The Most Unkindest Cut

 

Immortal dead white man

News is that the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust is planning to “de-colonize” Stratford. Apparently “the idea of Shakespeare's 'universal' genius 'benefits the ideology of white European supremacy'.” The Trust must “stop saying Shakespeare was the 'greatest' but part of a community of 'equal and different' writers globally.” Some exhibits will, for example, celebrate Rabindranath Tagore.

Questioned on how Shakespeare promoted “white European supremacy,” one authority issued this challenge: everyone around the world knows Shakespeare. But how many African writers could you name?

There you are. To suggest that Shakespeare is some unique genius promotes white supremacy. Obviously there must have been equally great writers in Africa.

By this logic, however, surely celebrating Shakespeare promotes Stratford supremacy as well. In fairness, they should celebrate as of equal merit some writer from every shire in England.

And let’s explore this rabbit hole further. How many Irish writers can you name? Several, I’ll warrant. Ireland, current population 6 million, has won four Nobel Prizes for Literature. And Joyce didn’t get one. Yet Ireland has been colonized by England far longer than any place in Africa. Britain held Kenya for 60 years. Britain held Ireland for 700 years. And with a deliberate attempt to wipe out Irish education and throw the Irish off the land. 

Demonstrably, if Shakespeare outshines all African writers, it is not because of colonialism. And it is not because Shakespeare has been artificially promoted for nationalistic or propagandistic reasons. These Irish writers certainly weren’t. 

Shakespeare indeed objectively suggests the superiority of English culture; at least when it comes to authoring plays. At least when it comes to crafting language.

Different cultures indeed have different specialties. You can’t beat Russians in the novel. You can’t beat Italy for cuisine. You can’t beat France for painting. You can’t beat America for sports.

Different cultures are better and worse at different things; and, given that a culture is a system for living the best possible life, it is also reasonable to argue that one culture is overall superior to another.

After all, whether it was right or wrong to do, what made it possible for a relatively small island off the coast of Europe to, at one point, control one quarter of the world’s population and one quarter of the world’s resources? 

Malice? 

The claim is ridiculous.

The ideal, of course, is to take the best from each culture, and combine them to create the best possible culture. This is what immigrant nations like the US, Canada, Australia, or Singapore have been able to do: the melting pot. To a lesser extent, this is what trading nations like England, the Netherlands, or ancient Greece, have been able to do. And these have generally become the most successful cultures as a result.

This is what we must return to.  This involves, in the first place, celebrating merit. 

The Real World of Colonialism

 

Kipling's Recessional

 

Recessional

God of our fathers, known of old,

   Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

   Dominion over palm and pine—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;

   The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

   An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;

   On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

   Or lesser breeds without the Law—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust

   In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word—

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Rudyard Kipling could hardly be less fashionable in these anti-colonial days. He was a promoter of empire. Worse, like Trump, he was a populist. He wrote for the common man. 

He has also never been to my taste. His prose seems unnecessarily foggy at most times; he rarely seems to make an interesting point. I won Puck of Pook’s Hill as a prize back in grade school, and could never get my head into it. In both poetry and prose, his upper lip is far too stiff for my Irish Catholic temperament. All that English stuff about doing your dooty and dying at the drop of a hat for king and law. Sounds blasphemous to this Mick.

Yet I cannot deny his immense skill as a poet. In the craft of casting memorable lines, he puts anyone writing today in the shade. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the youngest person ever at that time, and the first Englishman.

He is the ultimate “people’s poet.” His poem “If…” for all its weird Englishness remains the most popular poem in England. 

I was recently looking again at “The Recessional,” with my students. I think it is his best poem.

Perhaps we ought to see what he has to say. In this poem, at least, I think he does go deep.

The first point I think he makes worth making is that the British Empire is under God’s dominion, and derives its legitimacy by doing God’s work. God is “Lord of our far-flung battle line.” He is “Lord God of Hosts”—of armies.

Kipling is right. To the extent that any government can claim legitimacy, it is because and to the extent that it is doing God’s will. This is more or less the same point made in America’s Declaration of Independence.

Does God then command the armies? Does he play favourites among combatants?

Of course he does. Pacifism is not a Judeo-Christian principle. God plainly favours the Israelites in battle in the Old Testament; the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Seleucids, the Egyptians, are unambiguously villains.

What is unique about the Judeo-Christian tradition is the idea that God expresses his will and his divine plan through human history. That means in any given war, one side is probably doing his will, and the other side is with the devil.

More broadly, the creation is an eternal war between good and evil. We are to take up our sword and defend the right. Pacifism is simply moral cowardice. 

This ought to be clear enough to natural reason. Whenever a fight breaks out, between two individuals, two groups, or two nations, it is almost inevitably an aggression by one party against the other. Why else? Misunderstandings can be talked through. One party merely calculates it is stronger, and can take what it wants. 

The current war in Ukraine is an example. No, there are not perfectly balanced rights and wrongs on either side. Russia wanted to control Ukraine, and thought they were strong enough to do it.

And here we even also see the hand of God. Who could have predicted that Ukraine would hold out and begin to advance? A close analysis of history actually does suggest that, given anything approaching equality of forces, the side in the right always wins. This is true because we all have a conscience, and it weakens us when we go against it.

So the question is whether the British Empire was rapacious, or was doing the will of God. This is exactly the question Kipling asks, and struggles over.

Being an Empire by itself does not figure: it is neither good nor bad. There is no moral value in being governed by people with the same skin colour or ethnicity as yourself. The question is whether the British brought better and more moral government than the governments they replaced.

Kipling would no doubt see them as doing God’s work in ending slavery, ending the caste system in India, suppressing human sacrifice, toppling oppressive rulers in Africa who practiced cannibalism, ending interminable tribal wars, and so forth. All of which they certainly did. Along with instituting governing structures and infrastructure that successor regimes have almost never seen fit to discard. 

It was no doubt in Kipling’s eyes the world’s police force, introducing and protecting human rights. At a minimum, the case must be made that it was not, that it was oppressive and self-interested. It cannot be assumed.

