In the second lecture of professor Patrick Allitt's Teaching Company course, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, we get a sense of his Foucaultian fascination with excessive human-to-human violence (compare the opening of Michel Foucault's masterpiece Discipline and Punish with Allitt's description of the punishments meted on New World indentured servants who had big ideas about their rights). And he explains two important things, both of which relate to the Baby Trump balloon.
The first I will not mention here but in a post about a much later lecture that concerns the massification of the national feeling. Without this feeling, the conservatives, as a political party in the UK (and later in the US), would be out of business. The national feeling keeps the right alive. The first great expression of this feeling (called patriotism) occurred in Trafalgar Square right after the British Empire won a decisive battle in the Boer War (this incident was described to me by Jonathan Raban and is indirectly mentioned by Allitt). Trump—who visited the UK today, and therefore visited the future of the American Empire, whose decline he himself is accelerating because of a pee tape—certainly saw that the Trump Baby blimp landed on one of the lions in Trafalgar Square. There is so much to say about this image. It has so many echoes, like a dub track by King Tubby. Expect Trump Baby to make a big return in that later post.
The second concerns the fact that the British empire got its start by piracy. This happened under the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1533 – 1603). Her favorite pirate was Francis Drake. He was in the then-big business of robbing Spanish ships. He, by force, just took their gold and other valuables. The only difference between this man and the Somali pirates of our times is this: Drake was authorized to rob by the state. He made Queen Elizabeth super-wealthy. She even knighted him. Sir Francis Drake. Allitt goes to this fact, and says it like it is. The British empire basically begins here, with a pirate.
Trump would have loved Francis Drake. They're cut from the same cloth. Don't talk; just take. And take everything you can. And fuck over who needs to be fucked over. Don't be a loser.
