Melissa Chen - "The whole idea of decolonization has Western roots. So how about we decolonize decolonization?"
(post on the Benin Bronzes moved to dedicated one)
Kemi Badenoch said 'I don't care about colonialism' in leaked messages - "Badenoch reportedly wrote: “I don’t care about colonialism because [I] know what we were doing before colonialism got there. “They came in and just made a different bunch of winners and losers.” The message continued: “There was never any concept of ‘rights,’ so [the] people who lost out were old elites not every day people.”... Her colleague, who was not named, was said to have been “very aggressive” in challenging Badenoch’s views about “African achievement.” Badenoch reportedly then went on to claim that such conversations could not take place at work today, suggesting that her colleague “would just be sacked for racism”... Badenoch also reflected on an incident which saw her sitting on a panel alongside Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, an acclaimed civil rights activist and critical race theory academic. She described Crenshaw as “the [queen] of critical race [theory]”, adding: “She was practically in tears by the end of it because she literally had never heard the arguments I was making and could not respond. “And then she started shouting that I had no right to be on [the] panel… because I hadn’t read her book.” Badenoch closed out her message with a crying-laughing emoji. Elsewhere, Badenoch slammed Labour MP Diane Abbott, describing her as “practically the only black woman you see discussing politics”. She went on to suggest that Abbott had “disgraced” herself by “not knowing her brief”."
Black people aren't allowed to dissent from liberal groupthink
Activist Seeking The Restitution Of African Art Strikes Again In Paris - "restitution activist Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza attempted to take an Indonesian sculpture from the Louvre, before getting arrested. Diyabanza has received a lot of attention for similar stunts in other museums in Paris, Marseille, and the Netherlands. Through his action, he hopes to pressure European governments into repatriating African artworks in European museums... Thanks to a video published on Twitter, we can watch Diyabanza’s political stunt. In the video, we observe the Congo-born activist removing a sculpture from its base. At the same time, he announces: “We have come to recover what belongs to us. I came to take back what was stolen, what was stolen from Africa, in the name of our people, in the name of our motherland Africa”. The moment someone attempts to stop him, Diyabanza says: “Where is your conscience?”... In the video, he appeared confident that he was removing an African artwork."
Since he can't read, much less tell the difference between Indonesian and African art, they should just give him some random unrelated junk to "return" to Africa
Borscht Nazi on Twitter - "What if slaves were freed,sent back to Africa, wouldn't they be better off?
Liberia
What if the slaves overthrew masters and had their own country?
Haiti
What if blacks hadn't been colonized?
Ethiopia
What if the blacks seized all of the white property as reparations?
Zimbabwe"
Colonialism is so powerful that even though Ethiopia was never colonised, it is the sole reason why it is not a successful country
Meme - "So Colonization is a good thing? #lowlQ"
Annancy Jamstar: "The best thing to ever happen to Europeans was the Moors crossing the Straits of Gibralter also called the Iberian Peninsula and invading Spain. The Moors brought CIVILIZATION! Education, art, culture, architecture, the prototype for our modern sewerage system, agriculture which eventually spread to all of Europe! REAL HISTORY!"