The usual claim, I suppose, is that Britain exploited the colonies financially, leaving them poorer than they had been. It can certainly be argued that mercantilist policies might do this; but trade generally benefits both parties. And my impression is that the actual numbers do not bear that out.

But this is background. This is not the key message of the poem. It is, rather, that the British might lose their grip on this moral foundation, like “lesser breeds without the law.” 

Who are these lesser breeds?

“Gentiles.” “Heathens.” The distinction made is not racial, but religious. 

And Kipling is more specific: 

Heathen heart that puts her trust

   In reeking tube and iron shard

Kipling is not talking about African tribalists or Amerindian natives. Iron shards are products of the Industrial Revolution, not stone age cultures. Reeking tubes are most obviously found in chemistry labs.

Kipling is warning against “scientism,” the worship of science and technology as our new God. Which is indeed the disease that is currently killing Western civilization.

The prime danger of scientism is that it has no morality. It is “without the law.” 

Kipling was writing ten years after Nietzsche had published Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals, arguing that man had now replaced God and could create his own morality to suit his purposes.

Such boasting as the gentiles use.

Al Purdy's Racism

 

In a piece he titled “Norma, Eunice, and Judy,” Al Purdy lamented, as I do, the general disrespect in Canada for Canadian culture. He regrets, in his own day, Canadian children growing up thinking they live in “a nation without culture, art, or literature.” It is, he says, “a country where the native literature is added to English Literature or American Literature like an afterthought. Where it is said to be not worth teaching.”

It is the colonial mentality. And, if anything, it is getting worse, with our own prime minister (eternal shame be upon him) claiming there is no Canadian culture, with government cultural funding going as a priority to “multiculturalism.” In other words, any culture but Canadian culture.

Purdy then tells the tale of Jim Foley, an unusually well-educated Ontario high school teacher who “realized that Canada must be the only country in the world where high school kids aren’t taught their own literature.” He began his own database of Canadian literature, confident that in a few years “Margaret Laurence, Atwood, Layton, Garner, and all the others who talk about the place we live in, their voices will be heard and taught in our schools.”

These words were spoken in 1974. It is now the butt end of 2022, and it still has not happened. Instead, the reverse. Kids now read American pop novels in school, watch Hollywood movies, and read and discuss anything written by anyone claiming to be aboriginal. Or failing that, they will be assigned a book by an immigrant with views hostile to the country and the culture. 

Precisely the attitude of a colonizer.

And Purdy and Foley would now be declared “racist” for wanting to promote Canadian literature.

The Reality of Colonialism

 

European empires as of 1945

This essay, originally published in the Journal of Third World Studies, has been the cause of much controversy. Half the editorial board of the journal resigned over its having published it, and the article was ultimately yanked after protest. The author has gotten death threats

It has also become an issue in the current Ontario municipal elections, because one candidate for the Hamilton School Board linked to it. This has been seized upon by one of her opponents to attack her.

If there is a demand that something be suppressed, it is not because it is untrue. There is no call to suppress Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, or Gavin Menzies’s 1492: The Year the Chinese Discovered America. There is no call to suppress the discredited works of Sigmund Freud, or Margaret Meade. 

A demand that something be suppressed can only mean that 1. It is true, so that opponents cannot hope to convincingly argue against it, and 2. It threatens some established power.

This article’s thesis threatens many Third World regimes and elites, as well as a huge academic “anti-colonialism” establishment.

Some quotes:

“A sobering World Bank report of 1996 noted: ‘Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess.’”

“The rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and geographies concerned is prima facie evidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives.”

“Despite cries of ‘exploitation,’ colonialism was probably a money loser for imperial powers. …  European powers embarked on ruinously costly and ultimately money-losing colonialism for largely non-economic reasons. That is why they gave up their colonies so easily.”

So much for claims of oppression; so much for claims of exploitation and plunder.

Certainly some colonial regimes were deeply oppressive; but not colonialism as such. No more than when a business calls in an outside management consultancy to right an unsteady enterprise.

Why the Jews?

 

The CBC of course uses the death of Queen Elizabeth as an opportunity to slam the British and the monarchy. Just as Easter is always an occasion to question the divinity of Christ.

Both speakers simply assert without argument that empire was a matter of “looting and plundering” the colonies. ”Forty-five trillion dollars of wealth stolen just from the Asian subcontinent.” Even defenders of the monarchy and the British are inclined to argue only that the indecencies of the Empire were long ago.

Yet this is a point that needs to be established. Was government by the British more costly to the colonials than local government? There is no reason to assume so. In fact, historians often suggest that the reason the British, and other European, empires broke up after the Second World War was that the European countries could no longer afford them. They were being subsidized, then.

Were local industries suppressed? India commanded a larger portion of world GDP under the Raj than it did for many decades after independence. That does not sound like a suppression of local industry.

Of course, the issue of slavery is raised. Yet, as Don Lemon learned in a recent interview, if slavery is the premise, it is probably the British who deserve reparations. Slavery was universal. Britain was among the first nations to abolish it, they ended it in all their possessions, and they spent a great deal to end the practice everywhere.

The CBC interviewee actually blames Britain for ending the slave trade, on the grounds that they paid for the slaves’ freedom, instead of paying the slaves.

We have probably all had ancestors who were slaves, and ancestors who were slavers. Who pays whom? The one group who seem more deserving than the rest of us are the British, who ended slavery, fought the slave trade worldwide, and were still paying to end slavery as recently as 2015. That means most Britons still living today.

Surely it is they who deserve reparations. 

The interviewer suggests the Koh-I-Noor diamond should be returned “either to India or to South Africa.” But a half-dozen countries in total claim the diamond. They all say it was stolen from them by one of the others. So whom to “give it back” to? England obtained it by a peace treaty, in return for other concessions. If it is returned to India, other elements of that treaty must properly also be renegotiated. In effect, then, it must be bought back. And what if some other country wants to offer Britain more for it?

The interviewee even blames the British Empire for the Caribbean’s sovereign debts, and for climate change.

I doubt any of that sovereign debt was racked up by the colonial authorities. I doubt the British Empire had much effect on greenhouse gases today.

