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Jun. 26th, 2020 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dewlineThanks to twistedchick for pointing this essay out to me:
https://longreads.com/2020/06/18/the-long-con-of-britishness/
Good on Laurie Penny for this. She's been good for sometimes brutal honesty about the worlds we live in - real and fictional - for a few years now. This is another aspect of that work of hers.
And this comes to mind in particular:
"If you love your country and don’t own its difficulties and its violence, you don’t actually love your country. You’re just catcalling it as it goes by."
Canada's existence in its present form is another consequence of that long con, and the people living here are dealing with being consequences of that as well. Consequences for each other. We are a mess right now. We can do better. We can be better.
Whether we end up with balkanization back into what the Indigenous nations had before first contact with the European nations whose leaders wanted empires built upon the burned bones and spilled blood of the locals; into a mix of Indigenous and Settler holdings; the next conquest of the American Trumpist fascism if that survives this November upcoming; or something else hopefully unified by freely made choice and better for its struggles to accept our own ugly truths and better angels...?
I don't know yet.
twistedchick for pointing this essay out to me:https://longreads.com/2020/06/18/the-long-con-of-britishness/
Good on Laurie Penny for this. She's been good for sometimes brutal honesty about the worlds we live in - real and fictional - for a few years now. This is another aspect of that work of hers.
And this comes to mind in particular:
"If you love your country and don’t own its difficulties and its violence, you don’t actually love your country. You’re just catcalling it as it goes by."
Canada's existence in its present form is another consequence of that long con, and the people living here are dealing with being consequences of that as well. Consequences for each other. We are a mess right now. We can do better. We can be better.
Whether we end up with balkanization back into what the Indigenous nations had before first contact with the European nations whose leaders wanted empires built upon the burned bones and spilled blood of the locals; into a mix of Indigenous and Settler holdings; the next conquest of the American Trumpist fascism if that survives this November upcoming; or something else hopefully unified by freely made choice and better for its struggles to accept our own ugly truths and better angels...?
I don't know yet.
