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He's a Cecil Rhodes Imperialist, and the problem with Cecil Rhodes Imperialism is that it's all about the Empire and nothing about the homeland. It very easily devolves into this guy's brand of "I don't care about the Whiteness as such anymore, I care about the money and success" version of Empire, jeering at attachment to a local plot of land. Chesterton mocked such sentiments a lot, as in pointing out how Empire Day was the brainchild of Canadians, and it has since been watered down to Commonwealth Day as the Empire has fallen apart.
(Warning for what may be perceived as anti-Semitism)
From "Songs of Education":
II. GEOGRAPHY
Form 17955301, Sub-Section Z
The earth is a place on which England is found,
And you find it however you twirl the globe round;
For the spots are all red and the rest is all grey,
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Gibraltar's a rock that you see very plain,
And attached to its base is the district of Spain.
And the island of Malta is marked further on,
Where some natives were known as the Knights of St. John.
Then Cyprus, and east to the Suez Canal,
That was conquered by Dizzy and Rothschild his pal
With the Sword of the Lord in the old English way:
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Our principal imports come far as Cape Horn;
For necessities, cocoa; for luxuries, corn;
Thus Brahmins are born for the rice-field, and thus,
The Gods made the Greeks to grow currants for us;
Of earth's other tributes are plenty to choose,
Tobacco and petrol and Jazzing and Jews:
The Jazzing will pass but the Jews they will stay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Our principle exports, all labelled and packed,
At the ends of the earth are delivered intact:
Our soap or our salmon can travel in tins
Between the two poles and as like as two pins;
So that Lancashire merchants whenever they like
Can water the beer of a man in Klondike
Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
The day of St. George is a musty affair
Which Russians and Greeks are permitted to share;
The day of Trafalgar is Spanish in name
And the Spaniards refuse to pronounce it the same;
But the day of the Empire from Canada came
With Morden and Borden and Beaverbrook's fame
And saintly seraphical souls such as they:
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Chesterton was bitter because he saw that a certain traditional Englishness was subsumed by Empire. But the joke was always on him; most of that ‘traditional Englishness’ was itself less than a century old and the product of the first age of mass media in the early 19th century, before which much of rural Britain practiced an ancient, barely-ritualized, quasi-pagan kind of Christianity about as far as its possible to get from the orthodox Roman Catholicism Chesterton ultimately adopted. The Canadians who invented Empire Day were, in large part, ethnic Britons. It was conceived by one Thomas Robinson, likely of British extraction, in Winnipeg. The Lancashire merchants were ethnic English. Chesterton’s distaste for Jews like Disraeli and the Rothschilds obscured how profitable the Suez Canal was for Britain; it was India alone that was the whetstone around the empire’s neck, and if India had been jettisoned after the mutiny the entire enterprise would have been largely self-sustaining moving forward.
A century on, we can see that his distaste for empire was flawed. In truth, Britain is no worse off than those other Northern European countries that never pursued far flung imperialism, like Sweden. England’s cultural and civilizational decline is therefore likely unrelated to empire.
Cecil Rhodes was prescient. The only hope for Britain’s economy in the long is ultimately full economic union with the United States, and this has been clear since the 1890s. Of course, the less Anglo America gets, the harder it will be to convince them to let the British in.
I assume you're referring to the mutiny of 1857-58. Why exactly would jettisoning India have been a good idea in your view? I'd guess that anything that can reasonably be called a problem stemming from holding onto India could have been averted simply by turning it into a dominion, as the independence movement leaders wanted.
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