It all reminds me of an old Yiddish joke. A couple of Nazis stop a Jew in the street, and challenge him.

“Who is responsible for Germany’s problems?”

The Jew knows they want an excuse for a beating.

“The Jews,” he answers. “And the bicycle riders.”

“Why the bicycle riders?”

“Why the Jews?”

The answer is simple: because, like the British, they are envied.

Postcolonial Poverty

 

With the death of Queen Elizabeth, much is inevitably being said of the evils of the British Empire.

It is an interesting fact that Columbus discovered the New World the same year that the Spanish finally expelled the Moors. In other words, Spain began its greatest, most glorious era the very year it slipped the yoke of colonization itself.

The Dutch repeated the trick: they built an overseas empire just as they were casting off the Spanish yoke in turn.

The Jews, we know, are notably successful. Within living memory, they were hunted and killed throughout Europe.

In 1930, under the British Empire, India was responsible for 6.42% of world GDP. Five years after independence, it was down to 3.8%. In 2010, it was at 4.2%; it has risen in the last few years to 7.19%.

In other words, places like Africa and South Asia cannot blame their present poverty on having been oppressed three generations ago. Modern American blacks cannot blame their present poverty on slavery a century and a half ago. It does not work like that.

Freedom at Midnight

 

Today marks India’s Independence Day, which friend Xerxes considers the end of empire and the beginning of the era of decolonization.

I think he’s off by a couple of centuries or so. I’d pick July 4, 1776. Not just because that date marked the independence of 13 former colonies, but because the USA then inspired and sponsored decolonization generally. Soon after, most of the nations of the Western Hemisphere declared their independence. I believe Canadian or Australian independence was also inevitable due to the American model. That’s a large portion of the world to overlook.

Moreover, the fundamental revolutionary principle, “no taxation without representation,” if applied anywhere, makes empire impossible. It’s not an empire, or a colony, if everyone gets the vote.

The nations thus formed, on the American model, therefore further refused themselves to have empires or colonies.

The next most important date in the history of decolonization was January 8, 1918. This is when US President Wilson declared his Fourteen Points, which he was more or less able to impose at the WWI peace conferences. This dismantled the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires, another huge swath of the world. Ireland soon broke away from the British Empire. The Korean independence movement formed. The dissolution of remaining empires would have to wait, but the philosophical foundation had been laid. This is the novel idea that political boundaries should correspond to ethnic boundaries---the nation state. This made little sense for kingdoms; more for republics and democracies. When former German colonies were divided among the victors, they were assigned as League of Nations “mandates,” not as sovereign territory. Eventual independence was now assumed—for all colonies.

August 15, 1947, was just the biggest single colony to go.

But the British Raj itself did not end prior Indian independence. When the British arrived, India was under the control of the Mughals, from Uzbekistan. Empire and colonialism was not a European invention. It was the universal norm from ancient Mesopotamia until 1776, or even until Wilson’s Fourteen Points. It is the nation state, decolonialization, and democracy, and not empire, that is Europe’s historic contribution. Or rather, Europe’s and America’s.

Wilson’s ethnic nation states too have brought their problems. The nation state, after all, has given us Nazi Germany, the Young Turks, much strife at partition in India, and similar strife elsewhere—one might mention Ireland, Cyprus, Palestine, Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Burma, Timor Leste, … it is an almost endless list. The EU can be seen as an attempt to return to some of the benefits of Empire. So too NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Were it not democratic, modern India would still be an empire. It incorporates disparate ethnic groups, of disparate languages and cultures, under one government. So too for Canada, were it not democratic. Democracy is the key, not division into ethnic states--national ghettos.

Regime-Change Wars

A 19th Century British political cartoon.

I like the sincerity of Tulsi Gabbard. I believe she would be the strongest candidate for the Democrats against Donald Trump. And I think she is being treated dishonestly by a corrupt Democratic Party establishment and media. 

But what about the merits of her central issue, ending American involvement in “regime-change wars”?

She has a point in international law, or what international law said until Kosovo. Until then, intervening in another country’s internal politics, no matter what, was considered unprovoked aggression.

But then there was the Rwandan holocaust, and opinion shifted to holding France morally responsible for not intervening.

I at first resisted this new principle, that there was an obligation upon other nations to intervene in defense of human rights. I was, on reflection, wrong.

This, after all, is the same moral principle as our obligation to intervene if we see someone being raped or stabbed or beaten up. “None so guilty as the innocent bystander.”

So it follows that America, because it has the capability, has the moral obligation to intervene against any regime that is flagrantly violating the human rights of either its own or some other people. It is not okay to gas Jews. It is not okay to stand aside and let it happen. Sorry, Tulsi.

I believe Gabbard sincerely sees it differently, for the simple reason that she is a Hindu.

Hinduism or Buddhism can endlessly tolerate injustice without a moral obligation to intervene because of the doctrine of karma. If someone is being raped or stabbed or otherwise viciously mistreated, if some group is being systematically wiped doubt, it is no doubt just reward for some terrible thing they have done in a past life. No injustice is possible; no cause for us to get involved.

I leave the reader to decide how they feel about this stance; but from it follows the conclusion, for example, that having a criminal justice system is illegitimate.

Gabbard and her supporters would no doubt go on to argue that recent “regime change” wars have not just been costly, but have not worked. They will cite Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have actually had several recent case studies, since this new doctrine has become accepted: Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.

In the first case, the Western allies stayed on to establish stability, and, after some years, Kosovo has emerged as a functioning multi-party democracy. In Kosovo, it seems that the “regime change” war did work. One might also mention the postwar experience with Germany, Japan, or Italy, although WWII was not just a “regime change” war.

In the second case, Iraq, some stability did seem to have been achieved, after some years of struggle, then lost by what looks like a premature US departure. After some limited re-engagement, Iraq looks more stable. In Afghanistan, relatively low-level conflict continues. In these two cases, long-term results cannot really be determined.

