Acquisitive Europeans set the world up as a colonialist enterprise. The worst of them went for the worst form of colonizing – the sort where settlers either destroy or dispossess the indigenous population.
People from all over the world went to 'The New World' and created the United States by executing a particularly nasty example of settler-colonialism, and funded it via that other great wielder of racism, the slave trade.
Anyone who's read the Balfour Declaration knows that the UK created Israel, one of the few settler-colonial states that would survive the brief period of near-civilization Europe experienced in the latter half of the 20th Century (when we were in shock from World War Two, and trying, for a while, to do better).
As the USA grew into the biggest bully in the playground, it propped up and maintained Israel as a key piece in its global power structure. Defended and financed by the USA, Israel has now embarked on the worst carnage ever committed in plain sight, a crime that may well escalate and be the death of us all.
For decades, most of us have believed the implications behind what our media and our politicians tell us, that there are intractable 'trouble spots' dotted around the world and that, despite the best efforts of the civilized world, the trouble is maintained by the irrational violence of (mostly) brown people.
But what if you're read the Balfour Declaration AND you've read Immerwahr's book about the Greater United States? You might then ask when exactly, Westminster became one of the USA's prime puppet theatres, and which of those 'intractable conflicts' are being inflamed and maintained for the convenience of the global power-players.
So who is to blame, eh?
Walk into any library these days and you'll find well over half the total content is crime thrillers. It seems the biggest high going is that wonderful, comforting feeling you get when the inspector joins the gathering and figures out who's to blame. Everyone else can go "ha!" and get on with their lives. J B Priestly is famous for creating a detective story that did the opposite.
All over the UK, teachers are teaching An Inspector Calls as a GCSE text. All over the UK, students are studying it, supposedly thereby learning social responsibility.
I swear that play is a family-sized version of what the world is living through just now. We should call the current nightmare we're all living through An Inspector Calls Again (it's reality in Gaza and various other places, but fortunately for us, still no worse than a nightmare Europe).
It takes the reader on a journey from "it's not my fault, it's your fault" to "what was my part in this", to "what can we do about it?"
If you haven't seen it, or read it, or you've forgotten all about it, go find An Inspector Calls on YouTube or go buy the play-text from a bookshop. Catch up with the kids, and see if you can figure out what should happen next. You might even help them pass a GCSE.
The alternative, as Priestley has one of his characters say, is "fire and blood and anguish".
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