Independence Day
Has Britain ever really renounced imperial dominion over the American colonies?
It’s an open question whether Britain ever really renounced its imperial dominion over the American colonies. The colonies declared their independence from Britain on this day in 1776, but only gained self-governance after a bloody war. Nor did the signers of the Declaration escape British wrath. Of the 56 who signed, five were captured by the British and tortured to death. The homes of 12 signers were ransacked and burned to the ground. Nine died fighting in the war of Independence. The survivors were pursued relentlessly. The British Navy targeted and pillaged ships belonging to Carter Braxton, a once-wealthy Virginia planter and trader, reduced to penury by British vengeance. The properties of eight others were looted by British soldiers. Two others signers, Francis Lewis and John Hart, saw not only their properties destroyed, but also their wives and children killed. Such were the sacrifices made by the American Founders.
Britain tried to re-take the American Colonies in 1812 - 1814, capturing Washington DC and burning the Capitol and the White House. Like many wars before and since, both sides had unrealistic expectations. Britain thought it could recapture the Colonies, while the United States thought Canada would be easy prey for its expansionist ambitions. Neither side got what it wanted. The Tsar of Russia offered to mediate, which London refused. Eventually the Treaty of Ghent allowed both sides to end their war without too much dishono(u)r.
In the U.S. Civil War, Britain maintained official neutrality, which in effect recognized the Confederacy as a co-equal power with the Union. It also allowed Britain to trade profitably with both, including trade in weapons and war materials. Although Britain, the primary source of slaves sent to the United States, abolished the slave trade in 1840, the official British policy of neutrality remained in force, even to the extent of contemplating recognition of the Confederacy as a separate nation. British imperial policy was designed to keep open any opportunities the Civil War might offer to… re-take the American Colonies.
Union victory did not end British interest in re-taking the American Colonies, but did deflect that interest in a more peaceful and cooperative direction. As the 19th century segued into the 20th, Britain discovered that upper-caste Americans, despite their democratic pretensions, had a particular personal weakness for Imperial honours. This, together with a conjoined affinity for secret governance, gave the British an effective tool for dealing with their American counterparts. Toward the end of the Victorian era, as the Empire was slipping from its grasp, a significant body of opinion known as ‘Little England’ wished to cast these overseas possessions adrift, to fend for themselves without the ministrations of benevolent English law and profiteering. The colonial class would have none of that. They founded an influential quarterly magazine, The Round Table, in 1910, and Chatham House in 1919, supported by the Astor family (owners of the Times of London). The U.S. offshoot of Chatham House became the Council on Foreign Relations1 in the 1920s, a creature of the Morgan Bank. British influence was exercised through financial, academic, and legal associates of Morgan Bank, which provided virtually all the top American diplomats and spies from the 1920s through the 1960s.2
Incredible as it may seem to Americans who regard the British Empire as a relic of foppish parlour-talk, its unwavering objective was to (re-)place the United States in its proper position as a dominion, like Canada and Australia, autonomous and yet subservient in cultural and ideological matters. By re-constituting the Empire as a federation, Britain hoped to extend the days of its Imperial glory without the trouble and expense of direct rule. Best of both worlds, if you like. The American people never fancied themselves part of a federation. But this did not stop the secret governments of both countries from forming an intimate alliance. Bred first of wartime necessity, the relationship of these ‘cousins’ blossomed into a virtual mind-meld of intrigue and derring-do. If it was not the ‘federation’ that British imperialists dreamed of, it was something better from their perspective — an arrangement in which the American spies, starting with Bill Casey’s Office of Special Services (OSS), acknowledged and learned from the superior tradecraft of MI5 and MI6. Of course they did not see eye to eye on everything, but by the 1960s, there was enough shared experience that the ‘Five Eyes’ of the Anglosphere (Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) confidently shared each others’ secrets and secret longings. The spies also found the ‘Five Eyes’ a convenient resource for getting around their own laws prohibiting domestic spying, by seconding the domestic spying to each other, thereby making it international. Edward Snowden revealed this subterfuge, and many others, in 2013.