Appalled by the cost of these two interventions, however, when things then turned nasty internally in Libya, the West tried a different tack: go in, take out the regime, and leave. This is, to be honest, what I too thought would be the better policy. You can lead a nation to democracy, but you cannot force them to be democrats. It’s a contradiction in terms.

But this approach seems to have turned out worse: Libya remains in chaos, and human rights abuses remain common.

Disappointed again, when Syria then went south, the West reverted to the old, pre-Rwanda approach: do nothing.

And this has worked out worst of all: an ongoing holocaust of historic proportions, a refugee crisis flooding the borders of Europe, and the intervention of other foreign powers less friendly to human rights: Russia, Iran. As none have the strength to force a resolution, conflict looks to continue indefinitely.

So we’ve tried all the possible approaches, and in terms of defending human rights, the option of intervention, however costly, is visibly the best.

Americans, of course, are historically tempted to ignore the rest of the world’s problems, protected they are by oceans vast and deep. That may or may not be wise—but it is not the moral way.

Those alert to history may realize that Britain, in the nineteenth century, faced the same choice. Protecting the human rights of foreigners was actually the sentiment upon which was built much of the British Empire. Britain spent a lot of "blood and treasure," as the modern clichéd usage goes, ending the slave trade, thuggery, piracy, suttee, the caste system, banditry, endless local conflicts, and the like.

Honesty compels us to admit that, no so uncommonly, colonialism is actually a good idea.

Vietnam and Afghanistan

The way we were...

Saw a documentary on the Vietnam War last night. It is remarkable how memories of Vietnam, once such a pressing issue, at least to those of us who were young, have faded. For a time, the trauma of Vietnam seemed overwhelming, and the end of American domination in the world. It was, the Americans thought, the first war they ever lost. God had deserted them; or they had deserted God. When Reagan a decade later send a few thousand marines into Grenada, the world gasped at his recklessness. After Vietnam? Unthinkable!

And now Afghanistan has dragged on as long, and nobody notices.

My opinion of Vietnam has not changed; not since I read the Pentagon Papers in 1971. I don't think the Americans were wrong in any moral sense to go in. It would have been better for the South Vietnamese had they won. But it was foolish. Just look on a map. First off, they could never invade North Vietnam, or, the Korean War informed them, they would be engaged in a land war in Asia with China. That would be the world's worst-case scenario for American arms, it being a distant sea power. As a result, they were committed to a purely defensive war; they could not win, only hold the line. Unless the North Vietnamese decided to give up, they had to lose.

Worse, South Vietnam is little more than one extended border. Insurgents could slip over that border at any time, at any point. No part of the country could ever be secured. The only way the US could fix that problem was to invade and conquer Laos and Cambodia, which would be a clear act of aggression against neutral countries, a flagrant violation of international law, and would damage US prestige as badly as or worse than losing the war.

All of this was obvious before the US went in.

I do not blame LBJ for going in; he was already committed, and to pull out would have meant a huge loss of American prestige. I do not think you can blame Kennedy either. His hands were similarly tied by prior commitments. You can blame Eisenhower. First, at Suez, he kicked the slats out from under the French and British empires. He forced them out of the game, and so out of Indochina. Then he committed the US to preserving the status quo under which the French left. He put America's head in the guillotine, and pulled the cord. It just took a few years for the blade to fall, and by then he was out of office. Anything after that would have been a grievous loss of American prestige, with perhaps disastrous consequences: the domino effect everyone worried about. The US would have shown itself an unreliable ally.

So why doesn't Afghanistan provoke the same public angst as Vietnam did?

It was almost as obviously dumb from the start. Afghan conditions defeated the Soviet Union, when it was the second-greatest military power on Earth. And a heck of a lot closer for resupply than the US. They defeated the British, when they were the greatest military power on Earth. And a heck of a lot closer to their base in India. Why, other than insane hubris, would the US (and NATO) attempt the same folly? Afghanistan is mountainous—perfect for guerilla warfare, so good for it that local governments have never been able to maintain control. Back in the Sixties, Afghanistan was still famous, as it had been throughout history, for bandits. The roads were never secure. Its natural state is constant total war. It has no seacoast—a huge logistical problem for a sea power like the US. And this also means that it is all border, through which insurgents can always pass in and out. The long border with Pakistan works just as did the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And NATO cannot invade Pakistan to do anything about it. 

The American war aim, back in 2001, was to punish the Taliban for refusing to hand over Osama Bin Laden and for hosting Al Qaeda bases. That mission was accomplished within two months. The US should then have handed the reins of power, such as they were, to their local allies, the Northern Alliance, and pulled out. This is how the British or French used to do it back in the days of empire; this is good old “gunboat diplomacy.” Send in a mobile force, burn down the Summer Palace, and withdraw in good order. Lesson taught. If they go back and do it again, go in and do it again.

US White House after Royal Navy raid, War of 1812.

Anything else is, if you will pardon the term, colonialism. You really do not have to stay and take over the country, do you?

But Vietnam was a much bigger conflict: it required the draft, a lot of unhappy involuntary soldiers, and a lot more casualties. Afghanistan is far less fierce.

In fact, it is so relatively placid that there may be real, material reasons for NATO to want to stay, even if the conflict is unwinnable. It might still be useful as a live-fire training and testing ground for NATO arms and tactics. In case of and more serious conflict, having forces recently battle tested is a huge advantage.

Unfortunately, real people are dying. I'd still pull out. With a strike force waiting on Diego Garcia.

Did Darwin Do It?

Thesis: in the Modernist and Postmodern periods—say, 1918 to present—Western culture in general has been undergoing a period of depression. Or rather, first depression—Modernism—and then acedia, willful spiritual sloth--Postmodenism.

I anticipate an obvious response: look at all the progress we have made in the Twentieth Century. Do you really want to go back to Victorian times?

No, I do not. The issue is self-evidently not to go back into the past, since that is intrinsically impossible. It is to reconnect with specific vital things we have lost, and still had then. To that extent, and only to that extent, we should want the future to resemble this past.

You have lost your watch. If you take some time trying to find it, does that imply that you want to go back to the time before you lost your watch? And you are foolish and unrealistic to do so?

