goal is to establish a friendly regime in Libya to exploit that country’s extensive oil reserves. The UAE’s role has prolonged the civil war in Libya, ongoing since the 2011 NATO war for regime change.

After supporting various Islamist militias in Syria’s civil war and initially welcoming the overthrow of the Syrian government in 2011, the UAE changed its tune in 2019 and wished that current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remain in power. This shift was cemented by the realisation that the Syrian Islamist rebels would fail to achieve military victory.

Amer Zahr, Palestinian American activist and president of New Generation for Palestine, summed up the crucial flaw in this accord:

When you normalise relationships with Israel or any Zionist organisation – and normalisation means interaction without centering the Palestinian problem – then you are basically excusing and accepting everything that Israel has done to us for the past 72 years

Exactly.

Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, introduced a bill in Congress to deny federal funding for schools which incorporate material from the 1619 Project in their curriculum. Attacking the latter as ‘racially divisive’ and ‘neo-Marxist propaganda‘, Cotton has also penned a New York Times article demanding that troops be sent in to shoot down Black Lives Matter protesters.

The 1619 Project, an ongoing collection of award-winning essays and educational materials, examines the foundation of the US as a state founded on slavery and white supremacy. The American war of independence and subsequent development of capitalism, rather than fulfilling the promise of equality and freedom, resulted in the construction of a racialised, economically exploitive society. Such a reexamination of American history has been met with hostility by US President Donald Trump and his supporters, such Tom Cotton.

The bill which Cotton introduced, the Saving American History Act of 2020, is not motivated by an altruistic concern about teaching history. It is a direct challenge to the BLM movement, and the historians and writers of the 1619 Project, to maintain a conservative vision of American capitalism and deny the racism that underpins US institutions. Cotton’s push to influence school curricula undermines any examination of America’s history as a white racist edifice.

Was not the 1776 American revolution about liberty and equality for all? The founding fathers, who called slavery a ‘necessary evil’, sidestepped the hypocrisy at the heart of the Declaration of Independence – liberty and equality applied only to the white race. Postponing any solution of the glaring racial disparities of the new nation, it took the US Civil War and the Emancipation proclamation to finally abolish slavery.

The abolition of slavery, while a monumental and historic achievement, did not resolve racial injustices. The slave-owning Confederacy was defeated, but white nationalism was not – it adapted to the new conditions by implementing economic and political measures to fight a rearguard action against the newly-freed African American community. The mythical ‘Lost Cause’ of the Confederacy was invoked as a way to disenfranchise and marginalise the black working class.

From education to housing, business and law enforcement, health care to politics, black Americans have faced a diverse set of measures and tactics which have as their unifying goal the enforcement of racial disparities. This is not a historical anomaly, or a thing of the past. Unemployment, poverty, and the racial wealth gap are issues that disproportionately affect African Americans today.

The current pandemic has shone a light on the existing racial disparities in health care. To be sure, the Covid-19 outbreak did not create these racially differentiated outcomes, but has exacerbated them. Death rates from the coronavirus have hit black and Hispanic Americans at more lethal rates than white communities. The greater number of Covid fatalities is a reflection of the unequal health structures that predate the current outbreak.

Writing in Vox magazine, Dylan Scott notes that throughout American cities, black and Latinx communities account for a higher proportion of death rates from the Covid-19 virus. In the state of Kansas, black Americans constitute six percent of the population, yet account for 30 percent of Covid-19 fatalities. Those communities which are already marginalised have been hit hardest by the current pandemic.

The end of the civil war, and the Reconstruction period, were historical achievements. However, white vigilante violence did not end. Wherever black communities demanded inclusion as equals, they were met with racist violence, usually under the watchful supervision of the police and law enforcement authorities. The Confederate flag, and its associated ‘lost cause‘ mythology, was an instrument for re-educating subsequent generations, falsifying the white supremacist character of American history.

Surely, there is no harm in recycling the Confederate flag? Not everyone who displays that flag is a vicious white nationalist? Yes, we have all watched the Dukes of Hazzard, a light-entertainment show featuring their car, coincidentally named the ‘General Lee’ with the Confederate flag emblazoned on the roof. Just ‘good old boys’, as the opening song suggested, Bo and Luke Duke were a pair of cheerful, happy-go-lucky rebels, defying comically incompetent authorities.

The Confederate flag has been sanitised, its racist undertones modified and made into a symbol of good-natured, moderated ‘rebellion’. Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit amplified these kinds of themes, a Southern maverick just trying to live his life unencumbered by federal authorities. Harmless fun…perhaps. However much the Confederacy is recycled as ‘Southern pride’, it cannot be dissociated from its racist and treasonous secessionist legacy.

When the late John Lewis, veteran civil rights leader, participated in the 1965 march across Edmund Pettus Bridge, his skull was fractured as the 600 marchers were attacked by troopers with clubs, attack dogs and tear gas. Lewis recovered and returned to the civil rights struggle.

