Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven (2008)
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Teach a man to fish and he'll not be hungry for the rest of his life.
Force a man and his friends to catch fish for you in big fish farms for your cronies back home to enjoy, but don't teach them how to run fish farms, instead make them dependent on your farm destroying their previous way of life, create some wars and kill a couple of millions, then exit leaving behind a vacuum and you get to write smug, pseudo-provocative pieces in time magazine bemoaning the white man's burden.
Allow the state to own and manage natural resources and make African dictators undeservedly wealthy (and their citizens poor and unproductive).
And it is not like whites invented wars. Africa was full of wars before whites came. So you can't pretend war was some sort invention brought to Africa by whites.
However, The facts are what they are, and if you're white, no need to feel guilty, but please be more considerate in the present and the future.
And please, before you feel the need to explain how the European colonialists civilized the savages, which is all you're saying with that comment about the iron age, consider, in keeping with our fiction theme, the Prime Directive, it's justifications, it's implications and how it applies to our life as human beings on this planet.
Crime is bad, war is bad. Sure.
But to bring it up in this way, as a way to say "see! it's not just us!" is just a distraction that has very little to do with the fact that a member of the armed police killed a man for no reason, or that the Europeans colonized the entire continent with disastrous consequences for the population.
I find the "iron age" comments to be especially hilarious given that they completely ignore African civilizations that gave much to Europe: such as the vaunted Ancient Egyptians, to much less well known Malians, famous for their gold routes and libraries, to the Ethiopians, who represented "bastions of Christianity" when Christianity was still being repressed in the Roman Empire.
And the point of my reference was to show that Africa was not this idyllic utopia before Europeans came. So I oppose your viewpoint that colonialism have been any more disastrous than the normal state of affairs in Africa would have been.
That's not at all what this discussion is about. The racist charge above was, and let me quote:
> Africa today would in large part still be in the iron age.
To charge that this racist view about the ability of the inhabitants of the African continent is racist, says nothing about idyllic utopias. That you seem to think that any challenge to that racist view, is aloof and removed from reality, shows that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Or you're just really, really sloppy with your argument...
And to explain my analogy, as a service to you, I will quote to you from Wikipedia [0]
> Analogy [..] is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another
In this case the "analogue or source" was the fact that whenever there is a well publicized fatal shooting of a black person, there are people in the US media who go and look up if the killed person had a criminal record, and the publish it. This despite the fact, that this has nothing to do with the incident at hand. Someone who has been stopped by police 32 times and has been to jail for a year for theft, can, under the laws that govern the US, not be executed on the street by an officer of the law because their tail-light is out. It's completely and utterly irrelevant, whether the dead person was a criminal or not. That has nothing to do with the fact that the police executed him for having a broken taillight. To bring up his criminal history anyhow, means that the person doing so is looking for other justification for the execution in order to discredit the victim.
The "information or meaning" here is: The action of the perpetrator which we are discussing is logically unconnected to the reputation of the victim. Therefore the reputation of the victim is irrelevant, and to bring it up means you have ulterior motives.
The other subject we are talking about takes the "information or meaning" and applies it to the subject we are talking about. In out case the action is colonialism, Europeans are the perpetrator,and the victim is the African people. Bringing up any wrongs that happened on the African country to try and justify colonialism is logically incorrect, and thus, hints at a different motive.
This is how an analogy works: You take a situation familiar to the addressee, lift the principle governing the situation, and use it to explain a situation less familiar to the addressee.
This has very little to do with my personal "troubles", but rather, it's a rhetorical device employed to make a point.
If you're gonna be racist on the internet, at least don't fail at simple logic.
"In 1988, Rhodes University professor Julian Cobbing advanced a controversial new hypothesis on the rise of the Zulu state; he contended the accounts of the Mfecane were a self-serving, constructed product of apartheid politicians and historians. According to Cobbing, apartheid historians had mischaracterised the Mfecane as a period of internally induced black-on-black destruction. Instead, Cobbing argued that the roots of the conflicts could be found exclusively in the labour needs of the Portuguese slave traders operating out of Delagoa Bay, in modern-day Mozambique, and of the British colonists in the Cape. The resulting pressures led to massive displacement, famine, and war in the interior, allowing later Afrikaner settlers to seize control of most land.[11] Among those involved were European adventurers such as Nathaniel Isaacs (who was later accused of slave trading)[12]"
Do you understand that Cobbin's claim is that existing understanding of the event is revisionist? That is different from saying that HIS hypothesis is revisionist.
