Mythinformed on X - "“The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States. For the freedom and future of all life on this planet depends on that.” University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie admits the Woke quiet part out loud."
Konstantin Kisin on X - "This is actually a very good explanation of what they mean by decolonisation: people who won in the battle of civilisations many centuries ago should voluntarily participate in their own annihilation because a small number of overeducated morons have decided winning is bad."
We are still told that liberals don't hate their countries
Meme - "Elephants outcompeted the Bantu for thousands of years and were only driven out with help from colonizers"
"The distribution of elephants is thus an indicator of the relationship between African populations and their natural environment during historical times. The changing pattern of town and village sites in Ghana, for instance, suggests that communities there never quite succeeded in establishing a long-term equilibrium with their environment. Instead, 'a sort of chessboard effect' developed, with people occupying one set of squares and elephants the other. Each human settlement was surrounded by a zone of potential farmland, not more than one- sixth of which was in production at any one time, while the rest was lying fallow and steadily became covered in thick secondary bush. Elephants feeding on lush secondary growth on fallow land inevitably were also attracted to the fresh young crops sprouting from adjacent cultivated fields, and communities barely large enough to provide the labour needed to feed themselves would be incapable of keeping elephants from all their scattered fields, all the time. The result was that wherever people settled and began growing crops the elephant became a major constraint on agricultural expansion and human population growth."
As schools shift towards ‘decolonized’ curricula, historians say their job is to understand history, not judge it - "“Should he [Macdonald] be judged by the standards of his time, or by the changing standards of the present?” asked David Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Toronto. “If the former, he emerges as an impressive and admirable nation-builder. If the latter, he becomes an architect of cultural genocide and an agent of anti-Chinese racism. The contradictions remain an integral part of the Canadian story.” Christopher Dummitt, a professor of Canadian history at Trent University and host of the podcast 1867 & All That, said he is not opposed to fresh perspectives on the past, and that they should always be sought. “Obviously, history changes. Revisionist history is not bad history,” he said. “If you have new evidence, wouldn’t you want to incorporate that evidence…and offer a fresh perspective?”... Wilson did, however, offer a warning about the perils of a decolonial approach to history. “Decolonization goes wrong when it becomes an ideological weapon. When in the service of a social justice agenda, characterized by absolute moral certainty, it falls prey to distortions, to presentism, and attempts to impose its worldview on academic pursuits in general,” he said. As Macdonald and other historical figures have come under greater scrutiny, many universities and even governments have chosen to focus on their discriminatory policies and have renamed buildings honouring them or removed their statutes from public spaces. This is presentism in action—the interpretation of past events through modern-day standards. In the face of these developments, Wilson said the role of a historian is not to serve an agenda, even if it is appealing. “Our task is to make the past more intelligible, not to dole out praise or blame,” he said. “It is not, or should not be, the historian’s role to act as John A. Macdonald’s defense attorney, just as it should not be the historian’s role to act as a prosecuting counsel.” Dummitt believes curiosity is the skilled response for historians, and that stepping past initial reactions and denunciation requires time, caution, and reflection... Of concern to Dummitt is what he calls a betrayal of the “JFK principle,” which refers to the former U.S. president’s famous quotation: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Dummitt said the principle remains a noble sentiment, and he places it in the context of what he calls the “Historian’s Ethos”: “Ask not what does the past owes you, but what do you owe the past.”... Stewart critiqued the poor teaching of history in some Canadian provinces and lamented that students may be unaware of what are thought to be some of Canada’s most important and well-known prime ministers of the last two centuries. He singled out Ontario as a province in which history is often not prioritized, and where the brief lessons may often be poorly crafted and focused on condemnation of figures such as Macdonald."
The problem is the woke want the "decolonised" perspective to be the only acceptable one, and it's not new evidence that motivates them, but a new agenda
Meme - "AFRICA HAS NEVER NEEDED THE WORLD. THE WORLD HAS ALWAYS NEEDED AFRICA. "SHITHOLE" COUNTRIES? NEVA!"
*Crude Oil* *Gold* *Uranium* *Diamonds* *Petroleum & Natural Gas* *Iron Ore* *Etc*
"When you accidentally out your entire race as being the most useless people on the planet.. by showing the whole world that you've had more resources than any other race since the dawn of time, but were still living in mud huts when those other races were creating apex societies and advanced technology. The idea that Africans only struggle because of racism is a myth perpetuated to save them from humiliation over their utter lack of progress as a people."