The ideology of the Alabama police and state troopers is being kept alive today by Tom Cotton, Trump, and their supporters. The 1619 Project raises a badly needed national conversation about the inbuilt white racism which underpins the structural economic inequalities of American capitalism until today.

Natan Sharansky, right wing Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident, was awarded the 2020 Genesis prize in Israel. A prestigious award, it is given to prominent personalities for their promotion of human rights. Sharansky, born in what is now the Ukraine, gained international fame and recognition as a courageous human rights and democracy advocate in the 1970s and 80s. A famed prisoner of conscience, his ostensible lifelong advocacy of human rights does not extend to the Palestinians.

Let’s unpack this subject.

Sharansky, a maths whizz and chess prodigy, became known as a refusenik – a description given to Soviet Jews denied permission to emigrate to Israel. Imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in the early 1970s, Sharansky’s cause for freedom was taken up by numerous conservative heavyweight politicians in the United States, West Germany and other nations. Spending time in solitary confinement, Sharansky was released in 1986 as part of a prisoner exchange.

He became a celebrity dissident, writing books and giving lectures about the triumph of individual liberty over government tyranny. The Sharansky cause célèbre seemed to achieve vindication in the late 1980s, when former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev permitted Soviet Jews to emigrate. Sharansky’s status as a hero of our times seemed assured.

Sharansky’s career as a political operator in Israel since the 1990s undermines his portrayal as a human rights hero. His politics is that of the ultranationalist and religious chauvinist Right, based on the large Russian Jewish constituency. Quashing any kind of compromise with the Palestinians, Sharansky has promoted the cause of ultra-rightist nationalism in Israel, and has encouraged annexationist policies in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

Sharansky, and his staunch ally Avigdor Lieberman (a similarly former Soviet Jew) have voiced hateful sentiments about the Palestinians and Arabs in general, have protested any moves by Israeli governments to withdraw from Palestinian territories, and have advocated near-genocidal policies with regard to neighbouring Arab states. For instance, Lieberman, a former settler and defence minister, suggested that Israel bomb the Aswan dam to force concessions from their Egyptian counterparts.

Sharansky has consistently and enthusiastically supported the Israeli government’s hostile and discriminatory policies towards African Jewish refugees. While Tel Aviv has presented itself as a friendly homeland for the Jewish communities in the diaspora, its mistreatment of Ethiopian and African refugees indicates otherwise. African asylum seekers, Sharansky stated, were not welcome in Israeli society, were unassimilable in his opinion, and constitute an unnecessary drain on precious financial resources.

Every person has the right to express themselves without fear of persecution, including Sharansky. If he wishes to write books and give lectures – good luck to him. During the Cold War, anti-Soviet dissidents were glorified, even though many of them had ultra-rightist and racist views.

When a person is elevated to a status of a human rights icon, upheld as a courageous advocate for democracy, we have the right to expose and denounce their hypocrisy. If Sharansky’s politics make him a solid ally of the American neoconservative Right – the politicians who advocated for war against Arab-majority nations – then Sharansky deserves condemnation for his pro-war views.

Sharansky’s contemptuous view of, and racialised hostility towards, Arabs and Palestinians in particular is not uncommon in the wider Israeli society. In fact, the heroic view of Jewish immigration to Palestine – framed as the Aliyah – has served to disguise the colonising project of Zionist ideology. That template of Jewish return to Palestine has also defined Anglo-American (and Australian) attitudes to the Palestinian question.

Leon Uris, the late Zionist writer, set the tone for Western audiences with his best-selling 1958 novel, Exodus. The latter was made into an award-winning movie in 1960. The novel sets out a fictionalised version of escaping Jewish refugees, who fight official British intransigence and indifference, to make their way to Palestine. Upheld as heroic settler-pioneers, the novel and subsequent movie have formed the basic framework through which audiences have interpreted the Israeli settler state.

It has been an exceptional work of propaganda, and it is its depiction of Arabs that most concerns us here. While the Israeli settlers are portrayed as valiant, dedicated fighters for the cause of liberation, the Arabs (if they rate a mention) are portrayed as dirty, uneducated, irrational savages. The Israelis of Uris’ imagination – generally white-skinned and blond – are resourceful in developing the land. The Arabs in contrast, are stuck in medieval ways, live in unsanitary conditions and are motivated only by an obsessive and fanatical anti-Semitism.

When the colonised people are dehumanised – the word ‘Arab’ is consistently prefaced with the adjectives ‘dirty’ or ‘smelly’ – their humanity as a people is denied. There is an abundance of Palestinian writing – novels, short stories, poetry, academic books – that articulate the experiences of dispossession and exile. Their suffering is ignored or minimised, and their works do not receive corporate or government largesse available to Sharansky.

