Fighting against imperialism...

Out there in the murky mists of the blogosphere, a blogger who shall remain nameless said:

"(My father) died defending Australia against 'imperialism' in 1945."

But Australia was already very much usurped by an empire. The British Empire. And it had no problem with that whatsoever.

And subsequently, by the early fifties, White Orstraya, feeling decidedly paranoid now that the British Empire it had been sucking up to was crumbling, quickly ducked in behind the apron strings of the White Supremacist American Empire.

Phew... Our whiteness was looking safe once more...

So you see, his father died trying to defend a racist, white supremacist empire against the imperial manouverings of a racist "yellow" empire. We only resisted because of race and our own imperial imperatives (which were very much race-based anyway.) It was all about asserting or defending race-based empires.

Mind you, at the time it was what one did. And if you were "our mob", it was a very pukka thing to do.

But the writing was already on the wall, so to speak. Joseph Rudyard Kipling, writer, poet, and noted celebrator of British imperialism, wrote, after his son's death in WWI, "If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied."

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Postscript: It's clear from emails I have received that I need to clarify what I'm on about here. My aim was to highlight the hypocrisy of an empire which, in the longer view of history, had no qualms about invading a whole swag of countries and committing all manner of atrocities, suddenly gets all self-righteous when it finds itself on the receiving end of similar dynamics.