Meme - Black Woman: "Decolonize this university"
*Grand university*
White man: "Okay I decolonized it"
*Mud hut*
Meme - Carl Benjamin @Sargon_of_Akkad: "We dug that stuff out of the ground after we conquered you. Then, for some reason, we lost confidence in ourselves after being on the winning side in the largest war in history, then we invented the internet so you could make feminine posts about how much you need our money."
Rich Emoji @Eng_emoji: "WELCOME TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM. DON'T ASK WHERE WE GOT ALL THIS STUFF"
Thread by @eyeslasho on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "At a South African university, an argument is made to eliminate science from study because it's a "product of Western modernity." "We have to restart science from an African perspective." As an example, the speaker suggests "Black magic." When a "science person" objects, he is scolded by the organizer for "disrespecting the sacredness of this space," and asked to apologize, which he does. But that doesn't stop the scolding. Opinions can only be expressed under rules that appear to guide outcomes. The "Black magic" advocate then adds that, despite the fact that she took some science in high school, she decided to not be on the science faculty because science stands in the way of "decolonization." [Note: Africa was decolonized over 50 years ago.] The speaker then finds Newton problematic because the only way to understand gravity in science, she claims, is through Newton, and then implies that gravity should only be understood as it occurs in Africa, "through an African perspective." She concludes: "Western knowledge is very pathetic to say the least," and universities should "do away with [Western] science entirely." Establishing strict rules for guiding parameters of discussion is something the activist left does everywhere. It's an admission that its ideas can't stand up under the scrutiny allowed in free and open discourse."
Aztec Dish - "Pozole is an Aztec recipe, with some substitutions. In ancient Aztec ceremonies we find this major difference. The indigenous ancestors used human flesh in the stew. Aztec priests would make human sacrifices to their gods, offering up the heart and using the rest of the flesh for a ceremonial pozole. After the Spanish conquest, Spanish rulers outlawed cannibalism, and so pork was used in replacement of human flesh in pozole."
Damn colonialism!
Breaking news: Europeans colonised Africa - "Ex-Labour MP Claudia Webbe has revealed a shocking fact: Western countries once colonised Africa. Sharing a map showing how Africa was carved up by European powers in the 19th century, Webbe tweeted, ‘This map has been hidden from you all your life’... ‘Anti-racist’ activists regularly claim that the horrors of imperialism are (intentionally) ignored in schools. But it simply isn’t true. The history of British imperialism is actually part of the national curriculum. Anyone who paid attention in history classes will know that Britain, like many other European countries, had an empire – and that it was nasty. Only an ex-Labour MP could be so clueless as to think this is news."
Captain Cook and the Colonial Paradox - "In August 2017, a statue of Cook in Hyde Park was defaced with the slogans “Change the Date” and “No Pride in Genocide.” This was, without a doubt, directly inspired by the debate over Confederate memorials then taking place in the United States. Australian political protestors, of all sides of politics, tend to slavishly follow the lead of our American cousins but on a much smaller scale (see the recent COVID-19 lockdown protest in Melbourne for another example). Cook’s case, though, is not as simple. The Confederates fought the US Army to preserve a breakaway government which primarily existed to preserve slavery (as the Confederate vice president himself acknowledged). Cook died before Australia as a country even existed, and his chief claim to fame is as an explorer rather than a soldier or conqueror. Cook was not a King Leopold, known mainly for colonial repression. It would be much simpler if he had been... There is ongoing debate as to whether the colonial treatment of Australian Aborigines would have constituted genocide under the modern definition. I am hesitant to accept this. The 1948 Genocide Convention requires “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and the British government and its successors in Australia never intended to destroy the Aborigines... Aboriginal Australia was not some peaceful and harmonious idyll before European contact. Ironically, one of the first people who took this erroneous view was Cook himself... many Aboriginal groups practiced strict religious laws enforced through violence, punishments such as spearing, the arranged polygamous marriages of pubescent girls to older men, and other practices we find abhorrent today. Australia was no stranger to conflict before 1788, and Aboriginal groups had fought, dispossessed, and killed each other across the continent for millennia... Some Aboriginal cultural practices may contribute to problems faced in Aboriginal communities today. It is valid to ask, for example, the extent to which traditional views towards women contribute to the fact that indigenous women are 34 to 80 times more likely to experience domestic violence than non-indigenous women... Without the conquest and dispossession of the Aborigines, this country would not exist in any form recognisable to its inhabitants today. Any Australian who feels pride in Australia’s multicultural success story, high standards of living, peaceful politics, or liveable cities, feels pride in something which could never have come into existence without bloodshed... In its historic 1992 judgement on Aboriginal land rights, Mabo v Queensland (No 2), the High Court of Australia briefly considered whether the British acquisition of sovereignty over Australia was legal. But it then, quite rightly, pointed out the question was beyond its jurisdiction. If the British claim to Australia was not legal, then the British parliament had no authority to pass laws relating to Australia, including the act giving effect to the Australian Constitution which gives the High Court its power in the first place. Hence, if the court found the British colonisation of Australia illegal, it would be ruling that it was itself entirely illegitimate and its rulings should be ignored... Conquest is a fact of history. Modern Britain, for example, is a product of the Norman Conquest of 1066. But there’s no great separation in life outcomes between Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans today... So far, though, every high-level policy on indigenous affairs seems to have failed."