While the Palestinians have appealed for international support from antiracist groups, such as Black Lives Matter, Sharansky has shown where his sympathies lie – with the Hong Kong ultranationalist protesters. The latter have consciously allied with far right American politicians, as well as the Trump administration, who advocate the suppression of BLM and the antiracism protests.

A commitment to human rights cannot exclude the demand for Palestinian self-determination. The hypocrisy of at the heart of Sharansky’s perspective stands exposed.

Since the anti-Vietnam war protests, including the civil rights movement, right down to today’s Black Lives Matter rallies, there has been a common theme advocated by the conservative Right – the disrespectful, badly behaved protester. The latter stereotype has been deployed not only to counter the protest movements, but to delegitimise the ideas and actions of the protesters, reinforce a conservative reaction, and distract popular outrage into unnecessary channels.

Let’s examine all of this more closely.

Civil rights protesters, and the anti-Vietnam war movement, faced the lawless violence of the police and state authorities. African Americans breaking the segregation laws were met not with polite requests to cease and desist, but with unrestrained racist violence by police, often accompanied by white vigilantes – the latter normally under the protection of the authorities. Dr King was always a nonviolent protester – and he was shot dead.

Racist militia groups, motivated by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, committed pogroms and atrocities against the black American community. They were the auxiliary arm of the US authorities as they tried to clamp down civil rights protesters. Ismail Muhammad, writing in The New Republic, explains that:

The Civil Rights movement made outright, avowed beliefs in white supremacy socially unacceptable. But racist mob violence has a long and robust history in the U.S., both before the 1960s and after. It forms a part of America’s political sediment, a foundation upon which our contemporary politics are built. 

The civil rights protests of the 1950s and 60s were dismissed by their opponents as paid dupes of a shadowy (sometimes Communist) presence – the Jews. The claim that Jews – in the shape of a vast, financially powerful, veiled malevolence – was circulated by white nationalist and racist organisations to discredit the real issues of racism and segregation raised by the civil rights protesters.

While American Jews participated strongly in civil rights actions, the falsehood that Jews manipulated or controlled the protest movement serves to undermine the agency of black Americans to organise themselves around important sociopolitical issues.

Portraying the African Americans as naive pawns of a vast Jewish conspiracy has its echoes today. The claim that billionaire George Soros is funding today’s Black Lives Matter protesters is a recycled, slanderously false rendition of the old ‘Jewish conspiracy’ trope. Soros, of Jewish origin, has long been a target of conspiracist falsehoods promoted by extreme right wing and racist organisations.

Today’s BLM protests are dismissed by the conservative punditocracy as a cunning manipulated tactic of the (usually foreign) Jewish billionaire. Soros has been demonised as a destabilising and malign influence, responsible for ‘paying protesters’ on multiple occasions. Attacking Soros as an underhanded influencer of the malignant kind is the perfect gateway to anti-Semitic vitriol. The Soros-funded protester is the latest incarnation of the historic anti-Semitic shadow – the international Jew.

US President Donald Trump has done his level-best to attack BLM as a product of ‘dark forces’ and professional agitators, but he is hardly alone, and certainly not the first to do so. Blaming social unrest on outsiders, or regarding them as the dupes of malevolent and underhanded figures, has a long anti-Semitic pedigree. Instead of having a national conversation about the difficult economic and political issues of our times, we are taken down a well-worn path of bigotry.

The myth of the disrespectful protester gained new currency in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam war. Defeated by the Vietnamese, the US authorities were looking for reasons to explain their defeat. From the 1980s, and in particular from the 1991 Gulf War, the story of the disrespected Vietnam veteran began circulating as a conservative response to the mass social movements of the 60s and 70s.

One of the most famous claims from the anti-Vietnam war era is the myth of the ‘spitting protester‘. Driven by disrespect, throngs of hippie-antiwar activists allegedly gathered at airports to confront returning Vietnam veterans with gobs of saliva-spit and insults of ‘baby killers’. The pathos of these stories is undeniable – but there is not a single piece of corroborating evidence to verify these stories.

Jerry Lembkce, a Vietnam veteran and sociology professor, undertook an extensive investigation into these stories of badly behaved, disrespectful antiwar protesters and found no evidence that back up the claims. However, the mythology of the war-at-home-after-the-war Vietnam veteran has achieved a cultural norm status. In fact, the antiwar protests included, among others, numerous Vietnam veterans.

Returning soldiers were welcomed by antiwar groups, and participated in organising activities. Vietnam veterans formed their own antiwar associations as well. However, none of this stopped Hollywood from churning out movies depicting the badly mistreated veteran, where patriotism became synonymous with pro-war. This claim gained national prominence in the ensuing years.