Acedia.

Specifically, what we have lost is our general and confident social and cultural connection with the Good, the distinction between right and wrong; with the True; and with the Beautiful. The three things that give life meaning.

But, you will say, what about all the wonderful social progress we have made in the Twentieth Century? What about sexual equality, the Civil Rights movement, the end of colonialism, the end of laws against homosexuality?

Let’s grant that these are all good things. However, in terms of social progress, do these things compare with what happened under the old cultural standards during the 19th century? Are they not, by comparison, fairly trivial? The ending of slavery worldwide—something that had been the norm throughout the centuries; the development of democratic government in France, the US, and, by mid-century, pretty much throughout Europe? How’s that for a record?

Colonialism was big, true, but this was not a new thing; it was not something the 19th century was responsible for, but something it did not correct. Empires have been the standard form of government everywhere for millennia, after all. One could also make the case that those European empires were, on the whole, more benevolent than those of the past.

And is nationalism—the alternative doctrine—such a self-evident value? It has itself led to some nasty things, like ethnic cleansing and Nazism and the Second World War.

Nor is it nearly as clear that the changes in relations between men and women during the 20th century have been as substantial and as clearly of benefit to women as those during the 19th. Votes for women happened just over the line into the Modern era, by our set boundaries, but it was the culmination of a long process. Philosophically, the whole thing happened over the Victorian era, starting with Mary Wollstonecraft. The vote was fairly symbolic by comparison. How low was the status of women in a time symbolized and ruled over by Queen Victoria, all of whose perceived sentiments became informal social convention?

One might even say that, since these great blows were truck, Victorian blows, getting the vote and since ending slavery, it has all gotten a bit confused. As though we had since lost much of our sense of purpose and direction. We fought segregation in the Sixties. Now we fight hard to protect segregation for native people. We fought to end colonialism, then we fought nationalism, now we try to form large tariff-free zones, recreating empire.

Gee, it is as if we are changing course with every wind that blows. As if we are sailing without a rudder or an anchor. Or without clear principles.

At the same time, to balance any claimed accomplishments of the Twentieth Century and Modernism, we really have to throw into the balance as well some other important claimed social advances of the Modern period: Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of people they willfully and needlessly killed. And the hundreds of millions more lives they blighted or destroyed. These were all also Modernism social “improvements.” No need to mention abortion, so perhaps we won’t.

Next question: what went so off kilter?

I once thought it was the trauma of the First World War. But no, that does not fit. Truth is, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is plainly a Modernist work, well before that war. That war was a result of Modernism, not a cause.

I think, awkward as it seems to say so, it was Darwin. Darwin, and, to a lesser extent, Marx. But Marx came after, and very much built on, Darwin. As did Freud. It took time for their influence to work through the wider culture, but here is where the unravelling began.

People miss the real issue by saying Darwin was threatening to the religious culture because his theory seemed to disprove the existence of God. It did not. No doubt some wanted to believe so, but this is hardly apparent. Never occurred to the Catholic Church, for example, to think so. It might have weakened one of the most obvious arguments for God’s existence, the “watchmaker” argument from design, but if so, that hardly amounts to a disproof. Nor is even that so clear: if we believe that God is behind all the other laws of nature, and does not fling the lightning bolts personally, why is it a special problem to believe he is behind a process of evolution through natural selection?

There is, at first sight, a problem with Darwin’s word “random” in “random mutation.” If it is truly random, then God is out of it. But it is a principle of science, as much as of theology, that nothing in nature is truly random. That word used to seem to me to be unacceptable, but it is not if understood in the sense “mutations not appearing specifically for greater survival value.” And this is its only possible meaning in scientific terms.

No, the real problem with Darwinism—and this was what people like William Jennings Bryan apparently objected to at the time—was its corrosive effect on morality. Darwinian nature, as Tennyson put it, was “red in tooth and claw.” Darwin conceived the law of the jungle as an eternal war for survival, “survival of the fittest.” Given that God was indeed behind nature, this apparently gave divine sanction to pure selfishness. Or else there was not God, and again we had full sanction for selfishness. Life, properly understood by the woke, was a matter of kill or be killed. You try to be nice to your fellow man, and you’re just a loser.

You can trace the genesis of the First World War to exactly this concept. This was how Germany was seeing the world. They had to grab their chance, now, because in a few decades Russia was going to exceed them vastly in population and close the technological gap. They had to conquer and destroy Russia now, or, in a few years, Russia would destroy and conquer them. Kill or be killed. We are, after all, only weasels fighting in a hole.

And of course, more obviously, you can trace the genesis of the Second World War to it as well. A reading of Mein Kampf makes it plain that Hitler's guiding principle was Darwinism.

This has ben fudged recently by inventing the concept of “Social Darwinism,” as, supposedly, a gross misapplication of a scientific concept where it does not belong.

Perhaps. But if so, Darwin is himself guilty of this very misunderstanding, for he explicitly applied his theory to human societies in his followup to “The Origin of Species,” “The Descent of Man.” A bit hard to find the clear separation here.

Communism is a more complicated example, because it traces back more directly to Marx rather than Darwin. But it is the same issue at base: conventional morality was defenestrated, and society conceived of as a life and death evolutionary struggle of class against class.

One can indeed even make the argument that the actual evils of European colonialism came not from conventional Victorian morality at all, but from Darwin. It was when Darwin’s concept of the survival of the fittest was superimposed on the enterprise, and conventional morality was jettisoned. This is what led to “subject races” being seen as lesser beings. Surely that is exactly what Joseph Conrad is saying in Heart of Darkness. A woman at home imagines Empire as a benevolent matter of helping the Africans to develop. But in reality, it is a case of “painted sepulchres.” The Africans are instead being lied to and ruthlessly exploited for gain, on Darwinian principles.

So the underlying problem of modern life is that we have lost our connection to morality. To the clear distinction between right and wrong.

And what could be more obvious, as the wild parade of postmodernism tramps on outside our window, that this is what it is all about?

