By Husam Dughman

Her Majesty The Queen, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor

When I saw footage of armed mobs surrounding Qaddafi back in 2011, abusing and beating him, before executing him, I was furious. That was definitely not the fate I would have wanted for Qaddafi. I had the best reasons for hating him. My family was a staunch supporter of the monarchy of King Idris I. We were an integral part of that system of governance, and we identified with it politically and ideologically.

When Qaddafi made his military coup d’état against King Idris, his success had been ensured by a combination of US assistance and Nasser’s destabilising, subversive policies. My family was at the forefront of resistance to the Qaddafi regime from day one. Needless to say, we paid a very heavy price for standing up to Qaddafi’s tyranny, but we stood tall. Very tall. Neither imprisonment, nor torture, nor confiscation of property, nor cutting off of livelihood, nor acts of blatant discrimination weakened our resolve. Although my family had been well respected by Libyans in general during the days of the monarchy, we later gained even further appreciation and admiration from many Libyans for our steadfast opposition to the Qaddafi regime. I, therefore, had every reason to be mad at Qaddafi, and to wish him the most agonizing death. Yet, I didn’t. His persecution of Libyans in general and of my family in particular; his marginalization of Libya’s institutions; his weakening of the education system and the health care system; his undermining of the rule of law; his corruption of the administrative system; his destruction of the economy, and his tyranny did not cause me to rejoice at the sight of his degradation, humiliation, and summary execution. I strongly believe in the rule of law, and that is how he should have been made to pay for all the horrific crimes he had committed against my country of origin, Libya. That is why I was shocked when I started to read the sick comments made by various wokers, gloating over the final sickness and subsequent death of Queen Elizabeth II.

“For 96 years, the colonizer has been sucking up the Earth’s resources; she’s represented an empire that’s committed mass violence and brought multiple flavors of atrocity to the world,” wrote Tirhakah Love of the New York magazine, who also wrote, “We all have our methods of mourning friends; doing the electric slide on a colonizer’s grave just happens to be mine.” The ugly vituperation also included some academics. Uju Anya could not hide her schadenfreude when she said, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” Another academic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, didn’t do much better when she stated, “Telling the colonized how they feel about their colonizer’s health and wellness is like telling my people that we ought to worship the Confederacy.” Others who write for newspapers such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post expressed similar views. To be sure, Britain was a major colonizing power. She had a huge empire. That empire was certainly not built by throwing roses at people. The perpetration of acts of violence and dispossession is what made that empire building possible. The British for a long time expressed great pride in the British Empire, even after it had long been gone. That is undoubtedly inexcusable. Taking pride in military might, expansionism, and the domination of other nations against their will is abominable and should be made a relic of the past. It does not belong to today’s world. That much is true.

On the other hand, one has to put things in perspective. There seem to be at least three mitigating factors that may blunt the sharp edges of the swords of those who are most eager and willing to take the British to task over their colonial past. Firstly, Britain is not the only country in the world or in history that built an empire. Since time immemorial, strong nations have always been in the habit of dominating weaker nations. Up until very recently in history, that was done by open, direct military conquests. Since the end of the Second World War, however, it has taken much more subtle forms, such as political, economic, and even cultural domination. To single the British out for their colonization of other nations is, therefore, at least unfair, if not outright wrong. Secondly, no matter how justified critics of the British Empire may be in their excoriation of Britain’s past colonial adventures, one has the impression that as colonizers, the British were more beneficial and less cruel to their subjects than other colonizers were to theirs. Britain is in fact the only modern colonial power whose cultural contributions went a long way in helping some of her colonies reach First-World status, namely the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Even France never achieved anything like that, let alone other colonizers, such as Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the US itself. All of the former colonies of the above-mentioned colonizing nations- barring Britain- continue to be Third World countries to this day. Furthermore, the British were not as cruel to their subjects as other colonizers were to theirs. The French were crueller than the British, while the Italians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Belgians, the Russians, and the Japanese were even crueller than the French. Germany actually came within inches of destroying human civilization as we know it. In addition, even though the British had practised the slave trade, all other powerful countries and nations had done so from time immemorial, not only enslaving other nations and races, but also enslaving one another: White Europeans enslaved white Europeans, black Africans enslaved black Africans, Middle Easterners enslaved Middle Easterners, and so forth. At least the British were the first major nation to ban slavery worldwide.

Thirdly, and most ironically, those critics of the British Empire- especially the wokers and their ilk- appear to ignore or be unaware of the fact that they are actually beneficiaries of British colonialism. Many of those critics- though by no means all- reside in countries such as Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. They don’t seem to have reflected on the question as to why they (or their parents/ grandparents) had immigrated to those former British colonies in the first place. What was it that actually attracted them to Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia? Was it not the liberal-democratic system that has given them much more freedom and protection of their human rights than their countries of origin ever had? Was it not the capitalist-based economy that has made it possible for them and their families to prosper to a far greater extent than they had done in their original countries? Was it not the rule of law that has ensured that should their rights be violated, they could resort to an independent judiciary that would redress their grievances, something which they had lacked in their home countries? Was it not the effective and transparent administrative system that has made sure things are done well with a minimum of corruption, something which stands in stark contrast to the inefficient and corrupt administrative systems in their own countries of origin? Was it not the availability of world-class education systems that has given them and their posterity the hope of developing and progressing well in life, unlike what their own compatriots in their original lands have had to put up with? The fact remains that all of those essential ingredients that would make a country very successful had been inherited by Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand primarily from British culture. One only has to see the state of Latin American countries to comprehend that had the four former British colonies been colonized by Spain or Portugal, they would have ended up as Third World countries, something which would have made them far less attractive for people- including the wokers- to emigrate to.

The wokers’ criticisms of the British dispossession of the indigenous populations in the four ex-colonies also comes across as rather hypocritical. Yes, the indigenous peoples in the said countries were certainly dispossessed. Yet, only the indigenous nations have the moral high ground to denounce the British for having taken their lands away from them. As for the non-indigenous people who permanently reside in the US, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia, they are not morally qualified to adopt that holier-than-thou attitude with the British. They themselves are part and parcel of the very colonial system they condemn. After all, when those buy properties in any of the four above-mentioned countries, are they not taking possession of lands which are not historically theirs, and which had been wrested away from the indigenous nations by brutal acts of colonial violence? Whether they admit it or not, those non-indigenous people themselves are an integral part of the horrific crime of injustice inflicted on the indigenous populations as a result of colonization. And it comes as no consolation that many of the aforementioned non-indigenous people regularly make their “Land Acknowledgement” statements in public, since that declaration is not followed by the actual returning of those lands to their historically rightful owners, is it?

There is one major difference between students of knowledge and propagandists: Students of knowledge follow the facts to their ultimate conclusion; it is the facts that dictate what the conclusion ought to be. By contrast, propagandists have their ready-made conclusion right at the outset, something which is made up of their own preconceptions, misconceptions, prejudice, and emotionalism. It is the propagandists’ conclusion that dictates what the facts should be: Those facts that accord with their own preconceived “conclusion” are accepted, while those that differ from or even refute it are rejected, ignored, or otherwise twisted out of shape in order to fit them in with the propagandists’ predetermined agenda. Wokers are, therefore, nothing more than mere propagandists. Pure and simple.