This recoil against my proposition that the colonial legacy contains some “grey”, as though this were a lunatic fringe opinion, is clear evidence of how thoroughly anticolonialists have succeeded in getting their narrative inculcated in the media, academia, etc. Yet despite this, only 15% of Britons polled in 2014 told pollsters the British Empire left its former colonies worse off than they found them. (How much lower still would this percentage be if people didn’t know what the expected, socially mandated “correct” answer was?)
Perhaps you dismiss this as “easy for the colonizers to say”. Yet even in Jamaica, the numbers in 2011 were almost the same:
Again, this despite their having been taught their whole lives that independence was a glorious landmark event in their national history. Put that in your spliff and smoke it, eh mon?
Sources cited:
Yes, I wrongly assumed you wouldn’t attempt this kind of parallel structure in your “witty” ripostes if it didn’t actually apply. Duly noted, and I’ll henceforth adjust my expectations from you even further downward.
The counternarrative to centuries of pro-colonialist propaganda is so thoroughly successful that 15% of Britons no longer believe they were God’s gift to Africa and Asia, you say? And even in a nation victimized horribly by colonialism there are a whole 17% of the population who think it was a bad thing? Now THAT’S thorough success!
Shit, Slacker, people are starting to remember what an idiot you are. Quick, remind us about your SAT scores!
Fuck you’re stupid. My expectations of you remain unchanged.
Whatever Brits think of colonialism tells us nothing about the facts of colonialism. And that many Jamaicans might think that the modern UK would do a good job governing them tells us nothing about colonial brutality in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yes, the UK is a much more just country today than it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Orders of magnitude better. That doesn’t justify or mitigate the incredible evils of colonialism.
As colonial masters, they were mass torturers, rapists, and murderers. They were also other things – engineers, bureaucrats, miners, merchants, missionaries, doctors, etc. That doesn’t take away the evil of mass torture, rape, and murder.
This is based on fact, not modern opinion. The facts of colonialism were atrocious. That many other places at the time also committed atrocities doesn’t mitigate or justify this. Like slavery, colonialism was wrong, some at the time even realized it, shame on the perpetrators, and shame on the modern apologists and justifiers.
It’s a fair point, as far as it goes, to note that this is not what the ultimate endgame success looks like from an anticolonialist perspective. OTOH my point, which still stands, is that it’s a pretty good trick to get a viewpoint shared so broadly—among the former colonizers and the formerly colonized alike—so deeply discredited in highly educated and mainstream media circles. It’s reminiscent of how much success outfits like the Cato Institute have had in making it seem as though libertarianism is a going concern, when in fact virtually no one among the hoi polloi supports that ideology:
ETA:
Agreed. How precisely does this contradict my assertion that there are “shades of grey” in the legacy of colonialism?
It’s the disingenuity of the neocolonialist, to ask “Is this country, post-colonialism, better off than it was before colonialism” rather than the far more valid question “Is this country, post-colonialism, better off than it would have been today had colonialism never happened and it instead was treated with some measure of respect and humanity”
And when we say “if colonialism never happened”, we’re not just saying “never happened to this country only”, but also “never happened to its neighbours, or the source of its slaves, or the source of its opium…”
But instead we get intellectually-challenged fuckbois telling us “there are shades of grey”. No. There’s only red, and it’s on the hands of the colonialists.
You seriously think the people answering this question are assuming that the “no colonialism” choice in the survey means “you would have to go back to the 18th century” (or earlier)? C’mon. I think it’s pretty clear people understand that it is implicitly premised on “had the country been left alone, other than entering into voluntary trade and migration with the rest of the world, as any other country does”.
There might be some kind of cheat in your squishy “some measure of respect and humanity” line though. Are you supposing an alternate history in which the colonizers provide the infrastructure, modern technology and medicine, etc., not only without colonizing but without being paid in resources? That’s unrealistic to say the least.
I would say your thought experiment has to be neutral both ways: no forcible intervention or exploitation, but no freebies either. And if you evaluate it on that basis, we are back to grey. Which is far from the same thing, just to be very clear, from my remotely claiming colonization was a good thing on balance.
Any shades of grey are almost indistinguishable from black, in this case. It’s like saying that the guy who trapped kids in his basement and abused them has “shades of grey” because he also sometimes gave them good food, medical care, video games, and educational DVDs, and then 30 years later let them go.
This is fair, as long as we stipulate that the medical care is care they otherwise would not have received, and without which some of them would have died. But then that starts to look grey again, if you ask me!