The Case for Colonialism

Former Queen’s prof (now at Portland State) Dr. Bruce Gilley has been summarily removed from Queens’ Centre for International and Defense Policy for publishing a paper titled “The Case for Colonialism.” Apparently arguing that colonialism can be moral in some circumstances is now intolerable.

But of course it can, or at least a reasonable argument can be made. Kosovo, for example, was a colonialist intervention. Bosnia was. Such interventions to prevent human rights abuses are not rare in the annals of European 19th century colonialism. More often than we are told, the intervention of the European power was largely humanitarian in intent. It was a matter of peacekeeping, or of preventing a holocaust.

Even when this is not the case, much colonialism can be compared to the sound corporate policy, when a business is not doing well, of bringing in new management from outside. It works in business; it works as well in government.

Of course, at the time that Europe was colonizing the rest of the world, European culture was also significantly more technologically advanced than any of its colonies. The colonial authority introduced this new technology, improving living standards: railroads were laid, canals dug, new industries developed, schools and hospitals founded. Sure, European firms profited in building and managing these things; but so did the local inhabitants.

The case against colonialism is that it infantilizes people; makes the colonized dependent and strips them of initiative. And this is an important issue.

But really—the idea that different ethnicities should be sovereign and govern themselves is a new idea, dating from about 1917 or so and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Before that, everywhere, colonization was the universal norm. It is, moreover, arguably racist to insist that there is something wrong with it—that government ought always to be on the basis of race or ethnicity. And this position that governments must be ethnically-based is disastrous for minorities everywhere.

Colonialism in Vogue

Condé Nast has recently announced the shuttering of the print edition of Teen Vogue magazine.

This piece explains why. And why journalism in general is in trouble.

Teen Vogue was supposed to be about fashion. Teenaged girls bought it to learn about the latest in fashion. Instead they often got stuff like this. Stuff they were suppose to pay for and read whether they liked it or not.

Not only is it irrelevant to their known interests. It is also telling them that they, or at least their presumably European ancestors, were bad people.

Worse, it is full of falsehoods. It is misinformation.

Begin with the subhead: “There were two major waves of colonialism in recorded history.”

They mean the colonization of the Americas, and the colonization of Africa.

No, empire and colonialism has been the standard system of government for most of mankind for all of recorded history; since ancient Mesopotamia. The nation-state is the new idea; and it emerged first Europe.

“Colonial logic asserted that a place did not exist unless white people had seen it and testified to its existence.”

An absurdity which, of course, nobody ever believed. And speaking of “white” people here, ith reference to the early exploration of the Americas, is an anachronism. “White” became a meaningful concept only much more recently, and only in some places, most notably the US. “Race” was not an issue before Darwin and modern biology. The issue in the case of America was that the existence of this continent was not in any known written source. It is similar to the situation today when some new plant or animal species is “discovered.” Nobody, then or now, ever thought that the thing did not exist before it was known to science, or that people living locally did not know about it.

“Yet, in many history books, Europe’s expansion is remembered as exploration”

That is exactly what it was, in the first instance—exploration.

“The first indigenous people he [Columbus] came across were the Taíno, who accounted for the majority of people living on the island of Hispaniola (which is now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic). They had a highly evolved and complex culture.”

That is at best a matter of opinion. Columbus's own first impression on encountering them was “they were a people very poor in everything.”

Speaking of the colonization of Africa, and the borders that resulted, Teen Vogue explains, “These artificial borders split cultural groups.”

True, they did. But left unsaid is that any attempt to draw a political map of Africa on ethnic grounds would have produced no stable borders at all, and no viable national economies. The thing about tribal culture is that ethnic groups are small, not exclusive to any one particular plot of land, and tend to migrate. Any borders, not just these ones, would have mixed and matched cultural groups.

“Indigenous political, economic, and social institutions were decimated, as were traditional ways of life, which were deemed inferior.”

Both British and French policy throughout the continent was actually to leave all existing power structures and leaders in place, and work through them. But, offered a better tool, people will use it. Cars work better for their purpose than donkeys, and TVs work better than jungle drums. The obvious reason for the decline in traditional African cultural practices was that the traditional ways of life actually were inferior. Yet this possibility is not even entertained.

“Among the most brutal of colonial regimes was that of Belgium under King Leopold II, known as 'the Butcher of Congo.' His well-documented acts of violence against the Congolese people resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths.”

This leaves the impression that the conduct of Leopold in the Congo was not too far off the mainstream, and can serve as an example of European colonization more generally. In fact, as the term “Butcher of the Congo” suggests, it was a scandal and considered an atrocity of historic proportions at the time. Belgium was forced, under intense diplomatic pressure from other European nations, to correct the situation. Citing it as an example is like citing the War in Bosnia as an example of modern European politics.

“Belgium, like a lot of the white Western world, can directly attribute much of its wealth and prosperity to the exploitation and deaths of indigenous people of color.”

No. The thing about European colonialism, and largely what led to its downfall, is that it was a money-losing proposition for the Imperial powers. Just as its Communist empire was, a few generations later, to the Soviet Union. Eventually, they, like Britain, France, or Portugal before them, could no longer afford it. Empire instead was considered a burden and a duty, done, if not purely for idealistic reasons, for national prestige.

Speaking of the first settlers in America, Teen Vogue reports:

“The majority did not want peace and harmony between cultures; they wanted the land for themselves. They did not want to share the abundant resources; they wanted to generate wealth to fill their own pockets.”

This might possibly have been true for some individuals outside of Disney cartoons. It was not official policy; both British and French authorities did all they could think of to establish and preserve peace and harmony with the native inhabitants. There was no good reason for conflict over resources. The presence of each group was beneficial to the other. There was plenty of land for everyone. Even aside from the fact that farming was a far more efficient use of the land than the traditional hunting and gathering known to the Indians, the Indian population had already been decimated by disease, and was not even using much of the land for traditional hunting. In any case, trading furs with the Europeans was far more profitable.

And very few of the early settlers were thinking in terms of wealth or of filling their pockets. These were the poorest folk in the Europe of the time, a time of periodic starvation. They were only concerned with surviving the next winter.

