No, the Empire Wasn’t Great
I was entirely correct to call Andrew Lilico a human shaped bag of rotting cocks.
Because we live on a hell planet in a hell universe, people have decided that today’s big issue is “was the empire good?” In the blue corner you have all the people who died, were enslaved, had their resources stolen, and still bear the scars of empire today. In the red corner you’ve got some people who none of that happened to but who live in Britain and thus aren’t biased at all.
Andrew Lilico, the best intellectual Brexit has, heard that many of the people on this island who’ve never had to deal with the negative downsides of empire quite like the memory of it. He then decided to castigate the rest of us for being out of touch liberal metropolitan elites. This is, of course, entirely mockable. But there was one particular exchange which made me nearly lose my lunch.
Twitter user Sunnysingh_N6 wrote a thread about her experiences as someone who grew up in India and moved to London, about the scars that people from the colonies still bear, and how even well meaning types can be utterly unaware of the depths of pain the empire has caused and continues to cause.
Someone linked this to Lilico, and because he is a monster he responded… well, see for yourself.

Now, there’s my response there. You might think, “that’s a bit harsh, Phil.” But it isn’t. It isn’t at all.
I don’t think Lilico is *literally* a human shaped bag of rotting cocks, of course. I’m using a technique that philistines like him can’t come to grips with — metaphor.
The thing about Lilico is he’s one of these people who appears, on the outside, to have human qualities. He can talk in sentences. He sometimes appears reasonable. He doesn’t consume puppies in public. But exchanges like this reveal the kind of deep corrosion of the soul against which there is no answer or response, with which one can have no conversation.
In Lilico’s mind, see, the two groups aren’t those who suffered at the empire and the people who benefited. There’s just “real Britons” who happen to be the majority on this issue, and the out of touch metropolitan elite. Because the story he was linked to was about someone who grew up in one of the poorest parts of India, next to the real and tangible legacy of empire, it didn’t fit into this worldview, and therefore simply had nothing to do with him. It was, to the extent he was willing to engage with it at all, whimsical. A folk tale by a peasant, of no meaning nor substance.
That it was a story of how generations have been traumatised by colonialism didn’t even register. Didn’t matter one bit.
The depths of corruption it takes to be so blase about that are honestly staggering. How to possibly describe that? How to engage with the realisation that you’ve watched someone react to someone else’s description of literal trauma with “how whimsical, but what does that have to do with me?”
The response I had was to resort to metaphor. For people like that are, on the outside, plausibly human shaped, but inside are rotten and viscerally repulsive. Just as if they were a human shaped bag of rotten cocks. The response to Lilico opening up his mind and showing us what’s inside it was the same as if he had split open and revealed that he was, in fact, physically a bag of putrefying dicks.
Lilico was upset by it, claiming that this was somehow abuse. This is a newly enervated tactic of the right: to say something monstrous and deeply inhuman, to display a sucking black hole where ordinary human empathy should be, and then to hitch their skirts up and scream when people say “what the fuck is this, you vile creature?”
I will at this point say that the tradition of puncturing the polite niceties of respectable authority figures does have some precedent in the literal Son of God calling the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” and a “brood of vipers.” I’m not saying I’m like Jesus, you can draw your own conclusions on that one. But it is definitely closer to the historical idea of Christ to insult the petty pieties behind which deeply immoral figures mask their rotten behaviour than it is to, for example, hear a story of pain and suffering and express bafflement that someone could have been so foolish as to think you might care.
Regardless of which of us is bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth by our actions here, I wish to make it clear that I do not, for one second, regret calling Andrew Lilico a human shaped bag of rotten cocks. The breathtaking amorality of his disgusting opinions cannot be described within the boundaries of civil discourse. Indeed, that is the purpose of civil discourse: to prevent the powerful from being called dickheads by the peasants. It is therefore necessary to break those boundaries in order to access the tools we need to properly express ourselves.
The empire was a string of genocidal atrocities, and those who not only defend it but don’t even understand why the opinions of its victims should be considered are deeply corroded individuals. It may offend the precious snowflakes to hear their character described back to them in such a way, but I see no reason why I should play by the rules of a civility which insists that “your story of personal trauma is so whimsical” is respectable.