Empire: the big historical questions | HistoryExtra - "'Where do you think the history of Empire, where's it going next? What's it going to look like in another 50 years time? By which time of course, to add to the complexities of the mix, 50 years from now, most for example of the British and French colonies in Africa will have been independent nations for far longer than they were ever colonies'"
Of course, everything that is wrong in former colonies until the end of time will be the fault of colonialism
Tom Daley and the woke ‘noble savage’ - "Is it homophobic to hope that Tom Daley stops making simplistic television shows blaming colonialism for homophobia... I would feel the same if he was a womanising heterosexual sportsman with three ex-wives blaming colonialism for prenups... Married and with a baby supplied by the rented womb of a woman – sorry, ‘surrogacy’ – he enjoys knitting and crochet, and has an Instagram account dedicated to his needlework. Of course, such a life would only be possible in the secular West. It’s not even a European thing – try being gay in Eastern Europe – while in anti-capitalist countries, from Cuba to China, homosexuality has historically been dismissed as a good-old-fashioned ‘bourgeois deviation’ (which sounds so much more thrillingly disobedient than being merely ‘queer’). But in the magical-thinking world of woke – where women have penises and pallid proles have privilege – the countries now being blamed for spreading homophobia are, paradoxically, the best countries to be homosexual in. It was colonialism what done it, of course – the scourge that also inflicted the horrors of the ‘master bedroom’ and ‘brunch’ upon us. In his new BBC documentary, Tom Daley: Illegal to Be Me, Daley takes an understandably sorrowing journey through the 35 out of 56 Commonwealth states where homosexuality is punished with everything from whipping to prison to death – due to the colonial legacy which, allegedly, first criminalised homosexuality. How the other 21 countries have evaded or outgrown such punitive prejudice is a mystery, considering that most of them also bore the yoke of the British Empire. It’s almost like developing nations can have things like agency and are not prisoners of their sad pasts – a shocking concept, I know... in the case of some of the most enthusiastically homophobic nations – such as Jamaica, once named by Time magazine as ‘the most homophobic place on Earth’ – this prejudice has played a notable part in anti-colonial movements like Rastafarianism. I’d have been interested to have seen Tom Daley sit down with a stern Rastaman to explain to him that Africa was a gay Eden before the colonisers got there. Isn’t there something wrong with white people telling non-white nations how to behave? Isn’t it, sort of, colonialism? And in seeking to scourge our hated white skins in a parasexual fervour of masochistic yet self-obsessed mania (illegal to be me, me, me), we give the worst offenders a free pass if they happen to be non-white. Islamic conquerors and colonisers have never seen anything wrong with enslaving non-Muslims, while the Koranic instruction to kill gay people was written many centuries before the British Empire was even an idea. Such attitudes even extend to modern times. During ISIS’s reign of terror, we saw its boastful enslavement of the Yazidis, while sub-Saharan refugees are openly sold in Libyan slave markets. But somehow historical slavery is more important than that which is still happening, simply because the old slavers were white and the new slavers are brown. Perhaps with the Commonwealth Games now done, we might hope that the BBC will ask a gay footballer to interview gay people in Qatar about their right to be who they truly are without it being illegal. Maybe it could involve that proud ‘gay icon’ David Beckham, who has pocketed a cool £150million to be the brand ambassador of the Qatar World Cup. The ‘noble savage’ was always a dodgy racist trope – the woke version is even weirder. It’s so condescending to peddle this idea of indigenous people as pure childish souls untouched by corruption – rather than seeing them as regular people, with good and bad qualities and practices, like all of us. (I’m still reeling from finding out that many Native Americans enjoyed having black slaves.) But even weirder are those privileged people who still try in some way to identify as the wretched of the Earth, though it’s understandable in an age when many people consider that being a victim is integral to being a good person. It would be interesting – subversive, even – to watch a BBC documentary in which a rich, famous, white gay man ‘owned’ the fact that in certain professions, such as fashion and entertainment, being a gay man in the Western world can actually be an advantage"
Adrian Hilton on Twitter - "“where that homophobia stemmed from in the first place, and it is a legacy of colonialism”. It's a shame #TomDaley propagates this ahistorical nonsense: Hinduism, Judaism and Islam predate the British Empire: the 'stem' of #homophobia is religio-cultural."
Experts blast Tom Daley's claim that 'colonialism is to blame for homophobia across Commonwealth' - "academic Dr Zareer Masani, who fled Mumbai in the 1970s due to the persecution he faced there as a gay man, told MailOnline: 'Homophobia did not begin with the British Raj, it began thousands of years before.' Dr Masani, an author and expert on British colonialism, added: 'Under Hindu and Muslim law people were executed for being homosexual.'... Dr Masani has said that homophobia in India predates British rule and has long outlasted it and told Daley to, 'leave the history to the historians.'... 'Saudi Arabia, Iran & Ethiopia were never colonised, and are virulently homophobic countries.'"