“Most had no respect for indigenous cultures or histories; they wanted to enforce their own instead.”

Just the reverse is true, in North America. The literary record shows a consistent idealization of native Indian cultures among European writers, from Montesquieu and Rousseau (the “noble savage” idea) through the Romantics, Washington Irving, Zane Grey, and the Western movie genre to the present day.

“These colonizers did not care that land was considered sacred and communal. Most believed that everything, including the earth, was meant to be bought and sold.”

Indians had little concept of land ownership at any level, and for good reason: they did not much use it. It was of little importance or interest to them, not being farmers. It was just something they passed through. Far from being considered sacred, it was considered only vaguely and provisionally there. The reality was the dream. There was no “communal ownership.” There was no ownership at all, and different communities passed often through the same lands. They no more owned the land than gypsies do. For this reason, they did not think of buying or selling it, just as we do not think of buying or selling air.

The idea of human stewardship over land comes with settled agriculture. The idea of human stewardship over “nature” is from the Old Testament. It is not found in most other cultures.

“The Europeans who first settled along the East Coast of the United States believed it was their Manifest Destiny, or God-granted right, to claim territory for themselves and their posterity.“

Nope. “Manifest Destiny” refers to a later (19th century) idea among Americans that the US was destined to stretch to the Pacific. The phrase does not imply any “God-given right.” Nor did this have to do with taking land from indigenous people. It was a question of acquiring territory from other European powers. In any American or British lands, Indian sovereignty had already been ceded by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Treaty of Niagara of 1764.

“The legacy of colonialism continues to manifest in obvious ways: Many of the world’s poorest countries are former European colonies.”

True, but on the whole, their relative poverty has generally become worse since the Europeans left, this was usually at least four generations ago. In the same four generations, uncounted immigrant families have risen from poverty to wealth in North America. Why the difference? At the same time, some of the poorest countries in the world today are ones that lack this experience of being European colonies: Afghanistan, for example, is the poorest country in Asia. Ethiopia is close to the poorest in Africa. Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, threw off the foreign yoke way back in 1804. Before most European countries did.

Why do magazines like Teen Vogue print such garbage? I expect mostly because it is easy. An article like this takes no reporting or interviewing anyone; and the author has evidently not bothered with much book research. One book is cited, and it is a commonly assigned undergrad read published in 1972. This is the sort of thing that can be written off the top of someone's head, simply from established prejudices. Political motives are probably purely secondary; being “politically correct,” suiting a political agenda, is probably only a useful justification for the laziness. With the right politics, you do not have to actually do the assignment. From the point of view of the assigning editor, similarly, with the right politics, you do not have to come up with any novel article ideas, and assignment is easy.

This is what comes from making journalists “professionals”: it becomes journalism for the convenience of the journalist, not for the wants or needs of the reader.

The Captains and the Kings Depart

It is okay to admit to some nostalgia for the British Empire?

One of my students, a Pakistani, asked me recently how I felt about it. It was a difficult question. On the one hand, I was raised in Canada on my grandfather's old boys' books, published in the early years of the 20th century. They made the British Empire seem a glorious thing. On the other hand, I am ethnically Irish, and my grandmother never let me forget that the Irish were treated very badly by the English.

All that being so, however, perhaps it leaves me as fair a judge as we can find. And I do feel some nostalgia.

Is empire wrong? Not necessarily. It is wrong if you believe in the primacy, the essential rightness, of the nation state. But the nation state is, at its core, to be perfectly frank, racist. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were the ultimate nation states. Isn't a multi-national state morally better? Does it not better conform with the universal brotherhood of man?

By the same token, if the person heading your state is of a different ethniciy or race than you, is that a problem? Only if you are racist. Only if you have a problem with, say, President Barack Obama. Or Queen Elizabeth II, ethnically German. Or the Scottish Gordon Brown.

Certainly, empire was good for human prosperity and human progress. Expanded, open trade makes everyone richer. Open trade in ideas makes us all the wiser. As The Economist once pointed out, only in very recent years has China recovered the same portion of world trade it held in 1900. The notion of the white people “looting” the dark races was, for the most part, a myth, though there were some exceptions. The foreigners made their profits, but the local workmen got their pay, and the local merchants and entrepreneurs their prices and their contracted fees. The British kept the peace, dealt fairly ont he whole, and they left some very fine infrastructure, infrastructure that is often still relied upon, a half-century or more after the last foreigners left.

What of the shame of the local people, being treated as if they were wards? Fair enough; but the same argument ought to hold equally against foreign aid. Let them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, then?

Of course, an empire is not a democracy. There is that criticism, surely?

Agreed; but I think it is also objectively fair to say that not all societies can handle a democracy. I recall the Saudi Ambassador to the US explaining this to Bill O'Reilly, on the latter's show, and being hooted down by the host. I knew he was right, but knew I would once have agreed with O'Reilly. I heard the same argument from a Vietnamese neutralist back during the US-Vietnam War, and doubted him.

But, having lived in various places around the world since, I now believe it—just, I might add, as Thomas Jefferson did. A democracy needs, first and foremost, a responsible ruling elite who are prepared to enter into a gentleman's agreement not to abuse power once they attain it, and to peacefully pass it on to someone else when the system requires it. That needs a huge amount of trust—trust, for example, that they are not themselves immediately going to be imprisoned or executed by their successors.

Without that, no democracy will last past the first fair elections; as history has repeatedly demonstrated. And, failing democracy, a disinterested, but essentially honest, foreign ruling authority may be the best remaining alternative.

In fact, an empire, acting as a court and police force of last resort, can be the ideal guarantor of democracy. It would have been best, perhaps, if the British Empire had worked harder in this direction. Nevertheless, it may have sown some seeds. And I suspect the fundamental insight was right, that the societies over which Britain held control were not ready for democracy for the most part.

India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Malta, and others emerged from the Empire as functioning democracies. Had the Empire lasted longer, perhaps more would have as well. It may not be coincidence that there seems to be a correlation between successful democracy post-Empire, and how long Britain held control over the territory. The oldest colonies have experienced the most successful transition.