British Raj was beneficial: PM - "Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday acknowledged the "beneficial consequences" of British colonial rule like "free press, constitutional government, professional service, modern universities and research laboratories"... "Our notions of the rule of law, of a constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilisation met the dominant Empire of the day." Dr. Singh said India's struggle for independence was more an assertion by Indians of their "natural right to self-governance" than an outright rejection of the "British claim to good governance." Both India and Britain had "learnt" from each other and had much to teach the world. "This is perhaps the most enduring aspect of the Indo-British encounter""
Damn internalised white supremacy!
Anti-Colonialism's Bad History - "Marx admired capitalism, which he credited with destroying feudalism and the “idiocy” of rural life. The fly in the capitalist ointment, as Marx saw it, was competition, which he thought would drive down profits. To remain profitable, he averred, capitalists would be compelled to squeeze laborers’ wages, thus “immiserating” the working class. The more rational economic system Marx envisaged would do away with competition and replace it with central planning. That was a big mistake, but not the only one. Between the time that Marx was born (1818) and the time he died (1883), British wages rose by 83 percent. There is some debate about the magnitude of the rise in working-class wages, but the improvement was visible enough to create a dilemma for Marx’s followers—how to reconcile the theory with what was actually happening in the real world. In 1917, Lenin updated Marx’s theory in his pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he argued that colonial exploitation created super-profits that allowed Western capitalists to “bribe” Western governments, bureaucrats, and even workers. The improving living standards in the West, in other words, were a direct result of Europe’s imperial adventures. Lenin relied heavily on the writings of John Atkinson Hobson... Lenin transformed Hobson’s anti-Semitic ravings into an economic theory that would, a century later, still be used to “explain” the economic rise of the West. Lenin’s theory proved to be a useful tool in the ideological struggle between the West and the communist bloc, because it purported to show that the superior living standards of ordinary Westerners were a result of Third World exploitation and not a result of commercially tested betterments in technology. The legacy of European imperialism also provided a convenient scapegoat for all the political instability and economic mismanagement that had plagued the newly independent countries in Africa and Asia after the Europeans had left. Lenin’s ideas received little support among economists and historians, and the collapse of the Soviet empire sent them into the intellectual wilderness for close to 30 years. The rise of the West has been scrutinized by thousands of scholars and been the subject of hundreds of books. Many economists agree with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North, who argued in The Rise of the Western World that changing institutions, including the evolution of constitutions, laws, and property rights, were instrumental to economic development. More recently, the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has argued in her book Bourgeois Dignity that the origins of “the great enrichment,” which increased per capita incomes in advanced economies from $3 a day to $100 or more, were attributable to changes in values and attitudes... important questions about slavery and colonial exploitation are under-discussed or not discussed at all. Slavery, for example, made many individual slaveholders rich. Slave-holding societies, however, remained dirt poor... Colonial exploitation raises similar questions... African colonies did not make Europe rich—it was European wealth and power that enabled Europeans to colonize the rest of Africa. At any rate, being a former colony does not equal perpetual impoverishment. At the time of the British handover of Hong Kong to China, the average GDP per capita in the colony was 12 percent higher than that in the United Kingdom... Between 1966, when it became independent, and 2019, Botswana grew five times faster than the global average. Lenin’s thesis ignores history and destroys all nuance and countervailing evidence. Contemporary racial discourse frequently suffers from similar shortcomings, belittling individual talent and hard work, thus ignoring the successes of millions of men and women of color... Crimes, no matter how heinous, cannot be passed onto the progeny like some modern variant of the original sin, condemning them to unending purgatory. That is why freedom of speech is so vital, and that is why “anti-colonialists” are so determined to snuff it out."
Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "In one sentence, the problem with "anti-colonialism" is that it selectively applies a modern dorm-room standard of morality only to Westerners/whites. The relevant question for 1792 isn't whether British conquerors were good rulers by our standards, but how they stacked up the the actual alternatives - the Zulu, Marathi, Mughals, Malay Sultans, Boers, etc."
Anti-colonialism is only against Western colonialism
Meme - "Me after hearing about pre-colonial Americas in school *Na'vi from Avatar*
Me after reading first hand accounts of pre-colonial Americas *Colonel Miles Quaritch from Avatar*"
Meme - Dr. Kristina Schierenbeck @BotanyRules: "l am trying to #decolonize my bio majors #Evolution course. Surely Darwin/Wallace ideas existed in other cultures? Any suggestions for readings? Some good resources in geography, zoology, botany, but specifically, evolution?"
Nicholas A. Christakis @NAChristakis: "In an effort to be inclusive, let's start teaching myths in science? Surely someone somewhere anticipated Galileo, Bohr, Einstein? I get that there may have been indigenous theories resembling such ideas. But they were not science."
Comments (elsewhere): "Better decolonise the other sciences while you're at it - surely the mathematics describing electromagnetism were known to indigenous cultures before Maxwell created his famous equations."
"Now now. students are allowed to ask questions even if those questions sound stoopid because they involve the word 'decolonising.' That's why they're at school. As it turns other cultures did tinker with evolutionary thought. The Ancient Greeks for one. Something about medieval Islamic Science - But tell her that Darwinki the Very Elder, indigineous Australian formulated the theory (fully formed) 40 000 years ago in the Northern Territory. And Captain Cook stole it and gave it to Darwin. That will keep her momentarily distracted from other activism and minimise damage on campus"
"The best way to decolonize is to abandon progressive thought all together and become conservative. Since that's what the vast majority of the "POC" population is. Progressivism is exclusive to white majority countries."
"Decolonization is a western philosophy."
Imperator Philippus Arabus on Twitter - "After 8 centuries of Muslim domination, the Catholic liberators of Spain expelled the recalcitrant descendants of its deposed North African overlords. And how do modern leftists feel about this? Was this a righteous act of natives reclaiming their homeland from colonizers?
NO. Of course not. This was Spanish intolerance. The Spaniards should have forgiven their former oppressors. In fact, they want modern Spain to offer citizenship to the descendants of expelled Muslims.
And what about the former imperial subjects of European Empires? How do leftists think they should treat Europeans? Should they forgive and forget? NO! Of course not. They should demand reparations. They should colonize their colonizers and erase their sovereign existence.
Whatever Europeans do, it's the wrong thing. The only right that Europeans have in the eyes of leftists is the right to be punished and destroyed."
Liberals just hate white people
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Idea of paying homage 'abhorrent' to King, says Jonathan Dimbleby - "I think the difficulty of a slavery and an apology for that is less of a problem than the idea of restitution. So the Koh I Noor Diamond will not be used in the ceremony. But the problem is many countries claim that, so which one of them do you give it back to?"
Niall Ferguson holds in own in a BBC debate - YouTube - "'In reality European empires... really were quite a short-lived presence in North Africa and the Middle East compared with say the Ottoman Empire which ruled over that region for more like 500 plus years... it's far more illuminating to talk about the long-term legacy of Ottoman rule than to talk about the relatively short term impacts of British French or Italian rule, much less American influence which has always been indirect rather than direct. There's a real problem here with this kind of perspective because we want to beat ourselves up and say oh it's all our fault you know that that these problems exist. They're far more deep-rooted than the consequences of European empire... I can't say it's the fault of imperialism and leave out the longest-living empire in the Middle East which was the Ottoman Empire, Muslim empire, which went back much farther than any of the European empires'...
'The legacy of the Ottoman empire was almost wiped out by the British'...
'The culture that exists in the greater Middle East and North Africa today bears very very few resemblances to the culture that the Europeans tried to implant there beginning in the late 19th century and carrying on through to the mid twentieth century. It owes far more to the long lasting impact of say Islam... when you look at the problems that currently exist in a country like Egypt they have far more to do with the ways in which those countries have been governed in the last 30 years'"
If it was so easy to wipe out the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, how come the mess in the Middle East today is all the fault of European empires?
