Europeans ("Whites") as Scapegoats

A perfect scapegoat should appear to be powerful, but not really be. He or they must appear to be powerful, in order to make it plausible that they are secretly controlling everything and truly responsible for all or much of the world’s evil. But they must not really be very powerful, or it will not be possible to persecute them.

The Jews fit the bill nicely for the Nazis.

Europeans, aka "Whites," often fit the bill today—specifically, the European empires of the last century or two. The whole dogma of “postcolonialism,” currently so popular in the academy, is an elaboration of this particular conspiracy theory. Like most conspiracy theories, the main beneficiaries are those who really are in power; as the Nazis knew well, such theories tend to promote social harmony and acquiescence within the group. The idea that the European period of empire was a unique historical event, which terribly damaged the societies on which it was imposed, allows current regimes and elites everywhere to escape blame for anything.

But the whole idea is absurd. As time marches on, it becomes less and less plausible that current poverty and other undesirable conditions in a given country are really caused by a regime that left power fifty or more years ago. Compare, for example, the condition of Japan or West Germany fifty years after their utter devastation by Fascist misgovernment and lost total war: weren’t they doing fairly well anyway by 1995? So why isn’t Burkina Faso, or Sri Lanka? Can it really all be the fault of the evil French and English? Can they really have been that much more destructive than the Nazis?

The thesis also requires turning history on its head. There was nothing unique about European empire but that Europeans were doing it. Empire and colonialism has been the standard governmental setup for most of the world for the last several thousand years. If five thousand years of being part of one empire or another did not already devastate Libya, for example, it is hard to see how fifty years or so of Italian government did it.

Where Europe stands out, if at all, is in resisting empire. Even as far ago as Greece and Rome, the idea of empire was considered, in the West, somehow illegitimate. This is probably not true of any other part of the world. Far from inventing empire, Europe’s unique contribution has been the invention of the nation-state and of democracy, which ultimately makes empire impossible. That, and the odd notion of the self-determination of ethnic groups.

The two to four hundred years during which Europe expanded imperially were therefore an anomaly, in its larger history. For Asian history, by contrast, it was the norm. So if anyone was changed by it, it must have been Europe. It seems indeed in many cases to have been accidental, not a part of a grand strategy. More a matter of wanting to establish the basic stability needed for trade, and becoming embroiled in local conflicts at local insistence.

That, and an altruistic desire to spread what knowledge the West had acquired. Joseph Conrad, even in his classic criticism of European empire, Heart of Darkness, makes this clear. The West, in its own mind, was in the business of empire in order to help the rest of the world. It was considered foreign aid.

This, too, is a very Western concept: the odd notion, as old as the New Testament, that when you possess some important knowledge or information, the thing to do is to share it as widely as possible. This is, surely, remarkable generosity. The more obvious and selfish thing to do would be to preserve secrecy, in order to benefit from the information personally in competition with your neighbour.

Springing from this we get, among other things, modern science. It is far from intuitive that one should publish one’s experimental results or discoveries, making them open to all comers. European “imperialism” was of a piece with this. It bore within itself the assumption that the “subject” peoples, once the knowledge transfer had been completed, would begin managing their own affairs. And this, remarkably, is just what the Europeans did. For most non-Europeans, this, self-determination, was a completely new experience, not a return to some pre-colonial norm. European “imperialism” was, both in theory and mostly in practice, anti-imperialism.

I do not mean to suggest that empire was always benevolent. It was not benevolent for Ireland, or for Poland, or for the Belgian Congo. It was not benevolent under the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese.

But just because that was so, it is important to make the distinction. There is a big difference, say, between the colonial experience of Canada and of Korea; and if we lose that distinction, we lose the distinction between good and evil.