The natives

The recent campaign to have French words removed from the British passport has been many things: a source of amusement, as it is pointed out the word "passport" is itself French in origin (as are a significant number of other words in the petition to have the offending French words removed, including, for that matter, the word "petition"); a source of deep embarrassment, as we have to look our French friends, family and colleagues in the face while knowing our compatriots are openly expressing such disregard for them.

It has also provided another example of a paradoxical phenomenon: spurious and ahistorical nativism. But this is more than just merely interesting. It is a particular example that illustrates a more general point, one not just about behaviours which recently influenced the Brexit outcome of the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU (of which this ridiculous petition is just one consequence), but which are associated with aggressive supremacist movements all around the world, and the worrying tide of prejudice Brexit has endorsed and unleashed (see "The Arena and the Agora," "The Clash of Civilisations," "We need indyref 2 as soon as possible for everyone's sake," "The Hinge," and "Project Fear Squared"). This nativism provides another basis for interpreting the result, and another reason to reject it.

Nativism in general refers to "the political idea that people who were born in a country are more important than immigrants" or "the political position of supporting a favoured status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants." It seems a good description of the anti-immigration sentiment that led to Brexit and the xenophobia encouraged and exploited by Donald Trump in the USA.

But the nativism in evidence here is a specific corrosive fantasy, a particular Anglo-Saxon idyll, which I would like to dissect. Because, although immigration was a key issue in the recent referendum, the nativism I want to outline initially arises in an encounter with others in which the "natives" are in fact, originally, the immigrants, in contrast to the definition above. This is why I use the term "paradox." I want to talk about the origins of nativism when the roles are reversed.

For example, when early modern European colonists sought to establish themselves in territories around the world already occupied by indigenous peoples, a nativism would be manufactured which exemplifies this paradox. They acted as though this paradoxical or inverted nativism entitled them to aggrandise themselves of any land or resources necessary to them in the lands they invaded. An ethnicity was synthesised so that its defence could be used to justify other acts of cupidity.

Their nativism was not the benign outlook of tribal peoples following an age-old way of life that sustains communities, observes balance with the environment and preserves ancient memories transmitted down generations in oral traditions. Ironically, their nativism was an artificial prop for invented identities. It is not an ideology needed by genuine "natives," who do not in general embark upon imperial adventures overseas which then require post hoc justification. It is the fabricated, toxic nativism of aggressive alien intrusion. It is contrived to allow the invaders to replace indigenous communities and to legitimise a new order in the absence of shared memory and with utter disregard for the environment.

Rather than connecting one to the land, it alienates one from it and unlocks extreme and destructive behaviours that would otherwise be moderated by that sense of connection. Reckless exploitation of people and resources can then accelerate out of control to create illusions of vast wealth unencumbered by limitation or consequence: the very mirage we still inhabit today, which shimmers on the brink of vanishing in the face of climate change.

It is a cruel caricature that mocks indigenous claims and compensates for the incomers' own claims' lack of moral substance. Its pioneers become founders of a new identity, an emergent invader ethnicity, and the threat posed to its foundational mythology by the presence of existing indigenous peoples is neutralised by their dehumanisation. Nativism is born in a act of aggression towards those with no need of it. I would contend that all nativism originates in this encounter, in relation to this emergent invader ethnicity, to confer a veneer of moral purpose to a common cause of cupidity, even though we now see it in an inverted form, directed outwards.  

The theft of land and resources, or more specifically the identification and redefinition of what they found as land and resources that could be capitalised and exploited, the re-purposing of the entire landscape, then become the "manifest destiny" of the new natives. The indigenous people, the genuine "natives," become a nuisance, vermin, a mere impediment to be removed. Historically, they were physically removed to reservations like Pine Ridge, or simply killed in massacres like Wounded Knee and death marches like the Trail of Tears. "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead," in the words attributed to General Sheridan. Or in the words of the song from The Lorax, "How ba-a-a-ad can I be? I'm just following my destiny."

A culture of violence develops from the spurious victim-hood of the aggressor which plagues settler societies even today. Historic injustices incurred and perpetuated to create and maintain the new society also create a context of fear and suspicion. This then requires a "right to bear arms" and a readiness to use them. Law enforcement officers are then particularly nervous and hasty when confronted by people immediately identifiable as belonging to communities marginalised and victimised by these historical injustices. Meanwhile Donald Trump re-asserts nativist claims once more, this time directed against external threats.

