By Paul Nachman
10/11/2022
In a current piece here at VDARE.com, Mark Gullick has written with guarded enthusiasm about Britain’s new Home Secretary Suella Braverman:
The daughter of a Tamil mother and a Goan father, Braverman’s forthright stance on immigration will please conservatives and enrage the Left.
He added, “Braverman might have learned that inaction on border control damaged the political standing of her predecessor, Priti Patel, and the inept Kamala Harris in the US.” That reads like speculation that Braverman’s stance on immigration is less a matter of principle than of political bean-counting (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).
But Braverman has a history of attitudes compatible with immigration skepticism according to Wikipedia (in what must be considered an argument against interest for that hopelessly leftist institution):
Braverman has described herself as a “child of the British Empire”. Her parents, who were from Mauritius and Kenya, came to the UK “with an admiration and gratitude for what Britain did for Mauritius and Kenya, and India”. She believes that on the whole, “the British Empire was a force for good”, and described herself as being “proud of the British Empire”.
Shades of John Derbyshire! In a classic, must-read essay from May 2001, Derb wrote:
It seems to me that the British Empire was one of the greatest civilizing forces the world has ever seen. At the very least, the post-Imperial history of places like Uganda suggests that there are worse things that can happen to a country than to be ruled by Englishmen. (And I recall, from my Hong Kong days, the 12-foot fence that separated that British colony from mainland China, erected so that the mainlanders would be unable to act on their inexplicable impulse to flee from the delights of Chinese government into the horrors of British Imperialism.)
[The Island Race … Riots, originally published at National Review Online]
(Derb has enthused recently about another non-white British parliamentarian, Kemi Badenoch, who seems to qualify as an ideological soul-sister of Suella Braverman.)
Another notable expression of pro-Western affection by non-whites appeared in a 2021 book, The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’s Epic Defense of the British Empire, by Portland State University political science professor Bruce Gilley. In a review of Gilley’s book, Helen Andrews wrote:
After retiring from civil service shortly after the juju affair, Burns poured his decades of experience into books presenting rational arguments for empire, such as In Defence of Colonies (1957). But once the wave of decolonization was in motion by the 1960s, no one was much interested in listening to anything he had to say. People are even less interested now, though decades of postcolonial misrule have vindicated Burns’s direst warnings. Today’s conventional wisdom is that the only voices worth listening to on the subject of empire are those of the colonized themselves.
Gilley quotes just such a voice at the end of his book. One of Burns’s great-nephews was studying at a Canadian university when a Ghanaian girl confronted him in class, saying, “You should be ashamed of being related to a colonial governor.” The following semester, the girl sought him out to apologize. She had told her relatives back home about the incident and, far from praising her, they gave her a tongue-lashing. “I’m sorry for what I said,” she told him. “It turns out my people loved your great uncle.”
[Rule, Britannia!, Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2021/22]
Mirabile dictu! Jared Taylor, call your office …
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