

Sutherland continues a long tradition of expropriation of the people from the land.

Gaels were expropriated from the land between 1800 and 1830. Gaels were expropriated from the land between 1800 and 1830. What is going on? Much has been said in recent weeks about a man named Peter Sutherland. Sutherland is the United Nations Special Representative on migration, and he is an international businessman and former Attorney General of Ireland who has served in a variety of business and political roles. He was appointed to the European Commission in 1985 and had responsibility for competition policy. He was the Chairman of AIB (Allied Irish Banks) from 1989 until 1993. He was non-executive Chairman of Goldman Sachs International until June 2015. In 2010, he was appointed co-chair of an Experts Group, to report on the priority actions to be taken to stave off protectionism and to boost global trade. Sutherland is also keenly pro-European, which doesn’t sound like a bad thing until you realise what he means by that. A person would think that it’s pretty simple, after all, when talking about the ‘European Union’, the word ‘European’ is literally in the name. But no, Sutherland is pro-European, or ‘a Europhile’, in the sense that he supports the institutions of the European Union, but he does not support the ethnic genetic interests of those who live under those institutions. Sutherland is a person who believes that the Arab Spring should have been considered as a chance to begin ‘weaving together’ Europe with North Africa and the Middle East, population-wise. What he of course means in practice is not—not ever—a colonisation of North Africa and the Middle East by Europeans, but rather, an invitation for literally unlimited migration from North Africa and the Middle East into the European Union to displace Europeans. Objectively speaking, that is the expropriation of European peoples from their own lands, it is a displacement. Sutherland however entreats Europeans to think of it from a humanitarian and empathetic point of view. For example, it was Peter Sutherland who described the makeshift refugee camps in Calais, as ‘an indictment on society’, and asked the British and French governments to do more to assist the Middle Eastern and North African migrants. Previously, profiteering For the Sutherland family name, there is a long history of humanitarian and empathetic points of view being expressed by its members, when behind the hand-wringing and the appeals to a universal morality, behind the cloak of respectability and quasi-aristocratic pretensions, lurks the dagger of the most vicious blood-treason and abject profiteering which can only be expected from business-people of their calibre—a tendency which is by no means diminished but rather is reinforced by their Christian identity. It was in January 1853, that the Stafford House Assembly of Ladies issued its call to their counterparts in North America, to ask them to consider the plight of black people in the Southern states of the United States, who had been enslaved for so long and were, in their view, in need of sympathy. They were consciousness-raising, making a call to action, and so on. That was a declaration that took place when Stafford House was under the presidency of the Duchess of Sutherland, who—much as it was in fashion then as it is in fashion now—was giving an object lesson on how easy it always is for liberals to show concern for people thousands of miles away, while ignoring the suffering of their own people close by—particularly when that suffering is caused by their own ‘humanitarian’ hand. The whole history of the primitive accumulation that has led to the appearance of the wealth and prestige of the name Sutherland, and of other names of that type from Scotland and Ireland, is really in fact a history of the expropriation of the Gael people from their own lands, and their destruction at the hands of blood-traitors. A quick sketch of history will be needed in order for things to become clear. In the 1100s, when the Danelaw was encroaching onto Scotland, the resistance came from the ‘Great Man of Sutherland’, a progenitor whose clan had defended him from all enemies, foreign and domestic, Scottish or Danish. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which installed the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau as King, due to the economic changes and the shift in political attitudes at the time, the internecine fighting among Gaels become less frequent, and at the same time, the propensity for Anglo-Dutch wars to erupt was reduced to zero. These things may not be the only factors, but they may comprise part of the reasons for why London was able to take the time to better integrate the Gael clans into the British military establishment, to incentivise stability by inducing these ostensibly different forms of social organisation to mutually support each other in Scotland. The clan system of the Gaels was an array of social relations based around a progenitor and his or her progeny, which is to say, it is a relationship delimited by ties of blood and proximity. The district in which a clan operated was the land from which it gained its livelihood, much like how it was in what Marxists call ‘the Asiatic mode of production’, because it existed in a similar form in China, Japan, Korea, and various parts of South East Asia, in the pre-feudal era. It’s also comparable to the systems in some parts of the Americas before the appearance of Columbus. It was basically a pre-feudal system of relations. At the head of the clan was the progenitor’s family, which had a leader. The whole of the clan was like a system of blood-related family circles under them, the system could not be said to be a system of private property, because all the land was held as common land, under the military command of the progenitor. The progenitor could increase or decrease the allotment of land to subordinates as necessary, perhaps on a whim, or perhaps to fit a particular need. Under the family of the progenitor, were soldiers that administered regions, and under them were subalterns who managed towns and hamlets, and under all of them were the peasants who co-operated with the system in