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Of all the images, videos and reports from the recent UK protests/riots, none have struck quite so powerfully as this clip of a policeman reporting from a meeting with local "community leaders".
The video is short, focuses almost entirely on one individual and quiet enough you could miss what the man is saying if there's some loud traffic outside your window. And yet it does a better job encapsulating all that's happening in the UK than any video of Muslims setting busses on fire*. Everything about it is perfect - the policeman sitting like a chastised schoolboy, reading as if from a pre-written apology letter, making references to "the leader" (presumably standing somewhere close behind), while a stern-looking Muslim (I can only assume) towers over the policeman from behind, looking contemptuously down his nose at him. I could imagine future artists painting this scene.
Of course, I'm being a bit dramatic. Maybe it's not as bad as it looks - the guy in the background could have that expression because he's ill, maybe he's standing over the policeman so that they can fit as many people in the frame as possible, etc. But it feels like the simplest interpretation is that which corresponds most closely to what's been seen over the last few weeks: that there are non-insignificant areas of the country where the police have effectively abandoned the monopoly on violence and are turning instead towards diplomatic outreach, as if dealing with foreign neighboring states of ambivalent friendliness. I don't necessarily blame the police for that; there are only so many of them and realistically they probably can't deal with hundreds/thousands of angry people who don't see them as legitimate enforcers of peace and order.
What does the future hold? There'll never be the political will or real ability to force such people out of the country. On the other hand it's pretty unrealistic that we'll see the other extreme (violent ethnic cleansing or civil war). Probably just a slow trend towards more of the same, although I do wonder what the final steady state will be.
(*I'm LARPing a bit here, I haven't lived in the UK since 2022. Feel free to correct me if I've managed to misunderstand the events of the last few weeks from a distance).
ETA: Here's another good one
The progression will go Brazil -> South Africa -> Haiti.
But it will take a long time and maybe something else will happen in the mean time to interrupt the process. AGI? Chinese world domination? Nuclear war? Black swan?
But Great Britain as it was is permanently gone. Britain has seen many changes in its ruling class over the years. First Celts invaded, then Romans, then Saxons, then Danes, then Normans. Each invasion left its mark but the most lasting marks were made when there was wholesale demographic replacement. The Saxons permanently altered the character of the nation by replacing the Celts. The Romans didn't leave a genetic mark, and as a result, Roman Brittanic culture vanished without a trace as soon as the Roman Empire collapsed.
This latest change will be more like the Saxon invasion since it will result in large scale demographic replacement. The UK of 2050 will be permanently different. They'll probably still have lame memes about jellied eels and queuing, but it will no longer be the orderly, decent, high trust society that Lee Kwan Yew so admired.
I'd argue you saw a lot of Roman culture in the way Britain managed it's empire. They knew all the tricks of the trade because at one point they had all been used on them. "Conquered, we conquer"
The British knowledge of Roman culture and military techniques came from a careful and deliberate study of the few remaining Roman writings available to them (a process that only began during the Renaissance), not due to ancestral memories of a conquest that occurred 1,500 years prior.
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