How Britain's colonial legacy still affects LGBT politics around the world - "the British prime minister, Theresa May, urged Commonwealth nations to reform existing anti-gay legislation held over from British colonial rule... Trinidadian Anglican Bishop Victor Gill called comments made by May a form of “neo-colonialism” when he denounced the ruling... In contrast with the British experience, the other major colonial powers did not leave such an institutional legacy on criminalisation of homosexual conduct... we also investigated whether former British colonies are less likely or slower to decriminalise on average than the former colonies of other European imperialists. We compared several former British colonies such as Singapore, Uganda and India, that still criminalise homosexual sex with another group of former colonies that have made significant strides toward greater social inclusion of their sexual minorities – among them South Africa, Belize, and Fiji. To test the still quite prevalent idea that British imperialism “poisoned” societies against homosexuality, we looked in some detail not just at the historical origins of these countries’ anti-homosexuality laws, but of the contemporary political processes that have so far prevented some of them from scrapping the laws. Based on our research, we argue that the evidence in favour of the claim is inconclusive at best. Among former colonies with laws like these, former British colonies do not seem to have decriminalised homosexual conduct any more slowly than colonies of other European states. This suggests that the “stickiness” of repressive institutions is relatively consistent across different countries and histories, and not specific to a particular type of colonialism."
Meme - "France and their colonies:
*Forced to drink milk meme* "French Culture"
Britain and their colonies:
Congratulations! You are being rescued! Please do not resist.
Germany and their colonies
"Congratulations! You are being rescued!"
"But you didn't do anything"
Dutch and their colonies
"WHERE'S MY MONEY"
Portugal and their colonies
Portuguese : "slaps A crate of guns * this bad boy comes with a Jesus discount."
Belgium and their colonies:
*hickok45 on bicycle chasing small black baby*
Italy and their colonies
"The Roman Empire is back. It's time for Italy!"
"Who?"
Spain and their colonies:
*Conquistador looking at sexy native woman*"
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, The US and China edge closer on climate - "President Deby is dead, killed on yet another frontline. His son, unsurprisingly, is taking over, in violation of Chad's constitution. France, pointedly, has not objected"
Apparently neo-colonialism is a good thing when liberals approve of it
Colonialism and Modern Income: Islands as Natural Experiments - "Using a new database of islands throughout the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans we find a robust positive relationship between the number of years spent as a European colony and current GDP per capita. We argue that the nature of discovery and colonization of islands provides random variation in the length and type of colonial experience. We instrument for length of colonization using variation in prevailing wind patterns. We argue that wind speed and direction had a significant effect on historical colonial rule but do not have a direct effect on GDP today. The data also suggest that years as a colony after 1700 are more beneficial than earlier years. We also find a discernable pecking order among the colonial powers, with years under U.S., British, French, and Dutch rule having more beneficial effects than Spanish or Portuguese rule. Our finding of a strong connection between modern income and years of colonization is conditional on being colonized at all since each of the islands in our data set spent some time under colonial rule."
In other words, the claim that colonialism impoverished colonies is wrongheaded and gets it exactly the opposite way to reality - colonialism enriched the colonies
Facebook - "Why do many people don't consider Othman occupation of Baghdad as colonialism?"
Only white colonialism is bad
Noam Chomsky defends academic freedom of pro-colonialism professor under fire - "A political science professor who came under international fire and calls for censorship for writing a pro-colonialism article is finding some support from a surprising place: Noam Chomsky.The prominent anti-war activist and emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT is a member of the editorial board at peer-reviewed Third World Quarterly, which published “The case for colonialism” as a “viewpoint,” or scholarly op-ed... he opposes demands to retract the article, saying it opens “dangerous doors.” Fifteen of his colleagues resigned from the TWQ editorial board to protest the publication, saying that Portland State University Prof. Bruce Gilley violated the “very principle of free speech” by causing “offence and hurt” with his colonialism article... A tenured scholar of Chinese and Asian politics, Gilley came under withering criticism by academics, students and activists by arguing that colonialism has created net positives in some instances.In the article, he also criticized those who act as apologists for “atrocities visited upon Third World peoples by anti-colonial advocates.” While early petitions demanded Gilley’s firing for expressing “white supremacist” views and allegedly practicing shoddy scholarship, they have been joined by a more professional effort to blacklist Gilley from publishing in reputable journals... Sultana purportedly mused on Facebook about getting Princeton University to revoke Gilley’s doctorate"
