Episode Details

Good Sunday morning to you,

Last week’s thought piece on the inexorable rise of the Far Right has become my most read Substack ever. Check it out, if you haven’t already.

Today we continue on a similar theme.

Enjoy!

I’m currently working on a new book about gold, and, as gold often leads to war - or is it the other way round? - I’ve found myself reading rather a lot about conquerors and conquest. There are certain things all conquerors do, from invade to plunder to strip the conquered of their wealth, power, history and identity. What is so bizarre about today in Britain and Western Europe is that we are doing all these things to ourselves, voluntarily. 

Let me explain.

As the armies of Alexander the Great marched east, overpowering all who stood in their way to form probably the first great empire the world had ever known and, in terms of land mass, one of the biggest (even to this day), the annihilation of the cultural identities of those they conquered soon followed. Locals were raped, pillaged, subjugated and enslaved.

Coinage was a far more important tool of propaganda then than it is now, and Alexander had his armies confiscate gold and silver bullion everywhere they went; melt it down and then re-struck with Greek gods: Athena, goddess of wisdom and war; Nike, goddess of Victory; Zeus, god of power; and Heracles, god of strength, portrayed in the likeness of Alexander himself (at this point rulers had not yet started depicting their own heads). Conquered people quite literally had their own history and legend struck off. Alexander’s coins meanwhile were standardised throughtout his empire.

As well as “Romanizing” the Celts - imposing Roman language, law, custom and governance on them - the Romans actively persecuted Celtic druids and destroyed their sacred groves.

After William I conquered Britain, he took Anglo-Saxon land and gave it to his cronies; he imposed heavy taxes, strict laws and a new kind of feudal system; he replaced Anglo-Saxon English with Norman French in the courts and other centres of rule; he made ecclesiastical changes to better control the church. Any kind of rebellion met with swift and ruthless repression.

Even if 1,000 years later, World War Two was not so different. Both the Nazis and the Japanese did everything in their power to strip those they conquered of their cultural identity.

As well as possession of land and confiscation of wealth, the annihilation of local history, myth, hero and legend has always been a tool of the conqueror, part of the suppression and subjugation that follows invasion.  

Even today the US, not technically an empire and forever trying to distance itself from anything imperial, nevertheless controls much of the globe and its prime resource, oil, with its military. It also exports its culture in such a domineering way that everyone else confuses their own history with that of the US. Like its military, American cultural narratives dominate the world, and distort everybody else’s. You would think, for example, that there had never been any slavery in history, except for that in America, in the 200 years from when the nation was formed to its outlawing in 1865, never mind that the British outlawed it 2 generations earlier. In fact, slavery has existed since before civilization began and still goes on today, with some 21 to 45 million trapped in it. In just seven years between 1938 and 1945, Germany enslaved a number equivalent to 400 years of Transatlant