Today, cynical concerns about COVID-19 clusters are being perversely used to deny anti-racism protests – even though not a single COVID-19 case has been traced to any BLM or anti-racism rallies. The concerns for a potential surge in coronavirus cases were not used to stop the reopening of businesses, workplaces, shopping centres and other areas of close social contact.

Before we deploy the tired old cliche of badly behaved (or paid) protesters, let’s actually have a discussion about the economic and racial disparities that generate social upheaval.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has built up a solid friendship with US President Donald Trump since the latter took office. It may seem strange that a South Asian head of state would find common ground with an avowed white supremacist.

Scratch beneath the surface, and we will find a political correspondence based on mutually-reinforcing bigotry; white nationalism on Trump’s part, and ultranationalist Hindu supremacism from Modi. In fact, the ideology advocated by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is directly based on its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The latter is longest continuously-existing fascist movement in the world, and seeks to establish India as Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist state excluding ethnic minorities.

Narendra Modi is a longtime activist and missionary for the fascistic RSS. The latter, founded in 1925, is the wellspring of Hindu nationalist ideology. Its acolytes promote an exclusionary and Hindu communalist vision of India – a vision that Modi and the BJP have faithfully implemented since coming to power in 2014. The RSS, the National Volunteer Organisation, does not directly participate in party politics. However, its fanatical devotees have numerous offspring groups which control the streets and levers of power, such as the ruling BJP.

The RSS and its affiliates throughout society have organised mass pogroms and violence against India’s minority communities. In the name of purging India of non-Hindu elements, the RSS militants have carried out attacks, demolished mosques and imposed a strictly conservative Hindu nationalist political agenda. Its version of history regards the Muslim community, and Islam in general, to be a threat to the Hindutva state. Islamophobia is a common, uniting feature of the Indian and American far right.

One of the main leaders and ideologues of the RSS was Veer Savarkar, an anti colonial activist and scholar. Writing in his seminal 1923 text, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu, Savarkar elaborated a strictly religious foundation and boundary for the Indian state. Hinduism, he claimed, would be the sole organising principle of the entire society. Viewing Islam and Christianity as ‘foreign religions’, he expressed his admiration for Mussolini’s fascist regime. In the 1930s, Savarkar voiced his support for Hitler and the Nazi party.

Savarkar, and RSS partisans today, express their open admiration for Zionism and the colonial policies of the Israeli settler state. In the 1920s and 30s, Savarkar and his co-thinkers, were influenced by the Zionist model of building an exclusionary ethnonationalist state, reflected in the concept of muscular Hindutva. Current Indian PM Modi has built up a working alliance with the Israeli government of PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

There was a time when independent India denounced Zionism as an exclusionary ideology and a form of racism. That is no longer the case with PM Modi and his Hindutva ideology. Indeed, the BJP government is using the Zionist example as a template for its own actions.

When the UN in 1947, decided to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, Savarkar was particularly disappointed. Since the 1920s, the RSS has voiced its support for the settler-colonial philosophy of Zionism. Savarkar stated that the realisation of the Zionist project would gladden him as much as the Jewish settlers. Supporting an ethnonationalist Jewish state did not stop Savarkar from admiring Nazi Germany. He elaborated the view that India’s Muslims should be treated in the same way that Hitler treated Germany’s Jewish communities.

Hindutva is not only a religious exclusionary concept, but easily crosses over into a racialist one as well. The white nationalists in the United States want to construct a whites-only racially unified state – a goal that finds parallels in the Hindutva project in India. The Nazi party did not only borrow the hooked cross – the swastika – from Hindu India.

The pseudoscientific notion of an Aryan super-race of a long-lost ancient civilisation is not Germanic in origin, but derives from Hindu-Vedic mythology. Recovering the ancient glories of a mythic ‘great race’ motivates not only the Hindu nationalist community, but also the pan-Germanic anti-Semitism which fed into Nazi ideology.

The Sanskrit civilisation of early India, called Indo-European or Aryan, was transformed into a political project by 19th century pan-German nationalists. In the pseudo archaeological imagination of European white supremacy, Aryan was transmogrified into ‘whiteness’, and thus began a crisscrossing of racist pseudohistory.

The admiration for, and appropriation of, Hindu-Vedic mythology, continued with the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Himmler and Nazi leaders read the Hindu texts, the Bhagavad Gita, respected the hierarchical structure of the Indian caste system, and regarded themselves as reviving the racial purity of the original Aryan civilisation.

Himmler, as head of the SS, viewed his organisation as a modern application of the Kshatriyakaste, the old warrior caste from the Hindu-Vedic social structure. Racial killings, for the Nazi party, were not crimes, but service for the revival of an Aryan new order based on a mythical glorious past. Imperial nostalgia based on pseudoarchaeology makes for a toxic combination.