Meme - Then: *Clothed white people, half-naked Indians*
Now: *Clothed Indians, half-naked white people*
Postcolonial Astrology by Alice Sparkly Kat - "Fearless, radical, and fresh, Sparkly Kat’s Postcolonial Astrology ushers in a new wave of astrology revival, refusing to apologize for its magickism and connecting its power to the spirituality and politics we need now. Intersectional, inclusive, and geared towards queer and POC communities, it uses our historical and collective constructs of the planets, sun, and moon to re-chart our subconscious history, redefine the body in the world, and assert our politics of the personal, in astrology and all things."
Capitalism not slavery made Britain rich. It’s time we stopped apologising for our past - "there are strong historical links between monarchs and the slave trade. It’s just that the monarchs most deeply implicated are not British. In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat. While Tegbesu was trafficking human beings, the future George III, who had recently become Prince of Wales, was becoming a convinced abolitionist... He went on, as King, to free American slaves who opposed the Revolution – the vast majority of black Americans, unsurprisingly. Later in his reign, he signed the abolition of the slave trade into law in 1807. That act prompted incredulous rage among West African chiefs. A Liverpool slave captain was told by the ruler of Bonny, now in Nigeria, “This trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.” Those Africans who sold other human beings were not bandits or pirates. They were, in most cases, kings. Slavery was enforced by the coercive power of the state – right up to the moment when it was snuffed out under British pressure. In the 1840s, King Ghezo of Dahomey, played by John Boyega in the 2022 film, The Woman King, fiercely resisted such pressure. “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth,” he complained. “The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.”... How bizarre that, in a world where slavery was near-universal, we should train our ire almost exclusively on the country that distinguished itself by its abolitionism... during the eighteenth century, Britain had been heavily involved with the slave trade. At that time, human bondage was taken for granted almost everywhere. It had been practised by Aztecs and Incas, Arabs and Persians, Chinese and Koreans, Polynesians and Maori. Barbary slavers had seized more than a million Europeans, raiding as far as Cork and Cornwall. Some 17 million Africans were sold in the Arab world, a trade that continued well into the twentieth century. What made Britain unusual was not that it had engaged in slavery, but that it went on to pour its blood and treasure into eradicating the foul business, diverting ships to hunt down the slavers even while it was engaged in a life-and-death struggle against Bonaparte... The oddest thing about our public discourse is that those who like to portray our history as a hateful chronicle of racism and exploitation seem genuinely to imagine that they are bravely challenging the consensus. “Britain’s past, or a glorious version of it, is so central to maintaining the status quo that to question our history is to invite dramatic charges of vandalism and erasure,” writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian... Does Britain strike you as a country where we refuse to discuss slavery? A country, to remind you, where even a chair in a self-portrait of Hogarth at his easel can be labelled by Tate Britain as a symbol of “unnamed black and brown enslaved people”? You can find references to Tegbesu and Ghezo, but you will struggle to find new content about this pair of kings on any mainstream news website after 2014, when the Great Awokening gathered pace. Our public version of history is now a morality tale in which the villains are white British men. Critics talk of telling our nation’s story “warts and all”; but they rarely get around to the “and all”. The “and all” surely includes the vast sums devoted to stamping out slavery, calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape as 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. Even if there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not) that sum alone – not counting the billions given in aid – would surely have covered any debt. The “and all” might even include the effort to eradicate slavery in Malik’s native Sudan, where the repression of the trade was one of the grievances of the Mahdist war against Britain, and where slavery made a significant come-back in the late twentieth century. That strikes me as a rather more overlooked story than the Atlantic trade, which is taught in every school. What we are seeing is not a debate about history, but an argument about contemporary politics. Critics want to convince us that Britain became rich through exploitation rather than, as was actually the case, through private property, free contracts and independent courts. Imperial expansion happened haphazardly, and was usually resisted by London officials, who saw colonies as a fiscal burden and an administrative headache. A constant theme of Colonial Office memos throughout the nineteenth century is frustration at the missionaries and abolitionists who kept dragging Britain into unwanted responsibilities. Those running Britain knew that their taxes were higher than in the colonies... it was capitalism that did for slavery, by emphasising the sanctity of contract and by unleashing such technological innovation that human bondage became redundant. Why would anyone pay to feed and house fifty labourers when a barrel of oil could do their work? The easiest way to demonstrate the negative correlation between capitalism and slavery is to look at the places where human bondage is most prevalent today – in order, North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mauritania. If William III owning shares in the Royal African Company bothers you more than the continuing abomination of slavery in those places, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about your motives."
The liberals were very upset by this column, despite claiming that they are for teaching history. Ironic. But then, they just hate white people