The legacy of Empire that led to the violence in Belfast and beyond
JVL Introduction
“Before a single brick is thrown, before a single car is set alight, the ideological work has already been done. The mob in Glasgow, the mob in Belfast, are not improvising. They are executing a script written for them by people, nay puppetmasters, dressed in suits they will never be able to afford.” (Franz Fanon)
Here the writers cite not only Fanon but also bell hooks and Edward Said to remind us that it is the legacy of empire that led to pogroms in Belfast and riots in Glasgow last week and other race riots before. While Farage called for “cold rage” to “respond” to the attacks on white people by people of colour he said nothing about the Black and Brown families made homeless by the violence in Belfast and the terror brought to the street. Nor did he call for “cold rage” about the many women killed by their partners or when a Black or Brown person is attacked by a White person.
But it is not just the far right: most politicians feed the rhetoric that immigration is a problem if not the problem and constantly feed into the idea that Black and Brown people are “other”. This is the most important message from this article, that the far right rhetoric and the violence it provokes is the system working, not the system failing. The mainstream politicians and media legitimise the reasons for protest, share the desire to reduce immigration and “control our borders” even while they express shock at the violence.
This article was originally published by Bella Caledonia on Fri 12 Jun 2026. Read the original here.
The Empire Comes Home: Race, Power, and the Violence on Scottish Streets
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This is a powerful article from Bella Caledonia – the first time I have seen it. We see fascism on the rise. Anybody who is not white becomes a target. And we have politicians ‘of colour’ who effectively side with the fascists. Never was Fanons ‘Black skin, white masks’ more prescient. The statement that ‘I noted with sadness on the lack of support or check-in from my white, middle-class, liberal, left-leaning neighbours, acquaintances, and friends’ should make us all take notice. We need to stand up now.
Remarkably astute.
Franz Fanon gives an incredibly good account.
Edward Said’s work on Orientalism also asserts the European value of looking at the rest of the world has ‘the other’. Therefore it permeates through their political doctrine, law, academic writings etc to justify ‘imperial domination’.
To quote him – “Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. No better instance exists today of what Anwar Abdel Malek calls “the hegemonism of possessing minorities” and anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism: a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition “it” is not quite as human as “we” are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanized thought’.