While Trump and American white nationalists deserve vocal condemnation, we can not afford to ignore the rise of religious ethnonationalist supremacy closer to home. The rise of Hindutva, in the form of the governing party of India, the BJP, is its own form of toxic bigotry. The fight against the far right must necessarily have a global perspective.

In late June this year, the New York Times published a sensational exposé; Russian military intelligence, the GRU, paid bounties to Taliban guerrillas so the latter would kill American troops in Afghanistan. This startling revelation began a spiralling process of questioning and counter accusations between the US military and the various intelligence services.

After two weeks, the NY Times published a crucial admission: there is no factual basis for this allegation. Why was this uncorroborated claim published without any critical examination or skepticism, which created a media frenzy and public outrage? Why was no evidence for this claim produced, or any witnesses brought forward, in any of the articles published by the mainstream media?

Perhaps there is a level of incompetence in the corporate media. That explanation, while plausible, is unconvincing. Why? Back in November 2019, the NY Times was fully aware of the systematic and unrelenting deception practiced by the US authorities regarding the Afghanistan war. Dubbed the Afghanistan Papers, documents obtained by the Washington Post detail a scandalous pattern of lying on the part of the Pentagon and associated American authorities.

The US government, worried about the stalemated nature of its Afghan invasion, routinely misrepresented the situation on the ground, waging a concerted misinformation campaign spanning the 18-year (soon to be 19-year) US invasion of that nation. Framing the conflict as one of ‘progress’, the American government deliberately misled the public regarding the ongoing suffering and misery inflicted on the Afghan people.

The US authorities consciously lied about the Afghanistan war, denying that ground was being lost to the Taliban. The Afghan government, propped up by force of American arms, is a near-perfect example of a kleptocracy, impelled by corruption and avarice. Millions of US dollars, earmarked for the purported development of the nation, has disappeared into the pockets of Afghan ministers and officials.

The US war on Afghanistan, launched in 2001 on the purported rationale of responding to the 9/11 terrorist attack, has not brought the lofty ideals of democratic government or human rights to that nation. Extensive investigations by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has revealed that atrocities and war crimes have been perpetrated by the elite Australian SAS soldiers.

Afghan civilians have been murdered with impunity by the SAS troops, and a culture of coverup has allowed the perpetrators of such crimes to continue operating without any consequences or accountability. Major-General Adam Findlay, special forces commander, admitted that Australian troops committed war crimes in Afghanistan. Australian military forces are operating as allies of the United States.

Human Rights Watch has documented the atrocities and abuses by Afghan soldiers, backed by CIA-supported death squads, killing civilians under the guise of conducting the so-called war on terror. Counterinsurgency is a broad concept, and under that term, CIA-backed paramilitaries working for the Kabul government have committed numerous mass killings. These are not isolated or atypical events, but rather part of a systematic campaign to terrorise the civilian population.

It would be delusional to think that American intervention in Afghanistan only began in 2001 with the commencement of the ostensible and misnamed ‘war on terror’. The United States, under successive administrations, has been intervening in Afghanistan since the late 1970s, when the Democrat President Jimmy Carter, sponsored various Islamist parties and militias to wage a mujahideen anti-Communist insurgency against the socialist regime in Kabul.

Paying Islamist guerrillas to fight in Afghanistan, the United States intended to restore the old landlord class, wealthy mullahs and reverse the social gains of the Kabul socialist regime. After repeated requests, Moscow decided to intervene, and thus began the long-running Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. Withdrawing in 1989, the Soviets were implementing their part in an agreement with the US to de-escalate the conflict.

The US reneged on the arrangement, and continued supplying and paying the numerous Islamist militias to fight the Kabul regime. It is no secret that Saudi Arabia, a solid ally of the United States, strongly supported the Afghan Islamist forces throughout the 1980s. In the 1990s, the various mujahideen factions, having occupied Kabul, then turned on each other, reducing the country to ruins. The Taliban emerged as a ‘purer’, untainted Islamist militia, and took control in 1996.

The purpose of revisiting this relevant historical background is not to elicit reactions of boredom. It is to understand that manufactured outrage about the killing of ‘our troops’ is poisonous venom in the mainstream media. The conduct of the American authorities reeks of hypocrisy. The United States has a long and disturbing history of covertly sponsoring and supporting extremist Islamist groups, using them as a counterweight to secular, socialist and nationalist forces in the Middle East.

The Russian bounties story is yet another attempt to foment pro-war sentiment among the American population, perversely disguised as ‘concern’ for the lives and wellbeing of American soldiers. Rather than a cynical exercise in fabricating ‘outrage’ about the conduct of others, it would be more productive to rethink the trillion-dollar cost of the ‘war on terror’, the latter being the origin rationale for the Afghanistan ordeal.

