Coercion, force, violence is ...

... hardwired, I believe into Britain and the West; into Church and State; into both society and the individual psyche.  Therefore, we have had for every single year for, at least the last one hundred years, the killing of foreigners and, in their own lands, too; and by us good, decent, heroic Brits, too!

The 20th century saw more killings by the West of our fellow human beings than in all the previous years of humanity added together.  What sheer aggression, violence and pure evil in us upright and so, oh so democratic and freedom loving peoples!

The ever so Great Britain had the greatest empire the world had ever seen in 1914.  Kitchener had led the more recent colonial wars.  Therefore, it was the normal done thing to go to war.  It was the obvious thing to do when an upstart European country was wanting to rival the Great Empire of Britain and to acquire some nations for itself.  33,000 enlisted on one day alone in September 1914 and over one million men had volunteered by Christmas.  "They volunteered out of a sense of patriotic duty", Jeremy Paxman said on 'Britain's Great War'.  "It was a massive rush to arms", before it was all over by Christmas.

The European Union came out of centuries of European nations fighting wars with each other and around the globe; wars ordered and taxed by their representatives of God on earth - the divinely appointed and approved royal monarchs.  The grand climax of the West's World War in two parts, finally shook the war mongering Europeans into economic and some political union to have, at last, permanent peace with each other, at least.

The least you and I can do is to give to the British Red Cross and the Disasters Emergency Committee.  And, of course, avoid employment in armaments and the armed forces.

God is on OUR side. So there!

We always like to call Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Castro, Mugabe, al Qaeda and the Taliban as mass murderers but, oh no, never ourselves.  We are always angels and have God on our side, so what we do is just fine!

Colonialism and subjugation, imperialism and domination of others, of strangers, of foreigners.  And, this carry on went on for centuries, all over the world; and was official government policy and was widely accepted as very proper, civilised behaviour.  Even accepted by the Church and virtually all individual Christians and who went in on the coat tails of the explorers, traders and the armed forces to make Christians of the heathen natives.  This behaviour of domination and empire building all too soon led to the pernicious and murderous slave trade - again, with the Church fully implicated in this crime against humanity.  Astonishing!

Justice; then, you might get peace!

We are seeing collective capital punishment by our side on the Palestinian families of Gaza. Just two days after Christmas, hundreds of men, women and children are being killed, wounded and traumatised by the armaments and ammunition we have produced and sold to our good friends and close ally, the Israelis.

Rather than understanding the reasons for rockets being fired into the border towns of Israel from Gaza, we prefer to make, yet again, a wholly disproportionate response. Revenge is sweet for our side and for the Palestinians. It ups the anti and invites ever more rockets into border towns that kill Israelis infrequently. Therefore, ours is a counter productive response, too. For us and the Israelis, we have to wipe out every Palestinian to stop their rockets. Stupid and barbaric indeed.

Our aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan sets a very bad example to our friends the Israelis who, quite understandably, use killing of civilians to similarly 'defend' their expansionist policies into ever more of the West Bank.

On the very same day that hundreds of men, women and children have died at the hands of the Israelis, our church leaders prefer to condemn the immorality of government policy. Yet, that did not include condemning government immorality in a decade of supporting the Israeli terrorism to supposedly stop the Palestinian terrorism.

As Peter Ustinov once said, "The Palestinians are the second victims of the Nazis". The one time oppressed are still the oppressors.

Not so funny, not so noble, not so proud!

It is funny how we Brits think of ourselves as being so perfect and everyone else so awful! That might explain your anti-foreigner letters. Let me put the other, rarely heard, side of the story.

For many centuries, the good, clean living Brits have been exploring foreign lands and taking home the booty, eg the piracy of the Elizabethans, Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins. Both men were knighted for their noble efforts and for making their own personal fortune on the backs of the foreigner. Some of their wealth – and ours - came from human trafficking with the iniquitous slave trade. This was a lucrative activity in the organised abuse of black Africans. Our whole nation allowed either one or two million to die or killed them, out of the 12 million carried off as prisoners. It lasted from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries. The foreigner well and truly got it in the neck at the hands of the whites and the church-going, good Christians of the UK.

When the Quakers started pointing out the sheer immorality of this systematic, large-scale abuse of our fellow humans, the Christians and the small minority who were not, argued that the British economy would so seriously suffer that we could not possibly afford to give up enslaving the foreigner!

Eventually, the Church and Parliament abolished the trafficking of Africans but it took another 25 years to end slavery in our glorious and civilising Empire. Much to their credit, the Church of England did acknowledge their major role in slavery, repented and apologised to today's descendants of the slaves.

For many more centuries than the British slave trade lasted, our numerous wars around the world – 7 or 8 against France alone – have killed many more foreigners than British slavery. Certainly, since 1945, 16,000 Brits have died on foreign battlefields but, very many more than 16,000 foreigners have been bumped off by our so beautiful bombs and bullets and righteous rockets. For example, in our war in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975, our good friends and compatriots, the Americans suffered 58,000 deaths in the process of killing an unknown number of Vietnamese whom we labeled as evil, godless Communists. Different encyclopaedias put the figure between 2-4 million. This is genocide of foreigners for which our side is wholly responsible. Both during our war in Korea and during the Cuban missile crisis, the hawks on our side were urging the use of nuclear weapons. Our General Macarthur wanted to nuke a 30 mile wide zone between China and Korea to make it de-militarised (and pulverised and barren!)

The tumultuous end of our Empire in India resulted in the slaughter of over one million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs and over two million who fled their homes.

Our present major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan always give the fatalities on our side but, rarely, any indication of the casualties amongst Iraqis and Afghans. It appears that their casualties are many times more than ours. But, then of course, the lives of our soldiers are far more valuable, as they have always been, than that of the foreigner.

Having made Iraq and Afghanistan not the most congenial of places in which to live, we then get all hot and bothered when a few of these foreigners finish up our shores. Most of the two millions who have fled are taken in by the rather more welcoming Jordan, Pakistan, Iran and Syria.

Indeed, I think, after centuries of not so noble British history, too many remain as racist, prejudiced and as anti-foreigner as ever. We can war on their shores but we don't like it when these foreigners come to our shores. We can go where we like but they can't come here!

Our enslaving, our imperial ways and our warfare against foreigners is a shocking stain on British history. We remain shameless, unapologetic and unmoved. That is not so funny.