I think you do understand these things; it's just that you put blinders on in certain situations. Don't worry -- I do it too.
I can't let this pass. This is incredibly, crazily racist.
Africa is a vast continent with hundreds of millions of people. There are more middle-class people in Africa than North America, did you know that?
Your second point might make sense if Africa had middle class before Europeans arrived. The fact that there is civilization there after colonization doesn't in any way refute the original point.
I personally don't know whether Africa was on track to have civilization without colonialism (other people commenting that 'people around the world got there' is nonsense as most societies throughout history didn't get civilization on their own). But I detest trying to shut someone up merely because you don't find their thinking agreeable.
This is your imagination. Challenging someone's ideas is not shutting them up.
Especially if their ideas are as misguided, and yes, racist, as to believe the whole continent of Africa was unable to develop without the help of the white Europeans.
> I personally don't know whether Africa was on track to have civilization without colonialism
Are you seriously suggesting that there was no civilization in Africa before colonialism ?
You know, I'm not trying to shut you up, by this point you're so far off, that it doesn't even make sense to have a conversation. Or said much more succinctly:
The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it, and ain't nobody got time for that.
My understanding is that Asia is widely expected to get there without Europe - but it's not clear for Africa.
In the case of America there actually were quite a few civilizations on the upswing when Europeans arrived (and killed everybody off with their diseases). I am yet to see the same said about Africa.
He replied, "I think it would be a good idea."
I think you're confusing "modernity" with the steam engine and the Scientific Method. Little else distinguishes modern civilization from those of the past. The Renaissance was "re-birth" of something that had gone before, etc...
Everyone thought the Egyptians were the height of Civilization, except the Egyptians themselves. They thought it was the Nubians.
I'm not trying to shut them up, I'm trying to get them to think.
By saying 'That's racist' you come out meaning to stop the conversation because you have nothing more substantial to say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqH_0LPVoho
Good day.
You know the people there are not a different species. Just like the people, whoever that is, that first came out of iron age, Africans would've came out of "iron age" too. Without the colonization, the world would've been better off. People at that time thought colonization as required or as an easy way to get access to more resources instead of advancing internally with their own limited resources. They couldn't care less if those Africans(or insert any other colonized place/people) lived or died. They were colonizing for the resources.
Colonial Africa is no different. It is a mixed bag. It was exploitative but it also brought development, not because European necessarily wanted to help Africans but because getting hold of resources required building ports, roads, railroad etc. They could not exploit agricultural resources without actually building farms and hiring locals. And of course there was always people with different ideas. Some wanted to help Africans and brought modern medicine e.g.
The chief error the western powers did when they left Africa was to not allow for any transition period. They left countries were whites had managed everything and no African had experience or education in managing operations from the top level. They should have given Africans education in white institutions and let them work with the white administration to learn how things were managed.
We see the same disaster in South Africa. Suddenly blacks are put in power but they have no previous experience in having power since they were never given a chance. White rule should not have ended abruptly. There should have been a gradual winding down.
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To elaborate with less snark: No one is complaining about the good things. It's the violence and exploitation and coercion that are bad. The conquerors don't get "points" for the good stuff that they can redeem against their sins (or crimes if you prefer) to somehow balance the bad stuff out. What a strange idea!
If I stab you in the guts and then hand you a free milkshake, does that make it okay?
If we could survey Iraqis how many would say, "Yes, I hate being invaded and occupied, but at least they got rid of that jerk Saddam."? Keeping in mind that we can't survey the dead...
Notwithstanding that awesome scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian":
> Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
> PFJ Member: Brought peace?
> Reg: Oh, peace? SHUT UP!
The basic issue facing everyone is how do we have the good stuff, while giving the bloodshed and trauma the miss?