exchange for the benefits of a common defence perimeter and which was cemented by ties of blood. Without an explicit legal system that could describe or allocate private property, it would be impossible to arbitrate land ownership in any way at that time. However, tradition and rank would mean that someone would have the largest influence, and the family of the progenitor, the leader in particular, would be the person who would ultimately have the final say on what would or would not be happening. This may seem benign at first, but when brought into interaction with a system that does have a concept of private property and the concept of a salary or a wage, it can potentially produce a deadly transformation which can lead to the clan’s destruction. The destruction As all services were gradually transformed into contract-based exchanges, the leader of the family of the progenitor began to increasingly take on the role of a landlord toward the soldiers, the soldiers in turn acting like farmers toward the peasants, and the peasants themselves becoming transformed into something like sharecroppers on the land that they used to call their own. It would be in the early 1800s that the stab in the back was to come, and it came from one of the families of the progenitors in the form of the arbitrary and violent transformation of the clan’s common property into the private property of the leader, who could then dispose of it and its contents in any way that he or she desired, backed by government-sponsored force, which then resulted in armed conflict almost like a civil war. Karl Marx—yes, seriously—explains with great accuracy what happened after that: Karl Marx, Das Kapital Volume One, ‘Chapter Twenty-Seven: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land’, 1867: [...] The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the large farmers make use of their little independent methods as well. [15] The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M. Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he, himself, demands a “general Act of Parliament for the enclosure of Commons” (admitting thereby that a parliamentary coup d’état is necessary for its transformation into private property), and moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor. [16] [...] The stoical peace of mind with which the political economist regards the most shameless violation of the “sacred rights of property” and the grossest acts of violence to persons, as soon as they are necessary to lay the foundations of the capitalistic mode of production, is shown by Sir F. M. Eden, philanthropist and Tory to boot. The whole series of thefts, outrages, and popular misery, that accompanied the forcible expropriation of the people, from the last third of the 15th to the end of the 18th century, lead him merely to the comfortable conclusion: “The due proportion between arable land and pasture had to be established. During the whole of the 14th and the greater part of the 15th century, there was one acre of pasture to 2, 3, and even 4 of arable land. About the middle of the 16th century the proportion was changed of 2 acres of pasture to 2, later on, of 2 acres of pasture to one of arable, until at last the just proportion of 3 acres of pasture to one of arable land was attained.” In the 19th century, the very memory of the connexion between the agricultural labourer and the communal property had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent times, have the agricultural population received a farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the landlords? [...] The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping men off them. All the English methods hitherto considered culminated in “clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern conditions given in a former chapter, where there are no more independent peasants to get rid of, the “clearing” of cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not find on the soil cultivated by them even the spot necessary for their own housing. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies, we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland landlords have gone to the length of sweeping away several villages at once; in Scotland areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by the peculiar form of property, under which the embezzled lands were held. The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the English government succeeded in suppressing the internecine wars of these “great men,” and their constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their time-honored trade as robbers; they only changed its form. On their own authority they transformed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into collision with their clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman. [25] This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart [26] and James Anderson. [27] In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. [28] As an example of the method [29] obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both. [30] But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their idolatry, romantic and of the mountains, for the “great men” of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let the sea-shore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second time the Gaels were hunted out. [31] There is nothing that I can add to that. Nothing is new about what is happening now, compared to what was happening back then. Not only is the same kind of economic structure being used to carry out the destruction as was being used in the 1800s, but furthermore the very name of Sutherland has reappeared, it has reappeared as though to flaunt itself in the face of the people of the British Isles. A new decision Last time the great blood-traitors were able to take you down the path that they wanted—a whole ethnic group was effectively destroyed and scattered across the earth. Now they come again, under the same names to re-invite you down the same path. My question to all European peoples is this: Will you let them take you again? Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.



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