Tocqueville observed as early as the 1830s that ‘The surface of American society is, if I may use the expression, covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep’3. Elite privileges akin to those of aristocracy morphed from European-style landed gentry to captains of industry to merchant finance to the present-day technocratic elite4. America’s diplomats and spies always gravitated to whatever would grant them elite status, hence their elevation of geeks and white-coats to positions of influence. The widening gap between democratic forms and aristocratic governance reached a critical point during this transition, as populist sentiment, embittered by decades of neglect, put its chosen representative into the White House in 2016. No sooner was this unlikely populist inaugurated, in fact at least a year or so before he took office, than the Empire struck back. The instrument of this attack was an equally unlikely — as in ‘you can’t make this stuff up’ — British ex-spy named Christopher Steele. Unable to string together a coherent sentence, Steele was a sorry sad-sack successor to the litterateurs of espionage like Graham Greene (1950s), Ian Fleming (1960s), and John Le Carré (1970s and still active). From third-hand sources, including an alcoholic Russian job-seeker languishing in the Brookings Institution, Steele compiled a dossier of wholly fanciful and lurid misdeeds by the presidential candidate and his staff. This was meant to persuade the American electorate to reject him, but its transparent mendacity had the opposite effect. Only momentarily daunted by the election result, American spies seeking to retain their aristocratic Deep-State privileges re-circulated the same dossier repeatedly among media, Congressional staff, and academics until it gained enough traction to generate a series of investigations. Using a data-sharing Agreement between NSA and GCHQ dating from September 2009, the U.K. and U.S. spy organizations coordinated their operations seamlessly, including top-secret communications from GCHQ Director Hannigan to CIA Director Brennan in December 2015 and August 2016 about ‘suspicious interactions’.
The cast of characters included an MI5 Director with a name LeCarré might have invented, John Dearlove, supplying a touch of British class without which any spy story would be incomplete. After the 2016 election, NSA Director Susan Rice requested GCHQ to continue spying on the President-Elect for ‘suspicious interactions’. Two days after the U.S. Inauguration, GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan had had enough of the Russia-collusion narrative, and suddenly resigned. But cross-Atlantic cooperation at the highest levels of mutual spydom continued throughout the upstart presidency, until its avatar was sent packing by a lab-created virus from Wuhan China.
The extended emergency that ensued cancelled many of the fundamental rights for which the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged ‘our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor’. Free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, free enterprise, and in many cases life itself — all were overwhelmed by the perpetual emergency. Censorship of even the slightest hint of dissent remains entrenched in the academy, Government agencies, the military, business, science, and medicine, often in the service of the most bizarre perversions. Reinforced by economic and career sanctions against those who dare to exercise their (former) rights of free speech, the current regime appears bent on keeping control regardless of the societal damage it incurs. Whether Britain or another foreign power will take advantage of the current disarray to re-colonize the United States is not clear on this Independence Day 2023, but what is clear is that will be America’s fate if American citizens themselves don’t act soon on their own behalf.
It was to this organization that Joe Biden delivered his famous boast about having extorted the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Shokin for getting too nosy about the terms of his son’s lucrative no-show job at Burisma.
As Carroll Quigley notes in Tragedy and Hope, his comprehensive study of contemporary history, ‘On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure beween London and New York which penetrated deeply into universities, the press, and the practice of foreign policy. In England the center was the Round Table Group, while in the United States it was J. P. Morgan and Company or its local branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. Some rather incidental examples of the operations of this structure are very revealing, just because they are incidental. For example, it set up in Princeton a reasonable copy of the Round Table Group's chief Oxford headquarters, All Souls College. This copy, called the Institute for Advanced Studv, and best known, perhaps, as the refuge of Einstein, Oppcnheimer, John von Neumann, and George F. Kennan, was organized by Abraham Flexner of the Carnegie Foundation and Rockefeller's General Education Board after he had experienced the delights of All Souls while serving as Rhodes Memorial Lecturer at Oxford. The plans were largely drawn by Tom Jones, one of the Round Table's most active intriguers and foundation administrators.’ (Page 953.)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, free download from Project Gutenberg.
James Kurth, The American Way of Empire, reviewed here.