That being so, the British Empire might, I think, in the end, have taken another course. A course that was actually proposed by many at the beginning of the 20th century. It might have slowly evolved into an international federation, like the EU, with nations becoming full partners in an Imperial Parliament once they had established their democratic traditions.

Perhaps it is for that lost opportunity that I feel most nostalgic. Had it come to pass, we surely would have avoided much human suffering: in the partition of India, in Idi Amin's Uganda, in apartheid South Africa, in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, in the Sri Lankan civil war, in the Yemeni civil war, in Saddam's Iraq, in the partition of Cyprus—even, perhaps, in the ongoing tragedy of Palestine.

It would be a very different world.

And wouldn't it, frankly, be a better world?

The Evil Legacy of European Colonialism

Dear Abbot:

The Third World is poor today because of the legacy of colonialism. While the charges of corruption and incompetence are, in many cases, true, let us not forget what created the conditions which gave rise to such regimes: subjugation and colonization by European governments.

Guilty White Liberal


Dear Guilty:

Certainly not because of a legacy of colonialism. Let’s look at that.

Suppose that European colonialism was purely exploitative, and not, as it was generally thought at the time, a type of foreign aid. Even so—when did it end? India gained independence in 1947. Qatar and the Gulf States gained independence in 1972. Let’s split the difference; say that the average former colony of Western Europe in the Third World achieved independence about 47 years ago, circa 1960.

Now, that does seem like a fair length of time to make good any lingering unwanted colonial legacy. That’s two generations of leadership.

Compare the postwar experience of Germany and Japan. They lost a total war, unconditionally. They were more or less reduced to rubble. Surely no colonial oppression, however severe, could have been more devastating.

Now count 47 years forward from this point: that’s 1992. Both were in fairly good shape by then, weren’t they? So is it reasonable to blame a claimed exploitation two generations ago in other cases?

Nor does the German and Japanese case seem to be an artifact of a particularly generous peace settlement. The same had been done before. Japan’s colonization of Korea was, by most accounts, one of the harshest of colonial regimes. It included an attempt to wipe out the Korean language, for example, and live medical experiments on Koreans. Nevertheless, wasn’t South Korea doing fairly well by 1992? France lost the Franco-Prussian War badly in 1871. Paris was starving, and France was charged a deliberately exploitative indemnity. Nevertheless, France pulled itself sufficiently together to stage two world expositions, erect the Eiffel Tower as the world’s tallest building, become the acknowledged center of world culture, and come back and defeat Germany, by 1918—47 years later. Germany, similarly crippled and stripped of its resources as a result of that war, in a notoriously rapacious peace settlement, came back to conquer France by 1940, and indeed made a serious bid to take over the world—21 years later.

Odd that these other tragically oppressed countries cannot manage the same. Note too, neither Germany, nor France, nor Japan, nor South Korea, are particularly rich in natural resources. Not nearly as rich as, say, the Philippines, Nigeria, Iran, or Zambia.

Now let’s compare culturally similar areas with different experiences of colonialism. Is Ethiopia, not colonized but for a brief period by Italy, doing so much better than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa? No: of the 195 nations tracked by NationMaster for GDP per capita, Ethiopia ranks 192nd. Most African countries, obviously, do better. Similarly, compare the experience of Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Singapore, all former colonies, all ethnically and culturally Chinese, with that of Mainland China, which mostly avoided direct colonization. Singapore: nominal GDP per capita: $26,892. Hong Kong: $25,592. PR China: $1,712. Or, indeed, compare Canada, fully independent only in 1933 by the Statue of Westminster, with any given Latin American country—most having achieved full independence in the early 19th century. Is Canada really doing so much worse than Argentina? Or compare Saudi Arabia with the smaller Gulf States—Saudi achieved independence from Turkey in 1918; the others were held by Britain until the 1970s. Is Saudi in better shape? No; in terms of GDP per capita, it is doing worse, despite having far more oil. Saudi: $13,399 per capita; Qatar: $52,299; UAE, $28,611; Bahrain, $17,773; Kuwait, $31,860.

Frankly, while there were some cases of genuine exploitation, it looks as though most nations colonized by Western European powers last century actually have an advantage over those who were not. Nor should this be surprising. This is just what the European powers thought they were doing, and intended to do, for the most part: to bring peace, order, and good government, to mentor and educate, to facilitate trade, and to build infrastructure. All of this should have been to the benefit of the local population. Empires were commonly thought of not as moneymaking ventures, but as a drain upon the resources of the home country.

Yes, the colonial masters hoped at best to make a profit, but from expanding trade: a large empire was a large free trade area. Free trade is to the benefit of both parties. If it is exploitation, it is an exploitation the rich world has since embraced for themselves, in such new empires as the EU and NAFTA.

Reality check: if the European powers were really in the business of ruthless exploitation, why would Britain pull out of the Persian Gulf in the 1970s, precisely when their tiny charges, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, previously economic basket cases, became fantastically profitable? These are even today small, militarily puny countries. In purely military terms, Britain had it chosen so could still be sitting on the oil and gas reserves of Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE. It would probably have been easier than clinging to the Falklands.

Finally, there was nothing new to most of the nations the Europeans colonized about the experience of colonialism. It is the norm of world history—the nation state is mostly a modern European creation, and itself part of Europe’s legacy to the Third World. Before Europe came, what Third World nations were unified, free and self-governing? Only a handful. China was held by the Manchus—the Manchurians. Hindu India was held by the Muslim Moghuls—the Mongols. The Arab Middle East was held by Turkey. Africa was primarily tribal, but with more powerful tribes often enslaving their neighbours. Consider the history of Israel in the Bible, and realize that it was typical of pre-modern nations generally. The only thing special about their experience of European colonialism is that it, uniquely, ended amicably with their complete freedom.

No—this continuing claim of harmful colonial legacy is a con perpetuated by corrupt ruling classes. It is a scapegoating of foreigners, no more plausible than, no more noble than, and more or less of a piece with Hitler’s scapegoating of the Jews. It is the traditional technique of a bad, oppressive government.

Abbot