Apparently free speech means you can't offend anyone by having non-kosher viewpoints
Colonialism is indefensible – but it was neither uniquely nor completely evil - "Professor Nigel Biggar of the University of Oxford is being branded a bigot for daring to question the reigning ideological orthodoxy in Western academia on colonialism, imperialism and British empire. While it is heartening to see that Oxford's administration is showing some spine and standing in support of Professor Biggar, this attack is also a glimpse of the latest attempts at ideological subjugation on university campuses across the Anglosphere. Biggar’s article, which caused this latest episode of outrage, carries forward a simple and perfectly sensible argument. There should be nuance about studying history, and the episodes of colonialism and imperialism, especially Britain’s own colonial past, are no different... The broader question is the ideological orthodoxy in this field of study. Biggar’s critics dwell heavily on post-colonial literature, a discipline which stems from Euro-Marxist studies of the 1950s and 60s, and is more activist in nature than academic... this idea that European colonialism and imperialism is uniquely evil, is empirically untrue and a post-modernist construct which ignores other forms of imperialism and non-Western actors, and most importantly, patterns of world politics... the sheer savagery of colonial powers such as Belgium in the Congo and France in Algeria is distinct from the relatively benign and overall liberal imperial Britain. European colonialism on the whole, was again qualitatively different to Persian, Ottoman, Japanese, or even Soviet imperium when it comes to nation building.Consider India, a country I originate from and am intrinsically familiar with. India was subjugated by Persians and Turko-Mongols before, but the roots of modernity, including the democratic institutions, rule of law, penal and procedural codes and jurisprudence, military hierarchy, communication technology, railways, English language, science education, are all gifts from Britain. If one ignores the empire, or considers it to be a simplistic evil, one denigrates the contribution of liberals like Sir Napier and Lord Bentinck in eradicating Sati (where widows were expected to burn alongside their dead husbands) and diluting the caste system and Hindu and Islamic orthodoxy; or of Viscount Pellew in stopping human trafficking on the North African coastline; or the Royal Navy, which after securing trade lines from piracy across the entire globe, devoted its time to scientific expeditions, territorial discovery and creating navigating charts which it distributed it for free. The debt that humanity owes to this era of science, remains unpayable... It is also worth remembering that a majority of newly Western-educated Indians didn’t rise in revolt against the British during the Mutiny of 1857, for the simple reason that they didn’t want to go back to the dark, feudal days. The Bengali Renaissance and subsequent spark of Indian nationalism which would go on to result in Indian independence wouldn’t have existed without this same British education, a fact that is masterfully chronicled by Nirad C Chaudhuri"
The Censorious Left’s Latest Mania: ‘Decolonizing’ Everything - "Preventing all discussion of colonialism erases, rather than confronts, the past. Indeed, the logic of the decolonize movement is that colonialism is not a legacy of history but a malignant impact upon the present. This sleight of hand allows campaigners to equate past invasion, murder, oppression, and exploitation with being made to sit through a lecture on Kant or Shakespeare in an expensive and elite institution.The move to decolonize is not based on a nuanced critique of the West’s historical legacy. We cannot have a discussion that asks how and why colonialism occurred, and considers its impact then and now, because the conclusions have already been decided for us. Rather than questioning the past we must remove all trace of it from our universities, architecture, and food. We must start history afresh.This Year Zero approach is inevitably censorious. It’s about removing monuments and articles, not adding to a national debate. Campaigners might claim they want to expand and diversify reading lists and university courses, but this is often disingenuous. When teaching time is limited, including new content means removing material elsewhere... Instead of looking at what Hegel or WEB Du Bois, Audre Lorde or Sylvia Plath, have to offer in terms of beauty or truth, we are asked to make crude judgements based on sex and skin color, with white and male being bad, black and female being better. We are asked to start by assuming that knowledge carries no universal truth or relevance, that ideas can only ever represent and speak to particular identity groups. Decolonize campaigns present black people and white people as two distinct groups with nothing in common. No books or facts or ideas can transcend this racial divide and be equally relevant to all. In this way, the decolonize movement entrenches racial thinking. It promotes a racist and patronizing view that black students can only learn if they see themselves, in a most basic and biological form, represented in the curriculum. This is to suggest that black students can only learn “black knowledge”; in other words, black students can’t learn Kant or Shakespeare... Ironically, the decolonize movement is colonizing more and more areas of life. As it does so it introduces an uncritical disdain for the past and a censorious, intolerant approach to the present. It entrenches racial thinking and presents a debilitating view of black people as burdened by historic victimhood."
