Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

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>but after Burma's/Myanmar's coups, ethnic violence, atrocities...perhaps even British colonial rule was not quite so bad after all.

Please never ever spout this nonsense again, we are all done with that part of History;

Here is a relevant excerpt from G. K. Chesterton's article on Indian Independence movement;

When all is said, there is a national distinction between a people asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for things that have been wholly invented by somebody else. There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of the conqueror. Suppose an Indian said: "I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than die of toil and vexation in order to avoid the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it." Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him.

I don't understand this quote. This is a conversation with an imaginary person who never existed. The Indian Nationalist Movement was founded and pushed forward by Western trained and educated elite Indians who wanted self government and Western institutions. They most certainly did not want a return to the caste system or to the system of Islamic slavery that the British abolished. They most certainly preferred "dying in hospital" to dying in pointless battles between warlords.

That quote and the passage it is from (https://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2009/01/gandh...) was directed at very "concrete" Indian Nationalists who were arguing to basically transplant British Empire values into Indian Independence Movement and by extension into a newly formed Indian State.

They had gone so far as to accept Herbert Spencer's "Social Darwinism" (among others) with its inherent justification of Colonialism and "rights" of the Colonizer over the Colonized in all Social/Cultural dimensions and Chesterton was having none of that.

Chesterton is arguing for Indians (and by extension all other colonized people) for changing themselves using their own social norms/culture/paradigms and needs. While they maybe influenced by other cultures, it is their decision to make in the context of their history and culture. He is deriding the attempts of the so called "intellectuals" in the then Indian Nationalist movement to transplant wholesale the ideas of the British Culture.

Chesterton's quote is a nice one, but that doesn't mean that the GP is "spouting nonsense". They may be focused more on outcomes rather than Chesterton's focus on maintaining national traditions and sovereignty. Both are valid views and both can be debated with nuance.

>Both are valid views and both can be debated with nuance

No.

When it comes to Colonialism (and ideas of Superior/Inferior races) there is no two ways about it; it is untenable and unacceptable.

One can believe that some people are better at ruling a country than other people without believing that this is due to genetic differences between these people.

>One can believe that some people are better at ruling a country than other people

That is a "belief" without any basis in facts and therefore untenable.

I'm pretty sure that I'm a worse at ruling countries than Angela Merkel and a better than the heroin addict that lives at my local underground station.

And yet all three have one vote each under a Democratic system i.e. you are equivalent in that context.

The point is that when it comes to sovereignty, there can only be self-determination based on whatever accepted criteria by the people themselves.

Relevant: The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie - https://mises.org/library/politics-obedience-discourse-volun...

.. so you let that be decided by election, right?

I can appreciate your passion and ideas, but continued rule under a modern western democracy would not be equivalent to the race based colonialism of the past. I think there is nuance to this, and I don't think any of us can speak for all residents of all former colonies. It doesn't seem unreasonable that a situation could get so bad that an individual would prefer continued colony status (which is nothing like it would have been in 1936) under a liberal western democracy over some of the alternatives. For instance, my understanding is that there are some people in Hong Kong, who would prefer British rule to Chinese.

From a WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-hong-kongers-want-to-be-br...):

"On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered outside the British consulate in Hong Kong for a rally urging London to take immediate action to protect British nationals in the city and grant them full citizenship.

“We’re too British to be Chinese,” said Eric Cheung, a 25-year-old Hong Kong resident at the rally who is a British National (Overseas), or BNO. “We share the same ideology with the U.K. We support democracy, we support freedom, we support the rule of law and of course we support the U.K. government,” he said.

“ Boris Johnson, fight for us,” he added, appealing to the British prime minister.

This argument is somewhat disingenuous with cherry-picked examples which are highly dependent on Time and Context.

Colonialism ruined whole countries leaving them poor, rewrote cultural narratives, uprooted entire social structures and in a word, destroyed peoples histories and a sense of their own independent identity. In the bloody aftermath some flourished and some did not; but this cannot be used as an example of the "superiority" of certain forms of government when the existing forms had been destroyed.

A good starting point on further research is the book; Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Acemoglu and Robinson (be sure to read the Critical Reviews section) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail

The following two videos though dealing specifically with India under British Colonialism are equally valid as to what had happened to other countries under the British Empire;

1) W.r.t. what British Colonialism did to India, see Dr. Shashi Tharoor's longer speech Looking Back at the British Raj in India - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB5ykS-_-CI

2) Shorter version of above at Britain Does Owe Reparations[to India] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4

Eh, its also ancient. Several countries before the western three had large colonies and exploited them. The western ones stands out mostly due to industrialization amplifying it.

Not viewing other colonialism before (like the one of the roman empire) or the chinese/osmanic empire is western centrism in disguise.

It's also continuing even today in "India" (itself a false British invention), for example with the imperialists in Delhi forcing themselves on Tamil Nadu, and banning important traditions like Jallikattu.

(Upvotes notwithstanding, I was basically trolling here.)

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