My personal hypothesis is that Britain stopped being an empire without ever learning how *not* to be one, so now they’ve turned those impulses inwards and are colonizing themselves.
Bah. The system predates colonialism. My ppl were forced into ghettos and into the pale of settlement during the infancy of the British empire. The repeated ethnic cleansing that occurred in Lithuania of my ancestral village was based on a system of hate that was racism enmeshed with xtian hegemony.
Don't get me wrong colonialism is the number 1 reason I ended up in this place. My grandparents were refugees from Europe and ended up in South Africa. I visited during apartheid. I have been all over the world and see the same vestiges of colonial Britain
I didn't mean to imply that there were no precursors or causes for colonialism, it's not like there's any point in history when everything was lovely and Good and nice for everyone.
It's a deeply stratified classist society that spent several centuries forcibly applying that class structure elsewhere, and formed a core identity around it. There are no more worlds left to conquer (or means to do it) - where else to turn those impulses?
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66857551?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA
New York
New Hampshire
New Mexico
We've got a whole list XD