Britain goes full Orwell accusing Putin of imperialism

Foreign Secretary David Lammy launched into a weird rant against Russia, accusing it of the crimes Britain has committed

There are intriguing and disappointing – though not surprising – continuities between Great Britain under the conservative Tories and the current iteration under a hardly less rightwing version of the Labour party. Crony corruption scandals that reveal the British political elite as comically greedy and petty are already erupting again. Ordinary people still face an unforgiving search for “austerity”; indeed, given recent Labour moves on the budget, for instance on the winter fuel allowance, affecting over ten million frequently vulnerable pensioners, the so-called “Left” is now outdoing the Right in cruelty toward the common man and woman. And the fairly new prime minister, Keir Starmer, is already as deeply unpopular as his predecessor Rishi Sunak was when he called the elections that predictably finished him off.

And then there is foreign policy. There as well, it is hard to spot a difference. It is true, we have just learned that, once, former Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seriously considering an “aquatic raid” (say that with a Churchill growl, please) on the Netherlands, a NATO ally, to seize Covid vaccines. We have not yet heard of similarly exotic plots laid by Starmer. But otherwise, same old, same old. The UK elite remains fatally addicted to a blind loyalty toward its special relationship with the US that sometimes could make even the Germans blanch with envy. And they know a thing or two about absolute submission.

London also won’t let go of its position as Europe’s hottest cheerleader for the proxy war against Russia via Ukraine, at least outside the Baltics. Officially, the British government is still promoting the idea of co-launching Western-supplied missiles from Ukraine deep into Russia. Never mind that Moscow has made it clear that it will consider such a policy as bringing all of NATO and Russia into direct military conflict – not (barely) indirect as up until now. Moreover, the Russian leadership has also put the West on notice that cut-out games won’t work. The core point about its recent revision of Russia’s nuclear doctrine is that not only the ostentatious direct attacker state but its supporters as well are fair game – as they should be – for retaliation.

There may well be an element of fairly cheap theater in London’s posturing as a missile street tough. Think of a dog madly barking behind a closed gate, precisely because it knows the gate is closed and it won’t have to act on its ferocious threats. The role of the gate is played by Washington, which fails to allow the brilliant British-Ukrainian Armageddon-Come-and-Get-Us plan to go ahead, as the Telegraph has just bemoaned. How convenient: We’d be (insanely) brave, really, if only we didn’t have to be so obedient, too. 

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Yet, at least as far as stentorian rhetoric is concerned, the UK’s government will certainly not be outdone. The problem with all the big talk, though, is that it can easily veer off into declarations so unusually hyperbolic and absurd that they backfire. Think of this current British mood as the very opposite of that fine understatement for which the island’s culture used to be famous. An example of this kind of self-defeating bombast was recently delivered by Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

Trying to reach an international audience, especially in a Global South that has long given up on the West, Lammy launched into a rant – there really is no other word – about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. The whole thing was rather cringe, as if trying to outdo his infamous German colleague Annalena ‘360 Degrees of Anti-Diplomacy’ Baerbock in demeaning his own office. Lammy, for instance, apparently felt no shame denouncing Moscow’s “disinformation” – that, from one of the West’s worst deniers and enablers of Israel’s many crimes, including its Gaza genocide and devastation of Lebanon. Frankly Russia, at this point: just wear it with pride. 

But the perhaps most stunningly grotesque moment occurred when Lammy sought to make opportunistic use of the horrific history of modern slavery. “As a black man,” he stated, “whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved, whose ancestors rose up and fought in a great rebellion of the enslaved” he had a special knack for recognizing “imperialism.” By that he meant, of course, Russian imperialism. 

Since then, be assured, there has been much head scratching, perhaps especially in that Global South that Lammy tried so desperately to impress with his rhetorical kamikaze attack. Was not the British – cough, cough – Empire (as in imperialism) one of the worst participants in the Atlantic slave trade that produced 10 to 12 million Black victims? 

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During the process of hunting and enslaving human beings, “an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the captives died on their way” from the African interior to the coast. Then the so-called Middle Passage, the nightmarish deportation across the Atlantic killed another 10 to 25% of the victims. Apart from the effects of brutal overcrowding below deck, malnutrition, and psychological trauma, slave traders had a habit of “disposing” of those they considered worthless by dropping them into the sea, alive and chained to each other, sometimes to make an insurance profit. William Turner depicted such a massacre by drowning on, as it happened, a British slave ship, in one of his most famous paintings.

And for those who survived both capture in Africa and the Middle Passage: Was it not the US – Britain’s current boss and the site of Lammy’s rant – that literally built its economic take-off on slave labor so brutal the ancient Romans would have been either impressed or shocked? And what about that famous “value” West that Lammy also seeks to speak for? Comprehensively represented in the same great crime: the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, you name it…

The result was not only death and brutality on a staggering scale. Parts of the African continent were also massively damaged demographically, economically, and politically. As summarized in Encyclopedia Britannica (as it happens), the transatlantic slave trade “had devastating effects in Africa. Economic incentives for warlords and tribes to engage in the trade of enslaved people promoted an atmosphere of lawlessness and violence. Depopulation and a continuing fear of captivity made economic and agricultural development almost impossible throughout much of western Africa. A large percentage of the people taken captive were women in their childbearing years and young men who normally would have been starting families. The European enslavers usually left behind persons who were elderly, disabled, or otherwise dependent groups who were least able to contribute to the economic health of their societies.” This was a holocaust for Africa. Historically, it is not long ago. Its scars are still there. And it was the West’s doing. 

The point is not to pretend that Russia, at the same time, had no imperial history, including great violence and injustice. Empires do. Only the naive are in denial about that fact. Rather what is so striking is that, to go after Russia, Lammy could not think of anything better than to bring up one of the British Empire’s greatest crimes. At first sight, this is “merely” yet another example of Westerners losing all inhibitions when demonizing their geopolitical opponent. They are not even ashamed to openly cite their own worst crimes to do so. Orwellian indeed.

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Yet there is something else here as well that is, if anything, even more insidious. Since the Ukraine War, we have seen a relentless and widespread effort to mis-appropriate the experience, the suffering, and the resistance of the Global South as a cheap rhetorical device to provide heroic spin for Zelensky’s regime and the West’s proxy war as well as cheap shots at Russia.

There is, of course, a politics of Left and Right here. Traditionally, and for good reasons, criticizing imperialism and colonialism has been a ‘left’ thing. By hijacking ostentatiously ‘anti-colonial’ terms for the proxy war in Ukraine, this potential on the Western Left was supposed to be channeled into serving the US-NATO-EU complex. With some, that rather perverse trick, transparent as it is, has even worked. Think of it as wearing a Che Guevara-print shirt and venerating Ukrainian Azov Neo-Nazis as ‘freedom fighters’. 

Politically, this is just another way in which semi-smart people fool semi-simple people. But there is a more serious, moral dimension as well. It is a truly and abjectly colonial and imperialist move to exploit the massive suffering – almost exclusively at the hands of the West – as well as the hard-won insights and hard-fought resistance of what we now call the Global South so as to feed them into the cheap propaganda that the West now uses to sell its geopolitics-101 proxy war in Ukraine as an issue of ‘rules’ and ‘values’. And yet that is precisely what David Lammy has done. What a disgrace.