As a follow-up to this, I have another thought experiment. What happens if someone like Wolf Blitzer publicly states that he doesn’t believe colonialism was all bad? Can you deny with a straight face that there would be a firestorm, leading directly to his abject (and presumably insincere) apology, followed by his nevertheless getting shitcanned or at least suspended?
If you cannot deny that, then you have to admit that anticolonialists wield a disproportionate amount of of power, when they can crush or marginalize someone for expressing a viewpoint shared by a broad majority of the public.
Why do you think we would need any pro- or anti-colonial narrative? It’s just a simple right/wrong thing. The only “narrative” I had to have is to look up the definition. It is literally just one culture taking over the country of another culture without their consent. It’s anti-democracy, anti-liberal (in the liberal society sense), bigoted (as the colonists are superior to the natives), and more.
All I have to do is think “would I want my country/state/city/neighborhood taken over?” Simple golden rule morality applies. It’s trivial to understand it is wrong, and thus there is no need to discuss “shades of gray.” Shades of gray are only relevant when things aren’t necessarily wrong.
If so, I think your judgment on questions of morality is horrifying.
“Wasn’t all bad” is such a vague and wishy-washy phrase I doubt anything would happen. I expect folks like Hannity and Limbaugh say such things all the time without any significant repercussions. If he said that colonialism was a positive good, then I hope he’d be pilloried, since it’s both ahistorical enough to show him to be incompetent (though Blitzer’s shown this time and time again) and gives rhetorical aid and comfort to the worst people in America (i.e. white supremacists/nationalists). But he’d probably just have to make a vague apology; maybe not even that.
I don’t think anti-colonialism has nearly the sway you think it does.
If you’re ruling out “freebies”, i.e., any stuff that one nation got from another as part of the colonialism process, then that works the other way too. Take away all the transactions of colonialism and there’s a lot less riches, resources and opportunities for the colonizer nations.
Or we could just hypothesize the continuation of global transactions without colonial exploitation. Technology transfer, etc., aren’t “freebies” if they’re part of exchanges and interactions that are voluntary on both sides.
When you look at it that way, the purported benefits of colonialism for the colonized nations seem a lot less impressive.
Think about how you’d feel if an advanced extraterrestrial society took over our planet for their own purposes and relegated humans to the combined status of draft animals and dangerous pests. I seriously doubt you’d be feeling all grateful for the cancer cures and the cloaking devices in light of the aliens massacring and enslaving billions of people. Especially when you’re aware that they could instead have traded the cancer cures and cloaking devices for the botanical/mineral/whatever resources they were after, like civilized sentient beings.
Sorry, but that “stipulation” is bullshit. It’s assuming that transactions spreading knowledge of technology, medicine, etc., simply wouldn’t ever have happened outside of a context of colonial exploitation. Nothing in the history of the world suggests that that’s a realistic assumption.
Acting as though the only two possible choices are brutal exploitation and stagnant isolation is presenting a false dichotomy.
Of course I can deny that with a straight face. People say shittier things all the fuckin time without getting fired for it. As you point out, the overwhelming majority of people in England think colonialism is a good thing, and in the US, most people probably don’t even know what colonialism is.
If Blitzer said that, there’d be a couple hundred people on Twitter, couple thousand tops, who would be pissed off at his idiocy. Some leftwing blogs would write about him being a jerkface. No way would it go beyond that.
So you think the SDMB is really that different from the wider universe of highly educated people? I see people here differing in all kinds of directions about a variety of issues, but I don’t see anything but near-universal lockstep on this one. And I only say “near” because I’m part of it, yet even I am not willing to go so far as to call colonialism a net positive.
I don’t see the lockstep here, and I don’t know how representative the SDMB is, on this or other issues. In my understanding, the topic is taught very, very poorly in US schools. I can still remember the shock I felt reading the first few pages, about the native people of the Caribbean islands and Christopher Columbus, of A People’s History of the United States.
That you apparently have some understanding of the real history, and yet still largely excuse (by proclaiming these crimes roughly equal to the benefits of being colonized) the mass rape, torture, and murder, along with the extreme cultural perversion that white supremacism wrought in virtually all colonized places, of colonialism, reflects very poorly on you, at least as a poster.
Just read through that entire thread. By my reading, there were more pro-colonialists (i.e. it was a positive good) than anti-colonialists, and way, way, more wishy-washy centrists (i.e. it wasn’t all bad, Africans are children who need guidance to govern on their own, etc.).