In addition to their remarkable resiliency, the fact is that they were, when Commodore Perry arrived, a highly literate society, well aware of events in the West such as the French Revolution. The same is not true of sub-Saharan Africa.
And Japanwas not colonized, anyway, unless you mean by MacArthur for a brief period in the 1940s. The euphemistic “opening” of Japan by Perry was humiliating, but it was not colonization.
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There was no one country in europe that was the place for all innovation, in fact, Europe didn’t just make a bunch of achievements on their own either. Knowledge and technology came from trading with others. At a certain point, European powers developed the gun, and that gave them an advantage over everyone else. They may have only been a decade ahead technologically, but having that form of superior firepower allowed them to colonize everywhere else that hadn’t developed that specific piece of technology.
When they colonized, they impoverished the areas that they went. They removed the easy to access resources, moved people out of their homelands, enslaved or killed large parts of the population, and generally made a mess of things. When you think of the “shitholes” of africa, what you are seeing is the results of colonization.
The world was not just full of stupid savages, just waiting for the white man to come and save them. We have that version of history in some of our consciousness, as it was the white man who wrote it, but that doesn’t make it true.
Sounds like you have been reading Jared Diamond. That guy is the opposite of a dispassionate historian who follows the evidence wherever it leads. He is desperate to drive a certain narrative. If he thought he could get away with having us all believe there is a real Wakanda that is the most advanced nation on earth, he would do it in a heartbeat.
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It is, btw, a very convenient crutch to be able to blame all your misery and social ills on colonialism. No responsibility need be taken by the people of these countries at all. They are the first peoples in history without Original Sin. :rolleyes:
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Yes, in part. And upthread I kicked this off by criticizing my fellow Kenyans for junking a perfectly good British-built railroad solely out of stubborn pride.
BTW, what do you anticolonialists think about the role of South Asians in East African society? From what I witnessed in my time in Kenya, I can understand why Amin ejected them. (Which is not a blanket endorsement of Amin, just to be clear.)
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Nope, I’ve heard of him, but never read him. I’ve heard he has controversial views.
If one of his views is that guns make it easy to subjugate those without guns, then I don’t think that that is that controversial of a view.
It is you that seems to think that there is something inherent about non-europeans that makes them inferior in such a way that they needed the white man to come save them from their savage ways, and that they should thank them for it, even if it also involved slavery, genocide, relocation, and destruction of their culture and environment. That’s a bit more controversial.
Al of them? Maybe not. But many if not most, absolutely. The european powers completely removed them from their previous ways of life, set them up with puppet govts, killed the people that resisted, enslaved a bunch more. How can colonialism not be responsible for much of the ills of the people?
FWIW, my father was an esteemed anthropologist (B.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford), and he would have agreed with most of you. So would my mother to this day, a retired professor of sociology. But I got a good look at the peoples least touched by Western colonialism (the !Koi San and Maasai in Africa, Yanomomo Indians in South America, etc.) and I just can’t connect with the romanticization of that lifestyle. I would rather be the average person in a poor country that had been colonized than one of those people. (Of course, I will take being a Westerner post-Enlightenment above all the rest.)
Just between us, he showed me his real Kenyan birth certificate and I compared it with mine. We had a good chuckle over the whole thing.
Lovely strawman you’ve constructed there. Really quite florid—you pulled out all the stops.
FTR, if I had been in charge of the colonizing governments in the 19th century, I would have conducted things quite differently. No human rights abuses. I would have offered voluntary trade of raw goods for infrastructure, medicine, etc.
But had that been the case, I guarantee you the usual suspects would as of today still be bellyaching to high heaven. Facts don’t matter to some people, as we see with accusations that there is a genocide in the U.S. of blacks being murdered by whites, even though blacks murder whites at a significantly higher rate than vice versa.
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Oh, I wanted to address this “one decade behind” business. Per Wiki, “In 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under European control; by 1914 it had increased to almost 90 percent of the continent”. Are you under the impression that Europeans didn’t have guns until 1860?
And so, what: someone in Africa would have discovered radioactivity by 1908, and powered, heavier-than-air flight by 1913? Please. This is as fantastical a proposition as Wakanda.