How many schools, hospitals, medical equipment, public infrastructure could have been built with the trillions of dollars spent on the global war on terror? Our outrage should fuel condemnation of US imperial wars, and the scandalous conduct of that nation’s institutions.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, criticised the Black Lives Matter (BLM), stating we should not import their issues and causes into the Australian context. Perhaps he is unaware of modern history, but white nationalism is a global ideology, and its advocates derive supporters and inspiration from its application across the globe.

The most successful exporter of white nationalist ideology, and the most efficient practitioner of that ideology, was the capitalist British empire. Employing ruthless means, the British ruling class expanded its operating frontiers, not only to increase its economic wealth. White supremacy was the ideological glue that cemented connections between the empire’s colonies and English centre. The empire was held together by overwhelming coercion, racism and economic exploitation of its nonwhite peoples.

One of the major results of exporting English imperial capitalism was the eventual emergence of the nation of Australia. Founded on the dispossession of the indigenous nations, the newly constructed Australian capitalist class used, among other methods, slave labour to enrich itself – blackbirding, as it is known in Australia. The kidnapping and forcible exploitation of Melanesian labourers on the cotton fields and pearling industries of the new nation have been amply documented.

What is not so well-known is the warm reception granted by Australia to a class of fleeing merchants from another colonial-settler nation – slave owners and traders from Louisiana, in the United States. As the American civil war began, the viability of continued cotton plantations – resting as they did on slave labour – was being undermined. The plantation owners who fled that state found an opportunity for a fresh start, in Queensland, Australia.

Louisiana planters, finding their cotton production grinding to a halt, found a receptive commercial environment in Queensland. Given a business-friendly economic setup, they continued their use of slave labourers, albeit from a different source – the Pacific Islands. Queensland became the replacement cotton industry for those slave owners and traders whose businesses were disrupted in the United States. It is indicative that the Queensland colony’s authorities – ultimately responsible to Britain – were quite comfortable with providing asylum to their fellow white supremacists from the northern hemisphere.

When protesters pull down statues of Columbus in the US, or slave traders like Edward Colston in Britain, the reflexive cry of ‘just get over it’ can be heard in the shrill conservative punditocracy. This claim is intended to dampen any debate about our collective history, and provide a rationale for continued historical amnesia regarding the black presence in white majoritarian nations. Indeed, such a cry undermines an extensive examination of how our societies became white majority states in the first place.

In this context, it is instructive to note that the white nationalist view of history extends beyond national boundaries, and engages in historical revisionism of its own. Dylann Roof, the white nationalist American who gunned down several African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, was wearing the flag of the long-dead white supremacist state of Rhodesia on his person, among other racist symbols. Rhodesia-nostalgia has become a bedrock of white nationalist propaganda.

As John Ismay, writing in The New York Times, explains it:

Nostalgia for Rhodesia has since grown into a subtle and profitable form of racist messaging, with its own line of terminology, hashtags and merchandise, peddled to military-history fans and firearms enthusiasts by a stew of far-right provocateurs.

Reclaiming the long-gone white supremacist nationalism of Rhodesia has long and disturbing echoes. In fact, the decision by the-then Rhodesian government to declare independence was based precisely on a tribalist refusal to accede to majority-rule in the former British colony. American (and Australian) white nationalism extends its cross-border solidarity to the historic whites-only statelet, to indicate their desire to configure their own societies on the same organising principle as that of Rhodesia.

The appeal to Rhodesia nostalgia is not a mere hobby-like exercise in historical appreciation. It plays the same, albeit updated role, that the myth of the “Lost Cause” of the slave-owning Confederacy plays within the circles of white nationalist retroactive victimhood. Preying upon the real socioeconomic anxieties of poor white workers, Rhodesia nostalgia channels those social concerns into an anti-immigrant direction, mythologising a supposedly lost ‘golden age’ of a white exclusionary tribalism.

While current US President Donald Trump has recycled old white nationalist tropes in his current capacity, it would be delusional to think that white nationalism began with him. In the last stages of World War 2, as the regime faced certain defeat in 1945, the United States provided a secretive yet crucial refuge for white supremacists fleeing Europe. Operation Paperclip was a secret American initiative to recruit Nazi scientists, engineers and technical experts, and seamlessly assimilate them into the burgeoning US military-industrial complex.

The Soviets also nabbed German scientists, in 1946, as well. This measure is routinely interpreted as evidence of an ideological correspondence between two ‘totalitarianisms’. Let us for the moment accept that rationale. What excuse does the United States have for initiating such a programme? I think there is a little-examined yet striking ideological continuity between the ostensibly democratic United States and Nazi Germany – mutual dedication to white supremacy.

Prior to World War 2, when Nazi party ideologues and leaders were looking for a successful example of a racially-stratified society, they found inspiration and legally-significant examples to emulate in the United States. The goal of a whites-only homeland found common currency on both sides of the Atlantic. Adolf Hitler’s opposition to race-mixing was well within mainstream thinking about race in the United States.

