Interesting. I only read the first 20 posts, but there is a definite range of opinion there, you are right. The Flying Dutchman made good points, but so did Tamerlane.
Still, this was eleven years ago. You sure it represents the community of posters today? Where is this diversity of opinion on our actual thread now?
I did not proclaim them roughly equal. I just don’t believe de-colonization has been an unalloyed good.
I majored in history, and I too have read most of Zinn’s People’s History of the U.S. But I guess I should be more precise: I’m certainly not saying there was anything good about what Columbus or the conquistadors did. Hell, Columbus was so awful even for his time, he was brought back to Spain in chains. It’s a travesty to honor him with a holiday (I consider it Indigenous Peoples Day).
I’m not even talking about colonial history of a century ago. At that time, or just after, my grandmother was forced to leave the reservation to go to an “Indian boarding school” run by the federal government. There, she and her siblings and their fellow students were forbidden to speak their native language or wear their traditional clothing. That was clearly wrong and lamentable.
However, just as Dutchman was getting at in that other thread, the independence era for Africa came right at the time when the colonizing countries mostly (with exceptions like Portugal) were becoming much more humane and arguably doing a better job running those countries than the tribally-riven indigenous Africans were prepared to do. At the end of the day, though, if the people wanted independence (and in Kenya, they certainly did), they should not be denied it even if it led to their experiencing many serious social and political problems they would not have otherwise.
Saying that decolonization didn’t go great seems pretty different than insisting that colonial rule contained shades of grey, and taking issue with those of us condemning it extremely harshly.
Scrolling back, it appears I first raised my “shades of grey” point in a reply to your having said:
I thought of the railroad, and wanted to balance the discussion since colonizers didn’t just take wealth, they also created it and (again, with exceptions like Portugal) left it behind for former colonies to use after independence. And I’m just not sure that having a cure for all cancers (which have hit my family hard, like most families) and spitefully refusing to share it, while snorting “if they cared about their people’s health, they would ban cigarettes”, is “orders of magnitude…far, far less evil” than colonizing was.
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That seems a pretty trivial point to make – do you chime into every thread about the Holocaust and the Nazis to remind everyone of the factories and railroads and other “wealth” they created? I doubt it. If not, why is colonialism different?
As for Wakanda, based on the comics, they wouldn’t “spitefully” hold back anything. That sort of decision would be made to protect Wakandan secrets, whether because they could be weaponized or for some other reason. I know it’s a bit silly to argue about the actions of a fictional country, but for a relatively small country in a mostly plundered/colonized continent to choose to remain secret, including holding back secrets that might help outsiders, is far, far less evil, as well as being more reasonable, than colonizing an already-occupied foreign land.
I can only go based on the panels shared here, as I haven’t read the comics otherwise. But the dismissal of sharing a cancer cure (which was only even floated due to a personal grudge) was definitely stated spitefully, or at least contemptuously/dismissively (not sure which is worse). I wasn’t the only one in this thread who read that and was turned off.
It’s interesting that you brought up the Nazis, because one of the things I keep thinking about regarding this colonialism debate is how differently mid-20th century colonialism would have been under Nazi rule than under British or French control. Independence guerilla warfare would have been met with genocide. Everything would have been purely extractive for the benefit of Germans. Had they decided at some point that a given colony was no longer worth the bother, I think it’s safe to assume they would have dismantled or destroyed every bit of infrastructure they had built, and strafed native populations with machine gun fire on the ride to the airport, just for good measure.
But to hear the rhetoric around British and French colonialism in Africa, you would think this IS what it consisted of. I think some balance and nuance is called for, that’s all. If you think that’s a “trivial” point to raise, you’re entitled to your opinion.
Vis-a-vis your last sentence, though: it wasn’t a choice between sharing the cure for cancer and remaining secret. They could easily have done so anonymously. Maybe that didn’t occur to the comic book writer (who apparently is not Coates after all—my mistake), but it should have.
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That’s heinous, but your own cite shows that it was (1) not carried out by Britain (or France, the other country I specified) and (2) not even close to genocide.
