re: #58 Kragar

National Review Contributor: ‘Most Of The World Worked Better In Colonial Times’

Well, no one except for Africans, Middle Easterners, Indians and rational human beings would dispute that.

Hand-waving the Belgian Congo and the Dutch East India Company. Wow.

Am I supposed to take NRO seriously? Because even independent of their racist contributors they’re pretty full of shit. Snide, cultural-imperialist, ahistorical shit, to be precise.

This entire “but at least the natives didn’t run wild” crap is just this side of racism pretty damn racist, now that I think about it.

It’s also pathetic in that it pretends that the problem in all these ex-colonial states are squarely rooted in colonialism. Hell—think of it in simple economic terms: colonialism channeled the GDP of a giant chunk of the world into a few nations for generations, swallowed irreplaceable natural resources, and price gouged captive consumers on scale that make “company stores” seem modest and ethical. The quantity of money that went back in as infrastructure was a tiny by comparison.

To say nothing of the fact colonialists specifically fanned tribal tensions and armed local populations, creating the “ancient tribal feuds” than in the post-colonial era have turned into massacres. Or the ongoing racism that was barely concealed beneath mouthed platitudes about “bringing civilization.” Or the cynical manner in which humanism and Christianity were yoked and used to cultivate excuses for brutality, exploitation, and extortion.

And lest we forget, the horrific shit perpetrated by the Japanese in the 20th century was an explicit calque of justifications and methods used by Europe.

The only way to “excuse” colonialism is to hold complete contempt for a vast and varied groups of brown Others, for whom charnel houses and plantations were better than what they could achieve on their own.