My main reservation around the independent Wales movement is that the movement as a whole fails to reckon with:
- Under the stewardship of England, Wales and Welsh people have been willing, often gleeful implements of colonialism and imperialism
- Much of Welsh culture as it stands has been lost, and what remains is influenced by a lot, a LOT of immigration and emigration
- There have been people of colour in Wales since fucking forever
While it is true that our language was stripped from us, our history remains marginalised or outright purged/ignored from the history books while simultaneously being fetishised internationally, that we remain in a purely extractive form of economic subjugation under England, and that both international and national perceptions of Welsh people are often either marginalising or dehumanising, it is also important to acknowledge that (even excluding the explicit settling of English people on Welsh land at waived tariff for colonial purposes) the majority of Welsh people today are immigrants, that Welsh people and Welsh culture have been shaped by non-White hands, and that Welsh people themselves, going back to before the 1200s, have done their own colonialism or been used for that purpose by the English.
Wales as it stands today cannot look to the future without accepting this.
You cannot start to talk of and build a Wales that is independent of England without first approaching and exposing colonialist thought and attitudes that come as part and parcel of nationalism. Any movement that fails to recognise and suppress such tendencies will inevitably crash out into another brand of fascism.