The same pattern of the synthesis of a settler or invader ethnicity and its associated spurious nativism arising from conflict with indigenous peoples is repeated elsewhere, like Australia, where the legal status of Aboriginal Peoples was similar to livestock until the late 20th century. H. G. Wells was inspired to write "The War of the Worlds" by accounts of the extermination of the indigenous people of Tasmania and a desire to render their experience somehow comprehensible to a European audience by role-reversal.

The encounter between Israel and Palestine can be understood in a similar way. The policies enacted by the state of Israel and settlers against the "indigenous" Palestinians are justified with reference to an emergent Israeli nativism that arises from an encounter in which the Israelis are incomers defending the claims of an ethnicity defined in part by the conflict. The ease with which Americans support Israel is often attributed to the belief of fundamentalist Christians in the literal truth of the Old Testament. We should also consider how the Israeli experience reflects the experience of their own pioneer forefathers and how America and Israel are today locked into a pattern of mutual legitimisation. Their mythologies justify the elimination of a previous society occupying the same space. The pioneers were as ruthless with the red man as Joshua was with the Canaanites.

The acts of colonists were legitimised by the contrived nativism of settlers and motivated by the sense of entitlement it was spawned to support. The cruelty of the atrocities committed against their dehumanised victims historically, guilty only of crimes imagined in the mythologies of the new nativism, is matched only by the inventiveness of those that committed them. The delight with which this sport was pursued is unrivalled in human endeavour. Nothing undermines faith in humanity more than a true account of these events. The horizons of our imagination were extended not just by new lands, but by the crimes we committed in them, when we rehearsed in private every genocide we subsequently came to abhor in public.

And the affluence we enjoy is a dividend achieved only by the undervaluation of the efforts of exploited people and the pillaged ores they excavate and harvests they cultivate and process on our behalf around the world in blighted lands our ancestors brutally subdued. And the original act in the imposition of our value system to enable the enforcement of this devaluation was the spilling of indigenous blood on the soil from which our coffee and tea and teak and tin are taken.

Once the new nativism is established through extirpation of indigenous peoples it is used, without a hint of irony, to persecute new waves of incomers. It is this that renders the term apposite, rather than the terms xenophobia or racism, and this is the context in which the term is most commonly encountered. Chinese, Catholic (Irish) and German immigrants in North America in the 19th century faced hostility from the self-styled "natives" whose forefathers had arrived only a few generations prior, and who now inverted the nativism with which they defended their invader ethnicity and directed it outwards. In the early 20th century in South America preference was given to white Europeans over black and Asian immigrants in the same way. This inverted nativism is what we now recognise simply as xenophobia and "nativism," leading to the perception of irony and paradox discussed above.

So the irony of the passport petition I mentioned at the outset extends beyond the use of language replete with French etymologies blossoming in our speech from the Norman Conquest to the Entente Cordiale and beyond to condemn the usage of French language itself in the kind of documents for which French was the original Lingua Franca (the historical reason for their diplomatic bilingualism).

The encounter from which the xenophobia we are witnessing today emerged occurred, I believe, over one and a half millennia ago. The settlers on this occasion were Anglo-Saxons. They established their trading posts in hostile territory among the indigenous people wherever the place-name element "-wich" is found on a map of England, and granted preferential rights to the incomers. Just as regions of North America were named after places in England, so England itself was named after the province of Angeln in Denmark from whence so many settlers came that contemporaries commented that it was almost entirely denuded of population.

In fact, the explicit devaluation of the life of the indigenous population is preserved in the Laws of Ine, an early Anglo-Saxon king in the south-east of England. The "wergild" or blood-money due for killing the indigenous people (the "Welsh") varied between a half and a fifth of the corresponding sum due for killing an Anglo-Saxon. The Welsh could be killed with relative impunity if you could afford it. It cost more to kill slaves.

The violence of the encounter from which a reactionary invader ethnicity emerged to persist until the present day in England is recorded in the other element of the demonym "Anglo-Saxon:" the word "Saxon" is derived from the word "saex" denoting a particular kind of knife or short sword popular with hired thugs at the time.

Anglo-Saxon identity is among the original contrived nativisms. It is no coincidence that those who profess it should excel in imperial pretension, and that their descendants should find this toxic fiction compels them to turn on themselves once they no longer have the opportunity to conquer other lands. From this point of view Brexit is an example of history coming full circle: we have colonised and subjugated ourselves using the same kind of mythology used to endorse genocide in our overseas possessions.