How can you tell if you are a sufferer of colonisation syndrome? |
THIS obsession on the airwaves and in the press here with the ins and outs of the agonies of the British Labour Party, and its prospects in the local government and devolved assembly elections, displays all the classic syndromes of the colonised.
For the colonised the world revolves around the ‘motherland’, despite the indisputable fact that no politician in the ‘motherland’ gives tuppence about what anyone here thinks.
No-one here has any input into policy or decision-making in England.
No-one here can vote for the Labour Party. In fact the British Labour Party makes damn sure no-one can, by sedulously supporting the fiction that you can vote for its – wait for it – ‘sister party’, the SDLP.
Tom Collins: Ulster University has nobody to blame but itself
Alex Kane: Cancel the state visit, Charles. Trump doesn’t give a damn about you or anyone else
You can vote Conservative, but few do – mostly in North Down where they can pretend they’re in England.
Such syndromes are not the result exclusively of British colonialism.
French colonists in Algeria thought they were French, though many had never been to France.
When they fled after 1958, they discovered the French didn’t accept them as French. They called them ‘pied noirs’.
Frantz Fanon, from Martinque in the French West Indies, thought he was French too........