Tearing down statues of racist conquistadors, rather than erasing history, provides a necessary starting-point for illuminating the darkest corners of imperial colonisation. We would do well to consider whom we uphold as venerable figures for our children.

In Sydney’s picturesque Moore Park, there is a memorial to those Australians who served in the Korean War. Located at the northernmost tip of the park, it is always a pleasurable experience to visit the memorial. Moore Park is close to the large and cultivated Centennial Parklands, a popular destination for walkers, cyclists, joggers and tourists. This past June 25th marked the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War.

A small service was held to mark the occasion, attended by Australian defence force personnel and members of the Korea War Veterans association. The memorial honours those Australians who perished in that conflict, and is a welcome addition to the beautiful surrounds of Moore Park. In the immediate aftermath of the global movement in toppling statues, the primary designer of the memorial was asked for her thoughts.

Jane Cavanough, the designer, stated that she welcomed the debates and histories that have found expression and wider audiences in the context of questioning historical landmarks. To that end, let’s make a contribution to the question of the Korean War, and what we are memorialising. There is no disputing that Australians suffered during that conflict. But let us not allow our own nationalism to blind us to the horrendous suffering endured by the Korean people.

What most Australians do not realise – just like most Americans – is that the United States, during the Korean conflict, demolished the North Korean side in its entirety. Between 1950 and 1953, North Korea was subjected to intensive aerial bombardment by the US Air Force, in which every city and town in North Korea was destroyed.

Under the direction of General Curtis LeMay, the US proceeded to drop more bomb tonnage on North Korea than during the American campaign in the Pacific in World War 2. When all the buildings, hospitals, roads and schools were bombarded, the US proceeded to bomb rice fields, dams, and other civilian infrastructure, bringing North Korea’s population to the brink of starvation. Aid from China and the Soviet Union averted a wider catastrophe.

Napalm, incendiary bombs, and fragmentation weapons were used to kill and vaporise hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. The North Korean countryside was left scorched and poisoned – but yet, after the war’s conclusion, North Korea rebuilt its society house by house, street by street, brick by brick. After World War 2 concluded, the major powers declared that industrialised mass killing would be outlawed and never occur again.

In the early stages of the world, General Douglas MacArthur, renowned American commander in the Pacific during World War 2, requested 34 atomic bombs to be used to create a radioactive belt in northern China to prevent any land invasion of Korea. Planning an aggressive war to achieve predatory war aims was something for which Nazi and Imperial Japanese generals had been convicted.

Surely South Korea is a democracy, a capitalist economic miracle and ally protected by the US and its friends, such as Australia? There is an element of truth to this description, but not in the way that the majority of Americans (and Australians) realise. The South Korean regime, based in Seoul and installed by the US in 1945, has spent most of its life as various military dictatorships. Syngman Rhee, the fanatical Christian and conservative supported by American arms, ruled South Korea with an iron fist, establishing a police-terror state. Thousands of suspected leftists and regime opponents were tortured and killed by 1950.

If South Korea currently implements democratic practices, it is not because of the regime. It is because South Korean people have periodically risen up and ousted widely-despised military dictators. Syngman Rhee, the longtime strongman, was deposed by the 1960 April revolution. He fled to Hawaii. In 1980, the little-known Gwangju uprising overthrew yet another set of military rulers. The Gwangju revolt was not without its casualties; highly trained elite special forces were deployed to suppress the rebellion.

It is very true that South Korea emerged as an economic tiger in the Asia Pacific. In the 1950s and 60s, Seoul pursued a series of policies that boosted its economy and lifted people out of poverty. But let us be clear on the reasons for their success. Contrary to today’s quasi-religious ideology of free-market fundamentalism, it was the state-driven capitalism that accounted for the stunning growth of South Korea’s GDP and export-intensive economy.

Setting out five-year plans, the Korean state elaborated ambitious targets to be achieved in cooperation with the private sector. General Park Chung-hee, the main architect of this government-driven, centrally-planned economic recovery, learned from his experience as an officer in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, and corralled the state’s resources to attain spectacular economic growth. Following Japanese models of state-corporatism, General Park created a resurgent South Korean capitalist class.

The South Korean chaebol, which literally means ‘money clan’, is a corporate-dynastic structure, which involves concentrating wealth in the hands of a few ruling family-dynasties. Samsung, Hyundai, LG – now famous international companies, have their origins in a dynastic clannish structure. The alliance between the authoritarian state and the dynastic chaebols contributed to the stunning success of South Korea’s tiger economy. The chaebols are the cornerstones of the economic and political landscape of that nation.

Should the Korean War memorial in Sydney be demolished? No, it should not. Am I suggesting that an enormous statue of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un be constructed in Sydney and worshipped? No, I am not. We need to have a long-overdue national conversation about what we memorialise whenever we commemorate US imperial wars, and what the Asian nations have to say about those wars.

