Divide and Rule

Even in the Middle East the brutal British managed to keep the peace between Jew and Arab in Palestine and between Sunni and Shia in Iraq – it was independence that has brought massacre and destruction to these unfortunate lands - to say nothing of an illegal "Great Wall of China" in Israel.

No-one will deny that Irish history over the past eight hundred years has been a sad litany of mayhem as the Norman barons (like de Clare often French speaking landlords over English peasantry) started to try to conquer the country (as had the Danes not long before them). But we must not forget that in earlier times it was the Irish who were great raiders and colonisers into Scotland, Wales, England and even Brittany; the kingdom of Dalriada in lowland Scotland was an Irish colony, while Saint Patrick was a Briton enslaved by brutal Irish pirates, and the Scots of the Scots monasteries in Germany were actually Irish! It is odd to think that the Scotti were the descendants of Irish invaders, so that the settlement of Ulster was in some degree a homecoming! Like any other nation, the Irish have their Achilles’ heel.

The truth of the matter is that almost all human groupings, tribes, clans and nations, are inevitably colonialist and expansionist by the rampant nature of their way of breeding; when any area becomes too crowded to afford a living to the growing population, then they almost automatically find it necessary to expand. Even the "democratic" republics like Athens sent out colonists. Add to this a chauvinistic distaste for foreigners speaking a barbaric tongue, and looking oddly “wrong” – in shape, colour, size, religion or habits - and you have the inevitable recipe for a bloody expansion. What country or people has not been imperialistic colonialist and expansionist? Whether Inca or Aztec, Zulu or Matabele, German, Celt, Chinese, Burmese, Dane, Swede, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese or Arab, it is hard to think of any permanently stay-at-home peaceful people.

However, times they are a-changing, for today there are only three great imperial colonialist powers still in undisputed possession of their conquered territories, i.e. Russia, China and the United States. The reason is simple – the colonial territories of all three powers are almost entirely contiguous to the heartland of their conqueror – Russia and Siberia, China and Tibet/Sinkiang, the U.S. (of the 13 original states) and the rest of the continental USA. The "odd man out" of the three is of course the United States, for the original thirteen were acquired by Mr Hallinan’s bêtes noires, the brutal imperialistic British – it takes a major leap in fixed ideas to think of the U.S.A. as the natural colonialist heir of the British!