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Who is romanticizing it? Is saying “it was wrong to plunder their communities, rape/torture/kill them, and completely disrupt every part of their society” romanticizing it?
This tells us nothing about colonization. We don’t know what the situation of various groups and people would be if they (and/or their ancestors) hadn’t been plundered, disrupted, cleansed, raped/tortured/killed, forcefully relocated, and more. But it’s entirely reasonable to believe that they’d be better off now without all that. If their resources hadn’t been plundered, they could have used them for equal trade, including trading ideas and technology.
Your guarantee isn’t very convincing to us. If the world was wildly different our reactions would be different. As for murder rates now, that’s a blip in history; for the vast majority of American history, white-on-black violence was overwhelmingly more common than the reverse. That there are statistical disparities in an society that is unjust in so many ways doesn’t tell us much.
You’re absolutely right about the vast majority of American history. But that’s not what the BLM types say. They say it’s still that way now. Which means they are not only way off about what is happening right now, meaning they are agitating for a solution to a problem that has already been solved and slandering the current white population of the country, they are failing to note that this means white Americans are actually showing much more restraint than any other hegemonic group throughout history that I can think of.
Imagine writing a science fiction story in which Group A had subjugated and brutalized Group B for centuries. Then Group A got a crisis of conscience (or enough of them did) and things changed drastically. Suddenly things flipped and Group B started killing members of Group A at a much higher rate than vice versa. But the vocal members of Group B insisted it was still the other way ‘round, and that in fact things were as bad or worse than they had been before civil rights. What would this hypothetical Group A do, in this science fiction story? I would think they would say “fuck this” and revive the KKK terrorism of the 1870s and 1920s. (Oops, I left my sci-fi metaphor behind there, but you get my point.)
Let me be VERY clear that I do not think that response would be the right thing to do. And I’m still a solid Democrat, who considers Obama the greatest U.S. president, Grant second, and LBJ third. But while I don’t expect people to be grateful for the human rights due to them, I would like to see them not lie and slander.
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Upon reflection, it was unfair for me to accuse all or even most BLMers of consciously lying and slandering. I would bet most of them don’t even realize it’s false to claim that whites are killing blacks far more than the reverse. The reason for this is that the people at universities in charge of imparting accurate information to their students are cowed into silence by the knowledge that correcting this misapprehension will likely result in a firestorm that could threaten their career.
Which, consciously or unintentionally, works in the favor of the BLM vanguard. As long as it is widely believed that white-on-black murder is far greater than black-on-white, they will have the sympathy and support of a huge swath of the left, center-left, and even center of the political spectrum. But as soon as the real facts are revealed, they lose a huge chunk of everyone outside the far left. I’d be willing to bet there were some reading this thread who thought to themselves “whoa, I didn’t realize this”.
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If the discrimination and oppression and brutality was over, you’d have a point. But it’s not. Less doesn’t mean gone. Black people are still not treated fairly and equally in society in many ways, and critically, by law enforcement. Statistical disparities in crime don’t change that at all.
I don’t know of anyone saying that racism and oppression are worse than in the 50s or before. I know of plenty of folks who say that it’s still a serious problem, and I agree with them.
“As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.”
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I am not sure it is worth engaging you at this point, as you’ve devolved into some remarkably familiar talking points I’ve encountered with people who tell me, “I’m not a racist, but…”
For those playing at home, I hope we recognize that there is a fundamental difference between white on black violence when both parties are regular citizens, and when one party is law enforcement. The crux of BLM is that our police system is flawed in some significant ways, and one of them, and the one they choose to speak out against, is the treatment of people of color by white officers, and a criminal justice system that favors whites and excuses brutality against blacks.
I openly admit to a certain type of racism. But it is a paternalistic one. I don’t at all understand racists who hate black people, call them vulgar names, want to subjugate them as farm or domestic workers, or favor separatism.
I’m going to guess your “I’m not a racist, but…” acquaintances wouldn’t agree with my list of favorite presidents, and would not share my support for reparations for slavery.
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