Commemorative memorials do not compensate for serious historical amnesia.

Across the world, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests against racism and police brutality have compelled countries in Europe (and Australia for that matter) to reconsider their own racist histories. For instance, protesters in Belgium removed the statue of King Leopold II, who was responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans during Belgium’s colonial adventures in that continent. Statues of Confederate generals are being torn down in the United States.

However, not everyone is supportive of BLM.

Morton Klein, President of the Zionist Organisation of America and enthusiastic Israel-supporter, denounced the BLM movement in the following words on Twitter:

BLM is a Jew-hating, white-hating, Israel-hating, conservative Black-hating, violence-promoting, dangerous Soros-funded extremist group of haters

Let’s take a look at this stinging attack on BLM, and why prominent Zionist groups find the anti-racism of BLM a strategic threat.

Klein is not alone – numerous Zionist organisations have denounced BLM in similarly vitriolic terms. Israel’s leaders and their supporters have attacked BLM as an anti-Semitic movement, conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The latter is a frequently deployed tactic to smear critics of the Israeli state as being motivated by irrational prejudice.

Ali Abunimah, cofounder and editor of Electronic Intifada, noted that it is interesting to see Klein incorporate an anti-Semitic trope, the ‘George Soros puppet-master funding protests’, as a legitimate critique. In fact, a number of advisors close to current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, recycled this right-wing conspiracy theory. The ‘globalist Jew’ funding revolutionary causes is an old, outdated anti-Semitic slander deployed to discredit social movements as just dupes or pawns in the hands of the ultimate puppeteer, the Jews.

Why is a Zionist circulating an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory? Zionism at its core, is a political ideology that accepts the logic – if one can call it that – of the anti-Semite. Jews, according to the ideologues of Zionism, constitute a distinct, unassimilable, fixed entity no matter where they are born and raised. The proponents of Zionism offer a resolution of the Jewish question – building an exclusively Jewish state in their ‘old-new’ ancestral home of Palestine. Zionism has always been a racialist philosophy.

The BLM movement openly supports and cooperates with the Palestinians, not for any anti-Semitic reasons, but precisely because of Zionism’s racist conception of Palestinians and Arabs. The founders of Zionism made no secret of their colonialist and racist attitudes towards the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, and offered their services to various colonial powers – such as Britain – to construct an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine. BLM offers its anti-racist solidarity to the Palestinians.

It is no secret that anti-Semitic and far-right parties across the world look to Israel as an example to follow. They in turn provide political support for the objectives of Zionism. Ultranationalist and racist European parties have expressed their admiration for Zionism and Israel, and a number have visited that nation in a show of political solidarity. Netanyahu has been quick to reciprocate.

The United Nations, in 2017, issued a damning report comparing the practices of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians with the policies of the apartheid government in South Africa. The process of ghettoisation and partition of the occupied Palestinian Territories bear striking similarities to those implemented by the white Afrikaners towards the black South African population.

Ronnie Kasrils, a formerly leading activist the African National Congress (ANC) and subsequent government minister, wrote that as a Jewish South African, he saw the fundamental similarities between apartheid in South Africa and the policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians. The Afrikaners who settled in South Africa founded states for themselves – Transvaal, Orange Free State – which became the union of South Africa. They were founded on the exclusion of the indigenous Africans. Zionism has produced a similar and parallel outcome in the land of Palestine.

Recognising the colonial-settler project of Zionism is not a product of irrational and fanatical anti-Semitism, but a recognition of the dispossession and exclusion of the Palestinians upon which Zionism is predicated. Indeed, Zionist leaders from the 1920s and 30s admitted that Palestinian resistance to Zionism was based on opposition to the colonising project, and not on any anti-Semitic hatred.

Tearing down statues of racist slave-traders, such as Edward Colston in Bristol, or conquistadors such as Christopher Columbus, is not an exercise in erasing history – far from it. The United States and Britain have been compelled to recognise and understand their histories of slavery and imperialism only because of the collective struggle of non-white peoples. Erecting statues to slavers, or Confederate generals, is an exercise in reasserting white supremacy, and constructing a white nationalist view of history.

The global protests in support of BLM are not motivated by hatred of white people, anymore than anti-Semitic prejudice. Indeed, African Americans and Jews have a long history of cooperation on the issue of civil rights in the United States. Political struggles always involve asking questions that make us uncomfortable about ourselves. Ran Greenstein, writing in 972 magazine, states that anti-Zionism is not a platform for anti-Semitism but rather an opportunity to correct historical wrongs inflicted on the Palestinians.

Black Lives Matter and Palestine form a historic alliance, opposed to all forms of racism. A necessary step towards decolonisation is the removal of historic monuments to the colonisers.