I sometimes forget that there has been a defining down of that term by many people, but when I use it I mean the killing of all or most of a race, ethnic group, national population, or that sort of thing. My point was that if a nuclear powered Nazi Germany controlled African colonies in the 1950s, they would have just nuked the place if it resisted occupation, and then turned to other colonies and said “Do you want some of that? I didn’t think so.”
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Erm, did you read *both *cites? And no, the white Rhodesians weren’t Britain - but they were British colonials. So tell me again how it’s just the Germans who commit genocide.
Just because they *sucked *at it, doesn’t make it not genocide. The intent was to kill everyone in the rebel groups - men, women and children. Biological warfare is kind of indiscriminate like that. And that’s just two examples, I didn’t even bring up the other attempted British colonial genocides like with aboriginal Canadians and Australians.
What you attempted to do was draw a distinction between German and Anglo-French behaviour, as though the behaviour of the latter would be better. Oh, so they didn’t nuke anyone. I’m sure anthrax is so much nicer…
And genocide has never been just about killing, not since the term was originated by Lemkin. So your definition has *never *been the definitive one.
What you’re doing is making excuses for genocidaires, just because they do it with a raised pinkie (or a certain je ne sais quoi). Fuck that noise.
I think it’s trivial because using the Nazis as a baseline means almost everyone looks good by comparison. If the best you can say about someone is that they weren’t as bad as the Nazis, then you’re saying they were among the most monstrous people ever to walk the Earth.
I don’t think the British and French and other colonial officials were mustache twirling villains who plotted and giggled about how to do evil to brown people. I think they were, largely, well-meaning and “average human” individuals who were raised in a culture that taught them that they were morally and intellectually superior to dark-skinned (and other) people, and cogs in a monstrous machine that was meant to funnel wealth from one place to another regardless of the consequences to the local people. And this combination of this monstrous wealth-transfer-machine-system and white supremacist culture resulted in the mass torture, rape, and murder, of millions of people.
I’m not sure Britain and France left those countries less wealthy on Independence Day than they were when the first colonizers appeared in their harbor. Not as economists define “wealth”, at least. If we say liberty is priceless (and I am a fan of John Stuart Mill, so I do) then they gained immeasurably from independence. But you are talking about stolen wealth, and it’s once again murkier.
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Again, that shouldn’t be the comparison. Are they (the local/indigenous people and their descendants) less wealthy than they would have been now had the colonizers never come to colonize/plunder them? There are certainly millions of tortured/raped/murdered (mostly long dead) who wouldn’t have been tortured/raped/murders without the efforts of the colonizers. Not being tortured/raped/murdered is a sort of “wealth”. It’s hard to argue that various tribes and groups for whom ~90% and up to 100% of their populations were killed (due to a combination of war/massacres, harsh slavery, and disease) during colonization/plundering efforts wouldn’t be wealthier had that not taken place.
But it’s all hypothetical. Even mostly uncontacted tribes in the Amazon or the Andaman Islands have been strongly affected by colonization – their extreme secrecy and xenophobia was significantly shaped by the actions of the plunder around them.
I see no reason to be “nice” to past aiders and abettors of torture, rape, and murder, just because they though they were doing the right thing. Even at the time, there were folks who recognized how wrong it was, just as there were abolitionists in the 18th and 19th centuries who recognized the evil of slavery.
It’s not a question of being “nice” but of accurately describing history with all its messy and sometimes discomfiting nuance.
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I’m well aware of what the word means. Doesn’t mean you’re not softballing the impact with your fatuous “But… but… Germany would have been worse” crap. Nuance is for symphonies, shades of grey are for poorly-written erotica. Colonialism was an evil, no ifs, ands or buts.
So, tell me about the “nuances” of the Holocaust, then…I mean, there have to be shades of grey there, too, no? I mean, anything else would be “absolutist”, n’est-ce pas?
Some shit is just so evil that the red completely wipes out any grey there might have been.
Anyone ever tells you “Well, say what you will about the Holocaust, at least the Jews got Israel out of it!”, you know is a fucker not to be listened to.