Main points in this very illuminating piece . To what extent are Nairn’s argument and dissection relevant to today’s Britain? Britain is … a description of the projection of imperial power out of a core whose boundaries remain misty, miasmic, and amorphous. There is, therefore, something very anachronistic about Britain: it is a nation which seems to exist with one foot in modernity and another in a mutant feudal-imperial past. Scotland had been forced to share an admittedly rather cramped first-class carriage dominated by England — it had not, however, been kicked into the luggage hold. The Scottish historian Tom Nairn (1932-2023) proclaimed that: “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the Sunday Post .” For Nairn, there was no guarantee of justice in independence, only the possibility. Indeed, the current dominance of a Conservative, rather than a progressive, opposition in the devolved parliament supports this conc...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51