Forget About Decolonizing the Curriculum. We Need to Restore the West’s Telos Before it’s Too Late - "n a bizarre turn of events, this movement now enjoys the endorsement of the British Royal Family. In February 2019, on a visit to a London University, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, lent her weight to the movement, having had her eyes opened by a presentation about the relatively small number of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff within the U.K. higher education sector... it is bizarre to claim that Britain’s universities are the last bastions of Empire. This conjures up images of dusty old white men (male, pale and stale) engaged in a conspiracy to ensure “non-Western” viewpoints are de-legitimized, with reading lists populated exclusively by straight white male authors, and people of color and women locked out of the academy. In fact, the humanities and social sciences departments across the Anglosphere are nearly all highly progressive and steeped in critical theory. From Edward Said’s post-colonial critique of Western Orientalism and Marxist critiques of capitalist imperialism, through to the postmodern deconstructions of “Western hegemony” by thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the humanities and social sciences are completely saturated with critical theories designed to decenter knowledge and deconstruct the Western canon. If the movement is “doing decolonial work in the home of the colonizer, in the heart of the establishment” where are the courses that reproduce these iniquitous power relationships? A far bigger challenge would be to find a single British university offering any course, anywhere, that does not regurgitate the dominant narrative of Western malignancy and provide theoretical frameworks that are explicitly dedicated to critiquing the “othering” of non-Western cultures and societies... the data used to underpin the claims presented to Meghan Markle, and those now informing the Labour Party’s higher education policy, are highly selective and do not support the assertions being made... At Professorial level (the data that shocked the Duchess the most), the report says that among “U.K. academics, the difference in proportions between white professors (11.2%) and BME professors (9.7 percent) was small at 1.5 percentage points.”... Historically, the decolonize movement is often highly selective in which facts it chooses to highlight. At its heart are the sins of Western imperialism and the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade... the protestors seek to stigmatize members of an entire racial group for the misdeeds of a tiny minority of British aristocrats from centuries ago who share their skin color. Isn’t that a form of racism?... the decolonize movement emerges from a deeper strain within modern identity politics and Western culture: one of endless self-flagellation for sins that ultimately can never be atoned for and makes the West the font of all evil... Insofar as Britain and the United States are exceptional, it is because they gave birth to the movements to end slavery, often at great cost, with hundreds of thousands of young men—male and pale—sacrificing their lives to end slavery in the American Civil War. They’re exceptional, too, in wanting to atone for it—there’s no decolonize movement in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, the centers of the Barbary slave trade between the 16th and 18th centuries... Perhaps more telling when it comes to the one-sidedness of progressive narratives about slavery is the complete indifference of the decolonize movement to modern day slavery... If Western intellectuals really are determined to atone for the transatlantic slave trade, wouldn’t their efforts be better spent on campaigns to end this disgusting trade in human souls that disproportionately affects women and young girls of color in the here and now?... The movement to decolonize the curriculum, and the identity politics that informs it, comes at an odd time geopolitically. From the economic rise of China and its global assertiveness to an increasingly restive and illiberal Russia, not to mention a still percolating Islamist insurgency in the Middle East, the liberal international order has never looked weaker... Much like the decolonize movement, these states and their leaders all share a deep sense of grievance against the West, based on their understanding of modern history. These grievances run from China’s desire to resume its natural place as a great power and correct the wrongs of British imperialism, Russia’s interest in reversing the humiliation of the post-Cold War settlement imposed on it by the West, and the Islamists wishing to strike back against the West and forge a new global caliphate. If we accept that one of the prerequisites for the rise of these anti-Western states and movements is a degree of confidence and civilizational purpose, or what we might call a “telos,” what does the West now offer to counter these highly illiberal, often authoritarian and in some cases actively genocidal states and social forces? What is the social glue that holds us together with a common purpose to defend our shared institutional order, and upon which our rights and freedoms (all highly fragile and historically contingent) now rest?"